God's Guidance in Life's Battles

Deuteronomy chapter 33, if you look at verse 26, begin there. Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy 33, verse 26. Deuteronomy is, this chapter of Deuteronomy, chapter 33, is a recitation of the blessings that Moses pronounced on the tribes as they were getting ready to enter the land of promise. I will proclaim the name of the Lord beginning with the verse, start with 33, chapter 33, and he says, he begins by talking about each tribe and their individual blessing that he wants to give to them. He starts with Reuben, and he says to Reuben, you're going to be a great fighter and be able to establish yourself in the land when you go in to settle it. To Levi, he said, you're going to be a teaching person, your whole tribe will, and they'll depend on you to make the sacrifices. Judah will be a fighting tribe that will give great benefit as they go in to drive out the other enemies, the people who are in the land. Benjamin will have great security for himself and his tribe. Joseph will be a nation of fighters and farmers. Zebulun will travel on the sea, and Issachar will be a place where people gather to worship. They'll have a temple there. He says Gad will be a tribe of fighters and will enlarge the land. Dan is a fighter, a tribe of fighters, warriors. And Naphtali will be farmers. And the Asher will have prosperity. Each one of these, they have an assigned sort of idea as to what they're doing. Now, as Moses has said, here's what's going to take place when you enter the land of promise. Each one of them have an assignment, and the assignment that they have is not necessarily something that is proven in their past. For example, none of the tribes that ever lived on the ocean, nor were they seafaring people. Even in Egypt, there's no indication that that was true. And yet they'd been 40 years, even if there was some experience with it. They had not been fighters because they'd never had any wars to fight. They had never been in charge of taking place, taking an altar and developing it so people could come to offer sacrifices. Every single thing that was promised to them, or responsibility that they would get, they had never had any experience doing it. They were going into a land of hostile people who were concerned about driving them out. There was a time in which they would meet very strong and angry people. Yet all of these promises were made to them as Moses is now ready to leave and there to begin to go into the land of promise. So at the end of this long list of things that Moses said is going to take place, that's where verse 26 starts, he says, he ends this chapter by saying there is no one like the God of Jeshurim who rides the heaven to help you and on the clouds in his majesty. The eternal God is your refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemies before you saying destroy him. Now the promise that Moses gives now leans back to be able to say how are all these promises going to take place. Now all of us understand that whenever you're called to be a follower of Christ and you understand what he wants you to do and how he wants you to begin to live, we look at our abilities and we look at the things that God asks us to do and oftentimes we understand that these are far and away beyond our ability or skill. So whenever you come face to face with the things that you need to do, sometimes they frighten us. The idea of teaching a class, the idea of being a witness to some other person, the idea of living our lives free from the patterns of habits that we've had in our life before. Sometimes when we see that we think of them and say this is beyond the ability that I have. I'm sure the nations of Israel who are gathered here getting ready to go into the land that was promised to them, facing the battles that they would face, thought the same things. The comfort that Moses gives them in this speech is to say there was no one like the God of Jeshurim, that's another word for Jerusalem, who rides in the heavens to help you and on the clouds in his majesty. What he wants them to be reminded of is they're not going in on their own. They're not going in with their own skill or their ability. He describes God in this situation like we would say maybe in military language that he's their air cover. They're going in walking. They're going in walking on the ground able to see only the people in front of them. Only with the skill that they have in their natural ability. You have, he says, as you go into the land of promise, God who's in the sky above you. Who's looking down on all that's taking place. He can see what's behind the hills. He can see what's behind the trees. He can see the people that are hidden. He knows everything. You don't go into this land in battle on your own. You have a God who is giving you air cover. Now we're so used to the idea that whenever people go into battle, they have the opportunity to be able to see because there are satellites and there are planes that fly and all kinds of things that allow them to see where the enemy is and where they're congregating and how many there are and what they face when they attack. It wasn't that way when wars were fought years and years ago. There's a battlefield near the place I grew up in Pea Ridge. You can go out there in the battlefield and they have it set up like it was when the war in the 1860s was fought. You can see where the people were standing. You can see where they were looking out across the field. You can go up on the other side and you can see where the other armies was gathered. There they were facing across this open area, but behind all of that they couldn't see the troops that were moving. They had no idea who was there. It was simply a blind battle where you shot in the direction of someone you could see and you knew nothing about what was taking place. Many of the battles were won or lost by just pure accident. People stumbled around somewhere and got behind them and they were able to attack from a different direction. But what he's saying here is, as you go into battle, you have a great advantage. You have God who is in the sky, who's looking over everything that you do, and he knows where every single one of your enemies is located. Now for us, we don't look at this battle in the same way. We don't look at it and say we're going to fight somebody. But in the life that we live, trying to follow Christ, we encounter the reality that there are many things that we get in situations where we have no idea what's one minute ahead of us. We have no idea who the people are that are on our side and those that are not. We have no idea the circumstances that we're going to face. And so when we get in those situations, we oftentimes find ourselves anxious and worried and upset and nervous. What he's warning us is, God knows all these things that you're going to face. While you may not know them, he knows every single thing that's going on. In a setting where you're at, he knows what other people are thinking. He knows what they want to do and what they don't want to do. He knows the people who like you and he knows the people that don't like you. He knows the people that are trying to hurt you and those that are trying to help you. You may not, but he does. You do not face living the Christian life alone. For not only does Christ come into your life to begin to give you wisdom and direction about this, but the wisdom and direction he gives you is from insight. You know, when you're sitting down and talking to someone who's your enemy, it helps to be able to know what they're thinking. Well, God does. And he knows what they're thinking. It's not necessarily always what they say, but he knows the difference between what they're thinking and what they're saying. And he knows whether these things are true or whether they're lies. He knows everything about what you're facing. So when you have a relationship with Christ and you live for him day by day and you read the Bible and you listen to what he has to say and you ask for his direction about what you need to do, you find that he gives you guidance that's above and beyond your skill and ability to ever acquire. That's what the Bible is trying to tell us. When we engage ourselves in living the life God wants us to live, we have assets that are beyond any human being in the world having. So that God gives us the skill to be able to do what we need to do. He gives the wisdom to be able to react in circumstances that other people would not even that would react in circumstances that other people are not prepared for. Being able to live in obedience to Christ gives us something other people don't have. Your enemies, when you go in there, are going to be blind to you. He's saying they're only going to be looking for you. But above them, God is giving you an insight for them that they don't have. So whenever you're living the life that Christ wants you to live, you encounter difficult circumstances, whatever it might be, you can sit down and you can ask God to give you wisdom about what to do. He will not always tell you what other people are thinking, but he will help you make choices about what you do and how you say it so it will be the right thing for the person who's talking to you. I have a great advantage over you because whenever I ask God to help me decide what to say in a service, and I say what I think God wants me to say, I hear people oftentimes come and say, today, what I needed, you said. Here's why. I had no idea. You learn that the ideas that come to you in teaching or proclaiming the Word of God are not yours. They're given to you by God for the benefit of people you don't know. In this image, he's talking about you're in war and you're walking up to this mountain. On the other side of this hill, there's a whole bunch of troops over there, and by the time you get to the top of the hill, they're going to be ready for you. So I'm preparing you. I'm telling you where to go. So instead of going straight over the hill, you go around each side and you'll be able to surprise them. In battle, that's a critical thing to know. In speaking, you don't have any idea who's even going to be there in church. Sometimes preachers have the experience of thinking when they get a text, oh, I know some people in church who really need this. And if you prepare for the people in church that you know really need that, they're almost always not there. Because you can't figure all these things out. So you have to learn to sit down and say, I'm not preaching to people, I'm saying what I think God wants me to say. That's the nearest thing I can see to what he's talking about here. And in the choices in your life that you make about things that you do and the things that you say, if you have a relationship with Christ, and that's why it's so important every day to get up and say, God, today I don't know what I'm going to face, I don't know what's going to happen, but I want to ask you in every situation that you'll help me know the right attitude to have, the right thing to do, and the right thing to say. And then you place that in God's hands. He already knows when you meet people what they're thinking. He even knows when you get up in the morning if some people that you work with thought about your name and said, I'll tell you today I'm mad at them and I'm going to give them a hard time. He already knows all this stuff. So when he prepares you for your day, you're prepared unaware. But in this lesson, he's talking about God is like an airplane in the sky and he sees all the troop formations. We can say, like, God is like, he can get in the heads of people and listen to them like you and I would listen to the radio and watch them like you and I would watch a television. So he knows exactly what's going on. So when I've given you this big job, you do not have it alone. That's what's important for you to figure. It is not you in battle with the people around you. If people around you are people not following God, it is God who's at war with them. See, the battle Israelites were going to face was a battle of judgment. When he talks about what takes place, the eternal God is your refuge, he says in verse 22, and underneath all the everlasting and underneath are the everlasting arms. He will drive out your enemy before you, saying, destroy him. This is hard language. When God comes to say the people of Israel, I want you to go into the land and destroy the people who are there. It sounds as if it's really a sort of mean thing to do. But whenever you look back on this passage in Leviticus chapter 18, when God is preparing for the people of Israel to go into the land of promise, he explains why they're getting this property. The land that he's going to give them was already populated. He said in Leviticus chapter 18, beginning of verse 24, do not defile yourself in these ways because this is how the nations I'm going to drive you out before you became defiled. Then the land was defiled, so I punished it for its sin, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. But you must keep my decree and my laws. The native born and the aliens living among you must not do any of these detestable things. He's told them along several pages before things that they shouldn't do, and especially the chapter before on things that they were forbidden to do that were immoral. And what he's saying to them is, the Canaanites in this land have lived this immoral life. They've done the things that I told them not to do, and they've defiled Canaan. And I've given them the warnings, and now it's time for judgment to come. When God decides that someone is no longer willing to do what he wants them to do, I mean, he may have patience for a long time. I think all of us, you know, we find the people that maybe have been a problem for us, that God is too patient with them. We oftentimes think, I don't know why God doesn't do something about that person. We see maybe the story on television or someplace, or maybe even somebody in their own life, I don't know why God doesn't do something about them, they're doing the wrong things. So we find whenever judgment falls on other people that we're impatient. We want God to carry justice, but when it comes to us, we like God's patience. We're glad that the first time we stepped across the line, he didn't snuff us. We're glad that he gave us another opportunity. We're glad he stretched out our opportunity for grace. The people who inhabited Canaan, God had worked with them, we don't know how long, but they were wicked people. Finally, the day of judgment came. His way of judging them was to bring the Israelites to this land and say, this land across the river is all yours. You go in that land and you destroy the people that are there. I've warned them, and I've warned them, and I've warned them. And now the judgment time is coming. God used the nation of Israel as a tool for judgment. He was sort of like their switch or their sword. And the judgment that he gave to them was because of what they did. Now in this passage that I read in Leviticus, he's saying to the nation of Israel, if you get in the land that I promised to you and you do the same things they did, I'm going to do the same thing to you. I will not allow you to pollute the land. You have to live by the same rules I'm asking of them. The judgment will be certain for you just as it was them. But in this situation, he says to the people of Israel, they are the ones to pass the judgment. When you go in, you will drive out your enemy before you, and I will be saying, and you'll be saying, destroy him, destroy him, they're to be completely destroyed. Now in all of this, he says in verse 26, remember this, he who rides the heavens to help you and on the clouds in his majesty, the eternal God is your refuge. That is, whenever you find yourself embattled, you go to God and say, God, protect me, take care of me, provide my needs. The one who has all the power and authority is the one you hide behind. In the battle that you're going into, you will not know where your enemy is, but God does. So when the attack comes, you say, God, guide me to where you want me to go. You protect me. The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. So what you think when you face issues of your own, I don't know God exactly how to handle all this. I don't know the things that I can do, but I'm depending on you to give me the wisdom to make the right choices, give me the ability to make the choices, and give me the determination to do what you told me to do. God says, okay, I will protect you. That's one of his covenant promises. I'll guide you so you'll make the right choices. I will protect you so you won't be destroyed, and I'll provide what you need. Those promises he asks us to hold on to. Now he gives us this response because he understands that in the heat of difficulty, it is easy to assess our own skills and abilities against the difficulty we face. I ask that you take another thing in consideration. I don't know what to do. So you get afraid. Stop and say, but God does know what I should do. So you don't know what to say, but God does know what I should say. So if you have the wisdom of God as to know what to do and to know what to say, in any circumstance you face, you'll be able to do the right thing. Will it save me or rescue me? Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes in the middle of all these things, it gets worse and worse and worse and worse. I had Monday, I had something I needed to get done. I needed to get on the internet, and I needed to copy some stuff that I had that I needed to work with, and I needed it really badly. I couldn't get the computer to access the site. When I got on the site, I couldn't get the computer to print what was on there. It started out, then ran out of ink. I put more ink in it, then it wouldn't access the site at all. I called the site and asked them to talk to me about it, and they said, well, it won't access that site because the site's been changed, and the information is not on there anymore. But we can send it to you by mail. I said, no, I need it by next week. They said, well, it'll take longer than that. And then they said, well, I mean, at the end of the day, all day doing this, and I was getting more and more frustrated with the inability. I was focused on getting it done this day, but by the end of the day, supper time, I hadn't been able to get any of this done. Then I went and sat down at the computer again, and some of the stuff I needed, it printed. So I started working on what I had. The next day, the stuff was faxed to me, and I was able today to get all of it done, last night to get all of it done. And I look back on that experience, and I saw frustration on my part, anger on my part when nothing seemed to be able to work, and what could I figure this out, and a feeling of failure on my part, but I looked at the circumstances, and what I wanted to get done when it was over was done in an appropriate time. I did get the information in enough time to be able to do it, and I finished it. As I thought about that today, and look back on the last couple of days, what I saw was that in all my frustration, it was, why can't I get this done in the time that I thought I should get it done? See, there was my time frame, and there was my frustration. I planned out what I'm going to do, and I want step by step for each of these steps to occur. Now, as each one of them didn't occur, what I visualized in my mind is, I'm not going to be able to get this done. Then I thought, well, I'll try something else, and I tried that, and then that didn't happen. Then I thought, this is not going to get done. With each of those failures, the certainty of failure on my part became more and more evident. But in the end, that wasn't the reality. God had another reality for me. I don't know that God intended to cause all these things to take place to make it difficult or hard, but I think he uses all these circumstances to show us that even the most difficult things, we don't have to give up. He is there to help us. What I want you to remember, he says, is that the eternal God is your refuge. Go to him and say, God, would you take this matter and help me with it? And I did that all day long. I kept saying that to God, okay, God, this didn't work. I don't know what to do about it. I'm going to try this. I'm going to try everything. You tell me what else to try. And finally, in the last thing I tried, something worked. Take refuge in God. Remember that underneath are the everlasting arms. So you stop and say, really, did I have to get all this done by next week? No, it would be a problem for me if I didn't. Sometimes we set deadlines for ourselves that cause us to feel like disaster is going to come if I can't get this done. When really, what it means is, it will be more difficult and it will raise other problems, but somehow or other, I'll get everything done I need to do. He was saying to the people of Israel, remember, you've placed your life in God's hands and underneath you are his everlasting arms. They will never fail you. And he will drive your enemy out before you. And he will be saying to you, destroy him, destroy him, destroy him. You will win. The comfort that came to Israel should be a great comfort to us. We do not fight the battles in life alone. When you've promised God your life, and you're reading the Bible, and you're listening to what he has to say, and you're living according to what he tells you is the right thing, you have every assurance that somewhere down the road, what God wants to have happen in your life will take place. He'll be able to see everything that needs to be seen. He'll be able to guide you in everything that you need to do. When difficulties come, you can hide behind him. And when you fall down, you fall down into his arms. He will take care of you. And the end result will be, his plan will be accomplished. He wanted to destroy the Canaanites and the land of Canaan. And in the end, that's exactly what took place. His purpose was accomplished. See, the difficulty came for me in that I knew there was something I needed to get done. But the difficulty came because I had plans as to how to get it done. And when each of those things didn't work, I became more and more certain that I wasn't going to be able to accomplish the end result of what I needed. And what God wants us to say is, okay, that didn't work out, but I know you have some way to help me with this. What should I do next? If that doesn't work, you go to the next one, and the next one, and the next one. And you'll find out, down the road, that all the things God wanted to do in your life, and he wanted to do through you, are done. Because it is God who's in charge of the circumstances. Verse 28, So Israel will live in safety alone, Jacob's spring is secure, in a land of grain and new wine, where the heavens drop dew. All this is going to take place. They're going to be driven out, and you will live in security. You'll have the food you need, the drink you need, and you'll be in a place where the heavens water the ground, so that there's no drought. Blessed are you, O Israel, who is like you, a people saved by the Lord. He is your shield and helper, and your glorious sword. Your enemies will cower before you, and you will trample down their high places. So after he talks about the place that God has in guiding them and providing for them, he says, here's what I promise, the covenant promise. You will live in safety. God will protect you. Jacob's spring is secured. I will provide what you need, water. The heaven in a land of grain and new wine, I will provide the food that you need. The promise is, I will guide you, first promise. Second, I will provide the food that you need to be able to live in this land. And third, I'll provide the security for you. All of these are powerful promises for everything that we need. As a result of this, you are blessed, people of God. See, remember that. God has made a promise to bless his people. And whatever intermediate circumstances might come to us, they're illusions. You look at the promise of God, not at the reality you face today. Because in the short term, it can look terribly difficult. But God promises in the long term that everything he promised to his children, he will bring to pass. Blessed are you, O Israel. Then he says, look at yourself. Who is like you? A people saved by the Lord. When you look around you, and you see the people who are living around you, and they seem to have success, they seem to have victory, and ignore God. Don't be deceived by all of that. For whenever you've given your life to Christ, and you're trying to follow him and live the way he wants you to, and think the way he wants you to, and do the things he wants you to do, you're assured that in the end, the blessings of God will come to you. That's not true of all the people that you know. People who have not made that promise to God, are not living their lives in submission to him, will find one difficulty after another. Oftentimes, when people talk to me about their lives, and they talk about the difficult situation they find themselves in today, oftentimes the spot that they're in today was started years and years ago. Decisions that they make, leading step-by-step to very difficult circumstances they're in now. If you're following Christ, you know that the choices you're making today, you will not come to regret 20 years later. You'll know that the decisions you're making today, will bear fruit in your life all the rest of your life. And sometimes the circumstances people get themselves into, they want to fix this circumstance. When they really need to go back and say, okay, where did I get off track? Why did I end up in this place? As a follower of Christ, we have those circumstances that come to us, where we look and say, how did I get here? But if we've been following Christ, we know that the fact that we're following him, means that this circumstance will be overcome victoriously by God. That's the promise to us, whatever it is. There is no one like you. Who is like you? You are people saved by the Lord. He's telling them about this before the battle takes place. You are going to win this battle, because God is there. He is your shield. He'll stand in front of you to keep the arrows from hitting you. He is your helper, whenever you need someone to be able to take care of your sword. A lot of the swordsmen or soldiers would have somebody carry their sword with them, and carry their shield for them, as they stood behind it to fight. He is the one who's doing that for you. You need somebody who's pretty good, you know, and keeps the shield right in front of you when the arrows come. God doesn't fail you. He'll take care of every circumstance that you get in, and your enemies will cower before you. No one will destroy you. You belong to me. And you will trample down their high places. They have places where they say their God is worshipped, and you'll take their great spiritual power, he's talking about. And your God will give you such a victory that you can go to where their God is, that they're afraid of, that they think has all power. And you can take their God and smash him on the ground, and he's gone. He's saying, what people who are without me, what strength and power they think they have, you will be able to see it as weakness, and it will be broken. So when you look around at people that may have the power, the job, your boss in authority from his company, or people who have money, or people that have something that they can hold over you, and you think they're going to be able to win, not at all. He said, God is the one who protects you, and you will, if you keep on, in the end, see that their greatest strength crumbles in the face of God. What God wants us to do is to be able to live our lives in a world, whatever the circumstances are, with confidence that his ability will save us from whatever our enemies might have. Now, we face sometimes circumstances like I was talking about in trying to get something done, but we don't know the half of what all the people face in the world. There are people all around the world right now who are faced with someone who says, leave Christ or die. And every day around the world, there are followers of Christ who are facing someone who has the power of life and death over them. And we could say that the worst thing that can happen to a person is to find out that they're going to be killed. But for the follower of Christ, that's the best thing that can happen to us. We need to look at people who are martyrs and say that tragedy has come to them. For if they're followers of Christ, heaven has come to them. God does not always protect us in the way we'd like to be protected. Don't let anything happen to me. Sometimes, even the worst things that happen in this world, he turns into the very best things that happen for eternity. So however God chooses to give us the victory, we can be guaranteed that the victory will be ours. So when you face your enemies, you face trial and difficulty, remember, your enemy will not win. I will. Let's pray together. If you have some particular thing in your own life that you're struggling with, it seems to be sometimes bigger than you, I'd like you to take just a moment to say, God, I trust you with this. I'm not going to be upset. I'm not going to be angry. I'm not going to be anxious. I'm going to do step by step exactly what you want me to do and believe that in the end, you will win. And because I'm holding on to you with all my might, I will be with the victor. Lord, help us to understand that your eyes look ahead to the future for us. Your voice speaks the words of clear direction. And your hand guides us to the victory. Give us an ear to listen to you and a passion to obey you. That we might find your arms underneath us and your power and wisdom guiding us. Give us confidence no matter what we face to believe that you will give us success and victory. In Christ's name we ask this. Amen.