God's Promises and Our Security in Him

Wichita. Oh, it's been a long time ago, but they had a big pulpit up in the front. And right on the top of the pulpit, it had a clock built into the pulpit. So the preacher didn't have to worry about it. He could just look at that clock all the time and tell what it was. But I noticed that the clock was stopped at 10 till 12. So when you get up there and you're looking at that, you say, my goodness, my time's almost over. Not very encouraging. Tonight we don't have a clock, so I'll never know when to quit. But fortunately, I have a watch and you do too. If you turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 33. In this section, Moses is giving the farewell speech to the 12 tribes of Israel. The 12 tribes now are receiving the blessing that had been given to them by Moses. And this sort of mirrors in chapter 49 of the books of Exodus. Whenever Jacob brought each of his sons before him and he gave them blessings. To each of them then, his blessing was a little shorter than Moses is. But to each of them, he gave the blessing the father. The idea that the father's blessing would carry to them the blessings of God and what he asked for. Moses does the same thing. And some of the blessings are similar and some of them are quite different. Now, I want to talk about beginning with verse 12 of chapter 33. The blessings that are coming here to these people of Israel are representative of how God blesses his people. The covenant promise that God made to Abraham was basically fundamentally this. I will guide you. He said I'll take you to the land and I'll show you. You follow me and I'll lead you to the place you need to go. I'll guide you. I will provide for you. There I will give you that land on which you can raise your sheep and all the things that you need. The provision. Your enemies will be my enemies. Your friends will be my friends. That means I'll protect you and care for you. And I'll make you a great blessing to all the world. All the nations of the earth. Your descendants will be as the sands of the sea and you'll be a blessing to the whole world. So, what God promised in those four things are the fundamental promises that he makes throughout the scripture in all kinds of circumstances. Whatever kind of promise God makes, it relates to one of those four fundamental things. They're God's contract with his people. Contract with Abraham. Contract with the nation of Israel. In this story with Moses and also the contract with us as exemplified in Jesus giving of the Ten Commandments of the Sermon on the Mount. The covenant with Abraham, the Ten Commandments and Jesus' Sermon on the Mount are all ways by which these four promises are exemplified or made to cover all the situations we find ourselves with. And in the Old Testament, they're given to the nation of Israel. In the New Testament, as Jesus does it, they are given to individuals. So, we see the external things that were required in the Old Testament and the internal way by which this is incorporated into our life in the New Testament. So, when we look at the blessings that are given here, they're blessings given to one of the tribes who belong to God, but those same blessings are also available to any person who is a committed follower of Christ. So, when you read these blessings, there is here a promise. A promise that God makes to his people and to his children. So, beginning with chapter 33, verse 12. About Benjamin, he said, Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him, for he shields him all day long. And the one the Lord loves rests between his shoulders. Can you see the sum of this promise to Benjamin? It is a promise of protection, security. So, this is one of the promises he makes, and it's the only promise he makes to Benjamin. Benjamin's tribe, part of his blessing is very short, small. He was known by his fighting ability. If you look back in chapter 49 of the blessing that was given there by Jacob. When he gives the blessing to Benjamin, if I can find where it is. He makes sure that this promise is sort of like that, in terms of him being a warrior. Someone who was a fighter for the land in which he settled on. So, here the same kind of promise is made. Benjamin will settle in the land, and he will be secure. Now, notice that the preface to this is, Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him. Chapter 49 was a series of the blessings that came to all the twelve tribes. But the one I'm reading is from chapter 33, verse 12. Now, there's a very important ingredient in receiving these blessings. All the covenant promises. All the covenant promises are made to people who've made one promise to God. I will receive you as my Lord and the ruler of my life. So many people pick up the Bible, even though they've never made a commitment to follow Christ, and they read promises, and they want to claim those promises as promises for themselves. But the promises in the Bible that God makes to his people are not for everyone. If you were to walk down the street and find a letter falling on the ground, and you picked it up, and it said to Bob, Bob, if you'll come by the house, I'll give you a thousand dollars. If your name is George, and you took the letter and went to somebody's house and said, I'm here to get my thousand dollars, they'd say, no deal. You're not Bob. So, people who are not followers of Christ pick up the Bible, and they read the promises God makes to his children, and they want to claim those. If that's not ridiculous enough, they get very, very angry when God does not deliver the promises that they anticipated because they read them in the Bible. God is not promising to everyone in the world that these promises he made to his people are going to come true for them. So, if you've decided that you want God to bless you, and protect you, and guide you, and make you a blessing to other people, and you come to the Ten Commandments, and you say, okay, I don't like number one, but I like number three, and five, and seven. So, I'm going to keep those, and then I'm going to ask God to provide for me, to guide me, to give me the things I need, to protect me, and to make me a great influence on people around me. I can't tell you how many people that I meet who violate the Ten Commandments and are mad at God because he doesn't do the things that he said he was going to do in the Bible for them. There's a simple thing here. You've got to be in the family of God for the father of his family to keep his promises to his children. That's why it starts that way. Let the beloved of the Lord rest secure in him. The one who is God's beloved. And the beloved one is the one who is a part of the family of God, who's committed to be a follower of God. So, the condition of fulfilling the promise to Benjamin is conditioned on the fact that he's a committed follower of God. Now, with that said, he said, let him rest secure in him. Benjamin was going to be one of the warrior tribes, one of the tribes that were always involved in the fighting. He was on the edge of the land between the people of Israel and their enemies on the outside, and they were always in trouble, always fighting. And every time he'd get settled down, someone would invade the land, and it would be another war, another fight. It's a temptation for a person like that to be secure in their preparation, in their defense, in their training, and in their skill. But God asked Benjamin to be secure in God. It doesn't mean you do away with your planning. It doesn't mean you do away with your skill. It doesn't mean you do away with your preparation. But it means that you never allow those to be the ultimate source of your security. So, when God promises us that he's going to give us security, protect us, and care for us, there is some responsibility on our part to do the things that would allow us to be safe. So, guidance from God about what we ought to do and how we ought to do it is a critical part of this process. I want you to do the things I tell you to do, and if you're obedient to me, then you're secure. Now, when the people of Israel entered the land of promise, they were asked to do some very ridiculous military things. They were first off at Jericho to walk around the city, and then blow their horns and break the glass, and the walls would fall down. You'll never find in any military manual this kind of instruction for warfare. And the people of Israel had every reason to doubt this. They had every reason to feel foolish and stupid in doing it. But what he wanted to teach them was, your victories are not the result of your skill in battle, nor your skill in planning. I want to show you right up front that I can win these battles by myself. Now, there are some people who start walking with God, who don't plan, they don't prepare, they don't use their money well, they don't use their time well, they don't do the things that a person ought to do, and they want God to make up for their irresponsibility. He doesn't do that. He wants us to do everything that he tells us to do, to be responsible, but he wants us all the time to be aware that the security we have is not because of our money, is not because of our skill, or our job level. Our security is because he is our Lord. That's what he wants us to understand. So, Benjamin, he said, you're the beloved one of me, and I want you to rest secure in me. So, when you're faced with circumstances that are dangerous, or difficult, or threatening, I want you to remember, I have made a promise to you. I will protect you. Now, you roll this back to ourselves. You come and say, today I've committed my life to Christ. I'm buried in the water to show my old life of self-control, self-dependence is over, and my new life of trusting Jesus Christ as my Lord has begun. You see, when you say, Jesus Christ is my Lord, you're saying, he is the one in charge of my life. He's the one in control of my life. I've given authority to him over my life. And once you do that, then he promises he's going to protect you. So, when you start out, then, living this way, the first thing that Satan is going to do is cause you to doubt this. He's going to bring things into your life that just make it look like, this is not going to work. It's going to be a disaster. There'll be small ones in the beginning, and when you learn that he can take care of those, there'll be bigger ones, and bigger ones, and bigger ones, until you're finally able to trust him with everything in your life. That's what God is trying to do. So, the promise he's made to Benjamin is a promise that's made to you. If you are the beloved of the Lord, you can rest secure in Christ. Not in yourself, but in Christ. It's difficult for us because we're so used to handling things on our own, and working things out on our own, that when it gets to something that's just a little bit bigger than we can handle, we get nervous. We get worried. We get scared. We become afraid. What God wants us to do in those instances is to stop and remind ourselves, I have given my life to God, and I am his beloved. And he has told me to be secure because he is my Lord. If you feel like that your life has drifted away from him, and you're not really under his control, it's time to stop and go back and collect the beloved, correct the beloved part of it. And then you can rest secure in him. Then he says in the second line, For he shields him all day long. You should think of your life as you're living surrounded by the presence of God. Like there was a wall, an invisible wall around you. We might say from the space things, a force field around you. So that you're walking down the street with this force field around you, over your head. And it's God. The spiritual presence of God. He's saying to Benjamin, you can be secure in him because he shields you all day long. We're not conscious of the physical presence of God all the time, but we should be. We should be aware when we get in circumstances that are dangerous to us, to recognize that we are not there alone. The Spirit of God is with us. The Spirit is invisible. But you remember whenever God said, let there be light, the Spirit made light. The Spirit made the earth. The Spirit created everything that was created. You have inside of you, in your presence, the greatest powerful force in all the world, right there with you. It doesn't mean that you won't get your ankle broken sometime, or your arm broken, or your finger cut, or whatever else it is. It just means that there's going to be someone there to protect you. You know, God doesn't mean by protection I will keep you from having problems, even terribly difficult problems, even life-changing problems, and risks of your life problems. But He does promise us that whatever happens to us, He is going to take care of us. And if the very best thing can happen to us, we die and go to be with God, where's the loss? See, we think, okay, God's going to do the very best for me. He's going to rescue me from every circumstance I won't be killed. Well, that's not the worst thing that can happen to you. The best thing that can happen to us is to go be with Him. The death of a follower of Christ is not necessarily a tragedy. It is the goal of our lives. It might be untimely for us and the people around us, but it can't be a tragedy for us. So, what God wants us to be aware of, that whatever happens to us, He is protecting us. When Jesus died on the cross, He was beaten. Terrible things happened to Him, but the Father was with Him all the time, guiding Him through that. Gave Him the ability to think of the cross next to Him, and the circumstance of that man, so that we still marvel at how God gave Him the ability to think more of others than His own pain, and challenges us how to live. This agony on the cross was not good for Jesus, but it's been a lifesaver for us, and the greatest example of living that we could ever have. How could that be bad for us? And Jesus did not see it as a terrible thing. He gave Himself to do what the Father said was the right thing to do. So, the promise to Benjamin is that God would shield him all the day long. The last line is a little bit of a puzzle, and the one the Lord loves rests between His shoulders. What does King James say there? He says, "...the Lord will shield him all the day long, and He will dwell between His shoulders." Some translations say, He will dwell between the mountains. The word, there is shoulders, but it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to some people, because Benjamin was a fighter. Some think that He's saying He will dwell between the swords, the sharp points of your shoulders, the swords that He would fight with. Some translations say that He's dwelling between the mountains, so that Benjamin would be between the mountains of his home country and safe in the valley. Here He says, "...the shoulders," and I think that's probably a good translation. You know, whenever you're around someone who's a really big guy, I mean, you know, if I were in a situation where there was somebody after me, I'd want to stand right behind him, between his shoulders, as much as I could. I wouldn't want, you know, somebody, you know, four feet tall to try to stand behind that person. He's talking about the strength that God has. I think that's what he's getting at. I'm going to depend on the power and strength that God has, and I want to stand between those two shoulders. The one and the one the Lord loves rests between His shoulders. You see, we don't fight these battles, but we get behind God and we stand between His shoulders. They are the source of our strength and our power. So, the promise that God makes to Benjamin is a promise for security. Now, how do you find yourself in circumstances where your security is threatened? Well, you could be in your house alone at night, and it'd be dark, and you might be afraid that someone was outside. You hear a noise. You could be alarmed. You could find yourself in a circumstance, financially, where things haven't happened the way you wanted to, and there's financial crisis, and you could be distressed. You could find yourself in a circumstance where people treat you badly because of something that you've done, and they take it the wrong way. They may criticize you. They may tell stories about you. They may cause people to think badly about you. And you can't do anything at all about it. The security does not come from our ability to change the circumstances. But what he wants us to learn is, I've promised you, I will protect you. The Abrahamic Covenant said, your enemies will be my enemies. So, if you have an enemy that wells up, causing you trouble, remember, they may be your enemy. That's not a big problem for them. But they've made an enemy of God, which is a big problem for them. That's why whenever we get into fights and trouble, he says we turn the other cheek. Now, if you have children outside, and one of your neighbor kids come over there, it's a lot bigger, and he socks your child in the side of the head, and you see that take place, you're liable to say, well, that's bad. And then if he turns his cheek the other way, and he socks him on the other side, you're really mad. Someone hurt you, you turn the other cheek, they hurt you again. God is settling the score. We don't have to get even. We don't have to protect ourselves. That's why we can turn the other cheek. That's why we can return good for evil. Because we are not fighting this battle. If somebody is treating you badly, I mean really badly, and you know God is on your side, you can step back and say, you know, whatever you've done to me, it hurts, and I don't feel good about it. But I feel sorry for you, brother. When God gets through with you, you're going to be really sorry for what you've done. Because God's made us a promise. If you can live believing that, it changes your whole life. Remember that you're dependent on the strength of the shoulders of God, not your own. You're dependent upon the resources of God, not your own. So when fear begins to come inside of you, or anxiety begins to come inside of you, or the problems that seem overwhelming to you, just stop and remind yourself of the one thing you can do. That is, you can say, I'm going to live as God wants me to live. The beloved of His, and then all these other things will be taken care of. The security that comes from knowing God should be able to take us through all kinds of physical, emotional, psychological distress. Because the one who made us, and who owns our lives, has made a promise to us. Your enemies will be my enemies, and your friends will be my friends. That's all there is to it. So when someone makes us an enemy of them, they've made an enemy of God. When someone makes a friend of us, they've made a friend of God. And the security that comes from that will lead us even through the most difficult circumstances. Would you bow your heads for just a moment, please? Maybe you're facing a situation in which you have anxiety, or fear, uncertainty, insecurity. Can you really believe that God is going to take care of this? See, what happens is we can't figure out a way ourselves that it can be solved. But you can just say, I'm going to quit trying to figure that out, and I'm just going to say, God will take care of it. Like when you were a little child, you didn't worry about where the food was coming from, or whether the rent was going to be paid, because you knew your parents would do it. As adults, if we can think the same way, we can have that child-life sense of security, even in the most difficult circumstances. Am I the beloved of God? As best I know how, am I living in obedience to Him? Then I'm going to claim this promise, and I'm going to believe that it's true. That He heals me all the day long, wants me to be secure, and I'm trusting in His strength, not mine. His wisdom, not mine. The rest of this week, whatever time of insecurity comes to you, remember this. Thank you for the promise you made to Benjamin, thousands of years ago, so that we can see in him and all our spiritual forefathers the truth of the promise you've made to us. That you would be with us to the end of the age, if we're faithful in being obedient to you. That if we build our house on a solid foundation of your truth, the storms of life would not overwhelm us or destroy us. Help us to live in front of all of the people around us with this kind of confidence, so they will know what it means to live by faith, faith in you. And we ask, when these terrible times come, and our friends say to us, How are you getting through it? We can say, The Lord will take care of me. And we can give witness to the reality of who you are and what you do. In the name of Christ, help us to be an influence for good to all those around us. You promised Abraham that by his life you would bless all the nations of the earth. You make the promise to us by living our lives like you want us to. We will bless those around us who are not followers of yours, but they will know then how to live in faith, and what happens when we live in faith. In the name of Christ, we ask for your faith, and your trust, and your strength. Amen.