God's Provision and Promises to His People

I'm going to begin reading in verse 13. This is the last stage of Moses' message to the people of Israel, and he's taking them tribe by tribe and asking God's blessings on each individual tribe one at a time. It's similar to what happened when Jacob was dying and he called all of his sons in and he then prayed for them. That's in chapter 49 of the book of Genesis, and I want to read that passage as it describes the blessings that he asked for Joseph. In chapter 49 of Genesis, beginning with verse 22, and then I'll turn to Deuteronomy chapter 33 to see the comparison between how Jacob prayed for blessings for Joseph and how Moses did. In Genesis chapter 49, Joseph is a fruitful vine near a spring whose branches climb over a wall. With bitterness archers attack him. They shot at him with hostility, but his bow remained steady, his strong arm stayed limber, because the hand of the mighty one of Jacob, because of the shepherd, the rock of Israel, because of your father's God who helps you, because of the Almighty who blesses you, with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies below, blessings of the breast and womb. Your father's blessings are greater than the blessings of the ancient mountains, than the bounty of the age-old hills, that all these rest on the head of Joseph, on the brow of the prince among his brothers. The blessing that Jacob gave was almost entirely, almost had, almost entirely to do with war and battle. I pray for Joseph as the one who protects and defends himself against the enemies of Israel. Now the land that Jacob was to be given, excuse me, that Joseph was to be given was in the very central heart of Israel. If you looked at the long strand of Israel, each tribe got a part of it and Joseph's part was the largest. It ran from the Jordan River all the way to the ocean, the Mediterranean Sea. It was a band that covered the most fertile part of the nation. Joseph was given a privileged place. Jerusalem would be in the part of the territory that he received and he had a special gift given. Now when Jacob prays for him, he's praying for his ability to fight and protect himself and conquer the territory that was given to him. Now when Moses prays for this tribe of Israel, his prayer is somewhat different. He does include the issue of protection and defense, but remember all of the promises in the Bible focus on four areas. One is God's guidance about people. The other one is God's provision for people and the other one is God's protection for people and the other one is that the people would have an influence or would be a blessing to the world around them. So each one of these tribes as they're given a blessing from Moses, it will include one or more of these particular promises that God made in his covenant with his people. These contracts that God made include these and so each one of them reflected. Now it's easy for us to look back at this and say well this had to do with the people of Israel and the tribes of Israel, but in the beginning of this he's talking about the people who belong to God. So in these promises are basically fundamentally the same promises God makes to us. Now he doesn't mean, I don't mean by that that he says okay now you get this part of Israel territory over there or that you're going to be a good farmer, that's not what I mean. I mean that in this way he said to these people and their circumstances I will protect you what Moses was talking, what Jacob was talking about or I will provide for you which is primarily what Moses describes here. These are part of the promises. Now beginning with verse 13, about Joseph he said may the Lord bless his land and the precious dew from heaven above and with the deep waters that lie below with the best the sun brings forth and the finest moon can yield with the choicest gifts of the ancient mountain and the fruitfulness of the everlasting hills with the best gifts of the earth and its fullness and the favor of him who dwelt in the burning bush that all the rest of the head of Joseph on the brow of the prince among his brothers. Now in this story he's talking, in what he's saying there is a sort of hidden picture maybe for us. For the people of Israel came out of Egypt where there were multiple gods that were worshipped. God came to them and said I am your God and I am only one. They'd never been around anywhere where there was an emphasis on one God. Never. 400 years they'd been surrounded by these people who worshipped all kinds of gods. They came through the wilderness and were coming to the place where they're to settle in the land of promise. Everywhere they've gone they encounter people who worship multiple gods. In every one of these places there is an appeal on the part of people who live there that their gods bring them the benefits of life. They're going to be faced with circumstances in which everyone around them is different than them. And so the promise that he makes about Joseph reflects some of these very things. What the foreign gods all promise are the same thing that Yahweh God promises his people. They're not any different. But he promises them as a result of himself in saying these gods have no way to be able to give you these things. And when he starts he said may the Lord bless this land with the dew from heaven above and the deep waters that lie below. Here he begins by saying when you get into the land God is going to bless you with rain. Now that doesn't mean very much to us. But you're familiar with the word Baal in the Bible. Baal was a powerful god among the Canaanites. But he was primarily the god of storms and rain. The reason the Canaanites worshipped him was because they depended on him to provide for their crops. He would bring the rain and the heavy dew which would keep the moisture from evaporating. He would provide the water that would flow down the creeks and rivers so that irrigation might take place if they needed it. Here was the god surrounding them who said I make the rain. If you want to farm in this land you've got to depend on me to make the rain for you. Now Moses is praying for the people of Israel and Joseph who will have the best of the farm land in all of Canaan. He has the best, the most fertile land, the land that would be most productive. And he says to him, Baal will not give you this, he didn't say those words here, but he's saying to him, the god of heaven makes the rain fall down, Yahweh God makes the rain fall. Yahweh God makes the water from the ground so that it's available for you. The secret to your financial success in raising your crops is what Yahweh is going to do for you. The god of Abraham and Jacob and Isaac. So that this blessing is to say to him, God will provide for you what your neighbors claim their gods will do. Then he says second, with the sun, with the best sun, with the best the sun brings forth and the finest the moon can yield. Now he's talking about the power of the sun. I looked up on the internet to find out the number of Canaanite gods that were common to the people of Israel as they would hit this territory. The article started out that I looked at and said this is a summary list of the gods of the Canaanites. There were 26 of them. For every kind of issue that a person would face, they had a separate god. A specialist god, we might call it. Now the god of the sun is located, is mentioned in the scripture, it's Moloch. Moloch was the god of fire and of the sun. And the people of Canaan worshipped Moloch by taking their small children and burning their children, giving this god the lives of their children that he would provide the heat and the sun for their crops. They had a statue. It was hollow. They would fire that statue up with wood inside of it until it glowed red. They would lay a baby in the arms of the statue and somehow it had a mechanism to raise the arms and dump it inside the mouth and into the fire and it would burn. And they thought giving this god the sacrifice of their precious children would cause him to give the sunlight to grow their crops. You're going to hear, and incidentally Israel did at one time worship Moloch in the valley near Jerusalem. It's hard to resist something when everyone around you is doing it. It's hard to resist when you see people who are doing these things and they are the majority and you are the minority. That's what they were, that's the circumstance they were in. And the people into whose land they are moving now thought of them as foolish, stupid people because they would not appease the God who provide rain and the gods who provide sun for them. How are you going to ever make your crops work if you don't do this? The Israelites were in the minority. They were looked at as people who were not up to date in the gods and the world's activities. The third one of these, with the choicest gifts of the ancient mountains and the fruitfulness of the everlasting hills. They also had, among all these 26 different gods that I saw listed, they also had a god that was the god of the mountains or the god of the fruit. So that now the sun, the water, and the wood, or the woods available for them, for houses or whatever else they would need to build, all have gods. And what Moses is saying to them is, when you go into the land, don't you look around you and see what your neighbors say about this. Yahweh God will give you water, he will give you sun, and he'll give you something to build your houses with. The provisions of food and the provision of a place to be able to live and stay was the promise he made. This is the covenant promise, I will provide for you, given to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, given to the people of Israel then, and given to those who commit their life to Christ. God makes a promise, I will provide for you. Don't look around you at the world you see and hear what they say the provision is. Look to me. Do it my way. I often times hear people say, even church members you know, say, well you know I work hard all week and it's hard for me to get up and come to church on Sunday morning because I just need my rest. And whenever we know that God says, don't forsake the assembling of yourselves together as some are, and then people say, well I can't do what God tells me to do here because I think that I need to have rest instead of coming to church as the Bible says I should. We are choosing between the commandments of God to bring us the fullness of life and our own human wisdom. This is true in financial areas, it's true in the way we make choices with our life. We are always going to be caught in circumstances where the people around us have different answers to the big issues that we face, different than what God says these answers really are. If you find people who are having difficulty in their lives, they often, the first place they turn to is counseling, someone to tell me what I should do. Instead of finding answers from God, they find the greatest of human wisdom. We live in a world where living and expecting to find fulfillment in your life from God's direction and God's instruction is not looked on with favor, even in churches, whether it's financial things or emotional things or psychological things. We live in a world where everyone around us says, no, reading the Bible and being obedient to God will not help you, you need something else. That's exactly the circumstance that the Israelites were in, in a culture shaped to say God is not adequate for what you're going to face. God boldly says to his people, if you will trust me, I will do these things for you, I will provide for you. Now when he's talking about the financial provision here, he doesn't mean that every Israelite is going to be wealthy, that's not what he's talking about. He's saying I'm going to give you the opportunity to have what you need to live on. He gave them a plot of ground when they came there and he promises, now I'm going to give you the ground and I'll give you some water and I'll give you some sun and I'll give you something to build your house with. But if you go in and sit down on your land and you don't work it and you don't plant it and you don't cultivate it, you won't have anything to eat. He doesn't give us things and say I'm going to give it to you, he says I am going to make it possible for you to have it. You get your ground, you plant your seed, you do the work and I'll give you rain, I'll give you sunshine, I'll give you a place to live. God gives opportunity to his people that allows them to be able to have the things that they need. And often times people are upset with God because he hasn't done exactly what they want or the way they want it. But God makes a promise, I will provide for you. Now God never means by this that you will never have something, you'll never want anything. He doesn't say everything you want you're going to be able to get. He doesn't say everything that you think you want you're going to be able to get. What he says is I will take care of you, whatever the circumstances. I know in the financial planning in our world, there's a lot of people who talk about the Bible and encourage you to not have any debt and that's certainly a good thing. But the Israelites had times in which there were great difficulties and many of them had very, very hard times. Some of them went through times in which their crops weren't as good as they should be so they didn't have enough money to be able to make the next crop and they had to go to somebody and borrow money to make their crops. That's what the Jubilee year was about. If you get into financial difficulty and you have to sell your land to somebody else that God has given you, you've had trouble. Here's what I promise you, when the 50 year mark comes, your family is going to get that back. This is what I'll promise you, if you do have to sell your land, and this is sort of the chain way it works, if you could farm your ground, make enough money, have enough for your family, then you could make it fine. If you were not a good farmer, you didn't go out and farm your land correctly, whatever else happened to you and you didn't have that, you might have to sell your land. If you were still not responsible enough to do the things you needed to do, you might have to sell yourself into slavery. There was no provision for anyone else to help you. You had to do whatever was necessary for yourself. So if you had no money and you'd sold all your land off and you'd sold everything you had and you ended up having a debt that you couldn't pay, you had to sell yourself to a fellow Israelite as a servant or a slave. God made the provision to say, seven years is the limit. So if you sell yourself to someone, after the end of the seventh year, he has to turn you loose and you start over again. What God's provision was, I'm going to give you an opportunity to make a life for yourself. If you're not responsible enough to do that, then you're going to have to pay the consequence for it. I am going to give you a second chance though, even if you do fail at it, I'm going to make another opportunity for you. We get a picture of how God works for us. He gives us in his kingdom what we need to be able to live. If we're not responsible enough to manage it and handle it correctly, then we get into difficulties. But God always says, I'm going to stand by you and I'm going to give you another chance so that the opportunity comes again. God's provision is a promise, not given apart from our effort or responsibility, but involving it. If you're responsible to do what I tell you to do, then I will provide for you. And even if you make mistakes and you keep being faithful to me, I will provide for you. And if you still haven't learned and you keep making mistakes and you'll do what I tell you to do, I will step in and rescue you. For God took care of his people, but he didn't take care of them without their responsibility or without their effort. The Bible is really clear that God gives opportunity, and that's important to get. God gives opportunity, and that opportunity is for provision. I will take care of you. Now, if you listen to people in our culture, how do you succeed financially? There's all kinds of ways to have financial plans that help you succeed. It's a temptation to walk away from God and say, boy, here are things that really will work and I can really make a great life for myself, and ignore what God says you should do. Our promise to God is, I will live the way you tell me to live. So whether it's financial planning or whether it's your job or whether it's your family or your lifestyle or your home or whatever it is, these all have to be under God's control. Doing what he tells us to do in this material part of our life is critical for God's response to us. And even though we might be as responsible as we can, difficulty comes to us, and circumstances can reverse themselves, just like they did with the Israelites, but always God is saying, I will take care of you. Now what I want to ask you to remember, as a follower of Christ, God says, I will give you opportunity. So you have a job. You do the job the best you can. You make sure you do everything that you can so that you have that job. You do what the employer tells you you're supposed to do, and you do the best you can. You may have a bad employer. He may fire you. You may get in trouble. God will give you opportunity. But if you're not responsible to treat people the way you're supposed to treat them and do the work that you're supposed to do, he cannot help you, because no matter how many opportunities you have, if you're not acting as God wants you to act, they won't succeed. That's just the long and short of it. Now if you're doing what God wants you to do, you have the income. The second side of that is making sure that you do with it what you're supposed to do. God's provision is, I'll provide something for you to eat, I'll provide something for you to stay, some place for you to live. I've oftentimes seen people who have financial difficulties, but most people outside of them can look at their life and say, I can see what they're doing wrong. Sometimes we have to make sure that the choices we make about how we spend our money and what we do with our money are approved of by God. Should I buy this, God? Well, there's a temptation, you know, when you go out to buy a car, for example, to say, I want this kind of car. And God may say, I'm going to give you this kind of car. The difference between those two in price sometimes is the difference between financial success and failure. Not consulting God about what you should do in terms of your house, in terms of your car, in terms of clothes, in terms of all the things that we can buy, oftentimes causes, even with God's provision, to find it is not enough. Oftentimes then we look around us and we say, the answer is more money, but you find someone else that makes more money and they say the same thing. I remember a survey that I heard, read about, that they surveyed people of all kinds of financial levels. And the question was, how much money, how much more money would you need, what percentage of money would you need to be able to have what you think you need? People that made lots of money said 5%. People that made not so much money said 5%. People that made very little money said 5%. It seems like there is something built into us without God's control that makes us think happiness is just a little bit more. And whenever we begin to think that way, then we find ourselves driven, not by what is necessary, but what satisfies. Not our obedience to God, but our greed is what that is. So God's promise to the people of Israel is very simple. I'll give you a way to be able to make a living. I'll provide the things you need. I won't do it for you and I won't rescue you from every difficulty you face. I just tell you that I will provide your need. If you think I haven't, stop and look around to see if you have failed in some way to be obedient to what I've asked of you, because I will keep my word. We live in a culture driven by people who constantly want more, and the television fills us with all that, and it's contagious with us, but God makes a promise to His people, don't listen to that, look at what I've done, and I'll tell you it's enough. Trust me. Let's pray. Father, we all know what it's like to live in a culture where having more promises satisfaction and contentment, even though we look around us and see people that get there that don't have that. Help us to find contentment in what you give us. Help us to be responsible with what you provide, and help us whenever we've done all those things to be faithful and trust in you when it doesn't work out like we think it should. Let nothing shake our confidence in you, because you promised us, I will provide for you. In the name of Christ, we claim this promise, amen.