Independence Day special using the Exodus as an example. Num 11:4-6; 13:27-33.

Title: Independence Day special using the Exodus as an example. Num 11:4-6; 13:27-33.

 

Announcements/opening prayer:

 

 

For many years the Jews were in slavery in Egypt. Their slavery consisted of hard labor in making bricks, mortar, and building cities. They were worked hard but they prospered and multiplied, but they were under slavery.

 

Life in Egypt is very regulated because of the Nile. This was one of the reasons Egypt was able to last so long as an empire. They were not interested in progress or change but in regulating life by the rhythm of the Nile. It flooded its banks in a very predictable manner. This made for some of the riches soil in the world. They produced a variety of grains, vegetables, and fruits and tended nice, fat livestock. This variety of food and plenty of water in a well regulated society made for a satisfied people and even though the Jews were slaves they enjoyed this constant produce from the state along with a very regimented and regulated life. Yet, for them alone, as God's chosen people, this was not the life for them.

 

Going off into the wilderness in freedom exposed problems that they had never seen before. They went from the oasis of the Nile to the arid wilderness of the Sinai peninsula.

 

 

There is no reliable source of food or water. The terrain is hilly and rough rather than level and smooth as the areas around the Nile. God doesn't tell them when the water is coming, though He does so with the manna, but the manna is the same type and flavor every day.

 

Num 11:4 And the rabble who were among them had greedy desires; and also the sons of Israel wept again and said, "Who will give us meat to eat?

 

Num 11:5 "We remember the fish which we used to eat free in Egypt, the cucumbers and the melons and the leeks and the onions and the garlic,

 

Tasty dishes of protein, vegetables, sweet fresh fruit, and flavor.

 

Num 11:6 but now our appetite is gone. There is nothing at all to look at except this manna."

 

They don't have a timed and regulated life that revolves around a faithful Nile river, but rather they have a life that revolves around the one true living God.

 

Deu 2:7

For the Lord your God has blessed you in all that you have done; He has known your wanderings through this great wilderness. These forty years the Lord your God has been with you; you have not lacked a thing."'

 

God gave them freedom and the freedom to follow a living God above any blind, deaf, and dumb idol of metal or wood. Yet with freedom comes risk. With freedom comes danger and failure as well as success. Some think prosperity to mean that they never have problems or get hurt or injured. And when a government promises such things, which God's government does not, in fact quite the opposite, through the voluntary submission of the freedom of the people, which would be their final free act, then they fall under the tyranny of evil, arrogant rulers.

 

For example, they did not have to fight wars in Egypt. Egypt is an oasis around a river that is surrounded by miles of desert. It is well protected by geography. But now as they travel into foreign lands there will be others, and especially in the PL, that are going to take offense at them and they will have to fight them.

 

Num 13:27 Thus they told him, and said, "We went in to the land where you sent us; and it certainly does flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.

 

Num 13:28 Nevertheless, the people who live in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large; and moreover, we saw the descendants of Anak there.

 

Num 13:29 Amalek is living in the land of the Negev and the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Amorites are living in the hill country, and the Canaanites are living by the sea and by the side of the Jordan."

 

Num 13:30 Then Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, "We should by all means go up and take possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it."

 

Num 13:31 But the men who had gone up with him said, "We are not able to go up against the people, for they are too strong for us."

 

Num 13:32 So they gave out to the sons of Israel a bad report of the land which they had spied out, saying, "The land through which we have gone, in spying it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants; and all the people whom we saw in it are men of great size.

 

Num 13:33 There also we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak are part of the Nephilim); and we became like grasshoppers in our own sight, and so we were in their sight."  

 

Joshua and Caleb drove the sons of Anak completely out of their land. Caleb settled his people in that very place. They took hold of their God given freedom by faith in Him and His word.

 

They are given the Law at Sinai, and in the Law there is a regulation of life, but not like in Egypt. God, through the Law, gave them the revelation that they were sinners and in need of a Savior. He would reveal to them through the Law of their need for deliverance that could only come from Jehovah and then they would be free to love Him even though every one of them would, at times, break the Mosaic Law.

 

Our leaders and the people have been given the chance to trust the greatest constitution that has even been written by man. If they had, everyone would have prospered beyond their dreams, but evil and lustful people have succeeded in dismantling it from within, for over more than one hundred years. This past week is the fruit of that time spent. The people lose their freedom first and then those who received power and wealth through that tyranny suffer the loss of all things.

 

In the regulations of the Law are statutes on how to properly live, eat, clean, and basically life prosperous physically. There are the Ten Commandments which regulate AND protect freedom. No other man could intrude on someone's marriage [you shall not commit adultery], or their family life [honor your father and mother, you shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, you shall not covet your neighbor's property], or their business life [you shall not steal]. In other words, the commandments of the Law, similar to sound laws in a democratic type society, regulated rights that came from the one true God [you shall have no other gods before Me, you shall not make an idol, you shall not take the name of the Lord in vain, and you shall remember the Sabbath as holy] and protected ones freedom from the intrusion of another person. Within these laws the individual Jew was able to enjoy freedom in his business, his marriage, his family life, and in his spiritual life by hearing the word of the Lord and loving the Lord with all his heart mind and strength and loving his neighbor as himself. Freedom doesn't mean a lack of laws and it does exclude the tyranny of one man over another. Only God may exercise such control as the Creator. So how can a person in chains or a person in another type of tyranny situation from which there is no escape, realize that God has given them freedom?

 

An evil government or situation may physically enslave a person, but no person or government can give or remove the person's dignity, prosperity, or freedom within his soul.

 

With that, in the wilderness without a regulated Nile that always assured you of a growing season, of a source of water, and of grazing lands for your beasts, the freedom of the people depended alone on the God, the only giver of true laws and the Creator of all things, even the Nile.

 

They are the only theocracy to ever exist. In our founding the writers of the constitution attempted to right one law that all the people could vote on, and that was the US Constitution. It had a similar regulation of freedom and protection from tyranny, either from a government or individual as God's Law. In a way it is similar to God's Law since it was founded upon it, but it is from a different source and it is not holy and perfect, however, it is the best Constitution ever written in history. That truth cannot be argued.

 

By writing the Constitution and having it ratified by the states, there would be one law, the Constitution, that the people voted for, that could not be changed. It was a law binding upon the people and their government. It wasn't a law written by the government but a law put upon the government that the people ratified and that could not be usurped by the government, no matter how powerful the national government was. It didn't come from God, but it was based upon God's law and it was written by men who not only knew history, literature, and politics, but who knew God.

 

The men who wrote the constitution, mainly James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, began to write a number of commentaries that began to be published soon after, together they are called the Federalist Papers. These were circulated to the states so that they could hear arguments for the ratification of the Constitution. Along with those articles, there were arguments printed for the rejection of the constitution, known as the anti-Federalist Papers. The first Federalist Paper was printed about a month after the constitution was completed.

 

It has been frequently remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. [Federalist 1, Alexander Hamilton]

 

What's it like when force rules? Tyrants are hated because they rule by force. No one likes to be forced to do what they don't want to do, against their will and without their consent. It is no accident that although many Roman slaves had a better standard of living than poor freemen, Rome still had a runaway slave problem.

 

One of the things that tyrants have to do to have any longevity in office is that they have to make war on every kind of excellence and especially of the kind owed to God.

 

They can't get their way with people who think there is something higher than them, and they can't get their way with excellent people and so they tend to corrupt the people. They interfere in their daily lives, interfering with their children, their marriages, their churches, their businesses, and they regulate life so that they may corrupt the excellence in people or at least stifle it to the point of powerlessness.

 

Our own Supreme Court, made up of nine unelected officials, lawyers, who do not represent all the people, became a tyrant this past week. The adopted a definition of marriage.

 

The dissent of Justice Scalia.

 

Today’s decree says that my Ruler, and the Ruler of 320 million Americans coast-to-coast, is a majority of the nine lawyers on the Supreme Court.

 

The opinion in these cases is the furthest extension in fact— and the furthest extension one can even imagine—of the Court’s claimed power to create “liberties” that the Constitution and its Amendments neglect to mention.

 

This practice of constitutional revision by an unelected committee of nine, always accompanied (as it is today) by extravagant praise of liberty, robs the People of the most important liberty they asserted in the Declaration of Independence and won in the Revolution of 1776: the freedom to govern themselves.

 

This is a naked judicial claim to legislative—indeed, super-legislative—power; a claim fundamentally at odds with our system of government. Except as limited by a constitutional prohibition agreed to by the People, the States are free to adopt whatever laws they like, even those that offend the esteemed Justices’ “reasoned judgment.”

 

A system of government that makes the People subordinate to a committee of nine unelected lawyers does not deserve to be called a democracy. [Justice Scalia]

 

The dissent of Justice Thomas:

 

“Human dignity has long been understood in this country to be innate. When the Framers proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,’ they referred to a vision of mankind in which all humans are created in the image of God and therefore of inherent worth. That vision is the foundation upon which this Nation was built.

 

The corollary of that principle is that human dignity cannot be taken away by the government. Slaves did not lose their dignity (any more than they lost their humanity) because the government allowed them to be enslaved.

 

Those held in internment camps did not lose their dignity because the government confined them. And those denied governmental benefits certainly do not lose their dignity because the government denies them those benefits. The government cannot bestow dignity, and it cannot take it away.”

 

Finally, later on in his dissent, Justice Thomas states:

 

Our Constitution—like the Declaration of Independence before it—was predicated on a simple truth: One’s liberty, not to mention one’s dignity, was something to be shielded from—not provided by—the State. Today’s decision casts that truth aside.[Justice Thomas]

 

With freedom comes disappointment, consequences of failure, pressure to make correct choices from your own conscience, as well as rich prosperities as well as an excellence that cannot be had by being forced to do a thing.

 

Our nation was established on this principle of freedom so that we could be the most excellent nation in the history of the world and we have been. This past week has included a precipitous fall from that excellence because freedom has been removed from all, not just those who disagree with the court's decision. It has been done in a brazen and immature manner, as has never before been seen. Because of this, it would seem that the precipice will steepen.

 

But as believers in the King of kings and Lord of lords we must not be occupied with people over and above God, in whom and from whom comes our dignity, identity, and freedom.

 

 Even if we happen to come to be in chains or internment, that in no way defines our freedom, or who we are as those in Christ, similar to what Justice Thomas wrote.

 

Israel went south for a while, in the opposite direction, and they despaired. But God turned them again to the north and they entered the land. There was great discipline from the serpents and there were two great battles to face before they settled and were ready and they thoroughly won both of those battles. They were then attacked by a diviner, a minister of Satan's heathenism, and not only was he not successful, but God used his very mouth to restated God's eternal covenant with His people.

 

Just as God literally turned Israel around (from south to north), He can turn this nation around, but the believers in this nation must get out of the cosmic system!

 

I would give the same advice to the Supreme Court - get out of the cosmic system and back into the Constitution.

 

God can turn our nation around if the people in the nation, and I do mean the Christian church, will remove itself from compromise with the cosmic system, learn from the discipline of God, and fight the good fight of faith.

 

In the end we will be in heaven and ultimately free. If the US continues on a very precipitous decline I personally believe the Lord will return to rapture His church, although no one can determine how low we can actually go before that happens. But even with these comforts, I for one, who has loved his country from the time I was old enough to learn the difference between freedom and tyranny, do not desire to witness the destruction of this nation, nor do I want our children to see it. We must keep pressing on towards the goal of the upward call and keep praying for our brethren from coast to coast, from sea to shining sea.