All The Generation Of The Men Of War Perished

So this morning we're going to be returning to our study of Deuteronomy chapter 2 and this passage is a longer passage than we would normally take on. It's about 16 verses and in it there's a lot of weird names and weird places. Things we'll probably struggle to say let alone have any reference to in our minds like where is that place and who are those people. Most of our text has to do with the history of two nations that we don't read a whole lot about in Scripture. You may know them, Moab and the sons of Ammon, or the Ammonites. We're going to read a lot about their land, where they live, and how they came to be settled in that land. That's the majority of our text deals with these two nations and how they came to be. The other portion of our text, sort of in the middle of our passage, deals with the nation of Israel, who are entering and going through these lands of Moab and Ammon.

as they're coming toward the end of their captivity in the wilderness, as they are about to go into the promised land, they have to make their way up through Moab and the land of Ammon to come into Canaan. And so we're going to spend some time focusing on Moab and Amnon, but most of our time is going to be focusing on the Israelites and how God was preparing them to enter the promised land. And my hope this morning is that God will help us to see his hand actively working in our lives and in the lives of those around us. That's what we're going to see in the text this morning. This is not just a history lesson. This is not just a geography update. You know, it's not just a GPS saying, and you have 36 miles to your destination.

sort of thing. There's more to it than that. And God's kind to give us these updates, these instructions. And so I hope that God will help us to see in our lives how he works, even as he was working in the Israelites' lives back then. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord now? From Deuteronomy chapter 2, verses 18 to 23. So he passed beyond our brothers, the sons of Esau, who lived in Seir, away from the Arab road, away from Elath and from Ezeon-Geber. And we turned and passed through the way of the wilderness of Moab. Then the Lord said to me, Do not harass Moab, nor provoke them to war, for I will not give you any of their land as a possession, because I have given air to the sons of Lot as a possession. The Emim lived there formerly, a people as great, numerous, and tall as the Anakim. Like the Anakim, they are also regarded as Rephaim, but the Moabites called them Emim.

The Horites formerly lived in Seir, but the sons of Esau dispossessed them and destroyed them from before them and settled in their place, just as Israel did to the land of their possession, which the Lord gave to them. Now arise and cross over the brook Zerod yourselves. So we crossed over the brook Zerod. Now at that time, now the time that it took us to come from Kadesh Barnea until we crossed over the brook Zerod was 38 years. until all the generation of the men of war perished from within the camp as the Lord had sworn to them. Moreover, the hand of the lords was against them to destroy them from within the camp until they all perished. So it came about when all the men of war had finally perished from among the people that the Lord spoke to me saying, today you shall cross over air, the border of Moab. When you come opposite the sons of Ammon, do not harass them nor provoke them.

For I will not give you any of the land of the sons of Ammon as a possession, because I have given it to the sons of Lot as a possession. It is also regarded as the land of the Rephaim, for Rephaim formerly lived in it, but the Ammonites called them Zamzumim. A people as great and numerous and tall as the Anakim, but the Lord destroyed them from before them. And they dispossessed them and settled in their place, just as he did for the sons of Esau who lived in Seir, when he destroyed the Horites from before them and dispossessed them and settled in their place.

This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now you have to remember that this is the second and third bit of nation that Israel is working through. They've been in the wilderness. They've been wandering around in the Arab. And then they're making their way up. toward the place where they're going to enter into the land of Canaan. And so they first had to go through the land of Seir, the land of Esau. And north of the land of Seir was the land of Moab. And north of the land of Moab was the land of Ammon. And just to the west was Canaan. So it's like saying, we're going to go up through Tennessee, and then we're going to go up through Kentucky, and then we're going to go up through Indiana.

And in the middle of Indiana, we're going to go over into Illinois because the goal is to get to Illinois. That's sort of a trip. And if you remember, when we studied a few weeks ago their passage through the land of Seir, you'll realize there's a lot of similarities between what they were instructed to do in the land of Seir as well as what they were to do in the land of Moab and the land of Ammon. What they were told was, you're not to make war. This land is not yours, it's theirs. I've given it to them. You're to buy your food. You're to pay for your water. You're not to steal or make war. You're a guest. You're a sojourner. You're just moving through. God had settled Esau in the land of Edom, which is called Seir. That land was not for the people of Israel. That was not their land. It was not theirs to take. Now, one thing we should know about, we can note here in the Lord's emphasis on these lands and how people interact with them, is we can learn something about war.

And that just because you want something or just because a nation wants something, they're not at liberty to take it. Because it's the Lord who's drawn these boundaries and has given these lands to these people. But as we move on, we're going to see with both Moab and with the sons of Ammon, very similar instructions. He says, when you go through Moab, do not harass them or provoke them to war, for I will not give you any of their land. Now note he says, I will not give you their land. Because the Lord understands that what we have, whether as an individual or a family or a nation, has been given to us. We don't live that way or think that way very often, but all the things that we have, we've been given. Paul asks us in the New Testament, what do you have that you haven't received? And that includes the heritage and the lineage of the countries that you live in. We've received this. What made you special enough to be born?

to be conceived and born and live in America as opposed to any other place. It's just God's choosing, isn't it? It's just him giving you this people, this place at this time. So don't provoke them to war, he says, the people of Moab, for I will not give you any of their land as a possession because I have given air to the sons of Lot as a possession. And then again in verse 18, speaking about the sons of Ammon, he says this, today you shall cross over air, the border of Moab. When you came opposite the sons of Ammon, again, do not harass them nor provoke them, for I will not give you any of the land of the sons of Ammon as a possession, because I have given it to the sons of Lot as a possession. Now, one of the things this passage teaches us is who Moab and Ammon are. Twice it says, you can't have this land, not because I've given it to Moab or given it to Amnon specifically, but because I've given it to Lot. So who are Moab and Amnon?

We could deduce that they're Lot's children, right? Do you remember how they were conceived? They were the children of Lot by his daughters. These were the children that grew up into a people that were the result of an incestuous relationship between Lot and his daughters. You remember when they left Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot and his family are leaving, and his wife turns back. and is turned into a pillar of salt, and she's gone. And they get up into the mountain, into the hiding, into the cave, and the daughters go, we're going to be blotted out as a people if we don't do something about it, because they've just watched all of their civilization that they've known just burned up with fire and brimstone. They're going, what are we supposed to do? And they say, here's what we'll do. We'll get our dad drunk, and then each one of us in turn will go lay with him. They both end up pregnant. The older has Moab as a son, and the younger one has Amnon as a son.

Now why do we bring all of that up? Is it just to make us uncomfortable? Is it just to make us feel gross? No, actually that's not the point, and we should note that God brought it up. He could have just said, I gave the land to Moab, or I gave the land to Amnon, and left their lineage obscure, but he didn't. He said, I've given it to the sons of Lot as a possession. The reason I bring it up is to say, Moab and Amnon were not good people. There's nothing in Scripture that commends either one of those men or those countries to us.

They're only spoken of as being wicked, as being vile, as being godless, as in need of destruction. And yet here, God's given them a land. And what kind of land did he give them? Was it a vacant land? Was it a land where it was just wide open? Sort of like when the, you know, we might think of when the frontiersmen in America went move toward the west we might forget that there were actually indians living in some of those places that had to be dispossessed but we tend to think of it as just being wide open unpossessed country that they just went and staked out their four corners and said this is mine that's not entirely true of america as we as as things progressed west and that certainly was not true of them as they took over these lands we're told who lived in these lands we're told that the anakin who've gone by different names who are of The race or similar to the Rephaim. Who are the Rephaim? What are the Anakim or the Emim or the Zamzamim? There's a mouthful. Teach your kids to say Zamzamim. They're giants. They're great. They're tall. They're mighty. In other words, they're really scary. And here, these godless people, Moab and Amnon, are given land full of scary people, strong people.

fearful people. The same was true with Esau, if you remember. They were dispossessed from the land. And so it seems that these Rephaim and all their various tribes were scattered all abroad, and that the Lord, as he was giving land to Esau and to Moab and to Amnon, he's just wiping out all of these giants along the way. And he's giving this land to wicked men. All of these men were wicked, and yet God still gave them a place to settle. Do you remember way back at the beginning of Genesis when Cain had killed Abel and he was, he said, you know, what's going to happen is everyone's going to kill me and what did the Lord do for him? He sent him away and he says, there's going to be a land for you. We're going to give you a place and people aren't going to be able to do to you as even as you've done to Abel. And so God gave these wicked nations, these wicked men and their children land. He gave them a place, a dwelling. And these were not people who had received any of God's promises.

There's nothing in Scripture that says God promised to give Esau's children a land, or Moab, or Amnon. There's no place that says, and God promises to give you this land. And yet he did. They were not his people, and he provided for them. So there are a number of lessons we can learn from simply them receiving this land. The first is that God establishes nations, and that he upholds them, or he crushes them, as he wills. We... as individuals or as a nation, are not nearly as strong as we think we are. We may compare our strengths to one another, or we may compare our strengths to other nations, and we might come out thinking we're strong or capable. But compared to the Lord, even the Rephim couldn't stand against him. They couldn't even slow him down.

So we should be careful to learn here that the first thing is God establishes nations and upholds them. And so the good things that we have, we've received from the hand of God. And if they're taken away from us, then it's the Lord who took them away from us. We need to learn to think and live as Christians as though we cut out the middleman. The whole point, the whole benefit of being a Christian is that you can see God working. The world can see the world working. They can see what all the people do and how all the people are screwing it up and how they aren't doing the right things and how if different people would get in place, then it would be better. But that's not how Christians should think. Christians should look and they should see God working. Do you remember when Elisha was holed up and his slave came to him and he says, man, this is not good. All the armies were mounting against them and he's just like...

They're going to kill us. Like I'm looking and I'm seeing all of these armies mounted against us. And Elisha says, ah, go back to sleep, basically. But he says a little more than that. He says, we are more than they. And then the Bible says, then God opened the servant's eyes to see, to perceive the mountains covered with soldiers and with chariots of fire. That's something Christians can see. That's not something the world can see. And so it's a crying shame when Christians live with the eyes of the world and can only manage to come up with the thoughts of the world concerning nations and concerning righteousness and wickedness and power. I understand you'll feel foolish if you say, but I trust God to provide for us. And if good comes to us, then we're going to praise him for it. And if hardship comes from us, then we're going to praise him for that too. And we're going to be content either way.

Because we're Christians. That's something only Christians can do. And you can see it in this text that God gave these wicked people lands he had never promised to and was not obliged to give to them. And you do know that in time, he wipes them out. It is God who establishes and upholds nations, gives to them, wicked or righteous. He gives to them as he wills. And they are not strong enough to keep or to take from God what he has not willed to give to them. The second thing you can learn from this giving of the lands to Moab and Amnon is that God doesn't give to people based on their worthiness. I mean, consider Esau selling his birthright. Consider Moab and Amnon. These are not good dudes. They weren't like, oh, and you've done well, so we will bless you extra. These were bad guys.

There's no indication in Scripture anywhere that as a result of God giving Moab her land, or Amnon his land, that they ever turned to God and gave thanks to him for it. In fact, if you could have asked them at that time, how did you guys come into this land, they would have a completely different story about how they came to be. They would have known that the Rephim had to be killed, or the Emim, or the Zamzamim. They would have known. We came in in the Horites. We killed them. We wiped them out. Look at us. But that's not the truth. Their perception was wrong because their perception didn't take into account what God did. They never looked in the mirror and said, are we strong enough to do this? They lived completely unaware of and unwilling to acknowledge God's agency in the prosperity of their nations. Should not be true of us.

The third and final point I want to make up from this passage about what we can learn is that if God would give to the wicked what He had never promised to give to them, then surely He will give to us, His people, everything that He's promised us. He was good to them and He never said He would be. But He's promised to be good to us. He's promised to give us good things. Now here's the danger. If you understand that promise to be comfortable, or to be without hardship or to be as you drew it up then you'll be tempted to think you're not getting what's promised to you but the problem is not in God's agency and how he acts the problem is in how you've prioritized or how you look at the things you think oh well this is what receiving the promise would be to me this is how I think God's love should be expressed in my life When instead, as Christians, what we should do is look around at our lives, look around at the things that we have or don't have or desire or want or whatever, and say, this, as it is today, right now, is the will of God. And it's good. It's good for me. And it's producing something better in me and preparing me to be able to perceive and appreciate and honor the gifts that are yet still to come.

I think these are the lessons that the Israelites were supposed to be learning as they walked through this land. They've been wandering around out in the wilderness in a foreign land, receiving their food straight from the hand of God and water from rocks. And then they're supposed to walk through this land where, how'd these guys get here? Why did they get a land? It would have been a very reasonable question to ask. And so God tells them, they have a land because I gave it to them. And that would have been disciplinary in some sense because all of the while they're walking through these godless lands, they would have said, yeah, God was going to give us a land too, but we're here instead. It would have been a good discipline for them, a good reminder. The difficulty was great in taking over the lands of Moab and Seir and Amnon that the Lord delivered it to them.

Compare that with the Israelites' fear of the Anakim. You remember just a chapter ago in Deuteronomy 128, after the spies come back, what is their report? Their report is, the people are bigger and taller than we. The cities are large and fortified to heaven. And besides, we saw the sons of Anakim there. If the Lord would wipe out the sons of Anakim for Moab, wouldn't he do that for his people as well? The point of all of this is that the fear that captivated the Israelites and kept them from trusting God when they were supposed to go in to receive the land which the Lord their God was going to give them, Moses now uses that fear to teach them not to be afraid of the things that their fathers were afraid of. There are many things we give to our children. Some we're glad to give to them, and we give to them on purpose. Some things we give to them and we're not glad to give to them, and we didn't mean to give it to them on purpose. We meant, in fact, to shield them from it.

And yet somehow many times our children come up with the things we wish they wouldn't have from us, our weaknesses and our sins and our failures. This thing Moses is saying to them is recasting their father's sins in another light so that they won't repeat it. It doesn't sound like a nice thing to say or a friendly or a kind thing to say. The difference between the congregation he's speaking to now as they're about to go in at the end of the 40 years and the congregation he spoke to originally, at the beginning of the 40 years, was that all of the men were different now. All the men were different. They had not heard Moses' telling of the story, the leaders' telling of the story. Perhaps they'd heard their parents grumble and complain or repent and be humbled. But you can understand with these children, there would have been a lot of questions like, hey, Dad, why do they have cities and why do we have tents?

Like, we're bigger people than they. We've got all this livestock and we've got all this wealth. Why don't we have a place? Why do we have to live in a trailer? If you were a dad and your kid asked you that question and all you could say was, well, because I was a chicken, what would you say to him? You might not tell him the whole truth. Or you might not be able to give them the proper perspective. And so hear Moses' kind and say, here's what happened. To a new group of people, a new generation of men, who are now about to go in and do the things that their fathers failed to do. So when we get scared, and we live as though God is not real and actively working in our lives, we're falling into sin. Even the Rephim, the Anakim, couldn't slow down God. They couldn't slow him down from what he was going to do. It wasn't even like, oh man, there's a detour now, there's these giants in my way. God wiped them out in just the amount of time that he intended to, so that he could give.

To Moab and to Esau, the things that he was intending to give to them. And so we ought not to be fearful that something is too big for God. Too big for us? Yes. Doesn't take much to be too big or too heavy or too scary for us. But for the Lord? No. So that's Moab and that's Seir. Now we're going to come to this sort of insertion in the middle of the text. Verses 13 on down to... or 14, down to verse 17. It says this, Now the time that it took us to come from Kadesh Barnea until we crossed over the brook Zered was 38 years, until all the generation of the men of war perished from within the camp as the Lord had sworn to them. War over the hand of the Lord was against them, meaning the men of war, that generation, to destroy them from within the camp until they all perished.

So it came about when all the men of war had finally perished from among the people that the Lord said to me. And he says, now you're going to go into the land of Amnon. That's what comes after it. I have a question, an answer. The question is, why did God keep most of the men that needed to be destroyed around for 38 of the 40 years? Because we're told in this passage that now at 38 years in, the majority of them are now dying. or being finished off, and that they weren't going to go into these lands until those men had perished. They had to be gone. They had to be done away with before they could go in. Well, there's a practical answer, and there's what I would say is a spiritual or more godly answer. Not that the practical one is bad, but I don't think it's entirely what motivated the Lord. The practical reason that these men were kept around for 38 of these 40 years is that if they wouldn't have been kept around, it would have greatly reduced the size and the future of Israel.

There would have been no children born for a lot. There would have been a missing generation. And that would have resulted in the contraction of the people of Israel. And you remember that the Lord promised to bless them and to multiply them. That back in Deuteronomy chapter 1, what did Moses say to them? What was his benediction at the beginning of his address? The Lord has multiplied you greatly just as he promised you. You are as the sea, the stars in the sky. And if all those men had been wiped out and taken away, that would not have continued. There would have been this massive contraction.

Talk about a falling birth rate. It would have just gone away a whole generation. It would have been left with a nation full of only women, young and old, and children. God still had a purpose for these men. It was to lead, to care for, and to continue to propagate the next generation of those who would possess the land, the land that they themselves were not allowed to go into. Now, here's the thing about discipline. Because all of this is a discipline of the Lord, that they're being made to wander and that these men are being wiped out. Many of us want discipline to be very short. Even if it's painful, just get it over with. 38 years walking dead men, still with work to do from the Lord. That's hard. That's hard. That would be difficult for us. 38 years, a generation, basically your adult life.

Spent in difficulty, spent in wandering, spent knowing that you weren't going to make it, that at some point between now and then we were going to die. And yet they still had work to do. And so one of the things we learn from this prolonging of these men's lives is that simply being disciplined does not free us from our responsibilities and our obligations. If you're at work and your boss gets upset at you, what does everyone want to do? My boss is a stupid jerk. He doesn't appreciate me. In fact, he's not very good at his job anyway. And I would do better if he was better at his job. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to quit. Do you think that's going to fix the prize? Have you considered for a moment that at least part of the problem is you and not your boss? Your boss has sins, but so do you. And you would do well, we would do well, to always keep in mind our own failures and stop blaming everybody else.

Because mystery of mysteries, guys that rotate through jobs, can't keep a steady job or can't excel at the job they're in, never seem to conclude that it has anything to do with their performance or ability. It's always somebody else not doing their part. I'll tell you a secret. You live in a fallen world, and nothing works the way it's supposed to. And your ability to provide for your family, care for them, or to make progress in glorifying God depends almost exclusively on your ability to deal with sin in a way that honors God in the workplace. If you can't do that, you will live a life of loose ends and broken commitments, and you won't be able to figure out why, but it's quite simple. You have responsibilities. Well, it's hard, and it's not fair, and why doesn't he just fire me? It's because he doesn't want to pay me unemployment.

Perhaps. It may also be that they've put months or years of training and investment into you and that they're not quick to throw away their investment. But they actually expect you to do your job. And that they're willing to make you just a little bit uncomfortable to that end. Or a lot uncomfortable to that end. And for a longer period of time. None of us like that, do we? When we get sick, what is our prayer? Take it away. Take it away. Make it go away. I want it to go away. Stop it right now. I hope I'm better by tomorrow. I understand the sentiment. None of us enjoy being sick. But is there any benefit to be gained from being sick? Or is it just miserable? Is it just this doggone result of living in a fallen world where God's not using it? No, He does use it. Even sicknesses. Every winter.

It's one of the blessings of living in the Midwest. You need to spend four months dealing with broken stuff, your body. And all of us just want to get away from it. That doesn't make it easy to bear. It doesn't make it, oh, well, those aren't real burdens. They're real burdens. It's like wandering around in the wilderness for 38 years. That's a real burden. It's a real difficulty. It's sad. It's hard. If you were married and you were in Israel, At this time. And you or your husband, you if you're the man, your husband if you're the wife, was one of the guys who wasn't going to make it into the promised land. What would you do? I think that if you were thinking about it, you'd have children. That's what Adam and Eve did. When the discipline came down, when the hardship showed up, when he went, you're out of the garden.

but the promise is going to come. The redemption is going to come through your children. If you were in this land and if you were amongst those people, you would have said, but God is faithful. Look at what he's done to Moab. Look what he's done to Ammon. Look at him. Look at his power. If he'll give to the wicked the things that they haven't asked for or deserved, won't he give to us the things that he's promised to give us? I think what we should do is make some people to go into that land. If I can't have it, then I want my children to have it. I want there to be children to possess it.

to receive the blessings of God. I look, there's nowhere in Scripture that explicitly says that that's what happened. There's also no indication that they shrunk. What we have is in Deuteronomy, Moses calling out to them in chapter 1 and blessing them and saying, I pray that God would multiply you a thousand times more. And I don't think that wandering in the wilderness was meant to prevent that. It may have actually motivated it. So practically, the men were kept around to... continue to be the men of the nation. To lead, to care for, not really to provide. They had screwed up the provision as they would have seen it. They were wandering. Now the Lord provided the food and the shelter and the guidance, but to lead and to care for and to continue to propagate the next generation who would go in to possess the land. You note that these men or this nation were careful as they went through Edom, the land of Seir.

and Moab and Amnon at this point, they did what the Lord said. There's no indication that they rebelled, that they stole, that they made war. They obeyed. They did what they were supposed to do. Because God had humbled them and they accepted it from Him. Here's the thing about discipline. When it comes, the longer you stiffen your neck against it and the longer you make excuses for yourself and the longer you say, they don't understand, the longer it's going to last. Okay? I get it. You're always right. But you're not. And what I'm saying doesn't mean that other people don't have any responsibility either. I'm not trying to give you a complex and make you think everything 100% is always your fault. I'm just trying to push in the direction that none of us want to go, which is taking a little more responsibility for our circumstances and saying, you know, I made this mess. I contributed to it.

Other people may have too, and that's fine. God will deal with them. But I know I did, and I need to deal with that part of it. These are the practical reasons. I said there was a spiritual benefit in keeping these men alive for so long as well. This is the hard one. I believe that God sustained these men these decades so that everyone else would have the consequences of their sin ingrained on their hearts in a way that they wouldn't have if those men would have been wiped out right away. What do you want to do when difficulty comes? Remember I said, we just want to get through it. We just want to get through it. You know what happens with things that are really short? We forget them. We just forget. We just forget. Scripture tells us, and as we come into Deuteronomy chapter 4, the whole chapter is about remembering. The whole point of it is remember.

what God's done. Remember how he's provided. Remember how he's disciplined. Remember what he's promised to you. Remember what obedience looks like. It's all about remembering. And the reason it's all about remembering is because we're also prone to forget. And so we need things to remind us. Now, we might feel it's inappropriate for the thing to remind us that that would be our father walking around knowing that he's not going to go into the land, but that would be memorable. And in the end, that would be helpful. That would be preparatory. And so sometimes when we see destruction in people's lives or in places, it's a good reminder to us. When Vanessa and I got married, we went down to a little island off the coast of Cancun in Mexico for our honeymoon. And we went in May of 2006. Well, in the fall of 2005, Hurricane Katrina had come through. And we know about it hitting.

Louisiana, New Orleans, right? Flooded all that area. But the eye of that storm traveled right between the mainland in Cancun and that island. Now, this is a beautiful place to go. Crystal clear water. You see 20 feet down like it's two feet away. It's just beautiful. And yet we go down there and it's not quite a year later. And Mexico is not like America. They don't have a FEMA to just come in and bunches of money to just pour it, fixing it all and putting it all back. So we go down there and there's like these parts that have been... Rebuilt. And they're beautiful. And it looks like nothing happened. And then there's the parts that aren't. Like the boats that have been blown up on the shore. And these big, huge boats. Blown up like you put this room on the deck. Blown up, turned over, just laying on the side. Up on the sand. Just rusting away. Because there was nobody to come and clean it up. It's a good reminder. You could understand going down to this beautiful tropical place that you would just think, it's always like this.

What's the purpose of that boat blown ashore and tipped over just to sit there and rot? Is that a good reminder? A good reminder of what happened and a good reminder of what may still yet happen again. It's a good reminder. And the fact that I knew Katrina had gone through there six months previous could not have had the same effect. It wouldn't have been as real to us. You know, when we went snorkeling, there was these, we'd go out and there used to be these huge docks where big boats would be. Big wooden docks with these pylons, you know, huge wooden pylons. And there would have been decks. But Katrina, all you had were these like toothpicks sticking up out of the water. And you'd go out there and you'd go snorkeling. It was a real nice place to snorkel because all of the docks were laying on the ground. Underwater now. And the fish liked it. And you think, what in the world happened here?

This is not small timber. This was not poorly constructed. It's destroyed. It's a good reminder of the power of God. And so these men were kept as a preparation for those who would go in. And the reason is because it's so easy for us to forget the Lord's discipline when we're not reminded of it regularly. In our own lives, when we're disciplined, when we're told no, we want the no to be short. We want the no to be soft. And we want the person saying no to feel sorry for the fact that they said no. None of that is biblical. You think in your marriages or in your homes, what sort of trials or difficulties you face in your relationship with your spouse. I know none of you don't have fights. But when you do, you should thank God for your spouse's failures. Because it's humbling to you.

And it reminds you that you have sins. We never think we have sins. Remember, it's always our boss's fault. It's always our spouse's fault. It's always our sibling's fault. It's our children's fault. It's inflation's fault. It's anybody and everybody except us. It's a kindness of God to have to deal with sinners on a daily basis. You guys are a single. That's why you should get married. It'll help. It'll help you see your sins in a way that you don't see them yet. But we get frustrated about it. We're just like, why can't you just stop that? Why can't we just forget about it? Well, because if we forgot about it, we would lose the benefit of remembering it. God gives us object lessons to teach us and to remind us, and so we would do well to see them and to remember them. Hebrews 12.11 says, All discipline for the moment seems not to be joyful but sorrowful. Yet to those who have been trained by it, afterwards it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness.

Now, I would forgive you for thinking that in reading that passage, the discipline is always very brief. And if we're talking about corporal punishment, it's brief. It's short. It should be short. Less than a minute, 30 seconds. The pain's over. The infliction of pain is over, and now we're to reconciliation. Now, what I want to ask you parents is, though that discipline in the moment is short, how many times does it have to happen for the training to occur? Multiple times, right? You know, every time I hear a parent say, it doesn't work, all they're doing is complaining about how long it takes to get the training to take root. And so we have this idea that discipline is supposed to be this really short, swift thing that happens all right at once, and then we're good to go. Is that your experience, though? Okay, then. It's not your experience. Because discipline, training, takes time.

And none of us want to submit to the time. We don't want to submit to the time that it takes. Young men in their work don't want to submit to the time that it takes to actually add the value that is necessary for promotion. Parents don't want to submit the time that it takes to love their children, to train them up, to discipline them. Husbands don't want to submit the time that it takes to love their wives. It's like, why do you take so long? We just have this problem all around. We don't like anything taking any time. It's one of the reasons, you know, we live in a society that everything is fast, fast, fast, fast-paced, fast-paced, you know, fast-paced. Everything we listen to, everything we read, everything we watch, we speed it up. An agony of agonies when you have to listen to or engage in something that can't be sped up. But it's bad for your soul to speed everything up.

And here's why. You can't speed the Lord up. You can't speed Him up. You can't make Him go faster. And you can't slow Him down. So you're going to have to move at the pace with which the Lord puts you through your paces. And you'd do well to say, okay, okay, I won't hate it and despise it. I'll see that my frustration is actually an indication of my sin. And Lord, help me to... Learn the lessons that you have for me. In the time that you deem it's necessary for me to learn them. If you have kids that are old enough where you can say, hey, honey, go do this thing. Every one of you has had the experience where you tell your kid, hey, honey, go do this thing. And you have another thing to tell them, but they're gone. And so you kind of call down the hallway, and also, and what do you know? They aren't going to do it. They didn't even hear the second thing, and they probably only heard half of the first thing. They're just in a rush.

They're just in a rush. We're just in a rush. So the Lord slowed down Israel and said, 40 years, and 38 of them, men, you aren't getting the land. I swore to you, you're not getting the land. I gave these wicked guys their land, but your wickedness is so much more heinous than theirs. And the reason it's more heinous is because God promised to give them the land. And so their refusal to accept it is worse. It's a worse sin. He says, I'm not going to give you the lien, but you still have work to do. You still have obedience to render. Training. Time. Repetition. Afterwards, it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness. When you get frustrated with how long something's taking, how long it's taking you to figure something out, how long it's taking someone else to figure something out, just remember these men wandering 38 years and say, you know, The Lord's at work in this. And if this is the time that he's ordained for it to take, then I don't want to be found grumbling against it. I'll submit to the time. I'll submit to the discipline. Because there's yet still more to learn. The failure of the kid who walks away or who says, I know, Mom, is that they don't know yet. They think they know. And a good parent doesn't say, fine, you know, when they know, in fact, the child has not learned the lesson.

The parent says, no, you don't. I'm going to make you do this until I'm convinced you know it. And the kid's like, once they've been trained by it, it produces the peaceful fruit of righteousness. It's preparatory. All this discipline and all this training and all the time that it takes is preparatory. And even with, just thinking ahead in the Israelite story, even with all this training, with these 40 years of wandering and all of this instruction, they still forgot. They still forgot. So what did the Lord do then? As you think forward in the history of Israel, what's he do? He disciplines them some more. He sends enemies. Eventually he sends them into captivity. Eventually it's the Romans. Like he just keeps on. He's like, well, so long as they need discipline, my people, I'm going to discipline them. So as long as we need discipline and instruction and correction from the Lord, it's our part to realize that and to accept it.

Things are going to move a lot slower than we would prefer them to move. And that's to our benefit. So do the things that the Lord's teaching you well. And give the time to it that is necessary. You children, if your parents tell you to do something, and they say, this should take five minutes, and you're like, I can do it in 30 seconds. Say, you should think, I can't do it well in 30 seconds. I can do it to my five-year-old sensibilities in 30 seconds. But then my mom or dad can come behind and spend the 10 minutes cleaning up what I did and then have to...

You know, do it the right way. Take the time it takes. What's your rush? I often think of this. What's our rush? What are you in such a rush to get to? Young people are in such a rush to get married. Why? Because they're so ready to be married? No. Probably because they want to have sex. Because they want someone to know their deepest thoughts and feelings. And then they get married and realize both of those things aren't exactly what they thought it was going to be. Oh, we're in a big rush. We're going to have kids. It's going to be great. Okay. then what do they say? Well, I don't like being pregnant. I don't like my wife being pregnant. I don't like this crying little baby that spits up and whines and upsets our sleep and we can't go anywhere and they mess up. Oh, they need to grow up. Well, we've gotten to a 17-year-old. They've gotten a little older. They never stop being more work than you think they are. What's the rush? Why not just live in and enjoy and learn from the place God has us right now?

And we need to move forward and move on and grow and things need to change. He'll do that. He'll do that. Don't be in such a rush. You'll miss the training that is necessary to prepare you for the next thing. He who's faithful with small things, he'll be given more. So be faithful with the small things that the Lord's given you right now. Learn the lessons. Don't wander through Moab and Amnon and not realize who they are and what's going on and what the Lord did for them. Slow down, open your eyes and learn. Let's pray.