God Hardened His Spirit And Made His Heart Obstinate

So we've come to the end of chapter 2 in the book of Deuteronomy. We're going to be studying the final eight verses. And in this passage, we see how Sihon, the king, responded to Moses' letter of peace, which we studied last week. And we're going to see what happened to Sihon and to his kingdom as a result of his response and rejection of Moses and the peace that he offered. When he said no, but will not let you pass through and buy the things you need. The result was that his kingdom was destroyed. My hope this morning is that God will convict us of the ways in which we've rejected peace. Each one of us has done it. And also that the Lord would help us to repent and not only to receive peace when it's offered to us, but even to become ministers of that peace as Moses was. Our text this morning, as I said, is Deuteronomy chapter 2, verses 30 through 37. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord?

It is the word of the Lord and it is eternally true. But Sion, king of Heshbon, was not willing for us to pass through his land. For the Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate in order to deliver him into your hand as he is today. The Lord said to me, See, I have begun to deliver Sion and his land over to you. Begin to occupy that you may possess his land. Then Sion, with all his people, came out to meet us in battle at Gehaz. The Lord our God delivered him over to us, and we defeated him with his sons and all his people. So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women, and children of every city. We left no survivor. We took only the animals as our booty and the spoil of the cities which we had captured.

From Aror, which is on the edge of the valley of Arnon, and from the city which is in the valley, even to Gilead, there was no city that was too high for us. The Lord our God delivered all to us. Only you did not go near the land of the sons of Ammon, all along the river Jabbok and the cities of the hill country, and wherever the Lord our God had commanded us. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So our passage picks up sort of mid-narrative. And it tells us the response that Sion had, but it doesn't tell us what came right before it because it came right before it. It's what we studied last week. As Moses and the Israelites were traveling north, preparing to enter into the promised land, they had to go through a number of kingdoms or lands that were not their own. And they were visitors there. They were sojourners. They were potential threats. Illegals, if you will.

Not always likely to be received well. And so through the first two kingdoms that they went through, through Edom and up through where Lot's descendants settled, they paid for their food. They paid for their water. They didn't make war. They didn't stop to settle. They simply traveled through. And now they've come to the southern border of Sion's kingdom. The land of the Amorites. The Amorites had basically a northern and southern kingdom. The southern kingdom was ruled by Sion. The northern kingdom ruled by Og, which eventually the Israelites do go up through and defeat him as well. But before the Israelites go across the valley into the land of Sion, they send letters saying, let us pass through peacefully. We'll buy our food. We'll buy our drink. We're just going through. Let us pass.

The interesting thing from that passage, and you see it showing up here again, was this theme, this thread of the Lord stirring up Sihon to not allow this to happen. And we're going to come to that discussion of what does it mean for the Lord to harden somebody's heart? How does that work? And from last week, why is it that Moses is sending letters of peace when the Lord's told him that they're going to be making war? These are things that we're going to discuss. this morning. But all of this hangs on or pivots on Sion's response to these letters of peace. Is he willing to grant them peace or not? And our text starts out by saying, no. Sion, king of Heshbon, was not willing for us to pass through his land. Moses sent these letters knowing that if he were to come into his land without having acknowledged his plan, it could very easily be construed as an invasion. And so these letters of peace were meant to, they anticipated a conflict, and it was Moses' effort to avoid the conflict. I know I'm going to do this thing. It may well, without explanation, it may be misunderstood, and the result may be war and death. So I'm going to seek to avoid that by sending these letters. Now this requires a couple of things. First, that Moses

realize that there's a potential for conflict, okay? Think for a moment in your own life, if you opened the door from your house, maybe into your garage, and standing in your garage was your neighbor from across the street rifling through your toolbox or your yard tools, what would you think is going on? You'd think, he's stealing my stuff. And why would you think that? Because he never said anything to you about it. He just showed up. Now, does that mean that you wouldn't be willing to loan him whatever he's looking for if he had asked? Probably not. If he came and said, hey, I'm digging a ditch. Can I borrow a shovel or a wheelbarrow? You'd probably say, yeah, I got one right over here. Just go ahead on and just grab it. Well, I may not need it for a few days. That's fine. Just grab it when you need it. Here's the garage code in case I'm not home. You'd be likely to welcome them to say,

Yeah, sure, have the thing. But if he just showed up unannounced, it's a whole different story. Now, that's not hard to see in our own lives. And the same thing that's going on here is Moses is taking this large nation of people into a land. To perceive it as an invasion would not be much of a stretch. So Moses sends letters of peace, anticipating how Sion might react. It's one thing to acknowledge or to anticipate a potential conflict. Moses does something else that's necessary, which is having seen the conflict or the potential for it, he takes steps to avoid it. He doesn't say, oh, well, no big deal, whatever. He'll just have to get over it. We'll kick his butt if he takes it up with us because the Lord told us that that's what was going to happen. If Moses had perceived the conflict and said nothing, it would have been as though he was just invading. His actions are what mattered.

Have you ever heard the phrase, it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission? Have you ever said it? Have you ever done it? I think all of us have. I want to talk about that idea for a second. The idea that you're going to ask for forgiveness carries with it the idea that you know that what you're about to do is sinful. Okay? We'll give you an example in a work situation. If you were at work and your boss shows up in the morning. And he sets you up for the day and he says, this is the work that I need you to do today. Okay? Do this and do that and then do the other thing. And you should be able to get it all done by the end of the day. And then he leaves. And as the day goes on, you run into some sort of a problem. And you can't get a hold of your boss and a decision needs to be made. You're not asking for forgiveness if you can't get a hold of your boss and you think, I'm going to make a decision that takes into account

What would my boss likely tell me to do if he were here, if I could get in touch with him? That's not sin. You may make the wrong decision, but that's not you choosing to sin. That's you making a decision in what you believe is the best interest of your boss, right? Same scenario. Boss sets you up during the day. Boss leaves, and you decide, you know what? My car needs new tires. and the tire shop's running a good special, and today's the only day I can get in. I'm just going to run over there and get that done. And you're like, I'll just do it on my lunch break, and it'll only take 30 minutes, and it turns in that it takes three hours. And at some point while you're at the tire shop, you realize, I'm supposed to be at work. And you choose not to call your boss and tell him what's going on. He'll understand. It'll be fine. I'll get all the work done. I'll just work late, or I'll work Saturday if I need to. You're making a decision.

without talking to your boss, and you're making it without all of the information. Instead of asking his permission, you just decided, oh, I'm going to do this. He'll just be fine with it. That's an example of deciding I'm going to ask for forgiveness rather than permission. What should the employee in that situation have done? Well, they should have called their bosses and said, hey, boss, I need new tires. They're running a special. Can I run over there at lunchtime? It should take an hour. I know it doesn't take an hour to change your tires, actually. But for the sake of the example, hey, is it okay if I go and run and do that today? Your boss may say, man, I've got to have you doing this other thing. I'm sorry you can't do that today. Or let me send a helper over to you. Or he may have some ability to protect his interests. But if you don't care to protect his interests, this is you asking for forgiveness rather than permission. It's because you don't want to be told no. And the same applies here. If you see the potential for conflict in your workplace and in your home and you go, well,

That might be a problem. And you just sit on that knowledge and don't do anything about it? You're not acting like a Christian. You're not doing what a Christian ought to do. They ought to step in and say, I see the potential for a risk here, for a conflict, for a war in Moses' situation. I'm going to do what I can to prevent that war from happening. So Moses sends letters of peace. He anticipates the conflict. He takes steps to avoid the conflict. This requires knowing how other people will respond to you in a given situation or what you're doing. So Sion receives these letters of offered peace, and he refuses them. He says, no. In his heart, he says, I'm not going to allow these people to pass through my land unchallenged. This is a theme I just mentioned at the end of my sermon last week, that in this story, if we were to pull out of the details and change some of the characters, God...

is offering peace in this story to Sion through Moses. Life? Safety? Keep your kingdom? Sion says no. Every time that the gospel is proclaimed, peace is being offered. Or peace should be what's being offered. The avoidance of a conflict and a judgment and death. So through Moses, God is offering peace to Sion. Whenever the gospel is proclaimed, Peace is being offered. If that offer, this is sort of an aside, but I think it bears being said today because a lot of what passes for gospel ministry and proclamation doesn't acknowledge the fact that peace is needed, that there's a problem. A lot of times what's offered when the gospel is preached today is therapy or better feelings. That's not peace. Peace presupposes that there's a conflict brewing.

that needs to be dealt with before it breaks out. And that conflict is between a holy God and a sinful person. They may be unaware of the conflict, but God is not unaware of the conflict. And at some point, if they don't receive terms of peace from God, they will receive judgment from God and death. So Sion's error here, his failure, his hardening of heart cost him dearly. He was offered peace. And in that offer of peace, he was offered life and security, and he refused all of it. And so when Sion rejected this peace, what did he actively do? What he actively did was make himself an enemy, an open and declared enemy of God and of God's people who wanted to travel through the land. Before that, who was Sion? Sion was the king of the southern the southern portion of the Amorites. We don't know much about him. We don't know anything about him. We just know that's who he was and where he was. But when the peace comes, when the offer comes, he reacts horribly to it and declares himself an enemy. Note that Moses was not the one who caused this. Sion did. Moses, the one who offered peace, didn't make the conflict. Sion did.

And many times in gospel ministry or in speaking about what God requires or what his word says, the one saying it is the one who's accused of being the rabble rouser, the one making the conflict, when in fact the exact opposite is the case. Here, it's not Moses who's causing the problem. Moses isn't looking for a fight. He's not trying to stir up a conflict. He's trying to avoid one and do something good. And beneficial to Sion because Moses has just watched what God will do to people if even just a little bit of his judgment gets poured out. And so we would do well to bear in mind that those who offer peace and speak God's offer of peace through the gospel to others are not the ones causing the problem. Maybe we could go so far as to say they're the ones exposing the problem. They're the ones who came into the dark room and just turned the light on and said, hey everybody, look at the mess.

The mess was already there. They didn't come in and trash the room and then turn the light on. They just came in and turned the light on and said, do you see the problems here? This is a real problem. Zion rejects the peace, declares himself an enemy, and prepares for battle. This is one of the responses of the gospel, to the gospel. I think too often we've, and I'm not sure why I've been thinking about it. I'm not settled on why it is. But I think we have this idea, maybe it's just because of being on social media or receiving little bits and pieces of news, having the things that we consume, the fact that they're very curated, meaning they've been tailored to communicate a very particular message, that our sensibilities and our expectations have been set by those curated bits of information to set us up for failure, meaning that When the gospel is preached, we're shocked when there's a negative response to it. As though something wrong is going on now. Like, well, someone must have done or said something wrong if there's a negative response to the gospel being preached. But I don't believe that's what the Bible teaches us. In the Old or the New Testaments, we see two responses to the gospel being preached. One is humility and contrition.

and repentance. When Peter preaches at Pentecost and he says, it was you who crucified him. All the while before that, when things much less aggressive were being said, they gnashed their teeth and sought a way to apprehend them. Whether we're talking about Jesus, but then eventually Peter and Paul and the rest, they're always running for their lives. And then Peter preaches at Pentecost and he says this damning statement to all who are listening to him. And the response is, they were cut to the quick. And they pleaded, brethren, what must we do to be saved? There's always two responses. And if we're conditioned to think that there's only actually one appropriate God-honoring response, then we're going to spend a lot of our lives confused when we read stories like this one or we see this type of thing happening in our lives. Many people, when they hear the gospel, don't respond with humility and contrition and faith.

And the reason is they don't possess the ability to respond that way unless God's been at work in them, changing them and restraining their natural inclinations and sensibilities, unless he gives them a soft heart. So Sion just represents here one response to the gospel, a negative response, a proud response, a response that says, actually, I'm an enemy of you. I'm opposed to you. Whereas before that, Zion didn't go out of his way to declare his rebellion. But when the issue was put before him in the letters of peace from Moses, now the truth was exposed. And I think many times that's the way it is with us, with people that we interact with. There are people who run around and make a point of opposing the gospel and Christianity, and they're overt and proactive in their opposition. But most rebels against God and his word, are like Sion. They go on about their life until it's stirred up, until they're confronted with the truth. And then what was inside of them all along is exposed, it comes out. That's what we see going on with Sion here, is he rejects the peace that's offered. He says, no, in fact, we're enemies, and I will not have you go through my land without a fight. So a question that can often arise is if

You read this passage, you see God's agency in it. He's bringing the Israelites through, and he tells them, I'm going to give you their land, and then Moses sends a letter of peace that was not sinful of him to send. It was an offer, a real, true offer of peace. It wasn't a trap. And then God hardens, you know, the scripture tells us here that God hardened Zion's spirit, and you go, well, Why should peace be offered? Why would God have peace be offered to those who in the end are going to reject it? Why should we do evangelism? Why should we talk to people about Jesus if it's likely that they're going to reject it? It's a good question. Here's the answer. Two answers. One, you don't know who's going to reject and who's going to accept. That's the first answer and probably the one we anticipate. Here's the second one.

It's so that they are without excuse when they stand before God. It's so that they can know that they were told the truth. And they can't say, we didn't know. Yes, you did. And when you knew and when you were told, you rejected it. They actively rejected it. It takes that subtle rebellion, the sort that's acceptable to society, the sort of thing that goes under the name of, well, they're generally good people. And it brings it into focus. The offer of peace takes the camera lens and brings it into focus and says, good person? Let's get clear, good person? Good people are good if God's made them good and they won't respond the way Sion did. But if God hasn't worked in them and made them good, then it will be exposed. That they are in fact enemies and rebels. So that it's clear to them and to those around that there is an active rejection and not a latent rejection.

It's one of the things that church discipline does, right? We all still sin, Christians. We all still sin in ways. And we cry out and ask God to change us and to purify us and to make us more like Jesus. And as we look over the history of our lives, a Christian should be able to say, I can see that God's working in me. And it's not that it's just a rocket ship to holiness with no sins along the way. But they can say, God has been faithful to me. Look at the ways he's changed me. Look at what he's done. Look at the good things that he's blessed me with. But many of us have sins that are quiet, that are hidden, that are unknown. When those sins get a hold of us and they become known, overt, out in the open, what church discipline does is it focuses on it and says, this is not a thing that Christians are allowed to do. This is rebellion.

And it's the letter of peace. And the letter of peace sounds like this. Repent or you're going to be cast out. Now, it's not said that simply and it's not said that briefly. But over the course of sometimes years, at least months, that's the message that's being communicated. You have to turn away from this. You have to repent of this. And if they say, no, I won't, they're refusing the letter of peace, the offer of peace. establishing themselves as an enemy of God. And then we say, you're not a Christian because you've put yourself at enmity with the Lord. Now, it's painful to watch. The hardest part of this passage in reading it is when they say, we went through this, we went through and there were no cities that we couldn't. And then they say, we destroyed all of the men. And you're like, well, okay, maybe they were fighting. And they say, we destroyed all of the women. And you're like, oh. And they say, we destroyed all of the children. And you're just like, I can't believe it.

And in the summary, he says, we left no survivor. And it's like painful. Whenever things are made clear and whenever sins are dealt with, it's hard. And we want to turn our face away from it. Could you imagine walking through one of these cities after they'd been through it? With our sensibilities, we say, this is a war zone. Because that's what it was. And it was a war that Sion chose. Have you ever been offered peace? There's a sense in which if you're a Christian, you say, yes, I've been offered peace and I've accepted it. At a really basic sort of top of the mountain view, if you're a Christian, you say, I've surrendered and accepted terms of peace. I'm not going to fight with God anymore. I'm done fighting. He's worked in me, so I'm not going to fight anymore. I don't want to fight anymore. I want peace with him. But after that time, when we still sin, When we get frustrated or angry, when bitterness wells up inside of us, we're kicking against the terms of peace. That's what our sins are. They're us fighting against these terms of peace. I don't want to be peaceful. We might not say I don't want to be peaceful with God, but we're quick to say, I'm not sure I want to have peace with him or her or them. And so things in Scripture sound very foreign to us. To the wife,

the Lord says, this is an example of the foreign sort of thing. Peter tells the wives that they ought to win their husbands without a word. And it's like, oh, you mean when he's sinning and doing something foolish and rebelling against God and I'm suffering for it, I'm not supposed to get bitter and angry and self-protective and recoil? No, you're supposed to accept the terms of peace that you have with God and you're supposed to seek after what God's told you to do. Same thing said to a husband. When your wife's in sin and having some sort of trouble and you're getting frustrated with it and angry and bitter, what does the scripture tell you? It tells you that you ought to be laying down your life for your wife. That you ought to be dying for her every day. And every husband has had the thought, for her? For her? Like, she's awful. She's being awful. She's not an awful person. She's just being awful right now. Will you reject or will you accept peace in those contexts?

How about in the Sermon on the Mount, which we studied last year? Someone strikes you on the cheek, turn the other cheek. If someone steals your shirt, give them your cloak also. If someone requires you to go with them one mile, and the imagery of that is that the Romans could enlist for a period of time, a certain distance, they could just come up and say, you're going to do this. And there was a law that said, this is how far they can require you to go out of your way. If the law requires you to go with them one mile, go with them two.

These are acts of peace. Are they our acts? Not as often as they should be. Not as often as they should be. We often find ourselves, having accepted the gospel and having been changed in our being from being an enemy of God to being a son of God, we still struggle day to day to be at peace when there's sin involved, ours or others. And so these offers of peace make it clear who is righteous. And who is wicked. Have you ever been in an argument with somebody and at some point, and they're a Christian, and at some point they say, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was wrong. And the thing that wells up inside of you is, well, I'm not going to forgive you. And then you go, I know that's not what I'm supposed to respond, but you don't want to forgive them. You don't want to accept their peace. They're done fighting, but you're not done fighting. The Christian accepts God's terms of peace. He accepts the terms of peace that come from other sinners.

as a result of having been sinned against. As long as that offer of peace is sincere and honest, not a sort of a ploy or a manipulation, but a sincerely offered repentance and confession, the one who rejects that peace is like Sion. I would rather have war. I'd rather we continue to fight. I'd rather there be more destruction. That's wicked. When you refuse to forgive, you refuse peace. On the other hand, the one who offers peace demonstrates their love for God and their love for others. And the reason is because offering peace in a day-to-day context requires vulnerability. Offering peace isn't going to someone and saying, you've done all these things that are wrong, and if you'll just acknowledge that and turn away from them, then we can stop fighting. That's not an offer of peace. An offer of peace is, we've been at it like cats and dogs, and for my part, I'm sorry. Here's the things I've done to contribute to this mess. Here's what I could have done. Here were all the off ramps that I could have taken and I drove right by them. Wasn't willing to turn off and not have a fight. I didn't want to be at peace. I wanted to be right. You remember when Israel, before the 40 years, was offered the land and they rejected it. They rejected it because they were scared. They didn't think that the victory would pan out.

They thought, we're going to go in there with all these giants and all these established cities and fortified cities, and we're just going to be wiped off the face of the earth. We're scared. When they did that, they rejected God and his peace and were judged for it. Now, they're in a similar situation being told to do very similar things, and they trust God. Moses is going to lead the people into this land, and he's effectively told by God, when you go in here, you've had 40 years of judgment from me. in various ways, but now we're about to go to war. We were going to do that 40 years ago. All the men of war died. That was in a few verses just ahead of this passage. All the men of war are dead now. Now we're going to go to war. But they went this time. There's no record of their grumbling or their complaining. They simply went down through the valley and up into the land and ended up in a war. They had accepted peace with God, which meant that they had accepted conflict with Sion. Those things often go together.

Can you be at peace with God and at peace with the world? If God's not at peace with the world and her ways, how can we be? So to accept peace with God requires that you trust that he will not renege or fail. It also means that you may end up in conflict with those who've declared their rebellion against him. And that shouldn't surprise us. Then this interesting... Turn a phrase. The Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate. There are times in Scripture, the other place where you see this type of thing going on is with Pharaoh, where his heart's hardened. In Romans 1, it talks about God darkening their hearts. We're going to read that passage in a minute. You get this sense from these passages that God is actively corrupting or hardening them. He's doing something active to them.

Which means that their hearts weren't hard before. And that God, through a proactive action, is changing them. They were had soft hearts, but now they don't. Now they have hard hearts. And Timothy's got the right look on his face, which is like, that doesn't sound like that's quite how it works. And that's what I want to explain to you. When God says here that the Lord your God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate. You have this question, is this just a big game that God plays, offering men peace, only to then make them unwilling to receive it? No, it's no game. The offer of peace was real. So then we're left asking, well, why didn't Sion accept it? And it says, well, God hardened his spirit and made his heart obstinate. And so we come to the question that really needs to be answered. How did God harden Sion's heart?

How did he harden Sion's heart? How did he harden Pharaoh's heart? The way that God hardens a sinner's heart is that he withdraws his common grace from them, and he allows them to act on the wickedness that's already in them. He's not making them something they're not. He stops restraining what they already are. One of the reasons that our society is crumbling is because we don't understand that the purpose of laws is to restrain evil. That's one of the purposes of laws. You don't have to be a Christian to want to need your evil restrained. It's a helpful thing to be told no and to have consequences associated with your refusal to obey. That's a helpful good thing. That's not a special treat that you get to receive as a Christian. That's just something that's needed in a sinful world.

We need to be told no. We need to have our impulses prevented. And God has multiple ways of doing that. One of the ways he does that is by instituting governments and working through them to create laws that say no to you. And to the extent that the laws reflect the law of God, in saying no to what God says no to, and saying yes to what God says yes to, it's really helpful. It's a kindness of God. If we were left to ourselves to do whatever we wanted without consequence, what would society be like? You would probably be right to respond, there wouldn't be a society. It would be anarchy. And so the fact that we have a society, that we have rules, that we are surrounded by restraints, that tell us no. We need to come to understand that as not just being the way it is, but being a kindness of God to us. When you have children and you see them and you say to them, no, you can't do that. That's a mean thing to do, says the world. They say, no, you need to let them do what they want. They need to have and fuss and scream and kick and do all the awful behavior. That's what happens when they don't have restraints.

When they're not told, no, here's a boundary. You can't speak like that, have that, or do that. Those restraints are a kindness. And those restraints are born out of a love that the parent has for the child. They say no to them. And the Bible tells us that even unbelieving fathers give good gifts to their children, which we could interpret to simply mean they say no to them. They say, you can't do that. They also say that at some point, if the child is rebellious enough and is... intent on their wickedness. He says, then go. You think of the prodigal son, then go. You think of Judas Iscariot, then go and do it quickly. God's activity in those men's hearts being hardened is that he removes his restraints, his gracious restraints, and allows them to do what's in their heart. And for Sion, that resulted in the destruction of him, his sons, his entire kingdom.

That's not what he wanted, but that was the result of God removing the restraints on his hard heart. That's what it means when the scripture says that God hardens someone's heart. He removes his hand from them. In Romans 1, 18 to 25, it says that the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness. Because that which is known about God is evident within them. For God made it evident within them. There's a lot just in that verse that the world would object. They say, no, no, no, that's not true. They don't know. You can't hold them to that account. Listen, this is what God said. And he made them. The ones who are rebelling, he made them. And he put in them what he says he put into them.

He's made it evident to them. For since the creation of the world, his invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made so that they are without excuse. Remember we talked earlier about why you offer peace to the rebels so that we know they're rebels, so that they are without excuse. They've been presented with reality and they in turn have rejected it. For even though they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks, but became futile in their speculations, and their foolish heart was darkened. How? How was their foolish heart darkened? We'll come to it. Professing to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God for an image in the form of corruptible man and of birds and four-footed animals and crawling creatures. Therefore, because of this condition that exists in men, sinful men, Now, what did it mean in Sion's case to be given over to the lust of his heart? To impurity.

How were their bodies dishonored? Whose fault was it that the women and the children in that kingdom were destroyed? It was his fault because he had wickedness in him and God removed his kind restraint. And that's immediately what Sion did was go to battle. And all of the vulnerable ones in his kingdom suffered for it. You might think, well, why didn't God prevent that from happening? There are a lot of answers to that question, but I'll give you this one. God had promised a land to his people, and God's not ashamed to give to his children the things that he's purposed to give to them, and the expense that other men pay, wicked men pay along the way, and resisting God's will is on them. They've chosen it. Zion chose that. God removed his restraining grace so that he could give his children the land that he had promised to them. He tells them, go, fight, occupy. Nothing they did was wrong.

or sinful in their battling here. And so to read the section that describes this, it says, That should terrify us. If you're a Christian, then you have the Holy Spirit, and your ability to do what Zion did is not possible as a Christian, unless you're deceived about who you are and what you are. You should be sure about whether you're a Christian or not, and it should be evident to you and to other people that you're a Christian, that your life is marked by obedience to and love for God. That's what marked the Israelites as they were walking into this battle. They had been through the valley. They'd been through the wilderness. They'd been disciplined. Many of them were struck down, we're told, in 1 Corinthians. But there was no doubt that they were God's people. We were told in the passage just before this that God was going to begin to instill dread and a fear of them. Everywhere they went, everyone knew who they were. They knew who they were. Do you know who you are? There are many who are like Sion, though.

And there are many who will receive the sort of destruction that Zion pursued himself. And so it's incumbent on us then as God's people, just as it was at this time, to offer peace. How could you look at this story and see the destruction of these sinners and go, well, they got what they deserved. Even though it's true that they didn't get anything that wasn't coming to them. It was awful. It was awful. They should have accepted the peace. We should be those who offer peace. Peace in our personal relationships. Peace with God through the forgiveness of their sins and faith in Jesus. These are the words that should be on our lips. But if all we can recount is our frustrations with what's been done or the sins of other people, we have to realize there's no peace on our tongues. And there should be. We offer it to one another and we offer it to the lost.

It means that what's required of us to be able to offer peace is that we be an exceedingly forgiving people. Because that's the kryptonite to offering peace, is unforgiveness. If you're unwilling to forgive somebody, you can't offer them peace. You don't think they deserve it. Certainly not from you. And you'd be glad to see God judge them. If we sow conflict and unrest, we shouldn't be surprised when we're then surrounded by it. Galatians 5.15 says, If you bite and devour one another, take care that you're not consumed by one another. Meaning, if you want to fight all the time, and you're always aggressive and pugnacious and poking, don't be surprised when your life is filled with people doing the very same thing back to you. When instead, if you offer peace so much as it depends on you, you'll be surrounded with peace. Our offers of peace ought to be sincere.

The goal isn't to say the right words and the right formula and the right context as much as it is to say it with love in our hearts for sinners. For capital S sinners, those who are rebels against God, and lowercase sinners who still have a sinful nature that they're entangled in and being freed from piece by piece. We should be offering peace to them. This is the lesson of Sion's rejection. Be like Moses. Be like the people of God. Offer peace, accept peace, fight for peace. Don't be like Sion, whose life is marked and therefore ended by his rejection of it. Let's pray.