Welcome to Delight in Grace. The teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. You can learn a lot about the character of God. Through what he does. In this message titled You Have Lacked Nothing, Pastor Rich unpacks Deuteronomy 2, shedding light on the narrative.
we can see God's necessary justice and His abundant goodness. The only appropriate response to such a God is surrender. Let's listen in. Turn with me in your copy of the scriptures to Deuteronomy chapter 2. Deuteronomy chapter 2.
And if you don't have one A copy of the scriptures, issue one in front of you. And you can also follow along on the screen. Then we journeyed, or turned and journeyed into the wilderness in the direction of the Red Sea. as the Lord told me. And for many days we traveled around Mount Seir.
Then the LORD said to me, You have been traveling around this mountain country long enough. Turn northward. and command the people. You are about to pass through the territory of your brothers. the people of Esau who live in Seir.
and they will be afraid of you.
So be very careful. Do not contend with them. For I will not give you any of their land, no, not so much as for the sole of the foot to tread on. because I have given Mount Seir to Esau as a possession. You shall purchase food from them with money.
that you may eat. and you shall also buy water from them with money, that you may drink. For the LORD your God has blessed you in all the work of your hands. He knows you're going through this great wilderness. These forty years, the Lord your God has been with you.
You have lacked nothing.
So we went on away from our brothers, the people of Esau, who live in Seir. away from Erebah road from Elath and Ezion Geber. And we turned and went in the direction of the wilderness of Moab. Let's pray. Father, we are thankful for your word.
for your truth. Father, I pray that As we receive your word this morning, that it would return 30, 60. or one hundredfold. It is in Christ's name I pray. Amen.
Hear, O Israel. The Lord our God. The Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. and with all your soul.
and with all your might. Think about what that means to love God with all your heart. Might. This is what he calls us to. We are his people.
Let's keep that in mind as we Consider the text before us this morning. Deuteronomy chapter 2. You have lacked nothing.
God tells his people. He cares for them. He's leading them through the wilderness. and they have been fully provided. They are wondering, why is that?
Well After the rebellion at Kadish Barnea, It says they journeyed into the wilderness. Remember, God brought Israel out of Egypt. Across the Red Sea. He opened up the Red Sea. They crossed it, destroyed the armies of Pharaoh.
They came to Mount Sinai, God made a covenant with his people. You are my people. Act holy. Walk before me in holiness. He says, I'm going to take you to the land that I promised your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
And so they went up. And they arrived at Kadish Barnea, which is an oasis in the middle of a wilderness. And they sent out spies, and the spies came back and said, it is a beautiful land. But It is a beautiful land that the Lord our God is giving us. But The people are taller than we are.
We can't fight them. Their city walls are too high. We can't traverse them. And so they decided they can't do it. And they limited God by their own ability.
And God said, This generation. After seeing all that I have done, And they don't trust me. You see, This is a little bit extra here, okay? We tend to think, you know, if only we had God walking among us and doing all these marvelous signs and wonders like God did, like Jesus did, oh, it would be so much easier for us to believe. True or false?
People will always be people. People don't change like that. We will always be. And what changes us is the grace of God. Amen.
So Israel rebelled at Kadish Barnea. And now they're journeying back into the wilderness. You know where they're going? Back toward the Red Sea. Isn't that awful?
That's regress. This is a desolate area. But in this desolate wilderness. They are learning dependence upon God. And in verse 3, it says, after a while, after many days, it says, God said, okay, long enough, turn northward, back toward the promised land.
And so now they were going towards what we call, I'm going to call family lands. And the family, this is a family of Abraham, Abraham himself being the object of God's blessing through a direct and specific promise and covenant. And they're going to come across the land of the descendants of Esau, the land that God gave to Esau. You remember who Esau was? You could call him Harry.
Might relate to that a little more. He was Jacob's brother. Jacob, who was renamed Israel. Mm-hmm. And God said, These are your lands.
And he's telling the people of Israel, you're going to go through these lands. Mount Sair is the name of the land, right? Verses four and five. And this is an area that is southeast. Of the Dead Sea.
If you can envision where the Dead Sea is, and God says, as you're going through there, do not contend with them. You can purchase food, you can purchase water, do not settle down. This is the land that I have given to them. Hands off. This is not your land.
He also says, you look later on in chapter 2, and he talks about Lot, the land that he promised to Lot and his descendants. Lot was Abraham's nephew. A lot of stories there back in Genesis. And these are the descendants of Lot's. Two daughters after fleeing, Sodom and Gomorrah, Genesis chapter 19.
We have two. Peoples here, the Moabites. And the Ammonites, both of them descendants of Lot. descendants of Lot's two daughters. And the Lord says, verse 9: He says, Do not harass or contend with them, the Moabites.
This is the land I've given to the people of Lot. This is not your land. You look way down to verse 19. He says the same thing about the Ammonites. I've given this land to the descendants of Lot.
This is not your land. Don't touch it. He also has here in the text of Scripture in Deuteronomy chapter 2, there are two parenthetical clauses in here. First one is verses 10, 11, and 12, and then the next one is verses 20 through 23. And these are ancient inhabitants that these descendants of Esau and Lot dispossessed.
Because this was the land that God had promised them. And they dispossessed these ancient inhabitants. They were. Eight. Terrifying people.
One of the words in here is the emim. The emim means terrors. Most of these were much larger than average people. You remember Goliath, David and Goliath. This is much later down history, right?
But David and Goliath was a giant, he's very large. He's a descendant of some of these people. Emim means terrors. They were a terrifying people. The Anakim, the giant people, is what they're referred to.
And if you look back in chapter 1, verse 28, and when the people rebelled at Gadish Barnea, they said, we can't do this. The people are giants. There's no way we can fight them. They forgot God. Right?
They forgot. They're number one champion. But they were larger than average people.
Some of the names of the people here are listed mean cave dwellers. They're probably pretty scary people, right?
Some of them were Philistines. earlier earlier uh ancestors of of the Philistines. But one thing that we learn from this as we look through this chapter, a couple of things that I want to point out here. Number one, God keeps his promises. God keeps his promises.
God keeps his promises To people we might not expect. God has made promises to people we might not expect. Did you know that God made promises to Esau and his descendants, to Lot and his descendants? Land promises not just to the lion of Messiah. but to others as well.
He keeps his promises, and sometimes his promises are beneficial And sometimes his promises are bitter. like the promise of judgment. And he promised on those who rebelled against him. Because that leads me then to the second point I want to make here. First is that God keeps his promises.
Second, God takes rebellion. Seriously. It's not a light matter with God. Not a light matter at all. Look with me at verses 14 and 15 in your copy of the scriptures.
And the time from our leaving Kadish Barnea until we crossed the brook Zared was 38 years until the entire generation, that is, the men of war, had perished from the camp. That's the people, that's the men who rebelled against God at Kadish Barnea after the spies came back from the land. Yes, it's a beautiful land that God has given us, but we can't do this. Verse 15, for indeed the hand of the Lord was against them to destroy them from the camp until they had. Perished.
They feared man more than they feared God. Listen to me. Folks, that is a form of rebellion. Full stop. To fear man more than we fear God is a form of rebellion, and God takes that seriously.
You've been listening to Delight in Grace, the teaching ministry of Rich Powell, pastor of Grace Bible Church in Winston-Salem. To hear this message and others, check out www.delightinggrace.com. To discover how to live by grace, tune in with us on weekdays at 10 a.m.
