Morning Light – Deuteronomy 21

[Deuteronomy 21]: Creation Groans Until Now! In this chapter, God lays out a litany of social ills that “defile the land.” There is a burden of responsibility that lies upon the population of a city or nation that extends beyond individual culpability. Likewise, there is a cleansing available to those that will stand not as political operatives but as kings and priests unto God on behalf of the testimony of the shed blood of Calvary for the land itself that scripture tells us groans to be relieved of innocent blood.

[Deu 21:1-23 KJV] 1 If [one] be found slain in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee to possess it, lying in the field, [and] it be not known who hath slain him: 2 Then thy elders and thy judges shall come forth, and they shall measure unto the cities which [are] round about him that is slain: 3 And it shall be, [that] the city [which is] next unto the slain man, even the elders of that city shall take an heifer, which hath not been wrought with, [and] which hath not drawn in the yoke; 4 And the elders of that city shall bring down the heifer unto a rough valley, which is neither eared nor sown, and shall strike off the heifer’s neck there in the valley: 5 And the priests the sons of Levi shall come near; for them the LORD thy God hath chosen to minister unto him, and to bless in the name of the LORD; and by their word shall every controversy and every stroke be [tried]: 6 And all the elders of that city, [that are] next unto the slain [man], shall wash their hands over the heifer that is beheaded in the valley: 7 And they shall answer and say, Our hands have not shed this blood, neither have our eyes seen [it]. 8 Be merciful, O LORD, unto thy people Israel, whom thou hast redeemed, and lay not innocent blood unto thy people of Israel’s charge. And the blood shall be forgiven them. 9 So shalt thou put away the [guilt of] innocent blood from among you, when thou shalt do [that which is] right in the sight of the LORD. 10 When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, 11 And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; 12 Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13 And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14 And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her. 15 If a man have two wives, one beloved, and another hated, and they have born him children, [both] the beloved and the hated; and [if] the firstborn son be hers that was hated: 16 Then it shall be, when he maketh his sons to inherit [that] which he hath, [that] he may not make the son of the beloved firstborn before the son of the hated, [which is indeed] the firstborn: 17 But he shall acknowledge the son of the hated [for] the firstborn, by giving him a double portion of all that he hath: for he [is] the beginning of his strength; the right of the firstborn [is] his. 18 If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and [that], when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them: 19 Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place; 20 And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son [is] stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; [he is] a glutton, and a drunkard. 21 And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear. 22 And if a man have committed a sin worthy of death, and he be to be put to death, and thou hang him on a tree: 23 His body shall not remain all night upon the tree, but thou shalt in any wise bury him that day; (for he that is hanged [is] accursed of God;) that thy land be not defiled, which the LORD thy God giveth thee [for] an inheritance.

In this chapter, there are several statutes given by the Lord that are intended to preserve the land itself from defilement. (see verse 23 “… that thy land be not defiled…”) This implies that sin and disobedience impact the landmass itself of a nation that forgets God. In November of 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down, I spent some time praying about the implications of this. I told the Lord, “I know that physical boundaries have spiritual connotations; what does this mean?” He told me that He had heard the cry of His people behind the Iron Curtain of Communism and was sending them respite. He told me that there were principalities and powers working behind the Iron Curtain that would now be released over the Western World. I asked Him what that meant for America, and He replied, “America is no longer protected from terrorism on its own soil.” On Feb. 26th, 1993, the first World Trade Center bombing took place. On April 19, 1995, the OKC bombing took place. From the Cuba Missile Crises in the fall of 1962 down to the present, the United States has faced mounting and ongoing problems that have been increasingly more difficult and at times, unsolvable. A nation that had never been defeated in war, we left Viet Nam in shame. We fought in Iraq, yet upheaval has returned there on the very hard-fought soil where so many of our soldiers died. Yet the images of George Bush Sr. shaking the hand of a grinning Sadaam Hussein was an ominous hypocrisy that led to the crises that lingers on still today. From WWII on, you can find the seeds of compromise, broken promises, and dark choices this country has made and within a generation paid for it with the lives of their young men and women in war. Demetri Duduman, a Romanian immigrant pastor, was visited by an angel who foretold in the early ’80s of decades of drought and forest fires in the Southeast and West Coast and the epic flooding in the Midwest in the ’90s. All this while secularism rose up and claimed the political landscape, overthrew religious liberty in our educational system, and usurped the values of liberty with rampant licentious individualism.

Paul told us in Romans:

[Rom 8:22 KJV] 22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

Jesus said that the last days would be marked by environmental upheaval in three places in the gospels (Matt. 24:7; Mark 3:8; Luke 21:11).

[Mat 24:7 KJV] 7 For nation shall rise against nation, and Kingdom against Kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.

While man revels in sin, the inanimate earth seems to respond in visceral rejection of the ungodliness on our planet.

[Lev 18:27-28 KJV] 27 (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which [were] before you, and the land is defiled;) 28 That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that [were] before you.

In Due. 21, we see that even unsolved murders have an effect on the land itself with direct implications on the leaders of cities and states. We don’t think in these terms, but the devil is a legalist. If we are not under the protection of the shed blood of Christ, then judgment falls according to the law of God as given to Moses. (Just as the Egyptians who didn’t have the blood of the lamb on their doorpost experienced the loss of their firstborn when the death angel passed over). In that light, we then have an accurate lens to understand the context of what we see going on around us in current events locally and on the national and world scene giving occasion for us to value afresh and anew the protections of Christ on our lives ON THIS SIDE of heaven as well as in the hereafter.

In vs. 10-14, there are instructions regarding the desire of a soldier to marry a beautiful captive after a campaign of war. This passage speaks to us of the bride of Christ. When Jesus came to earth, He came to war against Satan and “lead captivity captive” Eph. 4:8. He is the bridegroom, and we as the bride of Christ are the “beautiful woman among the captives…” In salvation, Jesus “brings us to His house” to be His wife. The bride was to shave her head and pare her nails. Paul spoke of a woman’s hair connected with her ability to choose: (Note – fingernails as with hair as well serve as a covering).

[1Co 11:10 KJV] 10 For this cause ought the woman to have power on [her] head because of the angels.

The word “power” in this passage means the power of choice. When you become betrothed to Christ, you relinquish your ability to choose your own path, for you are no longer your own:

[1Co 6:20 KJV] 20 For ye are bought with a price: therefore glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s.

In vs. 15-17, we find edicts concerning polygamy and the right of inheritance. In this statute, God preserves the rights of the firstborn in spite of rejection. The nation of Israel rejected Jesus as they reject Him to this day, but their own law asserts undeniably the right of the firstborn to rule over those that come after. Never forget that Jesus was born of the line of David and according to the law that binds the Jewish nation to the responsibility to ascribe Jesus as their king. Rejected though He may yet be, He is yet the beginning of Israel’s strength and entitled possessor of the double portion anointing that He chooses to share with you and me when we accept Him as savior.

In vs. 18-20, we see that under the law, children were not allowed to assert their independence. When the people rejected God, the consequence was that children and self-interested immaturity and individualism would be the rule of the day as Isaiah predicted:

[Isa 3:5 KJV] 5 And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbour: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honourable.

There was a day when our leaders maintained a level of moral purity that was unimpeachable. The mere hint of scandal signaled the end of a political career. Beginning with the sexual rapaciousness of President Kennedy in the ’60s and culminating in the 1990s when our president salaciously scandalized the Oval Office with his sexual escapades, something was unleashed in this country and in the west that has opened the floodgates of debauchery and defilement all in the name of individual rights and liberty. Honor has lost all meaning other than as a means of pointing the finger of hypocrisy at one’s enemies. The triumph of individualism and relativism over the peoples of the earth and the church is not answered by political activism but by a return to the Lord. It does no good to treat symptoms because these social ills are the consequence of national and social rejection of God Himself. We must choose to be a part of the solution and not part of the problem by living our lives in the context of Zec. 4:6 “it’s not by might, not by power, but by My Spirit says the Lord”. Our hope in God is found in the promise that there are sons of God in the earth and that the land itself is groaning and travailing to come forth into full manifestation of the people of God in the glory of the Holy Spirit. Paul wrote of this in Rom. 8:19-22:

[Rom 8:19-22 KJV] 19 For the earnest expectation of the creature waiteth for the manifestation of the sons of God. 20 For the creature was made subject to vanity, not willingly, but by reason of him who hath subjected [the same] in hope, 21 Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God. 22 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

This is the agenda of the kingdom on the earth.