Restricted Enemies of the Hebrew People
Today’s reading from
Deuteronomy gives us 2 categories of people.
There are the people that the Hebrew nation was told to avoid and there
are the people that the Hebrew nation was told to fight against. For the record, this list of nations that the
Hebrews were told to fight against is continued in the next chapter. So if you thought you missed some of the
people, they will be spoken of in the next chapter. In fact, I’m going to reserve my comments
regarding the people that the Hebrews were told to conquer until tomorrow so I
can put them all into one single place.
Today I am going to focus on the people that the Hebrews were told by
God to leave alone.
These people who get
left alone are kin to the Hebrew people.
The first group that is left alone is the descendants of Esau – remember
that he is Jacob’s brother. These people
were given land by God’s direction. It
is God who established them, although don’t take that at all as an endorsement
of their faithfulness to God. It is God
who sustained their presence, but that doesn’t mean they were faithful to Him. That’s not too bad of a commentary on many of
us at various points of our lives.
The second group that
is left alone is the descendants of Lot – remember that this is Abraham’s
nephew. Lot’s people were also given a
specific set of land when he and Abraham parted company. As with Esau’s people, it was God who put Lot
in the land and it is God who now sustains their presence. Again, don’t hear that as an endorsement of
their faithfulness to God.
God’s Power In Spite of Us
The interesting thing
about these passages is that it really is God who is sustaining them whether
they understand it or not. I told you
that tomorrow we are going to look at the people that the Hebrews conquered in
the land east of the Jordan River, but for a second I’ll use them to illustrate
my point. God fought against those
people. Because God was with the Hebrew
people the Hebrew people destroyed the native inhabitants of the land east of
the Jordan. In the same way, if God had
wanted to eliminate the descendants of Esau and Lot, there is nothing they
could have done to stop God. So quite
literally, by God telling the Hebrew people to not attack the descendants of
Esau and Lot, God is sustaining them.
God has allowed them to continue to exist, so they do. God’s establishment of the fact that they
should be allowed to live is the only thing that keeps them alive at this point.
God’s Memory
Let’s not forget that
the reason God allows them to exist is because God’s memory is better than
ours. To that point we can add that God
is more faithful than we are, too. God
remembered Lot and Esau and remembered His direction that brought them to the
land they were in. That was several
centuries prior in history than the moment we are now reading about. Regardless of how faithful Esau’s and Lot’s
descendants were – or in reality, weren’t – God remembered His promise to their
ancestor and sustains them here and now.
God’s promises are good regardless of whether we as human beings live up
to our end or not.
I should say here,
though, that while it may seem like I am talking down upon the descendants of
Esau and Lot, clearly they weren’t as bad as the Midianites in that they
weren’t actively leading the Hebrew people away from God, either. So don’t hear me putting the descendants of
Esau and Lot quite in the camp of the native people of Canaan, either.
So after focusing on
rebellion yesterday, today it seems we now turn to a reminder that God’s memory
is long and His faithfulness is true. On
both accounts He is better than we are.
It may sound trite, but that is why it is good to have Him as God and
not any of us! Because of the length of
His vision, the truth of His faithfulness, and His omniscient justice, it is
good to have Him as God. It is good to
be in relationship with Him whether we deserve it – or more likely, we don’t
deserve it.
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