Feast: Handwriting on the Wall: Forgetfulness
#FT22-00
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 09-Oct-22; 45 minutes
description: (hide)
transcript:
If you will please turn to Genesis 41, and we will read verses 39 through 41. This is in the days of Joseph just as he was being raised as prime minister of Egypt.
Genesis 41:39-41 Then Pharaoh said to Joseph, "Inasmuch as God has shown you all this, there is no one as discerning and wise as you. You shall be over my house, and all my people shall be ruled according to your word; only in regard to the throne will I be greater than you." And Pharaoh said to Joseph, "See, I have set you over all the land of Egypt."
And so going from prison to the prime minister's seat, he needed a few things to to go along with the job. So Pharaoh started to give him a few things. One of them was a wife. Let us drop down to verse 50.
Genesis 41:50-52 And to Joseph were born two sons before the years of famine came, whom, Asenath, the daughter of Poti-Pherah priest of On, bore to him. Joseph called the name of the firstborn Manasseh: "For God has made me forget all my toil and all my father's house." And the name of the second he called Ephraim: "For God has caused me to be fruitful in the land of my affliction."
Joseph gets this really big raise and with the new funds and everything he is able to settle down, get married, and have a couple of kids before the famine struck the land of Egypt. So he named those sons that Asenath bore to him Manasseh and Ephraim. We usually say it the other way around, but they were born Manasseh first, Ephraim second. And we understand that their descendants became two of the leading tribes of Israel and from prophecy we understand them to be the United States and Britain. We pulled a lot of that prophecy and interpretation out of Genesis 48.
Biblically, names are very important, especially when God is inspiring them. And Scripture often gives the meanings of the names that are given because they say something about the person or the place or the thing that is so named. I have in the past and not too long ago spoken and written on the names Manasseh and Ephraim. But this evening I will concentrate on Manasseh, the firstborn.
The internal definition that we are given in Genesis 41:51 is "For God has made me forget all my toil and all my father's house." My margin in the New King James says that it literally means "making forgetful." Other lexicons say it is "to cause to forget," "one that makes to forget," or simply "one that forgets," the forgetter. This last one is the most interesting to me.
Now the biblical attribution of this name to Manasseh and to all his progeny by the way, implies it belongs to this people in a significant way. Just as Joseph means "adding" or "I will add" or "God will add" and Ephraim means "fruitful," well, "forgetter" or "to be forgetful" is something that means a whole lot to Manasseh and his people. God intends us to understand in Genesis 41:51 that Manassites as a people tend to be forgetful or maybe, I do not know, better or worse, want to forget the past. They are very happy to start over again and leave the past behind them.
This has positive and negative implications. Like Joseph in the story here, Manassites can use this tendency to forge ahead into the future without baggage, without regrets, without grudges, without gripes. They feel like it is time to start again with a new slate and off they go and who cares what came before. It does not matter, we are starting over.
However (there is always a however), they can also be so forgetful that they fail to learn the lessons of the past and thus become doomed to repeat very painful experiences. They could be so eager to latch onto any new and exciting thing, forging ahead in innovation and ideas, that they do not consider the wisdom of the past or the restraining voice of experience or even the traditional common sense that provides necessary boundaries, and they end up paying a stiff price. Often in money, usually in integrity, sometimes in blood and destruction—and they do it over and over and over again.
We have a tradition in the Church of the Great God to begin each feast with the sermon titled, "The Handwriting is on the Wall." My dad began this tradition, I believe in 1990, for highlighting a trend that illustrates that Jesus Christ and His return are right on schedule. My offering this year will be somewhat different. It will highlight a sign of the times, yes, but I want it to function as an introduction to the Deuteronomy theme of this year's Feast of Tabernacles as well. So this sermon will do double duty in that.
Please go to Daniel 5 with me just to give some background to the handwriting on the wall.
Daniel 5:1-6 Belshazzar the king made a great feast for one thousand of his lords, and drank wine in the presence of the one thousand. While he tasted the wine, Belshazzar gave the command to bring the gold and silver vessels which his father Nebuchadnezzar had taken from the temple which had been in Jerusalem, that the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines might drink from them. Then they brought the gold vessels that they had been taken from the temple of the house of God, which had been in Jerusalem; and the king and his lords, his wives, and his concubines drank from them. [So it was not only asked for, it was brought, and they did what was not good, profaning the cups.]
They drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood, and stone. [They doubled down on that in also using God's vessels that were holy. They also used them in a form of idolatry.] In the same hour the fingers of a man's hand appeared and wrote opposite the lampstand on the plaster of the wall of the king's palace; and the king saw the part of the hand that wrote. Then the king's countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him, so that the joints of his hips were loosened and his knees knocked together against each other.
As we often say, he wet his pants and looked really bad in front of everybody. Remember his thousands! One thousand lords were there to watch all this transpire. Let us go drop down to verse 22. This is in the middle of Daniel's address to the king about what had just transpired.
Daniel 5:22-28 "But you his son [he had been speaking about Nebuchadnezzar], Belshazzar, have not humbled your heart, although you knew all this. And you have lifted yourself up against the Lord of heaven. They have brought the vessels of His house before you, and you and your lords, your wives and your concubines, have drunk wine from them. And you have praised the gods of silver and gold, bronze and iron, wood and stone, which do not see or hear or know; and the God who holds your breath in His hand and owns all your ways, you have not glorified.
Then the fingers of the hand were sent from Him, and this writing was written. And this is the inscription that was written: MENE, MENE, TEKEL, UPHARSIN. This is the interpretation of each word. MENE: God has numbered your kingdom, and finished it. TEKEL: You have been weighed in the balances, and found wanting. PERES: Your kingdom has been divided, and given to the Medes and Persians."
Obviously what we have here is the handwriting on the plaster of the wall, a message of doom for the Babylonian kingdom. It was a literal hand that wrote on the wall in Daniel's day. But the phrase "handwriting is on the wall" is used to suggest reaching a state or a condition in which the outcome, usually quite negative, is increasingly obvious and probably cannot be avoided by this point. For instance (I will give you a sentence here or two)—when the president announced his ultimatum, the handwriting was on the wall. War was inevitable. Here is another one (Ronny and I will like it and probably the rest of you will not). The race leader lost a cylinder just as he saw the white flag. The handwriting was on the wall. He would not win the Daytona 500. (How many times did that happen to Dale [Earnhardt]? If it was not a cylinder, it was something else.)
Well, here in Daniel 5, the handwriting on the wall was a sure sign of Babylon's defeat. And in this case it happened right away and the nation, the kingdom fell that night.
Let us go to Luke 12 because Jesus says something similar. He puts it a little different, but it is the same sort of thing.
Luke 12:54-56 Then He said to the multitudes, "Whenever you see a cloud rising out of the west, immediately you say, 'A shower is coming'; and so it is. And when you see the south wind blow, you say, 'There will be hot weather'; and there is. Hypocrites! You can discern the face of the sky and of the earth, but how is it you do not discern this time?"
Like I said, this is a New Testament equivalent, discerning the signs of the times. Jesus castigates the crowds that were following Him, representing all of mankind, for being so self-absorbed and blind that they missed the real significance of His work and message. Here He was, God with us, walking about the hills of Galilee and down into Judah, but they could not see Him. They were so busy looking for the weather or looking for whatever. The real answer is that they were looking for a messiah of their own making, so that they missed the real one and His spiritual work. He was doing these things right before their eyes, right under their noses, but they missed Him.
In Matthew 16:1-3 His ire is specifically directed toward the Pharisees. Whether it is religious layman or leaders, His point is clear. Without the right perspective and the ability to judge righteously, we might as well be blind. He calls the Pharisees blind guides all the time because they were. They could see, actually, through their eyes, but they missed an awful lot. They might as well have been blind and they were spiritually blind. We do not want to follow their example, not by a long shot.
God wants His people aware of the tenor of the times and thinking very deeply and often about the direction and ramifications of events and trends and philosophies that are swirling about us. And of all people in the history of this world we have the greatest ability to see them. I do not mean because we are intellectually superior. I mean because we have wall-to-wall television coverage of everything that happens in the world unless, you know, the powers that be block them from being aired. But we have the Internet that spreads these things all around. And if you go to the right places, you can find out what is happening.
I am not saying that we should be conspiracy theorists or people always looking at these things. There is a time for it though, to be mindful of what is happening in the world and thinking about how it impacts the church of God and the return of Christ. So we should be like a guard on duty, our heads on a swivel, light on our feet, ready to react to whatever dangers may come.
Now we began with Manasseh's forgetfulness and it is not very hard to see that America is foundering in a deep sea of forgetfulness. It has been building, with a few peaks and valleys, since about 1960 with the sexual revolution and the rise of the radical left. I could have gone back a little further because some of the foundations for those things were in the '20s and '30s and even earlier than that. But they got to a tipping point in the '60s somewhere and probably with the Baby Boomer generation and a lot of the movements that really got rolling in that time, and we can see the trends that have been extant since that time.
I mentioned the radical left, but everybody else other than the radical left has been fighting the long defeat, if you will. The rest of America, conservative America certainly, has trailed behind. And sadly the number of conservatives is shrinking terribly, many of their fellows having adopted the premises and the ideas and the values and the behaviors of the most forgetful—the ones who are most eager to explore the new from frontiers of freedom and unaccountability.
So, what have Americans forgotten? (We will be here till midnight. I hope you are ready.) I have three general areas that Manasseh has forgotten, these very notable things.
First, most notable and tragically they have forgotten God and the eternal values of His Word. Fewer people read the Bible and attend church every year and the number of Americans who believe in atheism rises all the time. Or if they are not atheists, they are pagans or they are "spiritual." I like that one. Or hardcore secularists that do not give any kind of religion the time of day. So without the authority of Scripture and strong churches, they lack a foundation, they lack a guide, and they lack a certainty about goodness and rightness, so they are led essentially just by ephemeral beliefs, feelings, emotions—whatever floats their boat at a given time.
Now we have just about anything goes in this country. There is nothing solid at the core of American thought, like God's Word, that keeps things from straying to the periphery on either side. We have gotten to the point as the book of Judges warns four times: in Judges 17:6, Judges 18:1, Judges 19:1, and Judges 21:25, "In those days, there was no king in Israel." That is, there was no common authority so everyone did what was right in his own eyes. Just do what you want. No one is going to say anything to you about it because there is no authority that really says you cannot.
The second thing that Americans have forgotten is their founding fathers and, of course, their founding documents. Rather than seeing them as the heroes and intellects they were—astounding minds with astounding ideas—people in this country have reduced the founders to dead white men and unwoke slaveholders. That is all they think of them. They want to cancel them. They want them off our currency. They want all those statues toppled. So they and their remarkable feats and ideas have been canceled.
A plurality of our fellow citizens have little or no respect for the Declaration of Independence and especially the Constitution, and they only use the Bill of Rights when it helps them. To those people, these documents and the founders who wrote them, are outdated and harmful and should therefore be abolished in favor of direct majority rule, by them of course. That is usually what happens. The worst of the worst end up on top.
The third thing that they have forgotten is the nation's history. They do not remember the struggles of colonization and carving out a nation from the wilderness. They scorn the great Civil War fought to determine what kind of nation America would be in which, by the way, freed the slaves and gave them the vote. They forget that 600,000-plus men died in that war for states rights and for other things. It was a war that had to be fought to find out what kind of nation this would be.
The people today, many of them, dismiss the strides the nation took to give women more rights too. They disregard the sacrifices and generosity of men and women across the nation to help each other and even other nations when war and famine or natural disasters ravage where those other people live. America is the most generous nation that has ever been on this earth. But those people who have forgotten excoriate America for this unique greatness. You try to tell somebody that America is exceptional and you are likely to get a black eye or worse. "Oh, America is no better than any other nation. Actually, they're the worst of nations. Look what they did to this group, that group, these people this, that," forgetting that all the other nations did worse.
Rush Limbaugh used to say that these days history begins with each person's birth. He could see that his own generation, he was a Baby Boomer, and the successive generations after after them have this failing. They do not study history as a whole. They do not even care to because to them history is inconsequential. It is old news. You know what is consequential? Me, what I think and what I have done. I am speaking as them, not myself. I do not think that way. They really believe that history has nothing to teach them because are we not the pinnacle of evolution right now? Are we not getting better? Are we not improving? Only present and future strides towards change matter. There has always got to be change.
And the conservatives who are supposed to be holding things back and conserving what is good and right, are not doing enough to do that, to hold back change. So over the last 20 years or so, this nation has changed radically and we can go further back too but it has really started to pick up pace over the last couple of decades. With this insight that Rush Limbaugh had about history begins with each person's birth, he predicted, and correctly so, that unless it were reversed, America's steep decline would not be arrested. It would just keep going faster and faster. And of course he was echoing George Santayana who said in 1905, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
So Manasseh's forgetfulness, if not a sin in itself, has become America's great shortcoming leading to intense iniquity and perversion. It has condemned itself to cancelation. It had the ingredients for national greatness and success. Granted, those things were never fully implemented or followed through with, and now by rejecting and ignoring those things it will pay the piper sooner than later. Things are speeding up, things are happening because (we can say this with quite a bit of confidence), God says in Numbers 32, "Be sure your sin will find you out."
Please go with me to Deuteronomy 4. It is funny, the New King James has here as its header, "Moses Commands Obedience." My substitute header on this is: "Do you see God?"
Deuteronomy 4:1-10 "Now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the judgments which I teach you to observe, that you may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers is giving you. You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. Your eyes have seen what the Lord did at Baal Peor; for the Lord your God has destroyed from among you all the men who followed Baal of Peor. But you who held fast to the Lord your God are alive today, every one of you.
Surely I have taught you the statutes and judgments, just as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should act according to them in the land which you go to possess. Therefore [therefore is one of those words, what do we conclude?] be careful to observe them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who will hear all these statutes; and say; 'Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.' For what great nation is there that has God so near to it, as the Lord our God is to us, for whatever reason we may call upon Him?
And what great nation is there that has such statutes and righteous judgments as are in this law which I set before you this day? Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. And teach them to your children and your grandchildren, especially concerning the day you stood before the Lord your God in Horeb, when the Lord said to me, 'Gather the people to Me, and I will let them hear My words, that they may learn to fear Me all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children.'"
Now verse 9 is the first time any Hebrew word is translated "forget" since Genesis 41:51. Remember we saw that? That was when Manasseh was named. This is the first time any other Hebrew word is raised in Scripture. Here the word is Hebrew shakach. It is Strong's #7911, if you want to check it out. It is the common Hebrew word for "to forget." Here, it stands within a passage that commands and urges the Israelites to take careful heed to all they experienced of God's works in the wilderness, and all the words that they had heard from God Himself and from God through Moses. Moses makes it clear that remembering these things that they saw and heard and teaching them to their children would be paramount to Israel actually being the godly nation, the representative nation of the great and Almighty God.
Notice how the passage begins. He says, the first verb, is listen. Listen suggests more than hearing. It is more than just the sense of hearing something. It also represents the ideas of receptivity, understanding, and even responding appropriately to what was taught, what was said. If you really want to get down to it, in Hebrew listening is tantamount to obedience. God expects that we hear and we respond appropriately in obedience. It covers the whole process of instruction all the way to implementation and observance. So when God says listen, He does not mean just "hear Me." He means here, "Everything I've said, think it through, do what is right and good."
Then in verse 2 here, he says, "You shall not add to the instruction that He has given." So when it comes to God's teaching we are not to get creative and start inserting our own ideas and flourishes on what He says. Yes, He does speak with a very conservative approach to the use of words. If He really wanted to explain everything, we would have to carry around a Bible that was about a ton. But He puts it very succinctly and tells us what we should do. And we should avoid the temptation at all costs to put our own little twist on things and add to what He has said.
Now we can extend them by God's Spirit to cover specific circumstances maybe not contemplated in Scripture. And those things we learn are called judgments. They are based on specific scriptural precedent and principles, but they must be qualified as such. That they are judgments based on an interpretation or an understanding of what God has said. We have no authority to go beyond judgments of this nature. We cannot in any way make our ideas or interpretations to be holy and binding as God's Word. We can make these judgments and hope that you understand that we are doing this, you know, under God's Spirit and coming to the right conclusion.
But, in his epistles, even the apostle Paul is very careful to say, "This is from the Lord" or "This is what I say, but I have the Spirit of God." So he was very careful not to go beyond his authority and say, "This is holy writ because here I am, the apostle Paul, and you should just trust me." But we do know that his writings were then canonized and they did become holy writ. But he was very careful to say, "I have made this judgment" and then it was God's turn to decide whether He would put that in the canon. And He did.
So we have to be very careful on matters that we have to make a judgment on that are not specifically mentioned in the Bible. But we have to have good reasons for making the judgment and showing a solid principle that undergirds them. So we can say this is what we believe is right in this situation.
Mr. Armstrong did this with smoking. He said many times that he went through a process of trying to figure out what God would say, how God would logically go through the idea if a person in the church of God should smoke. And he came up with a process of logic that he presented several times throughout his ministry and said no. Basically it came down to the principle of love that he applied in several different situations and said, "No, it's not a good thing." And so that has been binding as a judgment upon the church of God ever since. As far as I know, there are not many churches of God who have descended from Worldwide that have gone back on that. As a matter of fact, I do not know any, but we have accepted it as a judgment that is based on good scriptural exegesis and wise decision-making, using God's Spirit.
That is just one example. Third tithe was another and you know, third tithe is in the Bible, but how it is collected and that sort of thing there had to be some judgments made because this was way back in 1400, 1500 BC. Things have changed a little bit since then. And so there were some judgments that were made to bring it up to date, but we still feel like it is under what God said in His Word or our judgment is under what God says in His Word.
Note however here, that Moses does say something about taking away from it, but he goes over it very quickly in verse 2. "You shall not add to the word which I command you nor take from it." It is almost like taking away from it was a secondary thought that he just flew right past, mentioning it but not dwelling on it as he had the adding to it. He does say in verse 9 in terms of expanding on that idea, "Take heed to yourself, and diligently keep yourself, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life."
Maybe you have not thought of it this way and that is fine. But forgetting and subsequently forsaking God's Word is a form of taking away or subtracting from what God has revealed. We may never have considered taking away from God's Word in this fashion. But when we disregard and abandon one of God's commands, we essentially cut it out of the Book. That instruction, we say, does not apply. And so we excise it from all the things that God has said. To put it another way: When we forget about these things and we forsake them, those things have disappeared from our copy of the Bible. We are no longer keeping the whole counsel of God. So forgetting God's Word is just as bad as taking away from God's Word.
Forgetting, you people of Manasseh (many of us are I am sure), can be a terribly dangerous thing. Remember all of the curses that God gives or says He will bring on those people who forget His Word or take away from His Word. We have to be very careful to remember.
Please turn with me to Deuteronomy 31, and we will read verses 9-13.
Deuteronomy 31:9-13 So Moses wrote this law and delivered it to the priests, the sons of Levi, who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, and to all the elders of Israel. And Moses commanded them, saying, "At the end of every seven years, at the appointed time in the year of release, at the Feast of Tabernacles, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God in the place which He chooses, you shall read this law before Israel in their hearing.
Gather the people together, men and women and little ones, and the stranger who is within your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the Lord your God and carefully observe all the words of this law, and that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live in the land which you cross the Jordan to possess."
Now this year Moses' instruction in this passage will be a major part of our observance of the Feast of Tabernacles. We have heard a sermon from David [Grabbe] to say that we should have done this last year. Even if we planned to do it last year, it would have been with a little bit of a difficulty. And so we will do it this year, which is the normal year we would have done it anyway. But we will do it in six years from now again rather than wait for seventh year, so that we get on the right timing of this. It is supposed to be done in the year of the Shemita during the Feast of Tabernacles. Shemita is now over so we should have done this last year during this meeting rather than after it. But be that as it may, we will get on the right year as far as we can understand.
But even though we are doing it a year late, I consider it an important enough tradition to continue it. And because we need to learn these things I do not want to wait another six years to make the reminder and impose them on your mind because we need to concentrate on the book of Deuteronomy as God says here through Moses. And the reason why I wanted to do it is because of this instruction to remember. Not to forget and then forsake God's instruction.
So at this feast, each service we will have a new wrinkle to it. One of our men will read a portion of Deuteronomy aloud to you, covering various portions of the exhortations to Israel and spiritual Israel. We will not be reading the whole book of Deuteronomy. We will be reading portions of say about twenty verses each time and we will at least keep this command in spirit so that we can hear the book of the law. And for my part, I will give three sermons over the next eight days that will use the contents of this passage that we have just read to explore three central themes of the book of Deuteronomy.
My notes have come to an end. I do want to ask the men who will be doing the readings to come see me after this service, just up here for about five minutes, so I can make sure everybody knows what we are going to do and how it is all going to work. But I think it will be helpful to hear these passages that will be read. We will be doing them right before the announcements each day for the Feast of Tabernacles and none on the Last Great Day. That day is pretty busy as it is. But I think it will be helpful and instructive, and also help these guys learn to do some public speaking in front of a little bit of a larger audience.
So have a wonderful Feast of Tabernacles. It is just getting started. Make sure you start it off well by getting a good night's sleep.
RTR/aws/drm