AP

Deuteronomy 23:3-6  No Ammonite or Moabite or any of their descendants may enter the assembly of the LORD, not even in the tenth generation.  For they did not come to meet you with bread and water on your way when you came out of Egypt, and they hired Balaam son of Beor from Pethor in Aram Naharaim to pronounce a curse on you. However, the LORD your God would not listen to Balaam but turned the curse into a blessing for you, because the LORD your God loves you. Do not seek a treaty of friendship with them as long as you live.

What a contrast this is with our situation today, and how it highlights the difference Jesus has made to our world!

As the LORD brought his people into the land he had promised to Abraham, three things were important:

Firstly, the displacement of the nations who already occupied Canaan was God’s Judgement on them because of the way they had rejected the one, true God as the Creator and Ruler of the world and gone their own evil ways with vile, inhumane practices;

Secondly, because of their harsh treatment and cursing of God’s people in their time of need in the wilderness.  (The Ammonites and Moabites were their kinsmen, being related to Abraham’s descendants through his nephew, Lot, but were not included in the inherited promises given through Isaac and Jacob);

Thirdly, their worship of other gods, with all its sensual and seductive practices, would be a temptation, luring the Israelites away from the LORD.  Therefore they were to be totally excluded from the Assembly of Israel.

Jesus’ coming into the world as Saviour and King changed everything.  As Saviour, he fulfilled God’s Law perfectly for us, so the ritual of the Assembly of Israel’s ceremomial law with all its sacrifices and rules is now rendered obsolete, and our renewed relationship with our Holy God is now established by grace through faith alone in what Jesus has done for us, making his people the New ‘Temple’ of ‘living stones’ built on him as the Cornerstone as its foundation, and the Capstone that holds it all together.  And his Church is now God’s people (1 Peter 2:4-10), which Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, is now building, and ‘[not even] the Gates of Hell can prevail against, or overcome, it’ (Matthew 16:18).

Membership of this new ‘Assembly’, this new ‘Temple’ is now open to all through faith – people from every ‘tribe and language and people and nation’ (Revelation 5:9), sinners whose sins have been washed away by the blood of the ‘Lamb of God’ – Jesus (Revelation 7:14). We were all born with a natural disposition similar to the Ammonites and the Moabites – and all the other nations being removed from Canaan – but, “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ!  In his great mercy he has given us new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that can never perish, spoil or fade.  This inheritance is kept in heaven for you, …” (1 Peter 1:3-4).

– Bruce Chrisitan