Vows

Wednesday Prayer Service

February 27, 2008

Numbers 30:1-16

Vows

Amen. If you have your Bibles, I’d
invite you to turn with me to Numbers 30 as we draw close to the end of the book
of Numbers.

You’ll remember the last time
we were together in this passage we were looking at laws of sacrifice, commands
especially about the sacrifices that were to be offered in the seventh month.
And that chapter opened with the word of the Lord being given to Israel from
Moses as to how they were to conduct themselves in relation to these sacrifices.

Well, the chapter that we’re
going to be looking at tonight opens up in the same way. You’ll notice in the
very first words, ‘this is the word which the Lord has commanded’. And so
in both instances, it’s being stressed that Israel is to follow God’s word.
They’re to follow the Lord’s command in the way they (on the one hand in chapter
29) worship thru the sacrifices and on the other hand, how they keep their vows.

Now, you may think it a little
bit strange for a chapter on worship and sacrifices to be followed by a chapter
on vows. But this is not the only time we see this in religious history. Take
your hymnals in hand and turn to page 861. It struck me that this is precisely
the order that is followed in the Westminster Confession of Faith which, in
chapter 21 deals with the subject of “worship”.

And then, in chapter 22 deals
with the subject of “vows”. So the confession has (at least in this instance)
followed the order of the book of Numbers in treating of worship and then of
religious vows.

This is a fascinating chapter
and I think it may help you to see its outline before we read it. It has an
introduction and a conclusion and in between the introduction and in the
conclusion, it has six parts. Let me point them out to you:

In the introduction, we have
the words of the Lord’s commandment. That’s verse 1.

In the first part of the
chapter, we have directions from God about men, about males in Israel making
vows. That’s verse 2.

In the second part of the
chapter which runs from verse 3 to verse 5, we have commands about girls who are
still in the home and under the care of their fathers making vows.

In the third part of the
chapter, we have directions about young women who are brides to be making vows.
You’ll see this in verses 6-8.

Then in verse 9 we have an
aside. It’s the fourth part of the chapter and it has to do with widows and
divorcees and their making of vows.

Then, in verses 10-12, we come
to the fifth part of the chapter and it deals with wives making vows (women who
are already married and part of the home) and the wives making vows.

And then in verses 13-16 we
come to the sixth part of the passage and it has to with wives making vows which
are then violated and the consequences of that violation.

And then the conclusion of the
chapter comes in verse 16.

Now, we don’t have time to do
justice to all that is in this chapter tonight so I want to begin by just
bringing your attention to two or three things that I’m not going to have the
opportunity to develop in the course of the sermon. I’m going to point you to
three truths that I think this passage helps us with today. But since I’m not
going to be able to touch on these three things, let me go ahead and mention
them to you before I get to the three main points of the message.

First of all, this passage
makes it clear that God takes the giving of our word seriously. The whole
chapter is devoted to the subject of “vows” and the consequence of breaking them
and the circumstances in which they must be taken and the obligations which
attend us when we do. And so, the whole chapter emphasizes that God takes the
giving of our word seriously.

Second, this passage makes it
clear that rash promises, rash vows, rash pledges actually undermine our
integrity and open us to judgment. We think, for instance, of the vow that
Jephthah made.

You remember the judge,
Jephthah, who, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, led Israel against the
Ammonites in battle? But as he prayed to God to help him in the battle against
the Ammonites, you remember what he vowed? “Lord, if you’ll give me victory over
the Ammonites, I will sacrifice to you the first thing that comes out of my
house when I return home from the victory that you will give me.” And you
remember what happened? His daughter has heard of the great victory of Israel
under her father. She is proud. She gets her tambourine just like Miriam did at
the Red Sea and she leaves her house to meet her father, to greet him with words
of rejoicing at God’s answer to prayer and his daughter, his only daughter walks
out of the house and is the first one to meet him upon his arrival. And it dawns
upon him what he has done. In the rashness of his vow, he has put the mark of
death upon his daughter and in two months she is put to death.

And this passage deals with
the problem of rash vows. In fact, it puts into place a number of checks and
balances to make sure that rash vows aren’t made. But we’re not going to have
time to develop that.

Third, this chapter provides a
protection of women against oppressive behavior by either fathers or husbands.
You’ll note with some curiosity that there is only one verse about the vows that
men make, but the whole rest of the chapter from verse 3-15 is about the special
circumstances and qualifications when women take vows. Now, you might be tempted
at first to think, “There we go again. The men get off light­­ — one verse and
all of these extra regulations that are attended to the women of Israel.” But,
if you look closely, the circumstances of verses 3-15 are designed to address
all of the unique stages of a woman’s life and the unique situations that attend
those unique stages and to protect them from fickle men who change their minds.

As we read this passage, you’ll find
out that if a husband or a father objects immediately to a vow that a daughter
or a wife or a fiancй is going to make, then that vow is not binding. But if
that husband or father gives even tacit approval to that vow and then later on
decides , ‘well, you know, I don’t like that vow very much’, he can’t change it.

So all of the extra regulation
is not picking on the women of Israel; it’s protecting the women of Israel
against an unscrupulous influence of even husbands and fathers. But we’re not
going to have time to develop that tonight either.

Tonight, I want to look at two
or three things with you very briefly. One is — in this passage we see that the
taking of vows is an important part of spiritual life. It’s an important part of
the Christian life as it was an important part of Israel’s religious life.

Secondly, we’re going to see in this
passage that God cares about family harmony in the taking of vows.

And then third, as we look at
this passage we’re going to be reminded of a vow that the Lord Jesus took for
us.

So let’s look to God in prayer
and then hear the reading of God’s Holy Word.

Let’s pray. Heavenly Father, we
thank you for the truth of Your Word. We ask that you would open our eyes to
behold wonderful things in it. For Jesus’ sake. Amen.

Hear the word of the living God in
Numbers 30 beginning in verse 1.

“Moses spoke to the heads of the
tribes of the people of Israel, saying, “This is what the Lord has commanded. If
a man vows a vow to the Lord, or swears an oath to bind himself by a pledge, he
shall not break his word. He shall do according to all that proceeds out of his
mouth.

If a woman vows a vow to the Lord and
binds herself by a pledge, while within her father’s house in her youth, and her
father hears of her vow and of her pledge by which she has bound herself and
says nothing to her, then all her vows shall stand, and every pledge by which
she has bound herself shall stand. But if her father opposes her on the day that
he hears of it, no vow of hers, no pledge by which she has bound herself shall
stand. And the Lord will forgive her, because her father opposed her.

If she marries a husband, while under
her vows or any thoughtless utterance of her lips by which she has bound
herself, and her husband hears of it and says nothing to her on the day that he
hears, then her vows shall stand, and her pledges by which she has bound herself
shall stand. But if, on the day that her husband comes to hear of it, he opposes
her, then he makes void her vow that was on her, and the thoughtless utterance
of her lips by which she bound herself. And the Lord will forgive her. (But any
vow of a widow or of a divorced woman, anything by which she has bound herself,
shall stand against her.) And if she vowed in her husband’s house or bound
herself by a pledge with an oath, and her husband heard of it and said nothing
to her and did not oppose her, then all her vows shall stand, and every pledge
by which she bound herself shall stand. But if her husband makes them null and
void on the day that he hears them, then whatever proceeds out of her lips
concerning her vows or concerning her pledge of herself shall not stand. Her
husband has made them void, and the Lord will forgive her. Any vow and any
binding oath to afflict herself, her husband may establish or her husband may
make void. But if her husband says nothing to her from day to day, then he
establishes all her vows or all her pledges that are upon her. He has
established them, because he said nothing to her on the day that he heard of
them. But if he makes them null and void after he has heard of them, then he
shall bear her iniquity.”

These are the statutes that the Lord
commanded Moses about a man and his wife and about a father and his daughter
while she is in her youth within her father’s house.”

Amen. And thus ends this reading of
God’s Holy, inspired, and inerrant Word. May he write its eternal truth upon our
hearts.

Three things I want to draw your
attention to in this passage tonight.

I. Vows were important
for Israel and for Christians today.

The first thing I want you to
see is that vows are an important part of religious life in Israel and vows
continue to be an important part of Christian life, even in the age of the New
Covenant.

You may be scratching your head at
all of this vow business in the first place. What is this all about?

Well, in Israel one of the ways that
one showed the seriousness of the petitions which you pray to the Lord is to
attach a vow to those petitions that you promised to fulfill upon the Lord’s
answering of your prayer. The whole design is to make clear in your own heart
the strength of your commitment to the petitions that you are lifting up to God
and to give God proper credit for the answers to prayer that He brings to you by
offering something in fulfillment of that vow that perhaps will cost you
something.

So, for instance, you will find David
in the Psalm talking about paying vows that he has pledged in the wake of
answers to prayers.

And you’ll find important stories in
the Old Testament where godly Old Testament saints joined vows to prayers.

Let me give you a couple of examples:

Turn in your Bible to Genesis 28.
Jacob is at Bethel, the House of God. In Genesis 28:18 we read,

“So early in the morning Jacob took
the stone that he had put under his head and set it up for a pillar and poured
oil on the top of it.”

You remember, he had seen that
amazing vision the night before and now, he is constructing a crude altar and
engaging in public worship with the pouring of oil on this stone. And he says in
verse 19,

“He called the name of that place
Bethel, but the name of the city was Luz at the first. Then Jacob made a vow,
saying, “If God will be with me and will keep me in the way that I go, and will
give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father’s
house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God, and this stone, which I have set
up for a pillar, shall be God’s house. And of all that you give me I will give a
full tenth to you.”

Now, it might look like Jacob is
doing something that we hear some of our less spiritual friends do from time to
time. “Lord, if you’ll give me what I want, I’ll give something to you that you
want.” “Lord, if you’ll just let me bag that buck, I’ll go to church for the
next six Sundays.” Some sort of a bargaining going on between the hunter and
God. That’s not what’s going on with Jacob.

Jacob is making a vow, not because
he’s bargaining with God, but because he believes God’s commandments. But he
also knows what? His faith is weak so in order to bind his trust in God’s
promises, he makes a vow. And in order to properly honor God for the fulfilling
of those promises, he fulfills the vow. He makes the vow, “Lord, if You’re going
to do all the things that You’ve promised to me in this vision and elsewhere,
I’m going to be a very rich man, so let me just say right now, You journey with
me here and there and bring me home again, I’m going to vow right now to give
you a tenth of all that you give me.”

It’s not a bargain. “Lord, You
scratch my back. I’ll scratch Yours.” It’s an expression of faith in God’s
promises and proper credit to God for the fulfillment of those promises. But you
see it’s a part of religious worship in this context. To his belief in God, he
binds a vow.

Now, yes, you hear health and wealth
preachers on television grossly warping this kind of thing out of context all
the time. “Sow a seed of faith,” they say to you. “Send me a $1,000 and that
will help your faith bring about a great abundance of riches. If you’ll sow that
seed of faith and give me a vow of a $1000.” That’s what the hunter’s doing.
That’s not what Jacob’s doing. And why would you send it to a stranger anyway?

So the health and wealth teachers
greatly contort this, but vows were an important of religious life in Israel.

Let me show you another example. Turn
way forward in the Old Testament to 1 Samuel, all the way from the first book of
Genesis to 1 Samuel 1. You remember this story. There was a godly woman in
Israel who didn’t have a child. She was humiliated by this. And she cried out to
the Lord and she cried out to her husband. And on one occasion, she began to
pray and weep bitterly. 1 Samuel 1:10, Hannah was her name. She was deeply
distressed and prayed to the Lord and wept bitterly and she vowed a vow and
said,

“O Lord of hosts, if you will indeed
look on the affliction of your servant and remember me and not forget your
servant, but will give to your servant a son, then I will give him to the Lord
all the days of his life, and no razor shall touch his head.”

And she had a little boy named
Samuel. And he served in the house of the Lord and was a prophet of the Lord.
And she kept her vow.

But the point was not to make a vow
that would manipulate the Lord into doing something that she wanted him to do.
The point was to bind her faith to the gracious God to whom was praying and then
when He answered that prayer to follow through on the vow to acknowledge to Him
that He is the one who has answered that prayer and brought it about.

This is an important of religious
life in Israel, but it continues to be an important part of religious life even
in the New Testament. Not only does Jesus give attention to the whole issue of
vows in the Sermon on the Mount, but the Apostle Paul, as we may remember from
Derek’s exposition on the book of Acts, himself took vows.

Take a look at Acts 18. Acts 18:18 —

“After this, Paul stayed many days
longer and then took leave of the brothers and set sail for Syria and with him
Priscilla and Aquila and at Cenchreae, he had cut his hair for he was under a
vow.”

And there’s even a later passage
that has to do with vows in the book of Acts and the Apostle Paul in assisting
four men who had taken vows in the book of Acts. But it’s interesting that vows
are still operating in the book of Acts after Pentecost, after the resurrection
of Christ.

Now, what are we to learn from this?
Well, we participate in the taking of vows as a part of our religious life as
well. Every one in this room who is a communing member of this or any
evangelical church has taken in order to be a member of that church what? Vows.
Every one here who has been baptized has either taken vows or had them taken for
you. Every one here who is married has taken vows, most of you, in the context
of religious worship. Every time we come to the Lord’s Table, we are engaging in
a recommittal of ourselves to the Lord. Those of you who are church officers
have taken vows.

Vows continue to be an important part
of spiritual life. And it is vital that we understand that the honor of the Lord
is at stake in our fidelity to the vows that we take, and that is the very point
that the commandment, “You shall not take up the name of the Lord your God in
vain.” The fundamental point that that great commandment is making is not so
much as those of us who grew up in the south would have been wont to say “Thou
shalt not cuss”. (That’s what I thought that’s the first meaning of that
commandment, you shouldn’t cuss.)

Well, you shouldn’t cuss, but the
first meaning of that commandment is not so much that you shouldn’t cuss, it’s
that you should never, ever take on your lips the name of the Lord in a vow that
you don’t keep.

Um? What does that say about our
marriage vows and our church membership vows and the vows that we take at
baptism?

When I first got here, I was
rummaging through some letters that Jim Baird had written and one of the letters
that he wrote regularly to the parents of children who were being baptized had
this thought in it. The thought was, “You know, if parents just kept the third
vow that we take in the baptism of a child, it would be the most important thing
that they could ever do in the rearing of those children.” And the thought
struck me so much, I’ve passed that wisdom on to every parent that I’ve had the
privilege and opportunity of baptizing their child.

It’s the truth. We just kept the
third vow that we take it would be the single most important thing that we could
do in the life of those children. Because you remember that vow commits you to
live the faith as an example before them, to pray with and for them, and to
teach them the Bible and the truth of the gospel.

Well, what three more important
things could you do for a child than to live out the gospel in front of them,
than to pray for them, and to teach them the Bible and the truths of the gospel.

Now, vows are a very important part
of religious life. They continue to be so for Christians.

II. God cares about the
family as we take vows.

The second point that we
learned from this passage is that God cares about family harmony in the taking
of vows. And He does not want family harmony to be disrupted by rash vows.
That’s why vows that are taken by a daughter in the home in her youth that are
not agreed to by her father are rendered null. That’s why vows taken by a fiancй
prior to her marriage can be nullified by her groom to be. That’s why vows taken
by a wife immediately objected to by her husband are not binding. Why? Because
God cares about family harmony.

It’s vital and so even in this matter
of vows, God is deeply concerned about the solidarity of the family.

And it’s so interesting to me that
this shows up in the counsel of the Apostle Paul in 1 Corinthians 7. You
remember at the beginning of 1 Corinthians 7? You can allow your eyes to look at
that passage. It’s a fascinating passage. Apparently, what was going on in
Corinth is, there were some husbands or some wives or some husbands and wives
who were saying to their spouses (How can I put this delicately?) “There’s going
to be no conjugal intimacy in this relationship because I’ve taken a vow.” And
the Apostle Paul says, “Don’t do that unless you’re both agreed. Don’t do that
to one another. Don’t give Satan an opportunity unless you’re both agreed.”

Isn’t it interesting? Paul, who in
this passage is willing for some people to say, “I’m going to be celibate for
life.” He’s willing for them to say that if they’re ready to make that pledge to
permanent singleness for the sake of the gospel, but for
those who are married he says, “Don’t make a vow like that that might bring
about not only an opportunity for Satan to tempt you in the weakness of your
flesh, but would also bring about dissention in the relationship.”

It’s fascinating. I was doing some
research on the Council of Chalcedon, which was held a long, long time ago (451
AD). And the Emperor who called the Council of Chalcedon was married to a young
woman who was reputed to be extremely godly and devoted, but she
had taken a vow as a young woman to live in perpetual chastity. Yeah, you got
that right. He was married to this woman.

Now, I don’t know what the effects of
that arrangement were, but it couldn’t have been good with regard to his
morality. You can figure out what that probably meant in terms of his
relationship to other women.

But that’s what precisely what Paul’s
forbidding and that’s precisely what the commands which are being given in
Numbers 30 are designed to prevent.

III. Jesus took vows for
His people.

One last thing. Did you know
that Jesus took a vow for you? He did. It was on the night of His betrayal. It
was in the upper room. It was right before He began to institute the Lord’s
Supper. You’ll find it in Matthew 26.

In Matthew 26:27-28 we read,

“And He took a cup, and when He had
given thanks, He gave it to them saying, “Drink of it, all of you, for this is
My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of
sins. I tell you I will not drink again of this fruit of the vine until that day
when I drink it new with you.”

It’s a vow on the part of the
Lord Jesus Christ that He will not taste of the fruit of this vine until He
tastes it afresh with us. It’s a pledge of his commitment to His people. And He
takes it because He loves us. And He takes it because He saved us.

Let’s pray.

“Our Heavenly Father, we thank
you for this great passage on vows and we ask that in the mercy of the Holy
Spirit, by the Spirit’s power, that we would take our words seriously and honor
you in our truthfulness, that we would refrain from rash promises and failing to
keep vows so that our integrity is not undermined and so that we are not opened
up to your judgment. We pray, O God, that family harmony would not be disrupted
by rash vows or vows of any kind. And we pray, Heavenly Father, that you would
cause our hearts to overflow in gratefulness for the grace which has been shown
to us in Christ Jesus who himself made a vow that he will keep. These prayers we
lift up in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Would you stand for God’s blessing?

Grace, mercy, and peace to you
from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.