The sermon titled 'Dinah's Desire' by Paul Carrington focuses on the theme of 'keeping the heart' and explores the hidden core of who we are and what drives our actions. The speaker discusses the challenges and sins presented in Genesis chapter 34, which tells the story of Dinah's disaster and the devil's desire to assimilate God's people. The sermon emphasizes the importance of guarding our hearts and remaining separate from worldly influences.

All right, well if you would kindly open your Bibles to the 34th chapter of the book of Genesis, Genesis chapter 34. And what are we doing? Well, we're dealing with the hidden core of who we are, what drives our actions in this series on keeping the heart. And to paraphrase Proverbs 4, 23, where this verse comes from, above all things that you guard, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it. And I was reading John Flable.

He wrote that book, Keeping the Heart, and one of the statements he said in regards to what this whole work is all about, he says this, "'This is the work, and of all works in religion, it is the most difficult, constant, and important work. Heart work is the hardest work indeed. To shuffle over religious duties with a loose and heedless spirit will cost no great pains. But to set thyself before the Lord and tie up the loose and vain thoughts to a constant and serious attendance upon him. This will cost thee something." And so today we have a very, I would say, hard to read chapter before us.

You know, it would be much, much easier to leap from chapter 33 all the way to 35. And as I was preparing, actually, for this, I think it was on Thursday or Wednesday, I said, let me just go and see a few more commentators on this chapter. And the first guy that I read, a man of old, he says, now given the choice, I don't know of a single sane man who would choose this text as his verse to preach from. But I did check with one of the elders and got clearance, so I won't tell you which one for plausible deniability, but did get clearance. But here's the thing to think about God and who he is and how he preserves his word.

You know when you read in Timothy where Paul says, all scripture is God-breathed, think about that. So even the verses that we have before us are God-breathed and it's profitable. And In Romans chapter 15, we also read that whatever was written beforehand was written for our instruction that we through patience and comfort of the scriptures, we might have hope. And so the last time, if you recall, we went through, really we were in Esther, and it's really an entire book that has no mention of God even a single time. His name is not mentioned but he appears obviously in every single verse.

Well this time we have an entire chapter to chapter 34 where God is strangely absent. His name doesn't appear. He's in the last verse of chapter 33 and the first verse of chapter 35, but not in 34. And I think you'll see why. But in spite of the sin that we're gonna be talking about and the challenges here in this verse, God is building a nation out of a single family.

And so the context for us before I read is that in chapter 33, after being away from the promised land, the land of Canaan for decades, Jacob finally comes back with his whole family and he settled down and you can read the final words in verse chapter thirty-three it says that he pitched his tent before the city of Shechem and he's bought a parcel of land and he's now settled here. And the account opens up with a 15 or 16 year old young Dinah, the only daughter of Jacob. And I've broken this into two sections. The first 10 verses, we're going to call it Dinah's disaster. And then we're going to skip down to verse, I think we'll go down to verse 20, and I've called that the devil's desire.

And so let's see what the Word of God has for us here. It says in verse 1, Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her and lay with her and violated her. His soul was strongly attracted to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the young woman and spoke kindly to the young woman. So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor saying, get me this young woman as a wife.

And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah, his daughter. Now his sons were with his livestock in the field. So Jacob held his peace until they came. Then Hamor, the father of Shechem, went out to Jacob to speak with him. And the sons of Jacob came in from the field when they heard it.

And the men were grieved and very angry because he had done a disgraceful thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing which ought not to be done. But Hamor spoke to them saying, the soul of my son Shechem longs for your daughter. Please give her to him as a wife and make marriages with us. Give your daughters to us and take our daughters to yourselves. So you shall dwell with us and the land shall be before you dwell and trade in it and acquire possessions for yourselves in it and let's skip down to verse 20 and Hamor and Shechem his son came to this gate of this their city and spoke with the men of their city saying, these men are at peace with us, therefore let them dwell in the land and trade in it.

For indeed the land is large enough for them. Let us take their daughters to us as wives and let us give them our daughters. Only on this condition will the men consent to dwell with us, to be one people. If every male among us is circumcised as they are circumcised, will not their livestock, their property, and every animal of theirs be ours, only let us consent to them and they will dwell with us. And all who went out of the gate of the city heeded Hamor and Shechem his son.

Every male was circumcised, all who went out of the gate of his city. Well, let's pray. Heavenly Father, we have these words before us, these troubling words. Lord, we ask you to help us. Lord, I know that I need your help and I pray that you would use even a chapter like this, Father, to get glory and to get honor for your great name.

Lord, may your name be honored and praised in our midst here. In Jesus' name we pray, Amen. Well to help us just get context here of what's actually going on before us, remember who is writing. Obviously God is the author of all scripture, but Moses is the one who's penned these words for us in Genesis. Who is he writing to?

He's writing to the nation of Israel. And when is he writing? Well, he's writing to them on the cusp of them entering into the same land of Canaan that we're actually talking about here after years and years of wandering and their objective is going to be to uproot the ites of the land the hivites and the Jebusites and the Perizzites and the Canaanites and of course all of these different ones. And really the constant emphasis of the first five books of Moses is that there can be no compromise with the Canaanites. That's really the emphasis.

Go to Leviticus, you're going to be a separate people, holy unto God. And the message is this to Israel, if you neglect this, people of God, you're gonna lose all sense of destiny. You're gonna lose your identity and you're gonna become just like the people that you were sent to conquer. And so there's a purpose in the writing that even this account that we have before us here, it's not just a simple accounting of history of what happened, but in vivid color. The Lord, and of course Moses, the one holding the pen, is preserving this lesson for all posterity to teach us something here.

And we come to verse one and it says, Now Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land." It seems like a fairly harmless verse. But Calvin puts it like this, for it is not to be doubted that Moses in part cast the blame of the offense upon Dinah herself when he says she went out to see the daughters of the land. Spurgeon he has a sermon a sermon called gadding about you know going out into the world and enjoying yourself and he mentions Dinah here very unfavorably in that sermon. Matthew Henry, he says it like this, speaking of Dinah, her pretense was to see the daughters of the land, to see how they dressed and how they danced and what was fashionable among them. And so here's a situation for us to consider.

Here's a young lady, she's 15, she's 16, thereabouts. She's been catechized, She's been prayed for, but how bad could things really be in Canaan? And she's looking for friendship and for association with the daughters of the land, young ladies who obviously do not worship the true and the living God who are pagans. But to her modern ears, it doesn't seem to sound so bad, right? She's just wanting to go out and see what's around her.

But in those days, girls didn't just gat about and go and see the world as Spurgeon puts it. It wasn't days like that. James actually says it like this in chapter one. He says, but each one is tempted when he is drawn away by his own desires and enticed, she was enticed. And look how He diagnoses sin.

He says this, then when sin has conceived, it gives birth... Sorry, when desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin, and sin, when it is full grown, brings forth death. So what's the modern day equivalent for us here? Well, even without leaving our homes, we can pipe in pretty much everything from Canaan, can't we? Hours on Instagram or Netflix or any number of things like that, where we can be catechized by the enemies of God, the people that hate God, our music tastes, and even the darkest desires of the human heart can be imported right into our homes.

We don't have to gat about, so to speak, to leave the confines. Secretly, privately, maybe at least for a time, we can go and see the daughters of the land. And I just wanna ask the question that are there any among us right now trying to cultivate relationships that are not wholesome or to pry open doors that the Lord would shut, doors that you shouldn't pry open? Maybe Another way to say it is, am I trying to sit at a table that the Lord Jesus would flip over? Ask yourself that question.

With all the young people among us, here's a young lady catechized, brought up in a Christian home, obviously being a Jew, but there's something more, isn't there, about keeping the heart. And this young lady had a deficiency here. But there's another thought here as well, isn't there? You know, again, it's always safe to see what other men have written. I was following closely with some of the things that Matthew Henry said.

And he doesn't just leave it with Dinah. But he says this. It is a very good thing for children to love home. Do you love home, children? It is a parent's wisdom to make it easy for them and the children's duty then to be easy in it.

So you see the duties, right? There's the child's duty to love home, but then you have the parent's duty. And it's a really good question. Mom, are you doing your best to make it easy for them? Dad, are you doing your best to make life at home a joy.

Everyone has a responsibility in a familial setting. And so the remedy isn't legalism, so to speak, higher walls and more rules than even God has put in place. That's what the Pharisees tried and it failed miserably. We do need walls. We need warnings.

We need that admonition to stay away. But really, the most sturdy wall that we can build is the fear of God, To have that there in your hearts as a young person, as an older person, as a man, as a woman and to cultivate a love for the things that are good. To cultivate a love for the Lord Jesus Christ, for his people so that your attractions are towards the things that are actually wholesome and the things that are calling you from outside or maybe through your device have less of a hold on you because you have such an affection for things that are good. It's such a wonderful thing to have that because worldliness, what is the definition of worldliness? Worldliness is really a departing of the heart from God.

That's how you can very simply, concisely define what worldliness is. Your heart just departs from God. And this is really the clarion call of the apostles, of the prophets of old. Even John, the apostle of love, he ends his epistle, Little Children. Keep yourselves from idols.

Amen. That's what he's trying to do. And Ian Murray, you know, Ian Murray, he's a contemporary. He's alive even right now. And he wrote a book, an amazing book.

And he speaks of the collapse of evangelicalism between 1950 and 2000. How in the world did we get from there to where we are in the year 2000 and from 2000 to 2023 is another book in itself, I'm sure. But he says this, apostasy generally arises in the church just because this danger ceases to be observed. You stop paying attention to the danger. The consequence is that spiritual warfare gives way to spiritual pacifism.

And if you think about it like this, in observing John Bunyan's Vanity Fair, it was Asaph in Psalm 73, where he looked over the edge and he says, but as for me, my feet almost stumbled. My steps nearly slipped. Here's a man that loved God, but he was peering over the edge and seeing all that vanity Phara had to offer, and he had to catch himself before he fell into the abyss. Solomon, in warning his son, he says, "'Do not let your heart turn aside to her ways. "'Do not stray into her paths.

"'She has cast down many wounded.'" And then listen to this. "'And all who were slain by her were strong men. Not like you and me, but strong men. And of course, the mighty angel of Revelation chapter 18, he makes this call and this appeal. He says, come out of her, my people.

Remember that? We were in Revelation. Lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues. This is the call of the whole Bible together. Dinah wanted to go out and see the Canaanite women of the land.

And we continue here, it says in verse 2 to 4, And when Shechem, the son of Hamor, the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her and lay with her and violated her. His soul was strongly attracted to Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the young woman and spoke kindly to the young woman. So Shechem spoke to his father Hamor saying, get me this young woman as a wife. And what's so striking is you go down this account, there's never even a sense of remorse from Chekhov or Hamor, the father, not even a smidge of, oof, I think we did something wrong here. It's not, no sense of guilt even appears in these men's lives at all.

Because in the eyes of a pagan, a young lady wandering the town was fair game. They didn't do anything wrong in their eyes. Now, let me say this very clearly. This was an absolutely evil act. The single victim here is Dinah.

Dinah didn't go out looking for this or all the things that men can say, but she fell prey to an evil man because of the evil desire that she had in her own heart. And so Shechem sends his dad out to arrange this marriage. And in verse five and six, we find this. And Jacob heard that he had defiled Dinah, his daughter. Now his sons were with him, sorry, with his livestock in the field.

So Jacob held his peace until they came. Then Hamor, the father of Shechem, went out to Jacob to speak with him. So we get another taste of life in Canaan, don't we? When I've read this, and I've read this I don't know how many dozens of times, but I'd always thought for some reason that now Dinah was safely back at home. You know, this whole thing happened, she's back home, Jacob's heard about it from her, but he didn't hear about it from Dinah.

He heard by hearsay about this situation. How do we know that? Because in verse 26, which we didn't read, but if you go to verse 26, you actually find out that the sons Levi and Simeon rescue Dinah from Shechem's house. What does this mean? Hamor comes to Jacob and says, hey, this thing happened, terrible as it is, but my son really wants to marry your daughter.

But what are they doing? They're holding Dinah hostage, so to speak, in their own household. See, oftentimes we can underestimate the evilness of evil. This is the folly of youth, to underestimate evil and to overestimate your own ability to manage evil. This is how so many people get slain.

In Proverbs 1, it says how the careless ease of fools destroys them. And this is an evil place. Make no mistake that this man, and he's moved his family too. And it reminded me of a statement I think Scott had mentioned a few times years and years ago, And you could probably recite it with me. But sin will take you farther than you want it to go.

It will keep you longer than you want it to stay and cost you more than you ever intended to pay. Think of it like this. Could you imagine the gall of this man? Hey, this happened. We want to make it right.

But where's my daughter? She's still at your house? What in the world? But this is what's going on in this place. In verse 7, and the sons of Jacob came in from the field when they heard it and the men were grieved and very angry.

You could just see these brothers. Because he had done a disgraceful thing in Israel by lying with Jacob's daughter, a thing which ought not to be done. And so you find a man, Jacob, his response is too tame on the one side. His son's response, these 12, these different brothers, their response is going to be too harsh and full of trickery and deceit. You've got this kind of imbalance, right?

Dad's response, he's too soft, He offers no protection, no real defense of his daughter. And he's more concerned with keeping the peace, kind of building these and forging these political relationships than he is about his own daughter's welfare. And so the sons have this rebuke, dad, this ought not to be done in Israel, which is a true statement. And finally, we get to the ask. Hamor now has the ask.

This is kind of the punctuation mark at the end of verse 8 going into verse 10. And he says, please give her to him as a wife and make marriages with us. Give your daughters to us and take our daughters to yourselves. So you shall dwell with us and the land shall be before you. Dwell and trade in it and acquire possessions for yourselves in it." Hey, what's the big deal?

Hey, look, you've moved your family here now to Jacob. You settled in the land. You bought a plot. Everything's getting settled in. Perhaps, hey, we've gone through a bit of a rough patch, a rough beginning, but let's work to smooth things over.

Here's the plan. Just blend in with us. We'll make it work. We'll even give you citizenship. All is going to be right.

But here we find the forbidden fruit. This is no different than the temptation that the devil came to Eve with. Just blend in. And the devil always packages destruction like this. For you that are young people, but also for us that are old, think about how the devil can weave his way in.

And this really does take us into the second part. We move from Dinah's disaster, as terrible as it is, to the devil's desire. The Hebrews, the Jews, they make this counteroffer. I'm not...we don't have time to get into it all here, but they offer kind of this blasphemous design. They have in their minds one thing, but they end up using the Lord's sign of the covenant, circumcision, something that was special, something that was so dear and holy.

And they say, let's use this as a means to commit mass murder. And So they persuade Hamor and Shechem, hey, we'll have a deal as long as you get circumcised and all the men of the town will do what you ask. And so what a mess. How terrible is this situation? We have Dinah seeking the world.

We have pagan Shechem's despicable act, what he did to Dinah. We have Shechem's dad who doesn't even think his son did any wrong. Jacob is passive here and silent. And now we have the brothers using God's covenant sign of grace as a means and as a purpose to plot mass murder and a device of deception. And there's no mention of God at all.

Well, we find out that Hamor agrees to this plan and he goes back now to try to persuade his countrymen to buy into it as well. And in verse 20 and 21, we come to this here and it says, And Hamor and Shechem, his son, came to the gate of the city and spoke to the men of their city saying, these men are at peace with us, therefore let them dwell in the land and trade in it. For indeed the land is large enough for them. Let us take their daughters to us as wives and let us give them our daughters." And so we find the true motive here is revealed. The clincher to seal the deal among the countrymen is to assimilate the wealth of Jacob.

He was a wealthy man, they knew that. And they want to assimilate all of that wealth into Shechem. Basically, he's saying to them, hey, this is all we have to do. It's a fair trade. We'll engage in their little religious formality.

But then what will happen? And this is the devil's desire. We will totally absorb them so that they are entirely gone in a generation or two. And the devil, here's what you have to understand, he's always after God's people, right? As the demonic acts of Pharaoh to wipe out all the firstborn during Moses Day or Herod to do the same in the Lord Jesus's day, he's always after godly seed.

And when he can't destroy them by death, he'll try to absorb them with temptation and with worldliness. How many people have been slain and taken by that method? And there's a man by the name of Cyprian. He was the Bishop of Carthage. Carthage was a town on the northern tip of Africa.

And he was writing in, he was alive from the year 200 to 258. So think about that, children. That's like 1,800 years ago this man lived. But look what he has to say about this particular type of thing. He says, it is not persecution alone that we ought to fear, nor those forces that in open warfare range abroad to overthrow and defeat the servants of God.

And he's a man who knew what he was talking about because he's living in the early church when persecution was a real thing. He says, it is easy enough to be on one's guard when the danger is obvious. One can stir up one's courage to fight for the fight when the enemy shows himself in his true colors. There is more need to fear and beware of the enemy when he creeps up secretly, when he beguiles us by a show of peace and steals forward by those hidden approaches which have earned him the name of the serpent. And so, brothers and sisters, young people, this is the devil's desire.

And our task is to beware the world that wants to make the church and it one together. This is really always the challenge. See, the devil will never succeed by violence, but he may succeed by seduction. And we all know the verse, I will build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it. Christ is building his church, but we are made up of little churches all around.

And so the question is, are you complicit with the devil's scheme to be absorbed by degrees over time. This is really what's going on in the broader American church. And we have case study after case study in history. Think of the seven churches, just for a moment here, and The same Lord that dictated to the Apostle John those words to those seven churches. He's the same one that we worship, that we give honor and glory to today.

He's the one that walks among the golden lampstands, the churches. He's the one with the sharp, two-edged sword in his mouth. He was the one that was dead, but he says, Behold, I live and he's alive forevermore. He's the one whose eyes are like a fiery flame. This is Jesus and his feet are like fine brass.

He's the one that is called the faithful witness and true witness. He's the one that's called the Amen. All of these amazing titles that we'd laud upon him. And Jesus, as he's writing to these seven churches, as he's dictating to these seven churches, he was keenly aware of their temptations and he tells them about them. I know your works.

I know what you're going through, all the difficulties that you're going through. I Know the massive social pressure that you're under, the loss of jobs, the loss of goods, even their lives. Faithful Antipas was slain, if you recall, in Pergamos. False teachers were spreading abroad. The whole book of Hebrews is written to a group of people that were tempted to kind of go back and to be assimilated because it was just too hard to be a Christian.

The whole book is written for that purpose. And what is the remedy that the Lord Jesus gives to the churches in Asia? It's, behold me. Behold me. Look to me.

This is what we ought to do as a people as we live here. You know, the idea isn't to get as physically far away from the world as possible. You know, you're living in Ephesus, you're living in Tyatira. He's not saying, uproot and leave and go somewhere else. But his commandments are rather, remember, Remember that?

From whence you have fallen. Repent, refocus, rekindle. Don't go to sleep. And this is just so shocking because, you know, When you go to those cities today in Asia Minor, and we've been to them, they're nothing but ruins. You've got lizards and goats there climbing among the stones.

You might come across a stray dog. You're never beyond earshot of a mosque's call to prayer. No sign of Christianity. What happened? What happened to these churches over time?

And I just want to remind you of one thing. Think of how innocently this chapter seemed to begin. A young lady sitting in her house, happening to make a bad decision. But at the end of the chapter, We have Hamor, Shechem, and the entire town wiped out. Dinah, she never reappears on the pages of scripture ever again.

Simeon and Levi, When Jacob comes to the very end of his life, he ends up actually cursing both of these brothers because of the act they did. They went out and destroyed all these men by subterfuge. And of course, Jacob ends up moving where he should have been all along. He goes over to Bethel. So there's enough disaster, there's enough sin, there's enough blame to take up the rest of the afternoon and go up into the evening as you go through all of this.

But what's the message? The message is this, brothers and sisters, young people, above all things that you guard, guard your heart for everything that you do flows from it. And I just want to ask you that question, are you sitting or trying to sit at a table that the Lord Jesus Christ would flip over? May God help us as a people to live for him, to honor him, to glorify him with the life that we have, not to fall asleep, not to be entangled with the Canaanites, but to live before God and to honor his great name. Would you pray with me?

Well, Heavenly Father, we look to your loving kindness, to your goodness. Lord, we have no ability, no strength in ourselves, oh Lord, we look to you to help us to untangle and separate ourselves from the evils of this world. Lord, I am reminded of the words of the Lord Jesus, how he prayed that you, O Father, would not take us out of this world, but that you would keep us from the evil. And Lord, as we live here, help us not to underestimate the wiles of the adversary, but oh Lord, to be found looking to you. Make us a holy people for your name's sake, Lord, in these days of darkness, O Lord, that your church and churches which shine as cities on a hill.

Lord, we thank you for the work that you're doing here. You're preserving your word, the preaching that goes forth week in and week out. Help us to be livers of those words and to honour your great name. We thank you Lord for your kindness. Amen.

Well God bless you, we are dismissed.