God Directs His Children [Part 1] — Bertha Smith

That's why I can't ever remember to look at my notes. I can't take my eyes off of yours. I feel like I lose the attention when I do. Thank you. This is a lot better. Now you people on that black row there, are you near enough?

Up. I think this is a wonderful Monday morning crowd. Is the Lord here with us? Well, that's why you came, isn't it? You wouldn't have been coming otherwise. Well, how do we know he's here? Really, how do we know the Lord's here this morning?

He said he would be here. How many does it take? Two or three. Two or three meet in his name. He is there in the midst. We don't have to ask him to come. What should we do? Thank him for his presence and enthrone him.

Enthrone him to take over. Thank him. He could be here and be grieved, and we sure don't want to grieve him, and let's just thank him that he's here and ask him to take over. Dear Lord, how we do thank you for sending your blessed son into the world to recognize us sinful human beings not deserving anything but hell just because we descended from Adam and Eve, not the Adam and Eve that you made, but the Adam and Eve that the devil changed, and we thank you that even though we are descendants of Adam, after he received a devil nature and lost his God-glory and his God-likeness, we thank you that we still have access to thee because your blessed son came to reconcile us, to bring us back into fellowship with holy God.

How can we ever praise you enough? For that day when this good news reached our hearts because it was revealed to us by the Holy Spirit, and Lord, we thank you for these who are here this morning who love you.

They wouldn't be here otherwise. Lord, they want something higher. They want to be lifted up on a higher level of Christian living, and blessed be the name of the Lord, you're always trying to lift your children up higher and higher and higher, no matter how many years we've traveled with you.

We've just started, as it were, in comparison of what you have for us. Now, Lord, we just thank you for your presence, and we enthrone you here to take over and make something from your precious words come to life in a new and fresh way to these people here today, and get glory to yourself, we pray in Jesus' name and for his sake.

Israel's Journey From Egypt to Canaan

Amen. When the Lord led the children of Israel out of Egypt to take them back to Canaan, he didn't take them the way that they went down into Canaan, that road along the Mediterranean. A man could make that distance in 11 days.

Well, now the children of Israel couldn't travel as one man would because they had families to take, and they had large families in those days. Children all ages, old people, people all ages. They had their tents to live in on the way.

They had cooking utensils they took along. Now, they didn't know the Lord was going to provide ready-made food filled with vitamins. But they had all the wealth that they had collected from Egypt. Did you know that the Lord will just never let anybody oppress his children without making it up to them?

And he made the Egyptians pay back to those Israelites not only their own wages for their slave labor, but those of their ancestors. He must have made them pay back with compound interest from the very first time they put the children of Israel into slavery.

He won't let anybody mistreat his children. And Abraham was told by Jehovah God hundreds of years before they went out of Egypt that his descendants would dwell in Egypt and they would come out with great substance.

And they surely came out with great substance. The Word tells us that they spoiled the Egyptians. And after their oldest son and every family had died, been put to death because Pharaoh wouldn't let the children of Israel go back, leave to go back to their former land.

They had to go back because God had chosen Canaan as a place to send his son. And he'd let them go down into Egypt. He let that precious Joseph be torn from his family and carried down to Egypt in order to get Israel down there and get them out of Canaan.

They were married with the Canaanites. And a little while, the descendants of Abraham would have been lost all in the marriage of the Canaanites. And the Lord took them down to Egypt where, as you know, there were shepherds.

And the Egyptians worshipped sheep. And they would have nothing to do with anybody who would eat sheep and make their living off of sheep. And so they were separated and they lived a separate life. Now, some of them did make the great mistake of marrying with the Egyptians.

They were called the mixed multitude and caused trouble all their lives, all their journey out. The mixed multitude, always complaining and wanting to be back in Egypt. And they influenced the others.

Well, anyway, they went out rich. The Lord wanted to use some of that wealth, as you'll see later this morning. Well, why did the Lord not lead them straight up into Canaan, the shortest way? With all of their wealth, they could have gotten up there perhaps in a month, all their burdens they had to carry.

Well, they had to go to school to Jehovah God. They didn't have one line of Bible. The Lord was taking them up into Canaan to become the greatest nation the world had ever known in prosperity and in human glory, not in size, preparing a place right in the middle of the known world at that time, at the crossroads of Asia and Africa and Europe, to prepare a nation and a place for His Son to come into the world and be the Savior of the whole world.

We know there were only a few Roman Indians over here in the northern and western hemispheres. And so the Lord knew what He was doing when He chose that place for Abraham's descendants to live and a few people among whom He could send His Son.

Well, do you remember when they started out? The Lord led them straight east across the desert now where there was no road, and even to the Red Sea. And then the Egyptians got sorry after they left, and here they'd gone out stripping every home of their wealth, and Pharaoh and his army started after them.

And the Lord scotched their wheels when they got nearly to them, so they really couldn't overtake them. And then you know how He opened the Red Sea for the children of Israel to cross over. And when they got across the Red Sea, of course they should have gone north to go to Canaan.

But that cloud that was leading them just turned south, and they knew to follow that cloud. And they followed the cloud around that peninsula and over to the east side, and there that cloud stopped. And there the Lord was going to become their great teacher, and they were to learn enough about Jehovah God to have gone into that land and had a glorious, victorious beginning.

They need not ever have wandered around in the wilderness for 40 years. As you know, that was their own sin and wickedness. Well, when they got to Canaan, got to Mount Sinai, the Lord called Moses up in the mount and told him that he's going to come down the third day and speak to Israel.

Now, down in Egypt, they'd had no worship. The Lord wouldn't let them build an altar in a foreign land, because that would tie them there if they recognized that their God could be worshiped in that land.

And so long as they could only make an altar in the land that God had promised them, that would set a time when they remind them continually that they were to go back, and the Egyptians had gods that they could see.

And all they knew about Jehovah God was the little bits that had been handed down from father to son, except what they learned in getting out of Egypt, which was a good deal. The first thing I think we can say that they learned in getting out of Egypt was that God is a God of his word.

God's Faithfulness in the Exodus

He always does exactly what he says he's going to do. He told the Israelites that he told Moses to go to Pharaoh and ask him to let the people come out, and if he didn't come out, Pharaoh was to be told how the Lord was going to punish him if they didn't let them go.

And nine times the children of Israel saw the Lord do exactly what he foretold. Now, he didn't foretell that he was going to kill the oldest son. He'd given them nine opportunities to let the children of Israel go, and they didn't go.

Now, he told the Israelites, and they were all told, Moses told them, to put blood on the door, on the sides and overhead of the door, not down at the bottom, not all the way around the door. The Lord's blood was not to be walked upon.

The Lord's blood, that blood of that lamb represented our Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings and God of glory, who came down and shed his blood, and it was to be on the sides for protection and overhead.

The Lord was to be their guide and their God, and be over them and round about them. Well, all the Israelites, they did that, and they should have been in it if they didn't do it. And they had an old son, and that son would have been put to death even though he was an Israelite.

Well, the children of Israel knew that God always does exactly what he says he's going to do. Now, they'd learned that about Jehovah God, and seeing those Israelites, those Egyptians, funny. And they'd learned if Jehovah God commands to go a certain way, he makes the way, even opening the Red Sea so they could go through it.

And if Jehovah God commands to go a certain way, he provides what they need. I just spoke of his raining down bread from heaven. If Jehovah God commands to go a certain way, he guides. He never fails.

All the years he was in the wilderness, he didn't fail them. And he certainly hadn't failed them guiding them from Egypt to Mount Sinai, and they saw that. And they'd also learned that when a war is to carry out God's purpose down here in the world, the Lord gives victory in war.

Religious Liberty and the Meaning of Religion

Now, nobody could ever make you and me believe that the Lord didn't give victory to George Washington and his army when we were fighting for freedom in the British, freedom to worship God, not have to pay tax to the church that the king belonged to whether or not the person was a member of the same church.

The religious liberty. By the way, religious liberty was denomination of liberty. Let me put this in here. It was denomination of liberty. The word religion didn't have the meaning then that it has now.

Up when I was growing up, your religion meant what denomination you were. And when your neighbor moved in, we knew nothing about the religions of China and India and Africa and other places. Your religion meant what church, what denomination you belonged to.

Through which church did you worship? The one through God. It's taken for granted that we didn't have but one God, and that was the God of the universe, the God of the word of God. And religion meant when a new neighbor would move in.

I've heard my mother many times say to somebody, to another neighbor, have you visited the new neighbors? Yes. Well, what's their religion? What church do they go to? That was the next thing my mother wanted to know.

And just not too many years ago, when my dear brother's daughter had become engaged to a fine Methodist boy, wonderful Christian, and somebody, I was visiting, and there was somebody else there, and said, Mary Claudia, what are you going to do about L .A.'s church?

What are you all going to do about your church? Oh, she said, I'm going to make a Baptist out of it. And immediately her daddy said, Mary Claudia, don't you tamper with that man's religion. Now, he was still calling the denomination religion.

I mustn't give too much time to this. I've got too much to share with you this morning. But I do want to get this into our heads, that the religious liberty that people up in Washington boasted about was denomination of liberty.

We sinned against Holy God when we permitted Buddhists to build temples in the United States. When we presented Mohammedans to build a mosque in Washington, we sinned against Holy God in permitting. Idolaters would be put to death.

Now, there are two sins. God holds the right to put people to death for instantly without a word. And one is worshiping idols, and the other is any kind of abnormal sex life. That person deserves death at God's sight.

Sexual Ethics, Marriage, and Family

God preserves the family. And sex life is to reproduce the race. And if it hadn't been made delightful to the human nature, people would have just put it off and put it off and put it off until some other time until it's convenient to have their babies.

A lot of them wouldn't have a lot to have. God knew that. But sex life's not to be tampered with. It's only in wedlock. And you deserve the right to put to death any kind of abnormal sex life, no matter what the doctors tell you.

I tell you, I got the suck of my life at what's going on in Baptist churches since I've been home. A beautiful, precious young woman walked up to me and showed me her baby. Oh, just a beautiful child.

And I said, oh, how much you must love this baby. You love it, don't you? Oh, I surely do. I said, now, do you know how you can show me, the best way in the world you can show your love for this baby?

She said, what? I said, give it plenty of brothers and sisters. And then it'll never be a divorce, even it grows up. It'll grow up learning to give in and to share with others. And the biggest, the most effective preparation for life is to let a child grow up with plenty of brothers and sisters where they have to share and they have to take their responsibility and give and take.

And she said, oh, oh, I've had my teeth cut. I can't have any more. What on earth? What a rebel in a Baptist church. She said that just as if she'd have said, I've had a tooth extracted. She said to holy God, I'll not have the way you made me.

I'll do as I please. I don't want any other children. I'll not do it. I'll enjoy what should bring children into the world, but I'll not let them come in. God didn't know how to make me. I'll make myself like I want me.

Now, just what, I'm thinking she's a Christian. And lo and behold, one worse than that, I was in a church down in Florida and was in a home one evening of a young deacon. And I had a young co-worker with me at that time.

And they especially invited him to lead meetings for young people. He was just a specialist at young people and children's meetings and just wonderful at praying with people in the prayer room. He just seemed to know what Bibles he used to give people, especially in that.

And they had a prayer meeting in that home. I just looked up and he was there. But the man of the house just looked, just kind of had a cloud over his face, just didn't look free in the Lord at all. And he and my co-worker got pretty close that week.

And he told him, what do you suppose he told him? He told him to praise his wife. I think they had two children, you know. Two's a crowd now, you know. The Lord said, multiply. And the present generation's not even at it.

And when they have three, they think they've got a crowd soon enough. They've added one. They haven't multiplied at all. Got to have four to multiply. And then they haven't done anything. When they have two, they haven't done anything but hold it on.

They got one, they haven't even held her on. Gone back. Well, that young man told my co-worker that to please his wife, he had surgery to keep from having any more children. And he said ever since that it just nearly killed him.

Just nearly killed him. He just couldn't get over it. That he'd sinned to that extent. A woman having her husband have surgery changed the way God had made him so they could enjoy the lust of the flesh.

And that's what it is. That's what it is when they refuse God's plan for surgery and what it means. Now, could you just imagine such a thing? No, we couldn't have ten years ago. How we advance in sin.

You go home and read the 38th chapter of Genesis and see why God put a man to death. Struck him dead right there. Genesis 38. Well, I don't charge anything for that. That wasn't surely a part of my subject this morning.

But every church needs to know it. Teach your children the sacredness of marriage. And the greatest thing they can do in the world is to bring up personalities in a Christian home and in a Christian atmosphere and teach them as they can understand it about sin and the Savior and get them saved.

What for? To bring children into the world to be personalities for the Lord Jesus Christ to live in. Did you know your Lord doesn't have any way to live down here in this world except in human personalities?

He has no throne except human hearts. No throne except human hearts. And you'd rather go on and work and have things and spoil one or two, giving them what they want. And you'd rather your child would, your daughter would, than to bring in a lot of personalities and they'll, they've promised they'll have food.

The seed of the righteous, and if you're not righteous you'd better be in a hurry, you'd better get righteous, you'd better become righteous so you can claim that promise. The seed of the righteous will not beg bread.

And bring a lot of children into the world to grow up to be personalities for the Lord to live in. No, when do we have no revivals in Baptist churches? Well, I'll just go a little bit further. How, how many people, how many people in God's sight deserve death?

Wrong kind of sex life? How many would be left? If God was a civil ruler and couldn't punish him now, well he's not punishing now. He's not punishing now. You know, if you read that little leaflet about two deacons over in, in Mississippi who had, had a, adjoining plantations.

They both planted cotton. And one was a tither. Both of them members of the Baptist church. One was a tither and the other was not. And so when the cotton was gathered and sold for the year, the one who didn't tithe was Justin at the other and said, what did you get for tithing?

I don't tithe and I made just as many bales of cotton for the acre as you did. And the tither said, God doesn't settle in October. Well friends, it may be the reason a lot of Baptist church members and Baptist church leaders are still living is God doesn't settle in October.

But the settling day is going to come. Well, we were on Israel, coming out of Egypt. I don't know how we got to that. I sure would have gotten to it sometime during the week though. I'd as well put it in here to begin with as anywhere.

Sinai and the Giving of the Commandments

Well, uh, the children of Israel got around to Mount Sinai. And the Lord called Moses up in the mount and told him that he was going to come down and speak to Israel on the third day. And the signal of his coming would be a long trumpet sound.

And they were to clean up, wash their clothes and bathe. Now God expects human beings to have some respect for him. I'm glad I grew up when you had play clothes or work clothes, not play clothes. We worked at our house.

We played a little on the side. Work clothes, school clothes, and Sunday clothes. And Sunday morning everybody put on their pretty Sunday clothes to go to church. I had a nurse, nursing my sister. She'd had surgery for cancer.

She lived 21 months before she went to glory. And this young woman wanted to be a missionary. And she wanted to come and take that work because she said she wanted to learn from me how to be a missionary.

She's in the Bible school now, getting ready to go. Well, during the week she wore her pretty white uniform. She was a graduate nurse and would look so sweet. And Sunday morning I told her I would stay at home with my sister and let her go to church.

And she came down to go to church now with a blue jean skirt. I'm not sure it had a hem in it. And an old tacky fringe with white blouse. At least she came down to breakfast in there. She wasn't making any move toward dressing for church.

I said, you're going to wear that for church? She said, isn't this all right? Well, it was clean. Being a nurse, you wouldn't want anything dirty. Well, I just had to say, well, a cure does look everydayish.

If she'd been going to call on the governor of South Carolina, I think she'd have dressed differently from that. How much respect did she have for showing for holy God? Just imagine the excitement in those tents, those people getting ready.

And no doubt they were saying, we're going to see God, we're going to see God, we're going to see God. God of Abraham, the God of our forefathers. And oh, the third day that trumpet began to sound and it pealed forth louder and louder and louder.

And the people all came out, all cleaned up. Every man had had a haircut. Everyone looked just right. And oh, that mount began to reel to and fro and burn and smoke and God's mighty horse pealed forth.

I am the God that brought thee out of the land of Egypt. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Thou shalt not make unto thee graven images. Thou shalt not bow down to them and worship them. Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

The Command to Work and Rest

Remember this Sabbath day to keep it holy. And listen to the next one. Six days shalt thou work. And that's just as important as resting on the Sabbath. Now, this present generation don't know that's a command in God's word.

Six days shalt thou work. What are you going to do for me next? What are you going to do for me next? And I hear people in our churches say, oh, we're not doing enough for the young people. We're not doing enough for the...

Well, you've already spoiled them to death. Church is a place to be entertained half of the time, half of the week. On weekdays they go to be entertained in my church. Eat ice cream, be entertained. Not even having to memorize Bible.

If you're going to have them come to the church every day, why doesn't somebody lead them to memorize a chapter every time they come? Don't go every day. Let's at least go once a week around where I live.

Maybe the same ones go more once a week. They ought to be at home at work. Six days shalt thou work. They'll never be worth anything. They grew up. They don't learn to work when they're young. I heard a woman say, well, I don't have a thing for my boy and girl to do but to empty the waste baskets.

I saw her doing plenty that they could have done. She ought to have them young to desert and old enough to go to school. She ought to have them cleaning up their rooms and making their beds and putting up their clothes so she might have to do it over after they left and never let them know it.

Make them feel at home and feel like they belong there, like they're part of a family. Well, six days shalt thou work. That's a command of God. He couldn't leave people in sinful human natures idle. And that's why he had to curse the earth and make it grow brows and weeds that grow faster than the crops to keep people from sinning so much.

And the more they're idle, the more they sin in these devil natures they have. And he even had to curse to change the weather and people have to make summer clothes and winter clothes and old times they had to weave the cloth to do it.

And that was work for 12 months in a year to get it done for a family. And even change the animal kingdom, got to build houses to live in to protect us from the weather. That's what the houses are for, to protect us from the weather.

And the ferocious animals. The Lord put people to work so they wouldn't have time to give expression to that devil nature that they got from the devil. Well, even the domestic animals were not to be allowed to work on the Sabbath.

The Remaining Commandments and Holiness

Honor thy father and thy mother with a promise, thy days will be long on the earth. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbors.

Thou shalt not covet that which is thy neighbor's. And the children of Israel frightened to death and backed off and said, Oh Moses, don't ever let God speak to us again. We are frightened to death. You go up in the mountain, you get God's word and you bring it back to us.

And of course that's what Jehovah God had intended all the time. Because he had taken them around by Sinai, I said to go to school to him, to show them their sins and show them something of his holiness and give them a way whereby holy God could dwell in the midst of sinful human beings.

He would have to dwell in their midst if he carried them into Canaan and drove out those seven warring nations who had learned war from their youth and some of them were even giants. The children of Israel were not warriors.

The Egyptians would let them take military training. They were afraid if the Egyptians took military training, they'd join in with an enemy that might come to attack them. So they wouldn't let them, they just made slaves out of them and wouldn't let them take military training.

They were not warriors. But the Lord was going to dwell in their midst and he was going to give them the land. And so how could holy God dwell in the midst of sinful human beings? And then if holy God dwelled in their midst, he would have to have a standard for them to live by.

He'd have to have regulations for them. He couldn't let them live as they pleased and live like heathen nations when he was going to dwell in their midst. And you remember when Moses went up? Now Moses was called up, Joshua was carried up within a short distance and then Joshua was left down, perhaps down near the foot of the mountain.

The Tabernacle as God's Dwelling Place

And Moses was called up in that dark cloud. Now the psalmist tells us that God hides himself in a cloud. Now he's seeing us all the time. And he's just loving us and sending the Holy Spirit to strive with us, but he's in a cloud and we can't see him.

Why? Because of our devil nature that God didn't give us. Devil nature. We got that from Adam and Eve when they lost their God-likeness when they listened to the devil. And so he'd have to put the whole crowd to death for him before he could dwell in their midst.

Holy God would have to put the whole crowd to death. Well, how could he put them to death and leave them alive at the same time? Now that's why he carried them beside him. And he told Moses to build a tent.

Now he didn't say to Moses, you call a good Baptist committee and you all discuss and you bring in a plan and tell me what you think about it. He didn't care what human beings thought. He had to teach human beings his own holiness.

And he didn't ask Moses one word about it. He spoke and told him to build a tent in which he would dwell in the midst of the children of Israel. And every part, every material, not only selected the material, he gave the dimensions of every part of it.

He didn't leave one thing to the discretion of Moses. And that tent was made with this side and the back and that side and made of wood panels about two and a half feet wide in our measurement and about 15 feet tall.

They had a ring in them so they could run a rod in them to hold them together. And that wood, those wooden panels were overlaid with purely folk. Now certainly every part of that meant something in God's mind or he wouldn't have given that kind of direction.

And it seems that the wood must have represented the humanity of our Lord. The first man, Adam, was made out of dirt from the ground and God breathed into him the breath of life. And wood grows out of the ground and Jesus is spoken of as being the root and the tree and there's the branches.

And so that must have represented, and the gold in this seems to represent the Godhead. The gold is not seen except inside. All the gold is inside. Now God doesn't expose his glory to the eye of central human beings.

Now here are these posts, wooden posts, overlaid with gold, should be inside of that curtain. This isn't made right. I bought this from an art shop and in all my photographs I have I bought from an art shop in Hillsdale, Michigan, as a marvelous woman but she didn't get a reading just right since she made this.

These posts were to be inside of that curtain. Well then over that, and evidently the gold represented the deity and those boards represented the God-man, God becoming flesh and coming into the world.

Why did he become flesh? To reconcile these people out here, the people lived in the tent, to holy God who was going to dwell inside. And then the first covering over this was made of fine white linen, not coarse threads and fine threads.

You and I have our good qualities and our bad qualities. The Chinese say you have your longs and shorts. Well we have our longs and shorts. But God, the character of our Lord was absolutely perfect. So it was smooth, white linen.

And that represented, it seems, the righteous standard that our Lord required. And then woven into that pure white linen was blue, the heavenly color, and red evidently for the sacrifice. And blue and red together make purple.

Now purple was the royal color. The kings wore purple. And that was woven in, these three colors. This doesn't have the purple in it. Again, they didn't read right. But it has got the blue and the red.

And then overhead, this, and this curtain here at the entrance and the partition here was made of a curtain just like this, hanging on wooden poles overlaid with gold. And this, over the head and inside of this curtain and inside of that curtain partition was woven by the clever women, or embroidered by the covered women, not woven, embroidered by the clever women, angels of thread cut from jewel-leaf gold for beauty and for glory.

And then the next covering was made of, and of course this represented the Lord leading the king of glory and coming down to die for our sins, this first covering. And he's the righteous one. And it's only the righteousness of his Son that God can accept.

And so you and I have to be placed into him before the Lord can accept us. We have to enter into him as we do when we take his death. And the next covering was made, woven out of goat's hair. Now why goat's hair?

How could a goat's hair covering represent the Lord Jesus Christ standing between the Holy God who dwelt inside in the form of fire and the people outside? Why would an obstreperous goat be chosen to be a sin-offering?

Do you know anything about a goat? Well, I can tell you a little about goats. When my youngest brother was a little fellow, not old enough to go to school, but needed something to play with, we'd lost a little boy just older than he was, about two years old, and then there's a girl about two years old, and then another boy, which made the boy, you see, about eight years older than the little fellow.

And when he came home, he had his chores to do, and he didn't have much time for playing. We had a little while to play before supper, but that little fellow needs something. And Father bought him a pair of goats and a little red wagon with a seat on it and a harness.

But it would take two older brothers to hitch up those goats. And then when they got, it would take two, one to hold the goat and the other to get the harness on, and that goat would kick and cut up the, they'd just have a time getting the harness on him.

And then when they got one hitched up, they'd have to call me to come hold that goat while it took two of them to get the other one hitched up, and just such an ordeal. They just, they just balked at everything.

And finally when they got them hitched up, one brother would take one of the lines of one goat and the other would take the lines of the other, and they'd have to literally pull that goat across the barn lot and up the driveway out to the street and down the sidewalk about 100 yards.

There was a little ditch across the drainage in those days. And they'd turn the little way, and my little brother would go trotting along behind the wagon. And when they got that wagon turned around to go back home, my little brother would crawl up on that seat, and he'd, by the way, his name was Broadus.

Dr. Broadus at that time was a great man that was still living at Louisville Seminary, Southern Seminary in Louisville. Well, anyway, my little brother would take those lines, and those goats would just go up that sidewalk just trotting along, just as perfectly as any animal could go.

And they'd get to the driveway. They'd just go right down that driveway and right across that barn lot. Where to? Where to? To their trough where their food was. And those goats would never do anything in order but look out for number one.

Look out for number one. They'd go where they were going to get their food. They dropped their influence everywhere they went. They smelled perfectly awful, and they chewed up everything that they got their mouths to.

And we would hang table linens and bed linens so high, we were just sure those goats couldn't reach it. You have no idea the length of a goat from the tip of its mouth to its hind hoof. Oh, it'd stretch, and it would get up there and chew.