God's Commandments For Our Good

We will continue this evening in our study of Deuteronomy chapter 10, Deuteronomy chapters 10 and 11. I expected to get a whole lot farther this morning than I did, but we will press on this evening in Deuteronomy chapter 10.

Before we do so, let's ask the Lord's blessing upon our time. Our Heavenly Father, once again, as we look to your law, we look to this revelation of your character, we ask that you would be with us, that you would help us to understand the urgent necessity to understand, believe, know, be able to communicate what is found in your word at this point.

Lord, we desire to be servants of yours that are relevant in this day, that we are able to speak to those around us, but we need to learn from you first before we speak to others. So be with us now as we look to your word, we pray in Christ's name.

Amen. This morning we read Deuteronomy chapter 10 beginning verse 12 through chapter 11. We will not do that again this evening, but I will read at least this section of chapter 10. If we get into chapter 11, well, we will just read along as we get there, but we do need to have at least some context here.

The Command to Love and Serve Yahweh

And now Israel, verse 12, chapter 10. What does Yahweh your God require of you but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all his ways, to love him and serve Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of Yahweh which I am commanding you today for your good?

Behold, to Yahweh your God belong heaven and the heavens of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. Yet Yahweh set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day.

Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn. For Yahweh your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God who is not partial and takes no bribe.

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. You shall fear Yahweh your God, you shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear.

He is your praise, he is your God, who has done for you these great and terrifying things that your eyes have seen. Your fathers went down to Egypt seventy persons, and now Yahweh your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven.

We started looking at this text this morning and we recognized the importance of this study has to do with understanding who God is and therefore the authority he has to give to us his law. And we began working through the text just a little bit, especially the recognition that what we have here is sort of a repetition of what we had seen in the Shema in Deuteronomy chapter 6.

The Shema is that section of the law that the Jews repeat each morning. They would, as part of their prayers, there's an extensive discussion of this in what's called the Mishnah, the codification of the traditions of the Jews that was put together between 250 years after Christ.

And there's an extensive section in the Mishnah of how to say the Shema and when to say the Shema. And it's really without any question, I think, that Jesus and his apostles would have been quite familiar with the daily repetition of these prayers including Deuteronomy 6, 4 and following.

Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Akkad, hear O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. And then the command to love the Lord their God with our heart, soul, mind and strength. That was the very heart of the confession of the people of Israel.

That is not, by the way, I didn't really mention this this morning, but let me mention in passing, that is not a confession of Unitarianism, that is a confession of Monotheism. When we say that Yahweh is one, we are not denying the doctrines of Trinity.

And in fact, given the context of these passages, once again it's fairly obvious that what is in mind is that there is one God, Yahweh, not the concept of Unitarianism. The religions around them had no concept of a divine plurality of persons sharing one being of God or anything like that at all.

That is a revelation that will come to its fullness in the coming of Jesus Christ and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. But the confession that God is one is a confession of Monotheism, because as we saw, the people around Israel were polytheists.

They believed in many gods. Some of them might have been what we would call a henotheist. They had one primary God, but then all sorts of multiple gods below that. But they were all forms of polytheism, a belief in many gods.

The idea of one God, creator of heaven and earth, was a radical departure from the religions of that day and certainly served to make the Jewish people abhorrent in the eyes of the people around them.

I mean, think of what it was like when someone comes along, and for as long as anybody can remember and for as far away as anyone knew, certainly people recognized that there were different religious beliefs.

But the accepted idea was, well, you know, you have your religious beliefs in this area and these people have their religious beliefs and they have their gods and they have their gods. And they might have disagreements about which god has more power or exactly the border of the authority of that god, but my goodness, who are these people who come into the land and they have the hubris, they have the gall to tell the rest of us that not only do they have a new god, but their god is the only god and our gods are but idols.

What horrible people these are. And yet, as we go through the Psalter, have we not, for example, encountered Psalm 96 .5? For all the gods, the peoples are idols. This is a constant statement of the Scriptures and it is a true statement.

And yet, it was a radical statement at that particular point in time. And so, we have this revelation of the one true God and we were looking this morning primarily at verse 12 and the command to love Him, to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.

And so, we were discussing the reality of the fact that this idea of love and service, they go hand in hand, their requirement of the entirety of our lives, that we are to love God and to serve God with all your heart and with all your soul.

The heart, the very center of man's being, the soul, the spiritual nature of man. In other words, there is no aspect of man's being that is excluded from the command to love, the command to serve God.

Service to God is not something that is just a part of our life over here. It is that which defines our lives. It is that which must permeate the entirety of our existence. When you find Christianity, when you find those who claim to worship God and yet that has become just a sub-part, an area over here, rather than the defining part of the entirety of one's life, that's no longer biblical Christianity.

Now, the world considers that to be very radical. That is the very kind of Christian faith that the world is afraid of. The world is not afraid of Christians who limit their Christianity to Sunday morning or maybe even radically Sunday night and, boy, if you're really crazy, Wednesday evening.

They don't have any problem with Christians who limit the lordship of Christ and the worship of God and the love of God to those particular periods. The people they fear are the people who are actually described here who love God and serve God with all their heart and with all their soul because they know a person who does that is never going to bow to the authority that they are trying to place upon us to think as they think, believe as they believe, speak as they speak, to bow the knee to Caesar.

This is a radical call to complete worship. And notice that that sentence doesn't stop. Yes, if you're going to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, then He does not then stand back and say, and you can do that any old way you please.

My worship, I'm just going to leave it up to you. You all just want to get together and just do whatever makes you feel good. That seems to be what's being taught in a lot of our seminaries today, but I don't find that in Scripture anywhere.

And as we've been reading through this section on Sunday evenings, you may have noticed, ask Aaron's sons if God is sort of concerned about the type of worship that he is to receive and if God has revealed what His commandments are and how we're to live.

They seem to go together. So notice it continues on to say, and to keep the commandments and statutes of Yahweh which I am commanding you today for your good. For your good is right there at the end. So notice, what must we believe?

Well, that Yahweh has revealed commandments and statutes. Now, sadly, there are so many today. In fact, I would have to report to you that I would say it is the majority report of Old Testament scholarship and hence that which is repeated in most of our schools today and hence that which ends up in the classroom and therefore in the pew as well because it's preached from the pulpit.

We don't really know. We can't really trust that what we have in these words even came from somebody named Moses, that there even was someone named Moses, let alone that any of this came from God. And so when you are cut off at the knees, shall we speak, in your bibliology, in your view of the Bible by what you're taught about its history and its transmission, it's not overly shocking that as a result there is a diminishment of the authority of the preaching of God and the placing before the people the idea that God has spoken and He has spoken with clarity.

But notice what the result of that is. To keep the commandments and statutes of Yahweh, which I am commanding today, for your good. An article came out just recently, I think within the past two, two and a half weeks, that studied what's going on in denominations in the United States in light of their reaction to the cultural shift toward what can only be described as homosexualism.

I mean, that's what we're experiencing in our land. We might as well call it a movement. Homosexualism. The elevation of homosexuality to the greatest good. Those who practice this are to be viewed as really having more rights than anyone else.

That's what we're seeing. And the article examined the denominations that have attempted to befriend the culture and to reflect the culture and to abandon the historical position of the Christian faith, which no one really, from a historical perspective, can question what it has been, over against those denominations that have stood firm.

And you may have noted that there is a rather obvious difference between those denominations. Look at the denominations who have capitulated on this issue. And each one of them, and of course this isn't the only issue they've capitulated on.

I mean, it is a part of an entire disease that infects a denomination. But every single one of the denominations are rupturing, not just members, but churches. And in fact, so quickly that a number of them, if you just follow the current trajectory, which is not like this, it's sort of like this, they will not exist as denominations within 20 years.

They will simply cease to exist. Now, we all know what's going to happen. What happens when denominations are dying? They get together with other dying denominations, which is sort of a brief, and they last for, you know, they get a new name, you know, and then they die off.

Anyway, so that's certainly what has happened over history.

But it's consistent.

There's not a single denomination that has capitulated on this point that is experiencing growth. And yet you look at those denominations. Now, there's a downward trend pretty much for everybody in a secularizing society.

But those that have stood firm are at least holding, if not increasing, in their membership. Now, what does that reflect? Well, because once you give up on the idea that God has spoken,.

You don't have anything left to say to people.

A lot of brothers was talking about having gone by a church up here and out on a banner. It said, we have progressive theology. That wasn't progressive theology? Progressive theology. He was asking, what's progressive theology?

I said, that's just plain old liberalism. They're just simply advertising, we really don't believe anything. Come on in. If you're looking for a place to feel religious at, this would be a good place for you to come.

We won't ask you to believe anything. They are religious social clubs.

And they die a thousand deaths.

Those are the churches that end up boarded up or becoming very large, extravagant dental offices. That's their fate. Why?

Notice what it says.

For your good.

God's law is not evil.

It's not bad.

It's for our good. We actually have something positive to say to people.

We have something meaningful.

We have the owner's manual. We have the owner's manual. Now, we just recently had to replace Kelly's car. We should have brought it tonight so you all could see it. We've got a new 2014 Hyundai Tucson, right?

Is that what it is?

I haven't driven it yet myself. But anyways, I hear it's nice. And I may never actually get to do that. But somebody likes to be up higher in traffic. I'm not sure what that means. So somebody's up a little higher in traffic now.

Well, I was noticing that there's an owner's manual on this thing that's about yay thick. And so far, we haven't had any issues for us to have to open that thing up and go, okay, where do we find this, that, or the other thing?

And how does this work?

Or why isn't that working? Or whatever else.

But they always come with an owner's manual because they're getting more and more complex over time too.

Well, guess what?

Mankind has an owner's manual as well. Unlike many of the religions of man where the best we can say is, well, you know, our brightest minds have thought this. Or our brightest minds have thought that.

We actually say God has revealed his truth for our good. The Creator has said this is what I made you for. This is how you will find satisfaction. This is how you will have proper relationships with others.

You do these things and you don't do these things. And so, here in one sentence, we have revealed to us really a summary of so much of what the Old Testament is about and what Israel simply refused to do.

Trace back almost any of the prophetic messages from the prophets. And what are they saying? You didn't do this. This is what you refused to do.

But it goes on.

Yahweh as Creator and Covenant Lord

Notice the foundation that is then given. That we are to stand upon to recognize the authority of God to speak to us in this way. Behold to Yahweh your God belong heaven and the heaven of heaven, the earth with all that is in it.

Now, you and I go, well, of course. But once again, what did I say this morning? We really need to get into our minds a recognition of the necessity of stepping back into the context of what the people of Israel were facing.

And we will see over and over again that there was a real... This isn't just simply a, oh, there's God patting himself on the back again. There's a lot of people who view the Old Testament that way. I mean, the atheists today.

Why is God so concerned about his own worship? I mean, he's just an evil, sadistic God that's got an ego trip going on. That's what the new atheists are saying all the time. They're publishing books and making a mint off of it.

I don't want to be them someday when they stand before God, but that's what they're doing. And they look at the Old Testament and because they ignore the reality of what was going on around Israel,.

They don't see why these things are here.

But look at that verse again in light of what I mentioned this morning about the Babylonian gods and the Canaanite gods. Behold, to Yahweh your God belong heaven and the heaven of heavens.

Wait a minute.

The gods dwell in the heaven of heavens. And most of the cosmogenies of the people around them, remember the theories of how everything came into existence, they didn't answer the question of where that came from.

You had battles between gods and you cut Tiamat in half, and half becomes the heavens and half becomes the earth. And I didn't mention this morning, but one of them that is really, really interesting is the fact that in those days the belief was that the creation of man was because the gods didn't want to do the work of providing their own food.

And that's why you created man. So man just exists to serve the selfish desires of the gods and the problem is those selfish desires are pretty much physical in nature. The provision of food for the gods, growing food for the gods.

So for example, and this is again something that we've only come to know about because of archaeological discoveries over the past 120, 130 years or so, one of the regular religious ceremonies that would take place in Canaan amongst the Canaanite peoples was, and we see some pictures of this in some Old Testament texts, but now we know what the whole background was.

One of the big festivals of the year would be when you would bring your god, you know, Dagon or whoever it might be, Baal, and you would bring the idol into the temple and one of the big things was for the priest, they'd have this big religious ceremony and then what the high priest would do is he would come to the idol after all the purifications and everything has been done and so on and so forth and sacrifices and everything else and what he would do is he would open the mouth of the idol.

You know why he had to do that? Because the primary way that the priests in that day would get their income and stuff was for people bringing sacrifices to the temple to feed the gods and if the god's mouth is closed, how is he supposed to eat?

You've got to open the god's mouth so he can eat and so associated with the harvest time would be the ceremony where you open the god's mouth and it also would seemingly have something to do with whether that god can speak.

I mean if you've got to have a high priest go,.

Hello, I am Baal.

I mean, you know, it sort of impacts your doctrine of revelation or something like that, you know, but this was big stuff. Now keep that in mind and read through Isaiah again. How many times have we read through that section in Isaiah, the trial of the false gods, where you have the mockery of the people around Israel.

The mockery of a man who will go out in the woods and will cut down a tree and with half the tree, he chops the wood up and builds a fire and cooks his food on it and then when he's done eating, he gets up and takes the other half of the tree and carves an idol and bows down and worships it.

And it's pure mockery.

And how many other times does it say, Speak to us.

Tell us what's going to happen. Listen. See.

Idols can't do any of those things. They can't speak. If you've got to open their mouth, that means they can't do it themselves. There is a tremendous amount of apologetic and a tremendous amount of mockery of the false gods that is found in the text of the Old Testament.

So, to Yahweh, your God, belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. So, all this stuff about gods who have particular geographical areas of authority, the idea that you have gods of rain and you have gods of the sea and the gods of fertility.

What's the fundamental affirmation to the people of Israel?

That's all false.

To Yahweh, your God, belong heaven and the heaven of heavens, the earth with all that is in it. So, He is the one true Creator God, radical idea amongst the polytheistic religions of the day. Yet, right in the middle of that, verse 15,.

Yet, Yahweh set His heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Here you have this great God. And heaven and the highest heavens belongs to Him.

And the people of Israel knew they were not the greatest of the nations. They knew they were not the most numerous of the peoples. And yet, even with how great He is, Yahweh set His heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them.

And how did He do that?

In a covenant. We saw Wednesday evening, God, the covenant-keeping God. Yahweh set His heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them, you above all peoples, as you are this day. Wow, right in the middle of announcing the reality of God as the supreme God, what do you have?

The particularity of covenantal election. Not based on the worthiness of these people, but on the loving nature of God. You don't have to go to Ephesians 1 to find these concepts. They are from the Genesis to Revelation.

It is all across the canon of Scripture. God set His love on your fathers. He chose their offspring after them. He wasn't forced to do it. Who could force the God of all gods to do something?

And yet, He has done so.

And so, what should be the result of a recognition of the gracious election of God, of the people of Israel? Circumcise, therefore, the foreskin of your heart and be no longer stubborn. Wow, all the way back to Moses.

You have this theme, this thread that comes all the way into the New Testament, all the way into our understanding of exactly what regeneration involves. Be no longer stubborn. We're talking about the heart being different than the people around us.

The result of the recognition of what God has done in setting His love upon them should be the desire of the inmost man to be pleasing to God. Not some duty forced on us from the outside that we don't want to do and that we're constantly rebelling against, which is what you end up seeing in the history of the people of Israel.

Why?

Well, because that's one of the differences between the Old and the New Covenants is that under the Old Covenant, you've got this mixture. You've got the remnant that God has kept unto Himself. You've got those in whom the Spirit of God works.

But you know, you take the law of God and you force it down upon a rebellious heart of stone, and my goodness, look what happens. My goodness, look what happens. There's going to be rebellion. There's going to be rebellion, and there certainly was in the history of the people of Israel, despite the warnings.

And be no longer stubborn. Can any person, apart from the supernatural work of the Spirit of God, at any time in history, unstiffen their own neck, circumcise their own heart? You say, well, then why would God give the commandments?

Because God uses means.

You and I hear this, and because the Spirit of God has worked within us, we immediately click with this. We understand what this means. We know that there is that tendency, even in the child of God, for a stubborn neck, a stubbornness in our sin.

God uses means. He gives us commandments. And when our heart is made right, we love those commandments. But no heart that remains self-centered and hard is ever going to love the commandments of God.

Oh, there might be certain ones that we can use to our own benefit, but there will always be those where there's resentment against God for saying no in this area when I want to say yes. We'll eventually bring about rebellion.

The Justice, Immutability, and Mercy of God

For Yahweh your God is God of gods and Lord of lords. It's a very interesting phraseology there. I mentioned this morning that we have the term Yahweh, the Tetragrammaton. And in our English Bibles, they translate that as Lord in all caps.

But notice here, it doesn't say that. It says Yahweh your God is God of gods. And then notice the next Lord is capitalized, but it's not all caps. That is the term Adonai. And so He is Adonai of Adonim.

He is Lord of lords. He is the Great. This sounds a lot like Nehemiah chapter 9 again. He is the Great. He is the Mighty. Same terms that were used in the verse we looked at Wednesday evening in Nehemiah 9.

The awesome God who is not partial and takes no bribe. And so what you have here is a discussion once again, and step back, put it in the context, and you go, makes perfect sense. What we're saying is Yahweh our God, He is God over all gods.

He's not some God in the midst of a pantheon and He's going to have to get into a battle with another God. And eventually you know it's going to be Yahweh versus Dagon. And they're going to have to fight it out.

And every battle that we have with the Philistines is actually reflective of Yahweh and Dagon fighting it out. And if we take a few cities, that means Yahweh did pretty well. But if we lose a few cities, well, then Dagon learned some new moves or something like that.

That's how people thought things were going on. And the revelation of God is saying, no. God is the God of gods, Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, the awesome God. And there's no one else like Him.

And He is not partial and takes no bribe. Now immediately notice what is connected here. The Canaanite gods, the Babylonian gods, were immoral.

They were immoral.

I mean, they were just exalted men. And so they got angry and they fought with one another. And you could bribe them. And if one class would do something more for this God than another class, then He might shift His...

God might promise to do one thing at one point in time because of certain offerings that have been made or things like that. But then the next week He might be different. Have you ever thought about what it would be like to have a God who might be different next week than He is this week?

And yet many, many people have lived on this planet who in their conception of God, that's what God was like. We talk about the unchangeableness of God. We talk about great is thy faithfulness. Thy mercies are new every morning.

There's a reason why we should absolutely thank God that we can have every reason to believe He's going to be the same throughout our lives as He's been up to this point. Because a changeable deity, you want something that becomes a broken reed that you can't lean upon?

How can you trust any of the promises of a God who might be different next week than He is this week? The immutability of God. Not that God's a stone-cold idol that does not change in that way. But the fact that He does not change in His essential nature.

That He's not just an exalted man from another planet or something like that. That is a tremendous revelation from God and we should be very thankful for it. And it is reflected in His nature, who is not partial, takes no bribe.

He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. This was a radically different view of God than what you had in the people of Canaan. Radically different.

In fact, to be honest with you, the people of Canaan, had they heard this, had they heard this description of God, all the stuff about being God of gods and Lord of lords and powerful and all the rest of that stuff, okay.

But they would have found it to be very strange and almost an indication of weakness.

That this God,.

This God executes justice for the fatherless and the widow.

And loves the sojourner.

Read the law codes of the peoples of those days. A description of God like this, radical. Absolutely radical. And what it means, notice verse 19, love the sojourner therefore for you are sojourners in the land of Egypt.

What it means is, if God loves these people, if God provides for these people, if God executes justice for the fatherless and the widow,.

Then what must we do?

And it is interesting to me. You go to the minor prophets. We've been through a number of them. What's one of the things that God uses as a standard for judgment on the people outside of Israel? I'm going to bring my wrath to bear upon this nation over here and that nation over there.

And what's one of the constant themes? They oppress the fatherless and the widow. That means it's not just for Israel. That is a moral standard that is universal. And every nation will be judged. Every nation will be judged.

To wrap up this evening, verse 20,. You shall fear Yahweh your God, you shall serve him and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. The encouragement to the people of Israel is, now that God is revealing his character to you, then you shall fear him, you shall serve him.

Same terms we saw earlier. But now we also have, and hold fast to him, and by his name you shall swear. Hold fast to him. Remember some of the saddest incidents in the history of the people of Israel?

Where did they come from?

There were some who were open rebels.

And had just abandoned the worship of Yahweh and they began to worship idols. But I don't think that's the saddest. If you're going to apostatize, be an honest apostate. Go all the way. It seems to me that some of the saddest incidents in the history of Israel was when you saw people try to meld together.

To bring some of the idols and some of the practices of the Canaanite fertility cults into the temple itself and say,.

You know what?

We need to continue to worship Yahweh. But Yahweh is a great God. He won't mind if we do some other things too. And so this syncretism, this mixing in to the pure worship of God, the worship of these other gods, brings some of the greatest degradation to the people of Israel.

And eventually, as we have seen, as we've gone through Jeremiah,.

What does it lead to?

It leads to the destruction of the nation. It leads to the Babylonian captivity. Oh, it takes time. God's a merciful God. He sends prophets. He appeals to His people, but God is a just God as well and eventually that judgment must come.

The idea that you can hold fast to Yahweh, but also open up room in your heart for devotion to any other god is utter foolishness.

That's idolatry.

That's idolatry. And the temptation to idolatry remains the strongest danger for every single generation, even to this day. If you don't think there's a danger of idolatry, you are in the greatest danger of committing idolatry.

How can a Christian commit idolatry?

Every single time, every single time,.

We bow the knee to anyone other than Jesus Christ. We are committing idolatry. When we fear the world, when we want the world's approbation, when we are embarrassed by the demands of Christ, we are committing idolatry.

It may not be the gross form of offering and offering for some hideous idol that someone's opening the mouth of, but my brothers and sisters, we live with the greatest light of any generation.

We really do.

We have more knowledge of the Scriptures and their background and their accuracy and to whom much is given, much is required. The standard for those who have the blinding light that we have is going to be high.

So we must search our own hearts and ask the question,.

Have I made room?

Have I held fast? The New Testament says, Hold fast.

Kratai.

Hold fast.

Stand firm.

Stekate.

Hold fast.

Stand firm.

Why?

Because the world is always buffeting us. There's always that temptation to open up a part of our life to idolatry, to love of something other than what God has commanded us to love. And so these words, yes, they're vital to understand the foundation upon which we then can look at Leviticus and we can put all this together, but they continue to have meaning to anyone whose heart has been opened by the work of the Spirit of God.

Even to this day.

These words were uttered millennia ago, and yet they remain living words.