Fear and Love the Lord

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Our exhortation today will be from the reading made earlier in service, here in chapters 10 and 11,
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Deuteronomy chapter 10. Before we open God's Word together, let us ask
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Him to bless our time together. Our gracious Heavenly Father, once again, as we handle
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Your Holy Word, we ask that Your Spirit would be with us to give guidance, protect us from distraction, help us to concentrate upon Your truth, that all this time may be to Your honor and glory, to our benefit.
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As servants of Jesus Christ, we pray in His name. Amen. It's not the most exciting sport that I'm involved in, but for a number of years now,
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I have rowed, R -O -W -E -D. It becomes confusing when
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Kelly says, so why is Jesus rowing? Well, I rowed. Well, does that mean you rowed your bike or you rowed on the rower?
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So you have to spell things out. It's like we've got a two -year -old. R -O -W -E -D. Remember, you can tell when your kids grow up when you spell things out and they figure out what you're spelling, and then you know that you're in deep trouble.
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So, it's a great workout. It's a great sport.
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It really, really is. But there's just one thing about it. I'm not on a boat, so I'm not going anywhere.
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And when you're on a bike, there's always exciting things. It could be exciting things of dodging crazy people who are driving while texting, but that is exciting.
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And at least when you're running, I was at the end of a run last week, and I was really tired, and I was really dogging it, and I was dying.
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And all of a sudden, one of those yippy little dogs came flying out of a vehicle someplace after me.
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And it's amazing how much faster you can go when something like that happens. And it's exciting.
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It gets the adrenaline going. Nothing exciting ever happens on a rower because you're just rowing.
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And so what you have to do is you have to find something to distract you, and so sometimes you play games and things like that.
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But sometimes you set it up so you can watch TV and you can watch something. And recently, I got the crazy idea to watch a miniseries that I saw.
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I haven't looked up the date, but I'm pretty certain I was in the early portion of high school, so it would have been the late 1970s.
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And I looked it up online and got it really cheap on Amazon, and some of you, I bet, saw this miniseries years and years ago called
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Masada. Masada. Masada was a fortress.
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You can still go visit it today. I hope someday to get to visit Masada. But it was a fortress in the
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Judean wilderness that after the fall of Jerusalem, a number of less than a thousand
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Jewish zealots fled to Masada, and eventually the 10th
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Roman Legion laid siege to them and built a ramp up to the fortress, and they eventually battered their way in, and rather than being taken, all of the
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Jews in Masada took their own lives. And so when the Romans finally broke through the night before, all the
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Jews had slaughtered themselves, and to this day, the Israeli people in the nation of Israel really looked to Masada as a place of Jewish nationalism.
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And as I was watching that recently, I was watching a section of this where the
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Jews were looking down upon the Romans, and the Romans were doing their rituals, and they had actually snuck down off the mountain.
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I don't know if this actually happened or not, and had basically messed with the sacrificial animals, so when they would sacrifice the animals, they'd take out their entrails, and as long as their entrails were clean, this was a sign that the gods were in favor of what they were doing.
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Well, they shoved bad meat in the mouths of the sacrificial animals, and so when they opened them up, they were full of maggots, and that was a sign that the gods were no longer with them, and they were basically waging psychological warfare upon the
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Romans as they were building the ramp to try to get up to Masada. And it struck me as I was watching that, that here you had at this point in time, it took a long, long time, but eventually, after the exile, and the rebuilding of the temple, and all the things that had gone on, it had become absolutely definitional of being
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Jewish, to believe that there was only one true God, and at one scene, the
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Jews are up looking down upon the Romans, and they are mocking them, they're laughing at the foolishness of the paganism of these allegedly enlightened people, who don't realize that there's only one true
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God. Well, it took a while for the Jews to learn that lesson.
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We certainly see that from Scripture. We see that there was a constant temptation for the people of Israel to go astray.
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It took a long time to drill into their minds the reality that God had revealed himself, and that there was only one true
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God. In our text this morning, we saw repeatedly the assertion of the fact that there is only one true
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God, and he is the creator of heaven and earth, and that these people have been chosen by this one
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God, Yahweh, who has made himself known to them by his covenant name, and that they are to be his people, and therefore they are to be obedient to him.
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Now, this is a part of our study of the Holiness Code, but as we started a few weeks ago,
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I explained that there are all sorts of background issues that are necessary for us to deal with before we can really understand what's going on in the book of Leviticus, and that Holiness Code, that code that is laid out that gives direction there in Leviticus, and there are similar sections here in the book of Deuteronomy, but gives directions as to how the people of God are to behave, and the laws that are going to govern really all aspects of their lives, and we know that one of the primary reasons why we need to deal with this information is due to the fact that we live in a land that is undergoing an absolute moral and ethical revolution, and it is not a revolution of progress, it is a revolution of utter collapse.
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Just within the past few days, a federal judge has struck down as unconstitutional the laws of one state in regard to engaging in polygamy, and there have been
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Supreme Court justices who warned years ago that if we continued going the direction we were going, that this would be the next step, that not only would you have the utter redefinition of marriage as to who may marry whom, but you likewise will end up having the expansion of this term to refer to many multiples of peoples.
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There really isn't any basis any longer, given the direction that we've already been going, to insist that marriage should be between one and one at all.
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It doesn't matter what you put in the... It can be a marriage between three, four, or five.
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It can be a mixture of two with three, or three with two, and you might as well have two guys, three gals, and two ponies.
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It doesn't matter anymore because marriage doesn't have any meaning. When you no longer have a moral and ethical foundation for what marriage is, where it came from, what human beings are, and how they're to live, what does it matter?
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It doesn't really matter anymore at all, and we know, because they've been honest enough to say it, we know that many of the people involved in this movement, this was their goal in the first place, is the utter destruction of the institution of marriage, because it is that institution which civilizes a people.
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We are not seeing progress. We are seeing a jumping off of the cliff into absolute moral and ethical anarchy, back into the days, the dark days of paganism.
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And to be able to explain why we believe what we believe, we are forced by the fact that the
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Scripture gives us law, and then that law is applied, and we see what happens when people break that law, and then we see the one who comes to fulfill that law, and then we see the application after the work of Christ, the
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New Testament apostles, say, look, there is a right use of the law, if it's used lawfully or rightfully.
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We understand what its purposes are. It gives direction and guidance as to how God would have us to live.
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Because of the very nature of the revelation that has been given to us, we as believers, if we want to give a reason for the hope that's within us, if we want to give light to a very darkened world, we need to understand the background and the context of the passages that we turn to, and specifically in regards to homosexuality and sexual behavior to the
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Levitical Holiness Code. Now, we could just jump right into that. I mean, in our congregation, there has certainly been enough instruction on the basics of who
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God is and things like that that would allow us to do so, but we recognize that there are also many other people listening to what happens in this room.
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Isn't that strange? We normally just think of what's going on in here, but due to technology today, there literally are people listening to what we do here all around the world.
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And that's a wonderful thing. It certainly increases the opportunity we have and the responsibility we have in handling the
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Word of God aright. But at the same time, the primary reason why we need to look more at other foundational issues is the people with whom we're speaking.
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This whole movement could never arise during a period of time when people were historically and biblically literate.
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It's working real well today because that's no longer the case. That's no longer the case.
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The vast majority of the American citizenry knows nothing about the history even of this nation, let alone the history of the world, let alone be able to recognize that what's happening in our society is what's happened in every society before it collapsed.
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People don't have that perspective anymore. They don't care about what happened in the past. And the idea of having a system of morality and ethics, it's just whatever feels good.
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Each person's opinion is absolutely equal. That kind of anarchy and foolishness reigns around us.
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And so, if we are going to be able to communicate with people, then we're going to need to be able to lay a foundation.
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And we recognize that the people around us have no foundation upon which to stand when it comes to someone even suggesting that God has revealed
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Himself and He has done so in such a way that He has revealed Himself with clarity and that following His way leads to life.
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Rejecting His way leads to death. And it's been my experience that the more you and I are actually really familiar with the entire message of Scripture, the context of the verses that we actually do end up turning to, the more clearly we're able to explain them and, in my experience, it could just be the
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Holy Spirit's working, or it could just be a part of human nature, but I can sort of tell when someone's speaking to me, when they are speaking from something that is truly familiar to them, they're speaking from their heart, or when they're sort of struggling and they're sort of following a script.
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You know, when the guy comes to the door and he's trying to sell you something and he's talking too fast because he's already said this 47 times already this morning and he's just getting through it, trying to do it fast enough that you're not going to slam the door in his face and that kind of thing.
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It doesn't really have the impact. And when I talk with someone who's maybe, for example, part of another religion,
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I can tune in fairly quickly as to whether this person is a real serious follower of that faith or if they're sort of struggling to express themselves.
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And so the more confident we are that we understand the whole totality of why
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God has revealed the laws that he has revealed as to how we are to behave, and the more familiarity we have with the situation that the ancient
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Israelites were facing so we can explain that. You know, when you can explain to someone, well, you need to realize the ancient
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Jews, this is the context they were facing. And there were these kinds of difficulties and these kinds of temptations and that's why
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God said this, that's why God said that. Most people are like, wow, where did you go to Bible college?
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Or something along those lines. I mean, they're going to be able to tell that you've actually given some thought, hopefully, to what you're saying to them and you're not just giving them a knee -jerk reaction.
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And so that brings us to why I've chosen this particular text to provide us with some background.
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When I was in seminary, the classes you had to take, thankfully, were still decided, had been decided decades before by pretty smart people that realized there were certain things you needed to know.
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And there were certain classes such as Old Testament background and New Testament background. And I'm going to tell you, for most of the students, those were snoozers.
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They were the ones where, man, you know, you had to read these books, but, oh, I'm just getting tired of reading this stuff.
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Do I really, really need to know, you know, reading the New Testament background book about what happened during the intertestamental period?
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And there was this Jewish leader and that Jewish leader, and you got the Maccabean Revolt, and you got all the rest of this kind of stuff.
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And, you know, you sort of skim through it, and, you know, I'm already involved in ministry.
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What does this really mean to me? Well, thankfully, I was already involved in apologetics, so I knew why it was important.
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I knew why it was important. So I stayed awake and managed to make it through the snores of the other people to listen to what the professor was saying.
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But it was even worse with the Old Testament background stuff. Oh, my goodness. All these, you know, the gods of the
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Babylonians and the Amorites and the Amalekites and Babylonian religion, and you've got
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Canaanite religion, and the gods that would have been amongst the people that Israel dispossessed.
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It's so easy to understand why, for a lot of Christians today, that's just a complete mystery.
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We just know that there was paganism, and if you've ever tried to read through the
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Old Testament, you ran into something about some guy named Baal, or actually
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Baal, and there was something about Ashtaroth, and there's something about groves of trees on hills that's bad.
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I'm not really sure what, but there were lots of sacrifices and stone monuments and lots of warnings against idolatry.
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But the specifics sort of miss us. Well, that's a problem, because to be perfectly honest with you, if we would take some time to think about the situation facing the people of God as they lived in that day and know something about what was going on around them, it is amazing the windows that that opens up upon the text of the
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Old Testament. And friend, listen to me. When we read the
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Holiness Code, and we read these laws that sometimes seem so very strange to us, concerns about having different kinds of crops growing in a field or something along those lines, it's very easy for us, especially because of the context in which we live, to fall in the mindset of, well, a vast majority of both
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Protestants and Catholics, I would say, especially in scholarship. And that is, we look at these texts, and we give in to the temptation of going, that seems rather petty.
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It seems rather petty. We sort of look at it, and we put our noses up as moderns, and we look back at these ancient people and go, my, they were concerned about things that just don't seem to be all that important at all.
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Very easy for us to do that. But we do it out of ignorance. And I am absolutely convinced that ancient man, in many ways,
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Moses, Abraham, did not have access to the knowledge that we have of this universe.
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That's true. But I can't imagine what they would have done had they had access to the amount of information that you and I have.
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Because I get the feeling that their attention span was about 50 ,000 times longer than ours, and their ability to think and to concentrate far better than ours.
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I wonder what they would have done. I think we would have colonized Mars by now.
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I don't know. But these were not stupid people.
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And it's so easy for us to stick our noses in the air, and look at them and go, it seems so petty, so irrelevant, when the ignorance is actually ours.
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Now, the new semester has begun. And if you've gone off to university someplace or to a local community college, you may be taking a history of religions class to fulfill one of those humanities or something.
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You just happen to fit in your schedule. I know how that works. I know how that works. Especially when you're in the earlier part of your studies.
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You've got to get all those requirements out of the way. And sometimes it's just like, oh, do I really have to do this? And you end up in a particular class.
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And the professor starts pointing out that there are all sorts of parallels and connections between what is found in the first few books of the
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Christian scripture, and what has been discovered only over the past 130 years or so, even less for some things, in regards to the ancient world in which
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Israel existed. And they might point out to you that El or Elohim, the
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Hebrew word for God or gods, except when Elohim is used as a singular verb, that's just the word
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God, but that that has been found in all sorts of other contexts.
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And it was one of the Canaanite gods, one of many gods. And then they start telling you some of the stories about what these gods were like.
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And you start hearing about how in Babylon you have cosmogonies.
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You know what a cosmogony is. We all have cosmogony. Cosmos, the world. Genos or Genesis, the origin.
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The cosmogony is a story of how the world began. And there were all sorts of ancient cosmogonies.
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And all of these religious groups had differing cosmologies. Sometimes they'd have more than one.
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In fact, it's pretty obvious as we look at the various clay tablets that have been discovered and the stories, the
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Enuma Elish story and the Gilgamesh epic and all these things that have been discovered only over the past relatively recent period of time, that what would happen is you get all sorts of different versions of these stories because as politics would change, theology would change.
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Because let's say a king took over who was struggling with the priestly class.
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Well, that might affect the theological stories that were being told in the religions of the day.
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But then let's say the priestly class gets a candidate who becomes king and now all of a sudden the stories change because now the new king is in league with the priests.
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And so all of a sudden the deities reflect the new political reality. Well, this happened a lot.
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And so we get all sorts of different versions and we see this down in Egypt. We see this in Babylon.
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It happens a lot. But they do share at least some things in common.
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Generally, the idea was, and one of the earliest stories back amongst the
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Babylonians, was the idea of battles amongst gods.
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And there was this one god, Tiamat. And Tiamat is in this battle and she is defeated and she is cut in half and out of parts of her body you have the creation of the heavens and the earth.
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And so the heavens and the earth come out of the bodies of the gods. Now, you and I, being good
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Western thinkers, we go, that doesn't really answer the question because even if the heavens and earth are actually remnants of a deity's body, that doesn't explain where the deity's body came from to be used to make this stuff.
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But this is the idea. This is the kind of cosmogony that would be there.
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And you might have one story over in one area and then a slightly different story over here that would reflect the political differences between these two nations, for example.
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Or you might have one pantheon of gods in this group and another pantheon here and there will be people, gods, that will be concurrent between both.
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But if one is really popular over here, the story over here, their enemies could be that one gets defeated and then vice versa.
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And so there's all this confusion. But still there are certain similarities at least and that is that the deities that did exist, none of them are self -existent.
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They are offspring of somebody else and they came from someplace like this and they struggle with the idea, well, is there a primal beginning to everything?
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And they really couldn't figure out how that could be because you need a god to create everything but their gods depend upon other gods.
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And so you had the battles and things like that that would create the world and so on and so forth.
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But then you also had gods that had responsibilities over certain areas. So you had limitations of gods.
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I mean, you'd have the Philistine gods in our Bible read about Dagon. And so Dagon will be very, very popular in one particular area.
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But two nations over, they may have never heard of Dagon or Dagon might be a very, very minor god for them.
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And there would be gods of especially the harvest and fertility because what did you need to have?
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Well, you need to have food. And pretty much everything was focused upon food.
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And so everybody noticed there was this cycle during the course of the year.
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And so you had sun gods and moon gods and lots of stories about the sun, you know, gets lower and lower in the sky and that's not the best time to be planting food.
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And then the sun starts getting higher in the sky again. And so you had the cycle of death, burial, and then resurrection type stuff going on in agriculture.
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And so certain gods had control over the fertility of crops. And certain gods had the control over the fertility of animals because you needed your cows and you needed the cows to have other cows and sheep and goats and things like that.
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This is extremely, extremely important. And so the deities were involved in all of these things.
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And you also had gods of weather. Because if you're going to have fertility of your crops, you've got to have rain.
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You've got to have rain. And, you know, right now if Arizona was filled with Amorite pagans, they would be really, really worried because something's going wrong with the god of rain.
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He showed up last week for a while, but he's really been on vacation for about a decade, right? And so there would be all sorts of prayers going on and all sorts of invocations and incantations and everything else going on to try to get the attention of whatever deity was in charge of rain because, you know, a lot of the reservoirs around here are not looking all that good.
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And so that was the kind of mindset that you have. And it's going to have different forms.
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It's going to take different forms down in Egypt than it is in Babylon. But here in this little oasis in the middle, you've got the
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Jewish people. And they can't just build a wall all around Israel.
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They are going to have interaction with the people around them. And God needs to give them guidance as to how they are to interact with the people around them.
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And once you have even the vaguest idea of what was going on in the nations around Israel, you start seeing that a large portion of the
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Old Testament text is apologetic in nature. You're going, oh, you're an apologist.
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You see apologetics everywhere. Well, maybe. But I read a book either earlier this year or late last year.
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I forget exactly when it was. I think it was Something Along the Lines of Israel Amongst the
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Gods or something, some title along like that. It was very, very good. I'm going to have to reread it again, especially to remember what the title was.
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But it was pointing out over and over and over and over again that the things that liberals have pointed to in the
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Old Testament said, ah, see, they're borrowing from this over there. And they're borrowing from this over there. If you just realized what the function of these things were, they were arguments.
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They were apologetics. The fact that you can find a parallel in the use of the language meant that God knew what the people around Israel believed.
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He knew what the Egyptians believed. And He's making a revelation in such a way that people hear it and they go, uh -huh.
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I see. I understand. It's not like what the pagans say.
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Our God did it this way. And there is the difference. And this is why He should be worshipped for that.
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It's filled with apologetic arguments against the religions that surrounded the people of Israel.
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So they might be able to have an understanding of why their
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God is worthy of worship. And they might actually be able to explain to someone else why they believe the way that they believe.
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And so, think about this text. Let's start looking through it. And I think you'll see this.
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What we need to do is you're going to see the connection between knowing who the true
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God is and why, as a result, we should be concerned about His commandments and living in a way that is pleasing to Him.
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The Scriptures make that connection. The people we talk to today don't have that anymore.
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They see themselves in the center. They're the center of everything. And they're basically sitting back going,
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You convince me that I should worship your God. That is a truly reprobate way of thinking.
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And we have to recognize that. And we can see that with more clarity once we understand
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God reveals Himself as our Maker, our Creator. And therefore, everything we have is
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His. We are to live for Him. And we don't have any right to take the center position.
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If we are a creation, by nature, our first reflex is to look to Him to define everything around us.
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Because He's the Maker of all things. That's why God as Creator is so central to any meaningful worldview that will not collapse into utter moral, ethical chaos and death for man.
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And don't think that that's not why. It is absolutely central to the program of the secular world to banish the
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Creator from our thoughts. Once you have a populace that has no Creator, they are like sheep to be controlled.
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And that's exactly what's going on. So let's look at it. Deuteronomy chapter 10. And now Israel. What does
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Yahweh, your God, why am I using Yahweh? Well, it's just a
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Jewish tradition to say Lord in the first place. We're going to run across a second section here where the real word
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Lord, Adonai, appears. But the reality is that God revealed
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Himself by this name to His people and it distinguished Him from the pagan gods around Israel.
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And so I've never really fully understood, once I came to understand it, the
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English Bible tradition that is followed. But especially here, when we are contrasting the true
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God against false gods, I think it is good to go ahead and use the divine name. Jews will not do that.
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That is a tradition that has developed over the centuries, that it's too holy to say the divine name.
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But God used it. And the people of Israel used it. And they didn't have any problem with it.
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So anyway. And now Israel. What does Yahweh, your God, require of you? But to fear
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Yahweh, your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve
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Yahweh, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of Yahweh, which
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I am commanding you today, for your good. Now, this is a repetition of what we had back in Deuteronomy chapter 6, where we had the giving of the
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Shema. Shema Yisrael, Yahweh Eloheinu, Yahweh Etaad. Hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our
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God, Yahweh is One. And you shall love Yahweh, your God, with all your heart, soul, mind, strength.
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Here is the greatest commandment. And you are to talk about these things to your children as you walk in the way.
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It's repeated here in Deuteronomy chapter 10, just in a little bit fuller form than it was earlier.
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And so what does God require of Israel but to fear God? Now, I've told the story before.
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It was one of those classes where people had already fallen asleep. Dr. Baird and I were the only two conscious people in the room when this happened.
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But the room was full of people, but we were the only two conscious people left. And Dr.
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Baird was my Greek professor for seven years. And I've told him since then that this was one of those things that stuck in my mind.
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And his response is always the same. Well, I have absolutely no recollection of it personally, but that's okay.
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But it was a Life and Letters of Paul class. And he was talking about the fear of the
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Lord. And he said, now, in the Greek, the word fear means fear.
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And I had appreciated that insight. Because that's normally not what you hear, right?
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The word fear doesn't mean fear. We don't want to fear God. We want
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Him to be our buddy. We want everybody to be comfortable. So, no, it doesn't mean fear.
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No. It means fear. And so, in Greek, but this wasn't written in Greek, thankfully.
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It's written in Hebrew. Well, guess what? Let me tell you. The Hebrew word for fear means fear.
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Yes, it's actually there. Now, that doesn't mean the craven, hiding behind the boulder type of fear that the pagans should have of God.
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There is everything right pointing out the issues like respect and awe and all those other things.
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But it's never right to say fear does not actually mean fear. You are to fear
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Yahweh your God. You've seen what Yahweh did to the Egyptians.
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You've seen what Yahweh has done in the midst of your own people. Plague has broken out amongst your people and consumed unholy people.
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And so, there is to be, first and foremost, a proper recognition that God is
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God and I am not. And any theology that begins with God is my buddy,
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God is my grandpappy in the sky, will always end up far from the biblical standard.
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And yet, many theologies start there. Fear Yahweh your
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God. And to walk in all His ways.
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What does that presume? That He has been revealing what His ways are. We don't get to make that up on our own.
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His ways are His ways and there's nothing in the text that ever indicates to us that we have the right to pick and choose what's comfortable to us.
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He defines His ways. It's not our ways. But to fear
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Yahweh your God, to walk in all His ways, which means to live in.
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It's not, well, today I'm going to do that, tomorrow I'm not. I get a day off. I'll do it for three hours today and four hours tomorrow.
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No. It is to walk, to live, to dwell in all
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His ways. To love Him. Now, I'm going to avoid, as much as I can, given where the clock already is,
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I'm going to avoid camping out here because we could camp out for a long time.
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But I have to at least stop long enough to say this. If we are going to communicate with the world around us in such a way as to function as salt and light, if we are going to try to stop the decay that is taking place at an incredible rate in our society, morally and ethically, and if even within our own families and homes, we are going to speak and act in a way that is going to be glorifying to God, we must get a grip on what love really is.
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It is astounding to me how many people call themselves Christians and yet they begin with allowing the world to define love for them.
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It is not a sticky sentimentality. And when you find
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God commanding His people to fear Him, to serve
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Him, and right in the middle of it, to love Him, one thing should be absolutely, positively clear.
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That any definition of love that locates it primarily, first and foremost in its origin and definition in the emotions of man is a lie.
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It's a lie. This commandment to love
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God is just that. It's a commandment. You can't command that wonderful, warm love that you felt.
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Oh, I... That's where I talked about it recently, remember? Her name was
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Wendy. It was fourth grade. I remember once, oh, it was so bad.
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It was so bad. She lived in the same neighborhood
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I lived in and, I don't know, playing tag or something, whatever people do in fourth grade, and her shoe was untied and I rushed over to tie her shoe for her.
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That's how bad it was. It was so obvious. Oh, my goodness.
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And everybody goes, oh, puppy love. And because we use it that way and it's so much, you know, oh, he loves the little puppy, it becomes so much a part of our vocabulary that as we grow up, sometimes we don't mature in our understanding of what that word is really supposed to mean.
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Now, everybody in this room that has been married for more than six months has already found out that the term love had better have some more meanings to it than that warm, fuzzy feeling that made me tie
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Wendy's shoes and embarrass myself in the process. It has to have a whole lot more to it than that.
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It's an act of the heart and the will, and when the heart and the will are together, focused upon what's right in God's sight, yes, the emotions can be incredibly intense, but we are living a lie when we identify
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Christian love, first and foremost, with the intense emotional feeling, rather than the commitment and decision of will from the very center of one's being to love
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God and love others.
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So when I see the ubiquitous star breakup and divorce, well, we just fell out of love.
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That's all it was. No, you made a decision. You made a decision.
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To love Him, to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
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It is not a mistake, my friends, that love and service are said in the very same breath, because to understand what it means to be a worshipper of God, that term serve, ahav in the
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Hebrew, to worship and serve, ahav can be translated as either, and frequently that is the way it's done.
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There is no concept in the Bible of worshipping God if you will not serve
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Him, or serving God if you're not worshipping Him. And the fact that this is the same phrase as loving
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Him and serving Him with all your heart and with all your soul, and then when
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Jesus makes application, it's love Him with all your heart and with all your soul, what does that tell you? That the
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Hebrews, unlike us, did not cut man up into little parts.
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So that you've got the mental life and the spiritual life, the physical life, the Hebrew concept of man is of one whole.
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And if your heart loves something, then you're going to serve that something. This schizophrenia we have in Western culture is not shared by the
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Hebrew view of man. And so what's the very first thing that is said here?
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It's often been said, ah, the Hebrew law, it's so external. I don't know what anybody's been reading that can say that, but it's not the
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Old Testament. Because what's the very first thing that is said here?
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Israel, what does God require of you? There's all sorts of stuff about keeping the commandments, the statute of the
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Lord. It's right there. It's all external. No, what does it start with? Love God with all your heart. And we know the only way that can happen is if God changes that heart.
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Because no heart of stone has ever loved anything but itself.
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No heart of stone has ever loved anything but itself. And so when we talk about the necessity of God changing hearts, was it really all that different?
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Who were the remnant? Who were these people in whom the Spirit of God dwelled, who loved
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God? Were they not the people that God had, in fact, taken out that heart of stone and given them a heart of flesh?
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Isn't that what God's Spirit has always been doing? And can't we understand, don't we see the apostasy of the people of Israel primarily in this very context that there were just so many?
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You can give them all the law you want. This is where the law matters.
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In the very heart of man. In the very heart of man. And so, if we don't see this, we're not really going to have the proper biblical context to understand the high moral and ethical content of the law.
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And people will not see in us a meaningful messenger of the importance of these truths if they do not see in us, first and foremost, a love for God.
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A love for God. May God remind us of these things as we continue to study
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His Word. Let's pray together. Lord, our holy and powerful
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God, worthy of worship, service, honor, glory, praise, and fear.
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We hear Your Word. We hear its consistency. You have preserved it for us down through the millennium.
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And Lord, we hear it again this day. And we thank
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You for Your truth. We thank You that You are the God of gods, the Lord of lords, and that You've revealed
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Yourself to us. As we consider Your truth, and as we desire to be servants of Yours, we would ask that You would give us understanding and insight.
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And even as we hear this commandment that we are to love You, that we will understand that You have made it possible for us to do that because You've loved us first.
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You've shed abroad in our hearts Your love. You've proven Your love on an old rugged cross and an empty tomb.
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We thank You that we live in light of that. May we do so in this coming week. And may we be instruments in Your hands to spread light in this very dark world.