[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast. Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:37] Speaker B: Like I usually like to do at the beginning of class, I want to go over again the objectives I have for this series.
So by the end of the series, I want you to have an understanding of Deuteronomy as a place of ethical guidance and where you can get explanations for spiritual questions.
I want you to leave this series understanding the literary framework, the design patterns and the central themes found in Deuteronomy.
And if nothing else, I want you to leave here understanding how the New Testament authors interpreted and applied Deuteronomy's teachings.
So to accomplish these objectives, we spent the first two class building out a couple of tools for understanding and reading through Deuteronomy's writings.
One of those tools is how is Deuteronomy structured?
Right. We started in the macro level talking about how Deuteronomy fits into the Old Testament as a whole, right? The Tanakh structure.
And then we talked about how Deuteronomy fits into the structure of the Torah, right, the first five books of the Bible. And then we talked about how Deuteronomy's writings are structured altogether.
Right? And so we've been in the past couple of classes in the historical section, right? So the section that covers where Moses explains how the current relationship looks like between God and Israel.
And in this class we're going to finish up that section and we're going to. I'm going to introduce the stipulation section, right? That section where God goes into what an ideal relationship between a 14th century Israelite farmer might would have with God if he was doing everything perfectly.
And so in last class, in the middle of the class, I asked this question that I wanted you to ponder going into this class, which is what makes our relationship with God unique and what motivated that question was Deuteronomy chapter 2, where we read through this text, where God talks about how he helped a bunch of nations, the descendants of Lot and Esau, to conquer specific lands and the lands that had giants in them, right? The very thing that God promised Israel that he would do for them, even though they failed the first time.
And so that led us to the question of, well, if that is not a unique part of Israel's relationship, then what is unique about the relationship compared to the other nations? And how can that help us to understand our relationship with God and what makes it unique compared to the rest of humanity?
And the answer lies in Deuteronomy, chapter four, which we're going to be studying today.
So I'm going to start with Deuteronomy chapter 4, verses 1 through 8.
And that reads, and now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the rules that I am teaching you and do them that you may live and go in and take possession of the land that Yahweh, the Elohim of your fathers is giving you.
You shall not add to the word that I command you, nor take from it that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh your Elohim that I command you.
Your eyes have seen what Yahweh did at BAAL Peor.
For Yahweh your Elohim destroyed from among you all the men who followed the BAAL of Peor.
But you who held fast to Yahweh, your Elohim, are all alive today.
See, I have taught you statutes and rules as Yahweh, my Elohim commanded me that you should do them in the land that you are entering to take possession of it.
Keep them and do them. For that will be your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.
For what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as Yahweh our Elohim is to us whenever we call upon him.
And what great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law that I set before you today?
So Moses makes this statement about this kind of observation that the outside world should make of Israel if they are following the wisdom and the ethical teachings found in Deuteronomy and really the whole Bible?
And that is, they should observe Israel as a wise and understanding people.
And Moses goes on to identify two reasons for this, two things about Israel's relationship with God that this will bring about.
The first is he identifies a relationship where God is near to the people, right? He calls out this kind of comparison, he says, what great nation is there that has a God so near to it as Yahweh, our Elohim is to us?
And then he also identifies this idea of the wisdom and the ethics that are expressed in this law is righteous.
And those are the two things that make God's relationship with Israel unique compared to their relationship with the other nations.
Now, I want to separate this and I want to kind of handle each one on their own.
So I want to handle this idea of a God that is near first.
So one thing we can do, as kind of Moses asked us to do, is to compare Israel's relationship with their God to the relationship the other mythologies at the time expressed, right? One such example is the religion that they are coming from, right? The religion of Egypt.
And in their mythology, they have multiple gods.
They have these creator gods, the gods that are in charge of taking care of the universe, so to say.
And those gods are distant, right? Common people don't talk to those gods.
Perhaps the pharaoh, he talks to the Ra, the sun God.
Or some of the high priests might talk to these creator gods, but definitely not the common people.
Rather, you were supposed to talk to these minor gods, so to speak, that might be in charge of things like fertility or agriculture or something like that, but definitely not the creator gods.
And then you might have the Canaanite religion, right? The religion they're going to interact with next.
And in their mythology, it's actually quite fascinating if you go and read it, they have, in their mythology, they talk about the supreme God, El.
For those Bible nerds, you will note, you might note that El is also a name that Israel used for Yahweh.
But they had this God El, who was a distant being, right? He was the creator being. And to them he was. He's retired, he doesn't do anything anymore. So you don't talk to him or have any kind of relationship.
Rather, you have relationships with these minor deities like baal.
This is the deity you could have an idol of. You could then get it blessed by a priest, and you might consider a part of BAAL in that idol.
So you would place it in your house.
Now, another thing that is in their mythology is BAAL might not stay there.
He could go to sleep, he could go on a trip, or he might even just die.
And so a part of their mythology was that you would have to do these escalating and manipulative rituals to get BAAL to come back and act for you, right? It's not this personal relationship at all. It's a relationship. It's a transactional one, right? And these rituals might start with a simple animal sacrifice like Israel does, escalating all the way up to what we see in Second Kings, chapter three, where one of the kings that worships BAAL sacrifices his son.
And so those are these other religions, these other nations that Moses is thinking about when he says, compare for yourself that our relationship to theirs.
And when you do that, you end up with this description later on in chapter four. That kind of can help us.
And it's chapter four, verses 32 through 36.
And that reads, for ask now of the days that are past which were before you since the day that Elohim created man on the earth and asked from one end of heaven to the other whether such a great thing as this has ever happened or was ever heard of.
Did any people ever hear the voice of Elohim speaking out of the midst of the fire, as you have heard and still live?
Or has any Elohim ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation? By trials, by signs, by wonders and by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by great deeds of terror, all of which Yahweh, your Elohim, did for you in Egypt, before your eyes.
To you it was shown that you might know that Yahweh is Elohim.
There is no other besides him.
Out of heaven he let you hear his voice that he might discipline you. And on earth he let you see his great fire, and you heard his words out of the midst of the fire.
So again, Moses tells the people, observe for yourself, do this comparison and see how God treats us versus these other nations.
We have a God, or Israel has a God that is so near to them that he speaks to them.
You can see his presence.
He comes in the fire.
He's not one that needs to be coerced into acting. He acts freely of his own accord to save Israel, not because they had to do some ritual where you sacrifice, maybe even your own children, but one where he sacrificed and saved them first.
Now that's Israel's relationship with God.
And to borrow a phrase from the Hebrew writer, if Israel under the old covenant had such a close relationship with God, how much more do we have a closer relationship when we have a relationship with God where he literally dwells inside of us, where he uses phrases like children and father to describe the relationship?
Right? Have you ever really thought about that?
How incredible of a statement and reality that really is that we have A God who wants to be so close to us, to have such an intimate relationship with us, that he wants to dwell inside of us, that he gives us his spirit and uses words like walk with us rather than do as I command, just obey me. No, he walks with us and helps us and guides us.
And we can even do our own kind of comparison game, like Moses tells us to, with other religions.
For example, if we take the religion of Islam, they don't use phrases like child and son or father.
They only use words like master and servant. And in fact, in a lot of their religious texts, they outright rebuke that idea that that relationship could even exist.
They say it's impossible.
If you've ever read Nabeel Qureshi's book, Seeking Allah, Finding Jesus, first off, fascinating book. Highly recommend.
It's all about his conversion from Islam into Christianity. But in it, he spends the first part of it talking about his upbringing as an American Muslim and the things he was taught. And there's this one chapter called Righteous Through Ritual Prayer, which I thought was so interesting, especially for this lesson where he talks about the prayer life that they teach.
Islam does not teach an idea of a personal prayer that doesn't exist for them.
Rather, you memorize prayers, and in fact, you memorize them in the original Arabic. So most people don't even know the words that they're saying. They just know that they're supposed to say this prayer in this situation.
And when you compare that to Christianity, you see the difference, right?
It's a close relationship. It's a personal one where God dwells inside of us. He wants a personal prayer. He wants to hear your plea. He wants to hear your congratulations, your ecstaticness when things go well.
That is what makes us unique. That's what makes the Christian relationship unique, this closeness to God.
But now, let's back up, right? There was another part of that in Deuteronomy, in chapter 4:7 through 8, he also identifies this phrase.
What great nation is there that has statutes and rules so righteous as all this law?
I think to truly grasp that phrase, we first need to understand this word righteous.
Or in Hebrew, it's this word tzadik or tzedakah, depending on the context of the sentence.
And this is a word that I like to describe as a church word.
And what I mean by that is simply we don't really use the word like righteous in daily conversation.
I don't know about you, but I never use the word righteous when I'm just talking to the people. I'M working with.
But it really only comes up in these kind of religious points, right? In Bible class or sermon. And usually it has some kind of baggage to it. Based on what we've been taught, people come with a very specific understanding of what that word means.
So what I want to do is kind of go back and we're just going to do a quick word study to talk about what this word actually means.
So explicitly the word righteous or tzadik just means something has a right state, right, or you are in a state of rightness.
Usually it's a relational term, right? It's usually used between you and a person or you and God. This is how Paul likes to use it, right? In Romans, righteous is generally used by Paul to talk about a right state of relationship with God.
And in that he very explicitly says that comes from grace because of Jesus death and resurrection.
But that's actually not the only way that this word gets used, right? For example, in Deuteronomy 16:18, there's a law where God tells the judges of Israel to judge righteously in the context he specifically means to judge without taking a bribe and without having any bias between one socio economic class or another.
In Jeremiah, chapter 22, verse 3, God tells Israel to do justice and righteousness.
And specifically in that context, righteousness means you don't do something wrong to the foreigner or the orphan or the widow.
And then we also have Paul in romans in chapter 7, verse 12, where he reaffirms this idea that the law is righteous.
So what does that mean?
What does it mean for a law to be righteous?
Well, I think what it means is the laws express a moral ethical concept that puts you in the right outcomes of life.
Or a better way I like to phrase it as when you follow the wisdom of God, you live the best life.
It is this expression of this is how life should be lived and it leads to the best outcomes.
And specifically he talks about why you should care, like why you should be doing these, these laws, why you should be following them. And that I think helps us understand what it means to. For a law to be righteous.
So in chapter four, verses 37 through 40, it reads, and because he loved your fathers and chose their offspring after them, and brought you out of Egypt with his own presence by his great power, driving out before you nations greater and mightier than you, to bring you in, to give you their land for an inheritance, as it is this day.
Know therefore today and lay it to your heart that Yahweh is Elohim in Heaven above and on earth beneath, there is no other.
Therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments which I command you today, that it may go well with you and with your children after you and all, that you may prolong your days in the land that Yahweh your Elohim is giving you for all time.
Now, under the old covenant, it was true that they had a concept that if you did the laws perfectly, you would be righteous with God, right? Under the new covenant. That's not true. You get righteousness with God from this grace given to us because of Jesus death and resurrection.
But they also still had this concept. We see here that one of the reasons that you should live out this wisdom and ethical guidance because of the salvation act of God, right? It is a personal response to a personal salvation from God.
And that is followed in the New Testament, right? Where they constantly talk about why you should be following God is because you've been saved, not to be saved.
But there's also this other phrase that Moses uses here which I think explains what it means for Allah to be righteous.
He says, you do this that it may go well with you and with your children, that you may prolong your days in the land, right? That is an idea of blessing, right? That is an idea of a right outcome coming from following the wisdom of God.
Now, I want to make something very clear, right? This is not a concept of if you just do these things, you will be rich, right? That's what like a prosperity Gospel person might say.
That's not expressed in the Bible.
What is also not expressed in the Bible is this idea that if you follow these laws, you will have some concept of the American dream, right? That you'll be some middle class person that goes on vacations every now and then and has this picturesque family.
Rather, the outcome that is usually pictured, especially in the New Testament, is this idea we find in Galatians, chapter five, right? It's the fruit of the Spirit, right? When Paul writes this, he says, if you walk in the Spirit, right? If you walk in his wisdom and guidance, you will produce the fruit of the Spirit.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self control.
Against such things there is no law.
And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.
If we live by the Spirit, let us also keep in step with the Spirit, right? That is a very specific outcome that is described.
That is what it means to have the best outcome is producing these fruit, to live a life where you have these things in Your life. That is what it means to live the wisdom and the ethical guidance that we find both in the New Testament and in the Old, in Deuteronomy.
And that is what makes our relationship with God unique, Right? It is this relationship we have that is so close and so near, where we have a spirit inside of us that can guide us, that we can walk with, and that can teach us to produce the best life, the life that God always dreams about for his children.
Okay, so that's the end of the historical section.
Now I kind of want to take the rest of our time and kind of change gears a little bit. And I want to kind of introduce us to the stipulation section.
This section I talked about where God expresses what the ideal relationship looks like for ancient Israel, specifically a 14th century Israelite farmer.
And it begins like this. In chapter five, verses one through five, Moses says this.
And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them, hear, O Israel, the statutes and the rules that I speak and you're hearing today.
And you shall learn them, and be careful to do them.
Yahweh, our Elohim made a covenant with us in Horeb. Not with our fathers did Yahweh make this covenant, but with us, who are all.
Who are all of us here alive today.
Yahweh spoke with you face to face at the mountain, out of the midst of the fire, while I stood between Yahweh and you at that time to declare to you the word of Yahweh, for you were afraid because of the fire and you did not go up into the mountain.
So something very interesting here, if you remember back to our third lesson, I made this point that when Moses is speaking, he uses the pronoun you specifically talking to the historical listeners, right? That second generation, but talking about them doing something that the first generation did, right? In that third lesson, it was the previous generation failed to go in and take the land, right? But when Moses is speaking, he says, you were afraid, you did not believe. Talking to the second generation here, he actually kind of breaks that a little bit, or at least he acknowledges it, right? He says, this covenant that Yahweh made with us and Horeb, not with our fathers, did Yahweh make this covenant?
Now that's really interesting because if you read back, God very much did make that covenant with those people, with the first generation, their fathers.
I mean, they were the ones that were actually there.
You know what I mean?
So what can he mean, right? How does he say that? Or why does he say that? You made the covenant with God, not your father's.
And especially, like, what would it mean for you to hear this every seven years, way into the future, when someone reads this and says, you made this covenant, not your father's?
Well, I think he's being a little hyperbolic here, and he's trying to make a point, which is, as you go into reading these stipulations, you first have to make a choice, which is that this covenant has to be yours. It's not your father's covenant, it's your covenant.
And I think this is good wisdom for parents, teachers, mentors.
When you're dealing with this new generation coming up, right, you can give them all the logical arguments you want.
You can teach them the Scriptures to the best of your ability.
You can force them to show up Sunday and Wednesday up until they turn 18 and just go off to college or something.
But you can't make them choose this life in order for them and for us to have an actual relationship, to live out the ideals of God, eventually you have to say, this is my covenant, right?
This is my relationship with God, not my father's.
Most of y' all probably know this. I went to Mississippi State to the ucsc, and something I observed while I was there that kind of fascinated me was whenever students first showed up for college, they always seemed to be, I would say, a step down in faith from their parents.
Here's what I mean. I would meet kids that their parents were elders or just super involved in the church doing all these things, and the kids would know the right answers. They would show up on Sunday and Wednesday, but they weren't really on fire for God like their parents were when they first showed up.
Or if their parents just showed up on Sunday and Wednesday when their kids got to the ucsc, they would show up on Sunday, probably not Wednesday.
And if the parents only showed up on Sunday, I can promise you I did not see them unless their parents were there.
And here's the thing.
Something the UCSC was really good at was forcing the kids to make this decision.
That's what they always have to do, is if you really want the kids to be on fire for God to really make the faith their own, they have to make that choice.
And that's every single kid.
And the best you can really do is prepare them and guide them and push them into making that choice.
But eventually they have to do it. And I think that's what Moses is saying here, is that if you're going to read the rest of this, you first you have to make this choice now. It's not something you can put off. You have to do it now. This is your covenant, not your Father's.
Okay?
And then Moses goes on to say the Ten Commandments.
Now, I would love to talk about the Ten Commandments. We would spend the rest of the series talking about that.
But we also just had an entire sermon series on the Ten Commandments.
So what I will say is, they did a fantastic job. You should go listen to them.
What I will do is I will keep going and I'll reference the Ten Commandments as we keep reading.
And what I specifically want to get to next is after the Ten Commandments, we get this passage in 2229, these words, Yahweh spoke to all your assembly at the mountain out of the midst of the fire, the cloud, and the thick darkness with a loud voice. And he added, no more. And he wrote them on two tablets of stone and gave them to me.
And as soon as you heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness, while the mountain was burning with fire, you came near to me, all the heads of your tribes, your elders, and you said, behold, Yahweh our Elohim has shown us his glory and greatness.
We have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire this day we have seen Elohim speak with man, and man still live.
Now, therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us. If we hear the voice of Yahweh our Elohim anymore, we shall die.
For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the living Elohim speaking out of the midst of fire, as we have and has still lived? Go near and hear all that Yahweh our Elohim will say and speak to us all that Yahweh our Elohim will speak to you, and we will hear and do it.
And Yahweh heard your words when you spoke to me. And Yahweh said to me, I have heard the words of this people which they have spoken to you.
They are right in all they have spoken.
Oh, that they had such a heart as this always to fear me and to keep all my commandments that it might go well with them and with their descendants forever?
I'll tell you when I. I remember when I first read this, and I read Israel hearing God speak out of the fire. And their immediate reaction was, that's close enough.
We need someone kind of in the way.
I remember thinking, well, that's not how you're supposed to do that. That's not how you're supposed to respond. You should go nearer to God. You should want to draw nearer to him.
But what's interesting is God doesn't say that. He commends them for reacting this way, right? He says, oh, if only they had a heart like this always.
If only they feared me like this always, then, you know, perhaps it might actually go. They might actually do something. They might actually succeed in this.
And so what's so interesting is that word fear is such an important theme in Deuteronomy and in fact, the rest of the Bible.
For example, in Jeremiah 32, he talks about the New Covenant. He describes it as a covenant where the people will always have the fear of God continually.
He even says that God himself will put that fear in their hearts.
When you get to Acts, chapter 9, verse 31, it talks about the New Testament church as one who walks in the fear of God and in the Spirit, and that's why they're growing continually.
And In Peter, chapter 1, verse 17, he tells the people, the reader, live out your life as a foreigner in reverent fear.
And that's where I'm going to leave you this week.
A question to ponder an idea. What does it truly mean to fear the Lord?
That's where we'll pick up next week. Thank you.
