Deuteronomy 4 and intro

Deuteronomy is a challenging book, and maybe many of us avoid it! I don’t think l preached it during many, many years.

Yet the fact is that, as 2 Tim 3:16 says, `All Scripture is God-breathed, and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness!` And one verse I’ve often preached is Joshua 1:8, where God makes clear to Joshua that, if he wants victory, `Keep this Book of the Law always on your lips; meditate on it day and night.` `This` Book? `This` Book was, presumably, Genesis through Deuteronomy (perhaps in a slightly earlier version than what we have).

So it’s worth reading if we want victory! And yet Deuteronomy’s a puzzling book, a book of paradoxes: even a book of apparently contradictory messages, till we read it prayerfully & carefully. If we grasp what’s happening here, however, it can change our lives.

One thing it shows God saying very clearly: Be proud of My law (cf 4:8)! 4:1, because following it is vital if you are to possess the place where the promises come true; 4:3, it’s vital because God is genuinely a God who judges when His Law-commands are broken; 4:8, it’s vital because the Law is basic to what makes God’s people unique. And this is the attitude of the worshipping psalmist in Psalm 119:97 – `Oh, how I love Your Law! I meditate on it all day long ` – and Psalm 19:8 – `The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart… more precious than gold, than much pure gold!`; and indeed of Jesus Himself in Matthew 5:17-18: `Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them.  For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished!` It’s understandable, then, that Deuteronomy 4 urges its readers to be proud of the Law it contains; and 21^st century Christians often need to take that on board!

But the book goes further in a crucial and puzzling way. As Paul shows us in Galatians 3, Deuteronomy embodies at its heart God’s old testament agreement with humankind: It’s a wonderful law, & if you keep it, you’ll be saved; if not, see Deuteronomy 27, you’ll be cursed. A particularly key chapter is Deuteronomy 4, because that central OT covenant or agreement is embodied there in 4:1, and again in 4:40 –  `Keep His decrees and commands, which I am giving you today, so that it may go well with you and your children.` Deuteronomy is built around three long talks by Moses and this climaxes the first. And it presents this agreement, this `deal`, over & over again; for example in 6:25 (`If we are careful to obey all this law before the Lord our God, as He has commanded us, that will be our righteousness`), and in 7:12, 11:8,22, and 26:14-15.

So this is where lots of us will perk up our ears (I hope!); because we’ve been reading the Bible and we know that’s not the whole story; in fact that’s not how relationship to our living God works at all. We know the gospel is in fact `the gospel of God’s grace` (Acts 20:24); and `grace` is God’s colossal, unearned salvation: totally free, and totally unearned! There can, indeed, be such a thing as a `religious` way of living, which is all too close to bargaining: I’ll keep your rules, God, and then You do for me what I desire. Some of us have been there and know it just doesn’t work; we could never be sure where we stand with God, because we were never sure how far we’ve kept His commands; in fact the more we’ve grasped what this holy God is like, the more we’ve realized we aren’t keeping His commands. But then `religion` becomes something that just makes us feel guilty; and instead of experiencing the assured `joy of our salvation`, we find ourselves only able to keep on saying, Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy on me. Or worse still, our `religion` can become no more than egoistic negotiating with God – God I’ve done my bit, I really have, now You owe me blessing, You owe me wealth and prosperity, You owe me what I want, indeed You owe me heaven.

And we’ve thought about this, and we’ve seen that God revealed the old testament law, actually the best `religion` humanity’s ever had, to show us (among other things), by Israel’s history and experience, that this whole religious, bargaining, way of approaching God to which we are so prone just doesn’t work. We don’t want, and God doesn’t want, a relationship where we’re bargaining across a table. We want a relationship of love with God where we’re on the same side; where God’s not on the other side watching to see if we’ve kept His law and deserve our reward; rather He’s on our side, as our Saviour and Coach and Brother and Friend. Plus, of course, if we’ve got any self-knowledge, we know we don’t keep God’s law anyway. (I remember when two Jehovah’s Witnesses turned up at my door and told me that, if only I kept the two great commandments, I could go to paradise. I told them it was the most depressing message I’d ever heard; I was doing my best, and hopefully growing, but still I failed totally to keep those two great commandments, and so did they; so no paradise for us then….) But if that’s so, we can only come to God through His unearned mercy…

And we know exactly this is the wonder of the new testament gospel. Yes, we sin, & we fail; but Jesus died to pay for all those failures; and because of His grace, His colossal undeserved love that He’s showed in so many ways but above all in dying for us, He offers us 150% unearned, permanent forgiveness; and we can come to Him now purely through putting trust in His death, that paid once and for all for every sin we’ve committed. And when we do, He comes to live in us and is, forever, utterly, on the same side as us. That’s what the gospel shows us: salvation, forgiveness, by totally unearned grace, through faith!

So in the light of this, Deuteronomy is a puzzling book, even a book of mixed messages – until we read it prayerfully & carefully. For as we read Deuteronomy, it’s actually full of quiet hints that there has got to be more to it than that covenant/deal/bargain; continual pointers to something else beyond.

Already in the fourth chapter there’s a very clear and lengthy warning. 4:23-31: `If you … do evil in the eyes of the Lord… I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you this day that you will quickly perish.` And this is repeated over and over again, especially towards the book’s end in chapters 29 and 31: `I know that after my death`, says Moses, `you are sure to become utterly corrupt`, 31:29 (see also vv16-18,21,27). So it’s already clear that the way of obedience to the law on its own isn’t going to work. And Moses’ whole song of ch32 repeats this again (vv5-6,15-35) – but, he then presents how God’s healing and deliverance will come, and it’s only through His unearned grace and forgiveness (vv36-39). Which of course is the new testament gospel…

So why then read Deuteronomy? John Lennox has a helpful illustration: God’s law is a thermometer, not a cure. If you break up a thermometer and drink it with water it won’t cure you. But what a thermometer does, what the law does, is show us what’s wrong, show us (and reading Deuteronomy will do this vital thing) our sin & its huge seriousness; help us grasp that right and wrong really matter to God, and that we seriously need to be forgiven. And also, as we’ve said, we humans are so very prone to a `religious` way of living that gets horribly close to bargaining: I-do-this-for-you-God- and–you-do-this-for-me; and God revealed the OT law to show us (among other things), through all that followed, that that will never work. Like we’ve said, what He wants is in contrast a relationship of deep, mutual love, where we’ve been forgiven by God’s unearned grace and therefore are totally on the same side. (Perhaps as we read this we’ll sense God’s voice calling us to pause right now and think about this, and say to Him, I want this; I trust Your death for me on the cross, I ask you to be my Leader and Saviour living inside me… )

But then: God is an awesomely creative God, and so as usual with Scripture there’s a lot more going on here. Otherwise we might wonder why Deuteronomy was not forgotten once we had the new testament; whereas actually it’s one of the four books quoted most heavily by the early church writers. For example the last part of Hebrews leads up to 12:25-28, quoting Deuteronomy 4: `Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire.”` The Bible as a whole isn’t an embodiment of warnings of judgment like Deuteronomy (that would turn it into something more like the Quran). But Deuteronomy is a vital vitamin to train us in this godly `reverence and awe` that we need so much – and the character change it will empower us for.

We don’t get saved and into God’s family by what we do. But once we’re inside God’s family, then taking Him really seriously, and taking obedience to Him seriously, really matters. `Whoever has my commands and keeps them`, says Jesus, `is the one who loves Me. The one who loves Me will be loved by my Father… Anyone who loves Me will obey My teaching. My Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them` (John 14). But that life-giving obedience is naturally no more possible for us than for OT Israel. Only God’s gift of a new heart, a whole new centre to our being, that we receive when we give ourselves to Jesus and are `born again`, can empower us to obey him. But then that new heart of a child of God is recognized in that we love to please God; not to bargain or earn anything, but because we genuinely revere and love God & really want to give Him joy…

So which way does my personality tend? If that new heart is not yet really dominating me, there are two possible effects in my life. For some of us, the Christian life is still just about obeying rules (legalism), and we need to learn to love God, to foster the sense of our wonderful relationship as His children, and so to want above all just to bring Him pleasure. But others of us slip into the opposite problem: provided I have a heart, a passion, for God, then actual obedience and the fear of the Lord don’t really matter. Outside church I may get drunk, lose my temper with my kids or spouse or parents, watch porn, not forgive, gossip, live to get and spend money, and I don’t really care. And Jesus knows some of us are like that, and He says, then you need to hear My words to you in Deuteronomy…

Let’s therefore note three last things about God’s words in Deuteronomy that can lead us into a deeper life with Him.

First: what is the aspect of God that this book emphasizes for our worship, rather than any other? Well: this is the book of God revealing himself as the `great fire`. Look, for example (it will feed you!), at 4:11,12,15,24,36, and 5:24-26. This is not God’s most central self-revelatory image; He has given us a whole planet full of pictures of himself, and the most central `image of God` is humankind, and above all Jesus as the perfect human. If we want to know what God is like, we look above all at Jesus! But God’s nature is very rich and multifaceted, & there are other pictures of God we need like vitamins. If Deuteronomy was all we ever read, our idea of God would be unbalanced, but we do need to feed sometimes on this. `Who of us can dwell with the consuming fire? Who of us can dwell with everlasting burning?`, asks Isaiah 33:14; and the answer must be, Only someone who has themselves been turned into fire, into God’s nature. Again let’s recall the lesson Hebrews draws from this chapter: `Let us…worship God acceptably with reverence and awe, for our “God is a consuming fire”.` Practically then: let’s think about this, on the bus, in the car, walking along the street: worshipping God as the `consuming fire`. We sometimes sing: `Purify my heart… Consuming fire, my heart’s one desire is to be holy`– and if we‘ve meant that we’ve got it, this vital, life-changing part of the vision of Himself that we need, and that the God who is with us lovingly wants us to have.

A second thing in chapter 4 is closely related: God’s judgment on sins, including ours, is a reality – the judgment that happened in Baal Peor (v3) and all too possibly lay in Israel’s future (v26); but what strikes me especially is the judgment that came on Moses’ own sin, meaning he himself couldn’t enter the promised land (v21). The Moses who writes Deuteronomy is very human; he’s really hurting and he talks repeatedly about this (1:37, 3:25-27); and indeed he dies just outside Palestine (34:4). It’s serious: God is impartial, utterly holy, there’s no favouritism. But actually – and once again – there’s more going on: God’s grace is an incredibly creative thing, and once again if we know our new testament we know law and judgment are not the end of the story; because on the mount of transfiguration we see Moses again, and by God’s grace he has made it into the promised land! But right here in Deuteronomy 4, it’s heartbreaking for Moses: he’s disobeyed God, and the loss to him is real; the judgment, even on such a man as Moses, has been real. We need to remember this!

And that’s why he gets emotional in this book (eg 4:9, 25-26). Moses `pours his large, loving heart out to the congregation so dear to him`, says Mackintosh, `in glowing, earnest, soul-stirring accents.` Moses knows that sin can really cost what matters most to us, and so his word to them, and to us, is (4:9): Be seriously careful! So then, thirdly, the challenge to us is: Where might I be being careless about sin, and about living God’s way; and what shall I do about that? How can I better cultivate the heart-habit of the reverence, the `fear`, of the Lord (4:10)? Reading Deuteronomy will help us with this, over & over again:  <sup>`</sup>Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear Me and keep all My commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever’ (5:29); `And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to Him, to love Him!` (10:12). `Assemble the people—men, women and children, and the foreigners residing in your towns—so they can listen and learn to fear the Lord your God… Their children, who do not know this law, must hear it and learn to fear the Lord!` (31:12,13).

Here then is the practical word from God from this book: Learn to fear the Lord! Isaiah (11:3) says the mark of Jesus, as the One anointed supremely by the Spirit, is that `He will delight in the fear of the Lord `. In Acts 9 a hallmark of the growing church is that `it grew in numbers, living in the fear of the Lord`. Is this passionate reverence a hallmark of your character? Of mine? I remember my friend Martin Wagner saying at our church council meeting, `One thing people are not seeing or hearing in us is a fear of God.` Maybe if they did they would seek God’s forgiveness – and without that they may well not bother, and our outreaches will be fruitless…

Jesus is with us as we read His Word, calling us to grow and to change. Other Bible books don’t present this awesome God as the `great fire`, but this is what He wants to impress on us, deeply, from this one; and our lives will be different if we feed on this book and receive it. `The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom` (Prov 9:10), the beginning of holiness, the beginning of a deeper life with God.

Deuteronomy can give us that. Do we want it?

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