I'm going to look today at the climax of the stories of one of
the most legendary leaders in history, his foster mother,
which would become his, I guess his adoptive mother rather would
would name this character Moses, whose name literally meant to
draw out because when she found him, he was in the Nile and she
drew him out of the Nile. And that that would also be a
prophetic name because God would use him later to draw out his
people, an entire nation of 2 to 3,000,000 out of their bondage
to slavery in the single most dramatic event in human history.
There was nothing quite like the Exodus.
And the Scriptures tell us this. Deuteronomy 432 says, ask now of
the days that are past, which were before you, since the day
that God created man on the earth as from one end of heaven
to the other. Whether such an event has ever
happened or was ever heard of, there's nothing quite like this
event. A series of miracles or occur.
Moses leads and records this, the series of miraculous events
that happened 3500 years ago. A nation of people, 600,000 men,
not including the women and the children, had grown so large
where they were in Egypt that the Egyptians began to be afraid
because they said if there's ever an uprising, we can no
longer defend ourselves against this people.
And so a new king, a new pharaoh arose, and he put the people
into labor. And Deuteronomy 4 calls this
experience an iron furnace. Because the pressure on them was
so great. Exodus 113 says they ruthlessly
made the people of Israel work as slaves and made their lives
bitter with hard service and mortar and brick and all kinds
of work in the field. So the pressure of persecution
and oppression was on them, and they cried out to their God, and
their God heard them. And he stretched out his hand,
and he moved, and he drew through Moses this people out
into the land that God had promised to their fathers.
So Moses ascent to the Pharaoh repeatedly to tell him these
words. Let my people go, that my people
may serve me. And God sends as Pharaoh hardens
his heart, as God hardens Pharaoh's heart, he will not let
the people go. So he sends Moses to bring
plagues, and these 10 miraculous dramatic plagues come on the
Egyptian Egyptians and their magicians.
He turns the Nile to blood. It's his first act.
And all the wildlife or all the fish of that Nile River are
killed and their economy dries up.
This was not soot and silt that was red colored.
It was a miracle. And he begins to send these
plagues, frogs and gnats and flies, and he kills their
livestock, and he brings boils and then hail and locusts, and
terrifyingly, he brings deep darkness.
And then the climax of all of those events is the death of
every first born in Egypt. And so with that, Pharaoh says
there's not going to be anybody left.
There's not going to be anything left.
And he relents and he lets the people go.
He sends them out, 600,000 besides the women and children.
And he doesn't leave them by himself, but he goes before
them, showing them the way in a pillar of cloud, reaching into
the heavens by day and it by night to illuminate the
wilderness. He goes before them in a pillar
of fire. And when the Pharaoh, the king
of Egypt, is told that the people fled, some time has gone
by, he sets his mind to go and capture them the lest he loses.
He realizes he lost his labor force and the the building
projects have stopped. And so he says, I'm going to go
and get them back. And the Israelites, God leads
them to the Red Sea. He leads them to a a site that
we believe is the Gulf of Aqaba, which is several 100 feet deep
at its shallowest and 1000 feet deep at its deepest.
And the Pharaoh sends his armies with their Chariots after God's
people, saying the wilderness has trapped them in.
And so vulnerable Israel is trapped between this vast sea on
the one side and an approaching army on the other.
And the people begin to grumble and they begin to fear greatly
as any of us would. And then Moses gives this
wonderful speech and his courage and conviction.
He says, fear not, stand firm and see the salvation of the
Lord, which he will work for you today, for the Egyptians whom
you see today you will never see again.
The Lord will fight for you, and you only have to be silent.
And with those words he takes his staff and his arm, and he
raises it over the sea as God commanded him.
And the two bodies of water, the, the water splits, and
there's these two massive walls of water on either side, and a
way is made where there was no way.
And God's people begin to pass harmless through the middle.
The pillar of clouds moves behind Israel, between the army
and the people of God, and Israel moves as the army comes
behind them. And when the last Israelite has
crossed the sea, Moses turns again and he waves his staff
violently, drowning the host of the Egyptians in the sea.
And the people celebrate and they sing the song of Moses, the
same song we're given to sing in heaven when we've crossed the
barrier of death and we praise God that we've been brought
safely to the other side. They sing as God continues to
lead them. This was not the end.
Deliverance was not the end. It was the means to the end.
He delivered them so that he could come and that they might
be his people and he might be their God.
He delivers them so that he might speak words of revelation
to them. He brings them to Mount Sinai.
All this is paving the way for our text in Deuteronomy 5.
God's going to reveal himself to his people, and He's going to
make a covenant with him, and He's going to speak out of the
fire, swearing Himself to them. They will swear themselves to
him. And it's at that location that
he's going to reveal to them the 10 commandments, the 10 words.
And this is a gracious gift. We don't always think of this as
as a gift, but it's a gracious gift.
We heard last week Moses in Deuteronomy 410, it says that
God let us hear his words. We get to hear the revelation of
the Lord of glory. And this is significant in our
culture because the prevailing worldview of our culture is not
expecting words from God. They're not expecting any
activity from God because in their eyes there is no God, only
a natural universe where everyone's looking at one
another in confusion, wondering what is good and beautiful and
true, because it's different upon who you asked.
It's different to everybody. They're wondering where meaning
is to be found. There's no source of objective
truth. And they're wondering, how then
shall we live? They're wondering how we ought
to live. And that worldview only makes
sense if there is no divine revelation.
Francis Schaefer gave his life to making this truth known.
He says there is divine revelation.
God has spoken and we cannot feign ignorance to his words.
The problem, as Francis Schaefer puts it, is that God is there
and he is not silent. 3500 years ago God spoke in a dramatic and
remarkable fashion, such as the whole world still knows the
story. He has spoken and He has
revealed himself, and you cannot feign ignorance to his words.
And this is the only instance in all the Old Testament where God
speaks to a congregation of people directly.
He speaks through prophets, He speaks through judges and kings,
but this is the only place He speaks to them out of the fire.
And it's the voice of God. It says that He spoke from the
smoke and he smoked from the lightning, and He spoke from the
gloom. And this is Him addressing the
generation at Sinai. And now Moses is going to
rehearse those words with a new generation as they stand
encamped at the border of the Promised Land.
And he says this revelation, he says, this was for you, this was
you, this was to you. And he speaks it to a new
generation. And that event was equally
dramatic when he speaks at Sinai.
Our text last week said you came near and stood at the foot of
the mountain while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of
heaven, wrapped in darkness and cloud and gloom.
And you heard his voice from the midst of the fire.
And whatever it was, it was a very stressful experience
because the people say we can't hear any more words or we're
going to die and they're terrified.
They said we're going to be consumed.
This great fire is going to consume us.
And we ask, what words did God reveal to Israel out of the
smoke and the fire and the gloom?
The Recorded and Deuteronomy 5I invite you to turn there and
we'll read them together. Moses rehearses them with this
next generation of Israelites. Deuteronomy 5 beginning in verse
6. God says, I am the Lord your
God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the House
of slavery, out of the House of bondage.
You shall have no other gods before me.
You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness
of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth
beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.
You shall not bow down to them or serve them.
For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the
iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and 4th
generation of those who hate Me, but showing steadfast love to
thousands of those who love Me and keep My commandments.
You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for
the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in
vain. Observe the Sabbath day, but
holy as the Lord your God commanded you. 6 days you shall
labor and do all your work, but the 7th day is a Sabbath to the
Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work,
you or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant,
or your female servant, or your ox, or your donkey, or any of
your livestock, or the soldiers within your gates, that your
male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you.
You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt,
and the Lord your God brought you out with a mighty hand and
an outstretched arm. Therefore the Lord your God
commanded you to keep the Sabbath day.
Honor your father and mother, as the Lord your God commanded you,
that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in
the land that your Lord your God is giving you.
You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall
not steal, you shall not bear false witness against your
neighbor, and you shall not covet your neighbour's wife.
And you shall not desire your neighbour's house, his field, or
his male servant, or his female servant, his ox or his donkey,
or anything that is your neighbour's.
These words the Lord 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 2 tablets
of stone, and he gave them to me.
The 10 commandments is actually, in the Bible, never called the
10 commandments. And many of you know this.
It's the 10 words and that word debar is, is has a wide range of
meanings. And so some would say it's the
10 commandments, some would say it's the 10 words.
And there are many who would leave others to suggest it be
translated. The 10 principles of covenant
relationship. And I tend to go that way.
This is God swearing himself to his people.
This is them entering at a covenant, them swearing
themselves to God. And this is the nature of that
covenant. This is a covenant of love.
His law is his love. And so I want to work through an
overview of the 10 commandments. But you all know it's 1138, and
so we could spend weeks going through all of this, a week on
honoring your father and your mother, and a week on having no
other gods and not murdering or stealing.
But in this short time we have together, what I want to do is
to focus on this. Why did God give this law?
What does it matter for a New Testament Christian that God
gave the law to Israel at Sinai? What's the relevance for us?
And from the time of the Reformers, the church has
recognized that there are three uses of this law.
We get to see them all. There's three reasons.
It's just another way to say it. Three reasons that God gave the
law, and we see all of them in Scripture.
We're going to see him today. The the first reason is that the
law restrains evil. We call this the civil or the
political use of the law. It was meant to restrain the
evil of society, to put restraints on what people could
or could do. It's actually freedom to have
that constraint and that knowledge of God's will.
It's this ability to punish wrongdoing, to establish
consequences for evil. That's the first.
The second use is to restrain sin.
We call this theologically the pedagogical use because it
teaches us of our sin and it drives us to our need of a
Savior. That's the second use of the law
for you, and the third is that it guides Christian living.
We call this the didactic use. This is the principal use, the
premier use. It instructs Christians and
leads us to righteousness. It shows us God's heart, shows
us the pattern for godliness. It basically shows us who have
God's Holy Spirit. It helps us to do what we
already desire to do with all our heart, soul, mind and
strength. And that is to serve God.
It gives us the pattern. It shows us how to do that.
And we're going to look at these in series looking at the law.
It restrains evil, it reveals sin and it guides Christian
living. So the first thing is that it's
the political use. It's it restrains evil.
So remember, this is God establishing a nation.
What do you need? What are the ingredients of a
nation? You need people.
He's elected to people Now he's he's increased them to two to
three million. What do you need?
You need a law. Here is their law and you need a
land, and here they are looking at the promised land, waiting to
take it. He has all of the ingredients
for this and this body of laws he's using to create an ethical
community of faith as God defines it.
That's what he does in the church.
He's brought us together and he's created an an ethical
community of faith that lives by God's morals and God's ethics
and not those of the Pagan culture.
So that's what he's telling Israel.
I'm sending you in to be in the world, but not of the world.
I'm sending you in and you're not to live by the principles of
the nations that are surrounding you.
I'm telling you how to live. And the same is true of us in
the church. He puts us here and he says that
your culture is going to believe and value one thing.
You are not to value those things.
You are to insofar as they don't align with my word.
I've given you my word. Seek it and do it.
And when we look at this civil political use of the law, I hope
you understand we've built our society on this.
We're using this today. These are commandments that are
worthy of establishing a nation or a society.
And when we say that that Western law is built on the 10
commandments, sometimes people go kind of crazy with this and
they'll get online and go 1 by 1 and they'll say, see, there's
no, there's a disconnect here between, you know, I don't see
all these commandments in our law.
That's not what we're doing. We're not saying our forefathers
literally got out the 10 commandments and made our that's
not how what we're saying is the principles.
We say theologically, this is the moral law is summarily
comprehended in the 10 commandments.
This is a moral summary of the commandments.
It moves from God to society to family to life to sex, to
property. It's all in this.
This is comprehensive of saying God is declaring authority over
all of your life. Our worship extends to all of
life. The ethics come to all of our
life. It's summarily comprehended in
these commandments. And so America's built in part,
not fully, but in part on this law, and some of the laws that
we're talking about is that a society is built on the
principle of the imago day, which means we're made in the
image of God. Everybody is of equal and
infinite dignity and worth. We're all made in the image of
God. And this biblical principle
you're not going to find if you go somewhere like Afghanistan or
India, you're not going to find these principles because they're
built on the Scriptures. And we believe that punishments
must be restrained. And we see that the punishment,
the severity of the punishment, much must match the severity of
the offense. Where do we get that principle
except the Scriptures? There are places that you can go
like North Korea or Saudi Arabia, where that is not true.
And you see that there are principles like impartiality
before the law. And you can see before
courthouses that it's a Pagan God justice.
But we, we take these as as representative of things like
impartiality. You see that that blind woman
and she's blindfolded and she's got the scale and the scales are
balanced. It's saying we're impartial in
our judgments. And we get that from God
himself, who says in a few chapters, Deuteronomy 10, I'm
impartial. I'm the great, the mighty, the
awesome God. I am impartial and I take no
bribe. We are, we're built in part on
these principles. This Is Us exercising this, this
restraining of evil, this use of the law.
And so each term, I hope you see in this is in the second person
of direct address, they get really simple in the original,
it's literally no murder, no stealing.
It's kind of hard to miss the point, but this direct address
is actually for those who might commit a crime against God, that
they're written toward you, not to necessarily establish your
rights, but to keep you from infringing on the rights of
somebody else. It's not necessarily protecting
your rights, but protecting other people.
First and foremost, I want you to see these commandments
protect God's divine rights. There are certain rights
inherent to God by His nature of being God as your Creator.
He's the author, so He has authority.
He's your Redeemer, the supreme command, the first of the 10
commandments. In view of His gracious saving
action, Yahweh has the right to demand Israel's exclusive
allegiance. As He says, you shall have no
other gods before me, so God created them, and then he bought
them, and so now they are doubly his, and we can say the same of
Jesus Christ. You created me, and then you
bought me. I am doubly yours.
And so he says it's so much to ask as your Savior, as your
creator, as your Redeemer, that you worship no other gods.
Did those other gods deliver you?
No, He says, I delivered. You worship me Yahweh, the
second commandment. It says He has right to to
proper representation. He says I have given you my
name, He named them Israel. I have given you my glory and
now he has a right for them to live appropriately.
The same is true for you, Christian.
You have taken the name Christian, Christianos.
What does Christianos mean except follower of Christ?
He's given you his Holy Spirit. He's bought you.
Now He has a right to you representing Him.
Well, these are the divine rights.
And more than divine rights, even further, there's also human
rights. He gets into the the people that
are under a household. He says the people that are
within a household have a right to humane treatment and dignity,
even the animals. And he goes down and he says for
that reason, Deuteronomy 512 to 15, keep the Sabbath holy.
He's protecting those in the household and parents have a
right to respect from their children.
So he says honor your father and mother and Jesus is going to
even add, as you read through the New Testament, you'll see
the the implications that are being worked out from some of
these laws. Paul's going to say in first
Timothy that honor your father and mother is actually extends
to widows. As he says, honor widows who are
truly widows. And it extends to supporting
them financially and with care and providing and protecting and
including. And you see the the depth that
these laws actually go. There's a right for us to care
for our elderly. There's a right of parents to
have respect from their children.
Honor your father and mother. The next person has a right to
life, therefore he says you shall not murder.
The next person has a right to a secure marriage and to sexual
purity. Therefore you shall not commit
adultery. The next person has a right to
property. You shall not steal.
The next person has a right to honest and truthful testimony in
court. You shall not bear false
witness. The next person has a right to
enjoy property without fear that somebody else is going to want
it for themselves. You shall not covet.
And that is that the 10th commandment brings us back to
where we began. It actually intensifies because
the 10th commandment, you may have noticed or learned before,
takes the laws. They're no longer external
things that you do with your hands and feet.
But it's an issue of the heart. We can violate God's commandment
in our inner man. So there's these rights.
What is our Declaration of Independence say?
We hold these truths to be self-evident.
That all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator
with certain unalienable rights. These are not rights that we
invented. These are rights that were
revealed to man by God. So these 10 commandments are the
law of God summarily comprehended.
They are the summation of the laws on which a healthy society
will be based. Again, God's ethic extends from
the society to the family to the life to sex, to property.
It restrains evil and promotes a just society when we live
according to it. And I want you to remember last
week we saw that obedience to God's law was actually part of
Israel's mission. And they were.
They were to live by these things and invite the comparison
of the world where the whole world is going to look at them
and recognize their life is better.
You're you as being a Christian or inviting other people to
compare themselves to you and they're supposed to say it is to
use the language of Deuteronomy for and more just and more
righteous. They're supposed to look at your
marriage and say they have something that I don't to your
family to your society. They have something that I
don't. What's the missing ingredient
And that's our evangelistic opportunity to say it's Jesus
Christ and his righteousness. And God knew that when others
looked at Israel, they were going to see someone that was
more just and righteous. 3000 years after Moses led the
Exodus, the reformers begin to to order their society and, and
to put pressure on their society to live according to these
Christian principles. And it made such a splash that
it LED people like Max Weber to take notice.
And he said wherever the Reformation went, wherever good
theology went, there went prosperity and flourishing.
It's meant to invite comparison. People take notice.
When you live according to the principles of Scripture, it goes
well. And so the first purpose of the
law is to restrain evil. And God gives us all kinds of
ways to do that. He gives you at the individual
level, He gives you a conscience.
Your conscience helps you restrain evil.
At the family level, He gives you parents.
At the level of the church, He gives you a body that holds you
accountable and pastors. And at the level of society, He
gives you just ethical laws that you can put into practice and to
live by, praise God. Second purpose of the law is to
reveal sin. The pedagogical use, Romans 7,
verse 7. If it had not been for the law,
I would not have known sin. God teaches us sin.
So everywhere every Christian has to wrestle with the
question, how does the Old Testament law relate to my life?
So what if there's 10 commandments?
What does it matter in Oklahoma if we had a lawsuit from the
ACLU and they removed him from our capital?
What does it matter? What does it matter if it's at
your courthouse? What's the relevance today?
Paul says in the New Testament that the law is a mirror.
It functions. The metaphor you want you to
think of it as is a mirror that's reflecting the perfect
righteousness of God on the earth.
That's what the law represents. It is the perfect righteousness
of God. You keep the law perfectly, you
achieve righteousness as he defines it.
But the problem is we can't keep the law perfectly.
We can't achieve the perfect righteousness of God.
And that is why we say the law exposes our sin and draws us to
our need of a Savior. This is why we say that the law
has no power to save. The law only has power to
condemn. That's why Paul says in Romans
7, the law kills me, it slays me, it leads only to death.
The law has no power. It's just rules.
It's the same concept Jesus uses when he takes that Old Testament
law and brings it a little bit more into our New Testament
context. He gives the parable of the Good
Samaritan. I know he's talking about the
law because he asks what is written in the law and how do
you read it? And they get a little fired
about who your neighbor is. And Jesus takes that Old
Testament law and he puts it in a New Testament context.
And he says tells the story of a man who spent his time and his
money and his energy on a stranger who fell among robbers.
And he cares deeply for him and he commands him just like the 10
commandments command of you go and do likewise.
Go and live this way. And the point of Jesus to this
lawyer, the the take away was you could never live like this.
The point of the Good Samaritan is that, you know, not that we
need a, a world full of good Samaritans, it's that there is
no world full of good Samaritans.
There are no good Samaritans. No one can live like that.
That's the purpose of the law, to show our inability to keep
the law. It's to undo us.
It's to reveal our sin and to kill us, which is why if you're
trying to achieve some measure of righteousness on your own
through works, you're trying to impress God with your
righteousness. You can't.
It's futile. This is why the Pharisees and
the scribes and the lawyers were condemned.
And even in Deuteronomy 5, if you look down to verse 25, you
see these people crying out for a mediator.
Even here he says, they say, Now therefore why should we die?
For this great fire will consume us.
If we hear the voice of our Lord our God anymore, we shall die.
For who is there of all flesh that has heard the voice of the
living God speaking out of the midst of the fire as we have and
still lived? They say to Moses, Be our
mediator. In a word he says, Go near and
hear all that the Lord will say, and speak to us all that the
Lord our God will speak to you, and we will hear and do it.
And they tell Moses, you go, you go here, you go, stand in the
gap and tell us what he has to say.
And it's a stressful event. You remember Moses goes and
stands in the presence of God and he comes back and his face
is radiating with the resplendent glory of God.
It's stressful. And in the same way, we need a
mediator who will stand in the gap for us.
And we've been given such a mediator in the person of Jesus
who fulfilled the law on our behalf.
Write this verse down Second Corinthians 36.
The letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
The law kills you because it has no power to do anything.
The power comes from God's Holy Spirit, from the righteousness
of Jesus Christ. There's power in Christ, there's
power in the Spirit. That's why Jesus says of the
law. I came not to abolish the law,
but to fulfill it. So is the law relevant for you
today? Absolutely.
The righteous requirement is there.
God's righteousness is still there.
It's that we just don't have to accomplish it on our own.
It's been accomplished for us. And Jesus doesn't use the
language of keeping the law. He uses it as fulfilling the law
even as he was baptized. Jesus didn't need to be
baptized. Why was he baptized?
He didn't need to be cleansed from his sin.
He says this was necessary to fulfill all righteousness.
He got baptized because he's living your life.
And you had to be baptized because that was a requirement
of you. And so that's what we're
celebrating even today. Jesus fulfilled the law at every
point perfectly. How do we know?
Because Resurrection Sunday, because Jesus was raised from
the dead by the glory of God the Father, we say that was
validating his work of atonement, meaning that Jesus
was the perfect and acceptable sacrifice for sin.
That's what today means. That's the power of the
resurrection. Jesus was who he said he was,
and he accomplished what he said he would.
He fulfilled the law of God perfectly so that all those who
by grace through faith, who put their faith in him, he gifts
them that life. He gives them that righteousness
so that we don't have to beat our heads against the wall
trying to fulfill the law. He's fulfilled it for us.
He no longer, He didn't even just keep the letter of the law,
but He fulfilled the heart of it.
He was the Good Samaritan, the only one.
What does the Bible say about our relationship with the Old
Testament law? There's metaphors that the New
Testament gives so that we can understand it.
Galatians 324 to 25 says that the law was our teacher, It was
our tutor until Christ came. And so Christ has come, but it
still teaches us about the righteousness of God.
And now we're no, we're no longer under the law, Scripture
says, but under grace, no longer under the law of Moses, but
under the new covenant, the covenant which says simply, all
those who believe in Christ, by grace, through faith, he will
save. Romans 7 gives the metaphor of a
spouse whose whose spouse dies. You're you're united until death
do you part. But once death does you part,
you're free to marry another. And he uses this metaphor and he
says we have died to our former spouse, which is the law, and we
are now are free to marry another, namely Christ and
grace. And so now we are married to
grace James 212 gives another one.
It says so speak and so act as those who are to be judged under
the law of liberty. We're not judged by the law
anymore. These 10 commandments, those
have been fulfilled. Now we are judged by the law
that liberates the law that liberates is the gospel.
So Christ fulfilled the law of Moses perfectly that all who
believe in him. This is the absolute beauty of
the gospel, the absolute beauty of redemption and salvation.
God gives you his Holy Spirit so that you actually have the power
to keep the law, however imperfectly.
That's the graciousness of our Savior.
Romans 82 The law of the Spirit of life has set you free from
the law of sin and death, and no gospel is complete without
making a demand of you. Jesus says if you come, if you
are are burdened, if you're weary and heavy laden, if you
come to him under this load of the law, he will give you rest
from it. That's why he says, come to me
all who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.
He says, take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I'm
gentle and lowly in heart and you will find what rest for your
souls rest from trying to achieve righteousness.
He offers you the law of liberty that you may find grace.
The final use of the law is in light of your salvation by grace
through faith. The final use of the law is the
didactic use. It means that the law guides our
Christian living. It helps the the Christian to do
what we already want to do, to please God and to serve Him.
So studying the 10 commandments gives us an opportunity to even
reflect devotionally and what these commandments are saying.
I want to introduce a guy named Daniel Block.
He wrote a book called The Gospel According to Moses, and
he gives a wonderful list of how these commands point us to
worship. I want to give you just a few of
them. He says laws are not a
precondition to be saved, but a gracious response of those who
are already saved. He says laws are not primarily a
duty imposed by one party onto another, but an expression of
covenant relationship. He says obedience to the law is
not a precondition for salvation, but a precondition to
the fulfillment of your Christian mission and of your
blessing. He says the the revelation of
the law is a a supreme and unique privilege and obedience
to the law is an external expression of an inward
disposition of faith. And the laws are perceived
holistically or viewing all of life under the authority of God.
So what do the laws do? They guide us into worship.
They guide us into faithful living so we don't throw it away
because Christ is here. My wife says it this way all the
time. And I say to you every couple
months, His law is his love. God's law is the expression of
his love because the law shows us things like that.
God is impartial. And so then he says, go and love
orphans and widows and sojourners.
And so then when you go out in the world and you fulfill this
command to love orphans and widows and sojourners and to
behave impartially, guess what you're doing?
You're manifesting his values on the earth.
You're pleasing him. You're showing his values and
his loves, his laws, his love. That's why Kevin Vanhooser, he
has a book upstairs. He prevents a a wonderful
theological framework that he calls theodrama.
It's the the the drama of doctrine is the book.
And in this theodrama he gives a metaphor.
He says God is like a playwright and the scriptures are the
script and the church is the cast and the world is the stage
and history is the unfolding drama.
And he points us to the to the Baptist baptism and he says it's
a it's a play, We're acting out a play and it's the gospel.
And he says, look at Lord's Supper.
It's another play. We're acting out to remind us of
the cross. He says, so your life, this
whole drama of redemption is a play.
We're engaged in the cosmic drama where we're the actors in
the Bible is the script that we're performing.
And with that metaphor, it reminds us that the Bible and
the the commandments are not just for intellectual knowledge
so that we can accumulate them and say, look at all I know
about God. He gives us the script so that
it can guide our living, which brings us to our response.
Look to verse 31 and you're going to see our responsibility
not only to hear the law, but to do it.
Read with me verses 31 and to the end.
But you stand here by me, and I will tell you the whole
commandment and the statutes and the rules that you shall teach
them, that they may do them in the land that I'm giving you to
possess. You shall be careful then to do
as the Lord your God has commanded you.
You shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left.
You shall walk and all the way the Lord your God has commanded
you, that you may live, that it may way go, may go well for you,
and that you may live long in the land that you shall possess.
Want to highlight verse 33. For you walk in all the way that
the Lord your God has commanded you.
So do them, because God promises that if you do, you'll be
blessed. And do them.
Because God has revealed himself in time.
He spoke from the fire. He is there, and He is not
silent. We don't have to grope around in
the dark trying to figure out what is good and beautiful and
true. He has told you, O man, what is
good. And we cannot feign ignorance.
And God delivered Israel, not that they could because they
kept the law, but so that they might keep the law.
And the same is true of Christianity.
Now we've been delivered in order to keep and remember and
do all that God has commanded. And we must remember that his
commandments are not burdensome for those who love Him.
And we've said it before in previous sermons that the more
you align your heart to the heart of Scripture and the more
you come to know God, the less you need rules like the 10
commandments pointing the finger at you and telling you the way
you you ought to go. It's written on your heart, and
you long to do them. And so today, remember the
resurrection and the work that Christ did.
Remember what the resurrection means, that God fulfilled this
law perfectly on your behalf. And you can live in obedience
and confidence and rest and grace and mercy with intensity
and zeal, not so that you can earn a reward, but because you
already have the reward. And we run that others may know,
and that the knowledge of the Lord might cover the earth as
the waters cover the sea. Deacons, I invite you please to
come forward as we remember the work of Christ.
We prepare our hearts for communion by praying church.
Please pray with me, Lord, we can keep this law and we
recognize now our need for a mediator.
We see that some 633 laws that we can never keep on our best
day, Lord, and we recognize that the glory of you, the only Son
of God, you came so that you might live a perfect life.
You might live in complete obedience to this so that we
don't have to. And we praise you that we're
granted your spirit so that we, we have the power to please you.
You've given us the power to keep this law, Lord.
And so we say, help us. Help us to run.
Help us not to go to the right hand or to the left, but live a
life of faithfulness so that the world will look on us, our life,
our marriage, our children. And they will say, I want what
they have. Their God is the true God.
God, we love you. Be with us now in Christ's name,
Amen. Thanks for listening.
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www.heritageshawnee. Dot org.