Dennis Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is found in Deuteronomy 4:1-20. Deuteronomy 4:1-20. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Now therefore, hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and judgments which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you. Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you.

Your eyes have seen what the Lord did because of Baal Peor. For all the men that followed Baal Peor, the Lord thy God hath destroyed them from among you. But ye that did cleave unto the Lord your God are alive, every one of you this day. Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.

For what nation is there so great, who hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord our God is in all things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day? Only take heed to thyself and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life, but teach them thy sons and thy sons’ sons, especially the day that thou stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb.

When the Lord said unto me, “Gather me the people together, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they shall live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children.” And ye came near and stood under the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire unto the midst of heaven, with darkness, clouds, and thick darkness. And the Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire.

Ye heard the voice of the words, but saw no similitude; only ye heard a voice. And he declared unto you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, even the ten commandments. And he wrote them upon two tables of stone. And the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments, that ye might do them in the land whither ye go over to possess it.

Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves, for ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire, lest ye corrupt yourselves and make you a graven image, the similitude of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any beast that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged fowl that flieth in the air, the likeness of anything that creepeth on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the waters beneath the earth.

And lest thou lift up thine eyes unto heaven, and when thou seest the sun and the moon and the stars, even all the host of heaven, shouldest be driven to worship them and serve them, which the Lord thy God hath divided unto all nations under the whole heaven. But the Lord hath taken you and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day.

Let us pray. Father, we thank you for your word, and we pray now that your Holy Spirit would teach this word to us and reform us. In Christ’s name we ask it. Amen.

It’s an old song. The chorus went, “Just another day, just another week.” We’ve gone through, and I just want to point out some correspondences. I got my tax bill this last week. Property owner now—owner of property, debtor now—trying to achieve ownership. As a result, I’m more involved in understanding the degree to which our property is taxed by the state and then used to finance the very schools that undermine the Christian faith of our country as well as various other governmental institutions.

Your tax bill is a declaration to you of our being in subjection to a foreign power—a foreign power that is opposed to the crown of the Lord Jesus Christ, which indoctrinates children in schools to think that God is not at the basis of all knowledge.

I received an update this week from Ocean regarding the ESDs. In spite of the new law, they are hassling people in Multnomah County. Another indication of who’s in control and who isn’t, in spite of what the laws may or may not say.

I also found out for the first time—I don’t live in Portland, but I wish I would have heard of this earlier. Portland now has a daytime curfew. If your children go to Portland during school hours, they should have a note on them, or else they could end up in custody. You can assure them that your children are homeschooled and not subject to the compulsory attendance laws of the state of Oregon in terms of being at school during those hours.

Another picture of our subjection to a foreign power, as it were.

Also this last week I read in the paper where Jerry Falwell had a joint worship service with some homosexuals—a joint conference dedicated to eliminating violence against homosexuals, declaring that we should have unconditional love for them and get along with them. Now, I understand the need to speak out against the wickedness of men taking the law into their own hands and attacking homosexuals with their fists. That’s a horrendous act of physical violence, as I hope we’ve understood going through the case laws of Exodus 21. But I agree with Andrew Sandlin, who wrote this in response to that.

He said that Jerry Falwell’s piece on homosexuality was most disturbing. While each of us deplores violence against homosexuals and, for that matter, violence against Chinese Christians and unborn children, to cite 1 John 4:11 and 4:40 to buttress the idea that Christians are to love homosexuals as brothers is to do violence to the Bible itself.

Sandlin went on to say that Falwell advocates unconditional love toward homosexuals. The Bible knows nothing of this. God does indeed love the world—John 3:16—but he hates those wicked who refuse to cast themselves by faith on the redemptive work of his son Jesus Christ and who spurn his holy law. We may never assume that God is unwilling to save the most egregious sinner, but we dare not assume an attitude towards sin and sinners any less vehement than what the Bible does.

I’m afraid that in today’s ambiance of politically correct stampedes, Falwell has been guilty of watering down the Bible’s dire estimate of sin and sinners in an effort to appear gracious and brotherly. Grace and brotherhood are great Christian virtues, but not at the expense of tolerance towards sin. We may be neither less nor more tolerant than the Bible.

Good words from Andrew Sandlin.

Also, I got another email this week about kind of summing up some of what is being attempted to be foisted on the American population. This is a poem called “It Takes a Village.”

It takes a village, so we’re told, to raise a child today.
It takes a village, we reply, to steal his heart away,
To purge old-fashioned dos and don’ts from his enlightened mind,
To leave old-fashioned Ma and Paw a hundred years behind.

It takes a village, verily, to teach some mother’s son
To steal and gamble, smoke and swear and vandalize for fun.
His mother didn’t teach him that. His father, no, not he.
It takes a village to corrupt a village, verily.

It takes a village, this we know, to teach the maiden sweet,
To dress and act, to look and talk like women of the street.
It takes a village, not a doubt, to teach a maiden mild
To save the monkeys, owls, and whales and kill her unborn child.

It takes a village, public school, some subtle classroom chats,
To teach the little boys and girls to act like alley cats,
To teach them of the birds and bees without morality,
To teach them what to do and how and tell them they are free.

It takes a village, yes indeed, to brainwash all the youth
With notions and with fallacies in place of sense and truth—
Abortion rights, the right to die, the rights of animals,
Creative spelling, unisex, the rights of criminals.

It takes a village, well, we know, to turn their minds away,
To stand for fancy children’s rights and parents’ rights deny,
To honor human nature less and trees and rivers more,
To sacrifice to Mother Earth and Father God, ignore.

It takes a village, so they say, but something more, they mean:
United Nations, Washington, the liberal machine,
Society, the brave new world, the socialistic scheme,
The global ideology, the New World Order dream.

Well, another piece of news I heard just this morning—here in Jefferson, right, not too far down the road from Salem, down that way here in Oregon—some man took an eleven-month-old baby and threw it in a dumpster. The baby’s safe now. The man is hopefully going to be charged. I think he has been charged with attempted murder. That’s good. But we see increasingly infanticide following on the heels of abortion in the context of our land.

Now, this is a day that we celebrate Reformation. The only occurrence in the King James version of the Bible of the word “reformation” is found in Hebrews 9:10, which should be a familiar passage to most of us because it’s the passage that very neatly summarizes the Old Testament sacrificial system—the sacraments of the Old Testament into two types: washing ordinances or cleansing ordinances, and then food and drink ordinances.

And it says that these were imposed until a time of reformation. And the word “reformation” there in the Greek means a straightening out of things. And if we understand the crooked nature of our country at this stage in its history, we know that reformation—a straightening out—is what we need.

Today is also a day that I decided to touch briefly on our voters’s guide. I do an election day sermon every year to try to speak to the issues that God has raised to the level of dialogue and discussion in our state.

This year, not so much, because it’s an off-year election. So far, about twenty percent of the ballots have been cast. Very few people control these elections these days. But in any event, I’ve kind of combined these two because of the speakers we’ve had the last two weeks. My election day sermon’s coming a little late, but I thought I’d combine these together.

And what I want to do is use the text from Deuteronomy 4 to speak to three observations on that text, which give us three important truths that characterize true reformation in any time. And then I want to kind of apply the gist of all that to the voters’s guide and look at the nine Oregon ballot measures and see summarized there some elements of what we need to proclaim and to practice as Christians to affect reformation in our lives—to straighten ourselves out, to straighten our children out, to straighten our church out, and to straighten our country out. Reformation.

So let’s turn now to Deuteronomy 4, and we’ll begin by making these three observations on the text, accompanied by truths I think that they tell us.

We find, first of all, an observation that we have a commandment to hear and obey God’s law and thus exercise dominion. Verse one: “Now therefore, hearken, O Israel, unto the statutes and judgments which I teach you, for to do them, that ye may live, and go in and possess the land which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you.”

So we have a commandment here to hear—hearken, O Israel—and then to do, to obey God’s law, these commandments and judgments. And this hearing and doing is represented as the very life of the people—that ye may live—and that life is connected to the proper exercise of dominion in the context of the land in which they would be going into.

Deuteronomy is a reflection on the commandments of God, the ten commandments. It’s a sermon essentially by Moses, and it prepares the people for going into the promised land. Notice here, as I said, that there is a relationship between the hearing and the doing. He doesn’t tell them just to do. He tells them to hearken, to listen, to pay attention, and then to actually implement the commandments he has given them. And the end result of this is that they might live.

For us as Christians, to live is to exercise the providence of God, to fulfill the commandments that God has given us to do in our lives. That is life to us. To walk away from the commandments of God—it isn’t just that it doesn’t just carry a threat that we will be cut off in the context of the land, but really to move away from the law of God mediated to us graciously by the Lord Jesus Christ is to move away from life itself.

And our life itself here is put in the conjunction of going in and possessing the land which the Lord God of your fathers giveth you. We are the Israel of today. The Lord God of our fathers has given us the land in which he has planted us. And our very life should be seen as focused on exercising proper dominion in the context of the land in which we have been placed.

There’s a connection between the law of God and the exercise of dominion. This connection must be proclaimed. We must be reminded in a time of reformation to hearken unto the law of God, to pay strict attention to it, and then to do it as well. And that this very hearing and doing is our life, and that life is seen in the context of the exercise of dominion for the Lord Jesus Christ.

Our chief goal is to glorify God. People, I know we like the “enjoy him forever” part of it, and that’s very important, which we’ll see here in point three. But understand that we must be striving with all of our hearts to glorify God by knowing and keeping his word.

Now let me just say that involves labor on our part. That involves work on our part. To know anything requires attention to details. And I would just at the very beginning of this sermon ask you to reflect on whether your life is nice and pulled straight in the presence of God or if it’s knotted up in some ways that require reformation.

How well do you pay heed to the word of God? How well do you know the scriptures? If I asked you adults today and you older children to tell me the ten commandments, could you do it? If I asked you to tell me the Lord’s Prayer, could you recite it? Now, you probably could, because liturgically we’ve accomplished that here. And maybe you could at the ten commandments because we as a church have buttressed your knowledge of that. But if I ask you to tell me what the Pentateuch is—could you do it?

Do you know the word of God? Are you making plans to understand it better? Are you making plans to make sure your children are well-versed in the scriptures? The elders of this church desire to assist in whatever way we can. We’ve probably been too reticent. But I want you—if you believe that you have not paid attention, if you’ve not hearkened unto the commandments of God—I want you to understand that’s a knot that God wants you to straighten out in the reformation of your life.

You know, I’ve said this before, and I know it sounds like it’s in my own interest to say this kind of thing. It’s not in my own interest. I’m teaching classes now during the week, doing Sunday school sermons, a lot of pastoral work going on, administrative work. I’m a busy guy. But I long for the day when people say, “Teach us more. Get another study going. We want to know this book or that book. We want to know how the scriptures apply in this area or that area.”

I longed to hear that day. It was so delightful to hear the young men and young women, originally of the church, the teens, get together a study. In the case of the young men, to go through a book on apologetics—that’s great. I long for the day when we have a reformation in our congregation, that happened as it was in Geneva when the people said, “We want to hear the word of God more than just Sundays or Sundays and Wednesdays. Preach to us. Preach every night if you will so we can learn our scriptures.”

Now, I know that this is not the only thing we have to do. To do them is very important in this. And I don’t want to overstress what I’ve just said, but I do want to drive home the point that there is no reformation without the word of God being central to it. That’s what the Reformation taught us: sola scriptura. It’s our only rule for faith and practice. True reformation happens in the context of the word of God being attended to.

Now, let me also quickly say that I don’t want you to get this wrong in terms of the doing of it. If I was to say “do the word of God, and this brings blessing and reformation” apart from the proper setting for that word, it would be very bad on my part.

Verse 20 gives us the context for the commandment to hearken and do that ye might live and possess it. Verse 20: “But the Lord hath taken you and brought you forth out of the iron furnace, even out of Egypt, to be unto him a people of inheritance, as ye are this day.”

The word of God is given to a saved people. The laws of God are given not to effect deliverance or salvation. The word of God is given to a people that are saved, to tell them how they’re to live. Now, in the context of how they’re saved, we’re going through the book of Leviticus. At the middle are these laws for holy living, but they’re preceded by sixteen chapters of sacrifices, offerings, priests, cleansings, and the day of atonement, culminating in chapter 16.

All that begins—it’s the preface—for the commandment for holy living, the holiness code found in Leviticus 17-22. And when we talk about the Reformation, we know that the great truth of salvation through faith alone is one of the great hallmarks of it.

Do you know that we have a historic remembrance of the Reformation every Lord’s day in our liturgy? It was Bucer at Strasbourg who began to refine the old liturgy he’d received, and who did what we do now at this church where you have a call to worship followed by a confession of sin and a declaration of absolution, leading up to then the worship of God’s people and their hearing of the word. The word is placed in the context of our liturgy strategically, and we didn’t make it up. We understand that it’s biblical, and we understood that from the Reformers themselves.

Every day when we come forward and hear the command to worship God, we confess our sins. We hear the words of absolution from the minister ministering in God’s stead. We go through the great Reformed truths of salvation and justification by faith alone—not as a result of works.

You see, we practice those great Reformation truths liturgically every Lord’s day. We come before God confessing our sins and being assured of the forgiveness of our sins. We’ve seen that in Leviticus 1 through 3. I’ve talked about this. Memorize it. Understand it.

We’ve got the first offering: the burnt offering, the ascension offering, which pictures the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ. We then have the grain offering. We declare God as our king, and we give him his tax, his joyful tax. We give our tribute to him in the grain offering. And then we receive the peace offering, where we ourselves receive portions of the sacrifices to eat.

In the context of Leviticus 1 through 3, we’re brought near to the presence of God. We have communion and union with him through the atoning work of the Lord Jesus Christ, who is both Savior and King. It’s in that context that we receive his word—that he has graciously saved us out of our fiery furnace of Egypt. He has called us to worship him. He calls us then to hear his word, not to become his people, but rather that we might indeed reflect his character as his people.

Last week—not this last week, a week and a half ago—I was on the radio talking about the voters’s guide. A guy calls in. Wonderful. I love these kind of questions. He said, “Do you mean we’re supposed to keep all 631 commandments of the Pentateuch? Is that what you’re telling people today?”

No, I’m not. I said absolutely not. That’s not the way we’re going to create a great state. We want to preach the gospel of Christ, cause people to recognize their sinfulness before him, accept the atoning work of Christ, and then say, “How should we live our lives?” And this is the way—the law of God.

Now, we have to apply it. None of the scriptures are written directly to us today. We have to apply those truths in the context of where we’re at and what Christ has accomplished. But those are the truths we must deal with. We must struggle with to understand how to apply in our context.

The man liked the answer. That’s just the answer he was looking for. And it was a really good time on that show to talk about the proper relationship of the grace of God, the great Reformed distinctives of justification by faith, an emphasis on the work of Jesus Christ instead of our own works, and yet leading to the application of the law of God as being a component element of any true reformation.

The Reformation lives every Lord’s day when the confession of sin is presented by the people of God, and the absolution of their forgiveness based totally on the work of the Lord Jesus Christ alone is proclaimed from the pulpit. The great reformation is ongoing in a time such as that. But it needs to proceed on then to “What do we do now that we’re God’s people?”

And so the major point we’re making here from this observation of the text is that hearing and obeying God’s gracious law—gracious law—is essential to the reformation of any land. Now, the goal is the reformation of any land. They’re going into a particular place. Matthew 28 says our obligation is to disciple the nations. And what we see then is that in the context of our land, hearing and obeying God’s law, his gracious law, and his word is essential to the reformation and the straightening out of our land.

Great reformation occurred in the context of Josiah. What spurned it? What got it going? The discovery of the law of the covenant. He cleaned up the temple. There’s the law of the covenant. Josiah reads it, and he weeps and he rends his clothes. He dies, as it were, liturgically before God. The scriptures tell us that it’s the law of God that prompted that godly reformation of Josiah.

Isaiah 8:20 says, “To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them.”

We don’t need a conservative approach to political action or reformation. We don’t need a libertarian approach. We need a distinctively Christian approach. I know many of you have heard this quote before, but it’s an excellent quote. We put it in our voters’s guide every year. It’s from R.L. Dabney, the great Southern Presbyterian theologian, about the value of conservatives who are not Christians.

He said, “This is a party which never conserves anything. Its history has been that it demurs to every aggression of the progressive party and aims to save its credit by a respectable amount of growling, but always acquiesces at last in the innovation. What was the resigned novelty of yesterday is today one of the accepted principles of conservatism. It is now conservative only in effecting to resist the next innovation, which will tomorrow be forced upon its timidity and will be succeeded by some third revolution to be denounced and then accepted or adopted in its turn.

American conservatism is merely the shadow that follows liberalism or radicalism as it moves forward toward perdition. It remains behind it but never retards it, and always advances near its leader. This pretended salt hath utterly lost its savor. Wherewith shall it be salted? Its impotency is not hard indeed to explain. It is worthless because it is the conservatism of expediency only and not of sturdy principle.

It intends to risk nothing serious for the sake of the truth and has no idea of being guilty of the folly of martyrdom. It always, when about to enter a protest, very blandly informs the wild beast whose path it is to savor to stop—that its bark is worse than its bite—and that it only means to save its manners by enacting its decent role of resistance.

The only practical purpose which it now subserves in American politics is to give enough exercise to radicalism to keep it in wind, to prevent its becoming lazy from having nothing to whip. It knows nothing,” he said, “of the folly of martyrdom.”

God calls us to obey his word in whatever circumstance we find ourselves—to cleave to God in the context of his word and spirit, even if it produces death, our physical death, our embarrassment, our ridicule, our torture, our sufferings, our persecutions. That was the truth of the Reformation.

The word of God was at the center of it. That drove them to accept martyrdom on behalf of loyalty to God and to his word. The scriptures tell us that this word of his is to be at the center of any true reformation. And note that this word is the whole word of God, not just the New Testament. All sixty-six books of the scriptures are the word of God.

Verse two tells us: “Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall ye diminish ought from it, that ye may keep the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you, to have life and to exercise proper dominion, to affect reformation. It means a cleaving to God’s word at its core—to hear it and to do it, and to do all of it—not adding to it nor taking away from it.

We stand in the midst of a culture that badly needs straightening out because we have a church that for a hundred years twisted the word of God and diminished it, removed from it the Old Testament for all intents and purposes. Praise God that he now brings forward a movement of people to recapture the whole word that he has given to us—to take all of it and hearken unto all of it, to know it, and then to apply it.

Hearken, O Israel. Hearken to what? To the need to understand, hear, know, and obey God’s word and every bit of it in terms of affecting the reformation that’s needed in our lives individually, as well as the life of our culture.

Second observation on the text: We have here a call to covenantal fidelity to our Groom that transcends external actions. Verse three: “Your eyes have seen what the Lord did because of Baal Peor. For all the men that followed Baal Peor, the Lord thy God hath destroyed them from among you, but ye that did cleave unto the Lord your God are alive, every one of you this day.”

Baal Peor was the great place of compromise and sexual sin and covenantal idolatry because of sexual sin. Where the sons of God saw the daughters of men and saw once more that they were fair, and entered into relationships with them in violation of God’s word. And he tells us here to beware of that and instead to cleave unto the Lord your God.

The word “cleave” here is the same family of words that we found in Genesis when Adam was to cleave unto his wife. We’re to cleave to God. He is our Groom. We are his bride. He is our husband, and we are his wife. And we’re to have covenantal fidelity to the Lord Jesus Christ that transcends external obligations. It’s put in the context here of either cleaving to the harlot again or cleaving to God and either being a harlot as a result of our harlotry or being faithful to God in the context of our particular setting.

The point here—the major truth here—is that in a time of true reformation, the outward hearing and observance of God’s law is accompanied by an inward cleaving to the Lord.

Now, this is a point of application that I do not want us to miss. I wish we had more people attending Bible studies. I wish we had more people here Sunday mornings. I know it’s a long day, particularly today. You young people though, who are driving your own cars—do you have a desire to know the word of God?

I think if you do, it’ll find itself, and it really frequently does. I want to compliment you, and I had a great encouraging time this last week with several young people, understanding their commitment to the word of God. But I want to keep you alive to the need to not just accept the faith of your parents, but to understand the scriptures, to know it, to hearken, oh Israel, unto that word of God, and to do it.

And now what I want to get you to think about is that this is not simply an external obedience in terms of the law of God. This is a heart cleaving to God.

Now we’re in the context of now seeing the fruit of our ministry, as it were, as a church, as a group of people being brought up. Now we’re getting a chance to examine the fruit. It’s budding out on the tree of this church, as it were. We’ve got the second generation starting to bulge through the line of who Reformation Covenant Church is.

And I’m not worried, but I do want to give you proper exhortations, young people, that you’re to cleave to the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. That’s what drove your parents to form this church—not just a desire to know and obey God’s law, not just a desire to exercise dominion in the context of the world, but a love for God, a desire to please him as our husband, a desire above all else to seek the glory of God in all that we did and say.

And to find that in the churches in which we were, it just wasn’t the way to glorify him anymore. Our motivation for establishing this church was a heartfelt love for God and a desire to glorify him.

Now, that’s a tough thing to pass on. Quite frankly, it’s easy to pass on an external knowledge of the scriptures and the commandments of God and how they apply to things. But what we really have a difficult time both passing on and measuring, young people, is your heart commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Do you love him? Do you have a true sense of biblical piety?

You know, some of you when I read that little poem about “It Takes a Village” might have snickered at a few points in it, but you know, those points are ones for us to consider. Bill Gothard, I guess, says that what parents do in moderation, their children will do in extremes. And we’ve given you children a heritage of Christian liberty in this church—an understanding of what the commandments of God say and don’t say. And we’ve not absolutely prohibited things like drinking or smoking.

But understand that when those things are done too much, when drunkenness or a pattern of continual drinking on a daily basis of alcohol to achieve a calmness goes on, or when smoking is abused to the point where all of a sudden you don’t have the cigar or the cigarette, but it’s got you—in the words of a doctor, you know, something’s wrong. And I would cause you to ask yourself: How does this action of mine glorify God?

In the context of that, we’ve given you a heritage of watching movies and trying to think through them biblically. And the end result of that, if you’re not careful, children of the covenant here, if you don’t hearken, oh Israel, to the need to be covenantally faithful to the Lord Jesus Christ as your Groom, you’re going to end up watching things you probably shouldn’t watch as young people. And you’re going to end up in the context of certain temptations going on in your life that you’re going to have a hard time overcoming because you put yourself in the way of temptations.

I’m calling for a dose of good old-fashioned biblical piety—a biblical sense of cleaving to God the way he enjoins us here. That a time of reformation must be accompanied by this hearing and observing God’s word. It must also result in a hearkening to the heartfelt commitment and devotion to the Lord Jesus Christ that produces a sense of moderation in our enjoyments of the things that God has given to us to enjoy.

It produces a sense of a guard over our lips and our tongues and our speech.

I’ve had several folks in the last few months, from different sources at different times, express some degree of concern about the language of our young people here. Does that astonish you? And I’m not trying to make you feel guilty if you haven’t done something wrong. And I’m not—you know, as I said—overall I’m very pleased with the fruit I’m seeing develop in the context of this church.

But as this next generation prepares to take over for our generation, we want to urge them to moderation of speech—speech that is careful and controlled in the Holy Ghost, out of a desire not to offend brothers or sisters in the Lord, but an even greater desire not to do anything with their tongues and their looseness of what they say that’ll be offensive to God, to the Lord Jesus Christ who shed his precious blood that we might be saved out of that fiery furnace of Egypt.

Let’s not go after the leeks and onions again. Rather, let us be transformed in the context of God’s world.

Romans 12:1-3 says: “I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. Be not conformed to this world, but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. For I say through the grace given unto me to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think, but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith.”

Have a sobriety to your lives that’s based upon this desire to please God in all things. And the end result of that and the word of God in your life will be your transformation week by week, month by month into a more properly pious, committed individual to the body of Christ and to the Lord Jesus Christ and his cause.

The opposite of this, Romans tells us, instead of being transformed, is to be conformed to the world. Now, it’s a completely different word. It’s not the same thing. You’re not transformed into worldliness. You’re conformed into worldliness. It’s like a—the idea here in the Greek word is like a cookie cutter sort of image of something. It’s like an impression. You used to take Silly Putty, you know, and you’d take the comics and you’d get an impression of it, then put it on another piece of paper. That’s the idea here. Like a rubber-stamped impression of the world. There’s no transforming that really goes on there, though, because it’s external. It demonstrates the lightness and the insignificance to your life that accompanies you as you move in the context of the world’s conforming power.

But the transformation of the Lord Jesus Christ—a transformation that occurs in the depth of our being and completely modifies who we are. We go from grape juice to wine. We go from the burnt offering—the animal there—to becoming smoke. A transformation of state for us is what’s going on.

And young people and parents of young people—like I speak to myself and I speak to you—may we pray for our children that they have this heartfelt cleaving to the Lord.

And young people, if you think to yourself, “I’m doing stuff that isn’t right. I’m doing things. I’m not controlling my speech. I’m watching the wrong movies. I’m doing too much of this stuff, not in moderation, but in excess. I’m not being properly pious in the context of the Christian brothers and sisters at RCC or my other friends outside of the church or most of all in the sight of God”—today is the day of reformation. Straighten it out in your life. Confess it before God. Repent of it. Turn from it. Straighten it out, and let God’s Holy Spirit move you to obedience.

Hearken, O Israel. We have a need to know the word of God. We have a need to understand that word and do it. We have a need to see our life as exercised, totally given over to the dominion work that God has called us to do.

Remember when we said that the kidnapping laws have a reference in the scriptures to our sense of vocation? If you kidnap a man, the biggest thing that’s going on there is you’re preventing him from exercising vocation. Our life is not to be a life of ease. It’s a life of vocation before God. And our life is to be a life that’s seen in terms of the exercise of dominion—to an ongoing reformation in our land today.

And if that’s going to happen, we must hearken to God’s word. We must do God’s word. And we must cleave to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Third observation on the text: We have here the assurance that if Israel will indeed hearken with their hearts and their souls and their minds and all of their strength, the nations will indeed come to the brightness of such a light. Verse 5-6: “Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that ye should do so in the land whither ye go to possess it. Keep therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your great understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes and say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.’”

What nation is there so great who hath God so nigh unto them as the Lord your God is in all of these things that we call upon him for? And what nation is there so great that hath statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day?

Now, this is an odd verse. You don’t normally think about it this way, but I mean, you could sort of read this and sort of start to think in an Arminian fashion about the whole thing. You just live your lives differently. You have different laws, and the people out there—the nations—are just kind of neutral, and all they’re waiting for is a good demonstration in your life. And oh, that’ll be the thing that attracts them to Christ. I mean, it sounds kind of Arminian, doesn’t it? It does to me in a way.

And you know, if you don’t understand it properly, I suppose you could think of it that way. But committed as we are to the truths of Calvinism, the truth of God’s sovereignty, the truth that Paul once tells us—that the nations, the people, actively suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness. They’re not going to come running to some light, are they? No, they won’t. They’re going to run away from the light.

So how do I understand this verse? Well, I think the only way I can understand it is that God has told us that covenantally he promises us that to an Israel that hearkens to him with their minds understanding his word, with their hands doing what he wants them to do, and with their hearts loving him and being properly pious as a result of that devotion, that when God sees a group of people like that, he will in his sovereignty move in the hearts of the nations to bring them to repentance for their sins and conversion.

I don’t know any other way to understand the verse. It seems to me that God is saying that one of his means of bringing about salvation in the context of a nation is to see a light—the light set on the hill—that draws not men now who are actively suppressing the truth of God in righteousness, but men whom God has sovereignly worked upon their hearts to bring them to repentance.

So God tells us here, I think, that reformation occurs in the context of this application of a people to the truth of him and a love for him that produces an evangelistic effort in the context of a community. A sense of historical optimism then undergirds and motivates true reformation, which is founded on the sovereignty of God.

God says that if we will be this people—told Israel, at least, if she’ll be that people—then he will so move in the hearts of the nations round about her to cause them to come to that light of a people that holds up a proper sense of obedience and reverence for the Lord Jesus Christ.

I think that God tells us that today as well.

America was such a light at one time in the context of this world—a light to which immigrants came by the millions and who were essentially converted to the faith of that country. God moved historically in fulfillment of these very words when this country was founded primarily on biblical truths. And as a result, God moved in the providence of his Holy Spirit on the part of the hearts of other men and nations to come to that light.

The same thing happened in the context of the Reformation. There were cities, city-states such as Geneva, that provided a light to the world. And God then, in obedience to what he tells us he will do here, caused men—the elect of every nation—to come repenting of their sins and to come up to the lights of the Reformation cities, worship him, and come. The man who wrote most of the tunes for the Geneva Psalter came to Geneva, and that’s sort of the way that’s talked about here. What a wonderful city that has such great laws!

God has promised that to us, and the converse side of that is that as a nation moves away from those things, he causes them to be a reproach in the context of the world.

Now, I know that these specific applications here are to the nation of Israel and the nations round about her. And I’ve made applications to city-states and to nations. But I’ve got to think that the general truth involved here—that if Israel does indeed hearken and if she studies God’s word and does it and loves her Groom and has a proper sense of pious devotion to him and then exhibits that in some way to the people she’s in the context of—God will move evangelistically.

And I think that we could probably apply that to the church today. The church is Israel. We know that. The scriptures make those identifications for us. And I think it’s proper to tell the church at Reformation Covenant Church, the church in Portland, that if the church in Portland hearkens and does and loves the Lord Jesus Christ, God has said he will move to affect evangelism.

Now, this is a little different take, but this is what motivates me personally to continue to write the voters’s guide, to continue to proclaim God’s truth in the context of the public arena, to provide the light of God’s gracious law, and then to count on God—not human nature, but to count on God—to graciously call people to himself in response to his preached word.

God doesn’t work the way we do. He doesn’t try to figure out what’s the best Madison Avenue way of marketing things. His marketing strategy is a people who love him, and because of their deep love and commitment to him, because of their cleaving to him, know his word and obey his word and proclaim that word in what they do and say in everything. That’s God’s Madison Avenue marketing strategy for evangelism. And it ought, I think, to be ours as well.

Young people, if you hear this message, you know that what I’m calling you to do today is really evangelistic. As you live these lives and as Reformation Covenant Church exhibits the grace of God and the graciousness of his law through Christ, we can expect people to see that light and to come to it because God is working in their hearts.

All right, I want to now just touch briefly on the voters’s guide—not really on the voters’s guide, but some of the issues raised in the context of the voters’s guide. And of course, it is just a guide. Some of the issues that are on this year’s ballot in Oregon are rather complex, and good men have gone either way on them. Most of you know that I basically provide the first draft of the Oregon Family Council voters guide as well as the PAPAC one. And in their revision process, they ended up reversing positions from my position on two issues, and that was fine with me.

Some of these issues are very difficult. So understand—and if you hand out any voters’s guides or have this year, it’s very important to tell people—it’s just a guide. Our only standard is God’s word, right? So I wanted to say that.

Secondly though, I want to say that it seems to me that this particular year’s voters’s guide has a theme to it. You know, so far these elections have tended to have a theme to them, and this year’s theme is of course criminal justice. And what I’ve given you on your outline are three particular ways of thinking of the big issues behind this discussion.

So trying to apply this truth of knowing and understanding God’s word and apply it to our situation today, what we’re told here is first of all—I’ve characterized them as God’s law, God’s man referring to the judges, and then God’s men in the context of juries. There are three of these ballot measures that seem to relate fairly directly to God’s law in terms of restitution and the lex talionis.

And what I’ve given you on the outline is: the first major one of those is Ballot Measure 69.

Ballot Measure 69 puts into the Oregon constitution the requirement for criminals to make—rather, the right of victims to receive restitution from criminals for crimes against them. And as we went through the case laws of Exodus 21 and 22, we saw there that indeed that’s a very important part of God’s system of criminal justice.

Most of you know, I repeated in the voters’s guide, that our particular system of criminal justice today has roots in an Arminian theology that says that all men are kind of neutral, that all men have an inner light. If they commit a crime, you put them in a cell, a monastic cell. They become penitents then. And that’s where the prison cell and the penitentiary came from, rather directly, in terms of those particular words. It was here in America that the first holding place or ward—which were what prisons were—they were just designed to hold people until punishments could be their guilt or innocence could be determined, and that punishments could be dished out where that first holding place became a penitentiary based upon this Quaker theology that’s Arminian to the core and wrong.

So the prison system doesn’t work. And God says that here is a light that we’re to hold up to this state—the light of God’s system being restitution, double restitution in the case of most thefts, to the victims. So it’s a great delight to have a ballot measure that allows us to state yes, that should be in the constitution of the state of Oregon.

Now, the two other ballot measures here that are related to it are Ballot Measure 68…