Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript – Deuteronomy 5:6-7
Pastor Tuuri

Today’s sermon text is from the first word of Deuteronomy 5, verses 6 and 7. Please stand. “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.”

Let’s pray. Lord God, we do come to you as the God of all gods, King of kings, Lord of lords, and ask for your good gifts to be showered upon us this day. We thank you for giving us the wonderful gift of the forgiveness of our sins and acceptance of our praise through Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ. We thank you for bringing us together in this place to sing praises to your holy name and also to receive this good gift of knowledge and understanding of how the world works.

Bless us, Lord God. As we consider more of what your scriptures have to tell us about this first of your ten words to us—so important, shining like a light beam through all the rest. Bless us, Father, by your holy spirit. May your spirit indeed teach us today about this word and how to live our lives. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of his kingdom, not ours. Amen.

Please be seated.

You’ll notice that we did a Diptych. If you’ve been here before and you’re used to the liturgy, you’ll notice we changed the responsive readings for the first three commandments—the first three words. We did that, I think, to make a more accurate reflection of the basic meaning of those ten words.

So in word one, now we have a response that essentially talks about bringing all our thoughts, every thought captive to Christ, as well as every other power. And remember, that’s what we said the first word says: “Don’t have any other gods.” The fact is, you have other gods appointed by God. You have judges, you have police officers, you have parents, you’ve got a husband, you’ve got a boss at work, you have biology, you have the power of the storm to change your life. You’ve got all kinds of powerful forces and entities and people around you.

And what the first commandment warns us against is seeing any of those prior to our commitment and loyalty to God. So all gods—all powers that are legitimate forces of God—are to be brought into submission to the God of gods, the Lord of Lords, the King of Kings. And so we’ve reflected that with that responsive reading.

The second word has to do with mediation. We’ve taken the first responsive reading from the first word that we’ve done for the last few weeks and many years before that: “One mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus.” The second commandment is about worship and mediation. So it has to do with liturgical idolatry, whereas the first commandment has to do with covenantal idolatry. We’ll get to the second word in a few weeks, but we have a few more things to say about the first word.

We did receive another sermon last week about the importance of worship, and really there’s a beauty to our worship. I think that’s important, and we’ll talk about that when we get to the second word—that beauty flowing out of the worship service. We did want to ask you to do a couple of things to enhance that beauty and make it more beautiful.

The first is to not distract people by going out the side doors during the service. If you could avoid that, go to the back of the sanctuary. The second is the way we come up and enter and exit in relationship to communion but also to the offertory. We come up the side and we go back down the center aisle. We do well at that for communion, but we don’t do well at that for the offering. We’d like to see you do that as well for the offertory. We think it would make a more beautiful picture, better flow, and not appear chaotic. I’ll just remind you a couple more times. We’re putting out some emails, et cetera. But it has to do with worship and the beauty of worship and trying to do worship well. That’s the second word, and it has to do with that kind of mediation. Eventually we’ll get to that—the second word probably just a few weeks away.

This morning I want to remind you of what I just said. Are you bringing every thought captive? How did you do with the powers of your life this last week? Were you able to serve the powers and authorities, but in essence serve the greater one over all these things, trusting in him? Or were you controlled by forces of nature, urges, appetites, your love—inordinate love for perhaps a particular person? All these things, perfectly good in their own place, can become idols to us.

An idol is something that is a power or an influence meant by God for our good, but somehow exalted to our ill. When we exalt it to the place of God, it becomes evil in terms of what we’re doing. So I’d ask you as we go through the first word for a few more weeks: ask yourself, evaluate. Were you just a foolish hearer of the word, or were you a doer of the word? Did the last two weeks see you self-consciously try to subject everything to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

I’ve given you quite another set of handouts here. I apologize for the length of them, but these are mostly resources. We’re not going to talk about very much of this at all, but these are resources to remind you that, like bad worship with Cain and Abel leads to murder in the week, what we do here sets up the rest of our week. And Deuteronomy makes it quite clear that the great Shema—we’ll talk about that next week, Deuteronomy 6—we’ll talk about a little bit today. We’re supposed to be teaching our children this when they rise up, when we sit down, when we walk on the way, whatever we do. In other words, not just Sunday.

So I’ve given you some tools that might be useful to you to do that. The first is a series of divisions of the deliverance of God from Mount Sinai. Exodus, Leviticus, first part of Numbers—all happens at the encampment at Sinai. And while we’re going to be going through Deuteronomy, we want to remember that these ten commandments were given initially back in Exodus 20, forty years previous. These ten words. There were commentaries on them then, too.

The commentaries and the so-called case laws of Exodus 20 through 23 don’t really follow the structure of the ten words, but it seems like commentators thought we can actually identify them with particular words. So, for instance, what you might want to do in your family devotional time or personal devotional time is look at Exodus 23:20-33 as a summation of the first word. You can see on the handouts there that there are other sections identified with other elements of the words, and Leviticus also is part of that word, as is Numbers.

So I’ve given you the breakdowns for those there. I’ve also given you a chart from Leviticus 19. I’ve probably given this to you before. Leviticus 19 is essentially a sermon with seventy commands that reflect the Ten Commandments. Again, it doesn’t go sequentially through the ten words. What I’ve given you is what appears to be the structure from Leviticus 19 and specifically which commandments things might line up with.

A couple of those you’ll see have specific reference, I think, to the ten words or to the first of the ten words. So those are kind of resources for you in your personal devotion time, and we may come back to one or two of them. We might not.

I also today have gone a little high class. We’ve got some artwork in the handout. Hopefully you all got one. I have Daniel 1 there. We’ll come back to that in just a minute. But there is this painting—Cranach was the great Reformation painter, friend of Luther’s. He painted a series of panels on the ten commandments in 1516, actually a year before the actual posting of the theses. But he’s already clearly, from the paintings of the ten words, influenced by Luther. He’s friends with Luther. They’re talking about all that stuff. And so what I will do on occasion—I don’t know that I’ll do it every time, some of the paintings are a little jarring to our modern sensibilities—but as I think appropriate, I may insert panels into the outlines or even on the front of the order of worship. They’re nice little teaching devices that we can use in our homes.

When I was in Wittenberg last year, I picked up a set of cards—ten cards with these ten commandments, ten words. You can get the big painting that comprises one big painting, and overarching the painting is a rainbow kind of effect that he’s painted over the top of the whole thing. And so that kind of all comes together if you have all ten put together in the way they were originally painted.

But here, you know, there’s a little picture. This is his painting depicting the first word. As I said, Cranach was this great Reformation painter and actually a great painter in his own right, apart from Reformation theology. Last year at the British Museum of Art, they had a showing of Cranach’s work, which produced a big book—which we have in my office—of his various paintings. So he’s well regarded as an artist and a painter. And for our particular purposes, it’s particularly nice that he gives us these wonderful depictions of theological themes.

We’ve talked about his altar painting, and some of our kids who went to Wittenberg this year got to actually see the actual altar painting at one of the two churches in Wittenberg. And so here is the first panel that I’ve given you from the ten words.

Clearly there’s an influence of Luther’s theology in what he paints. And I wanted just to mention a little bit about this painting. You’ll see on your handout that what he’s got on the left-hand side of the painting is Moses. Moses is identified with two little horns. Why is that? Well, they were using a bad translation in the sixteenth century of a particular verse which talks about the glory or the light of Moses’ face, and they thought it meant horn. So it’s just a mistranslation, and you know, here we are five hundred years later looking at a painting that shows us their ignorance of translations at the time. A good thing to remind ourselves of in our own humility—need to be humble about how we approach things.

But in any event, so that’s Moses. God is kind of coming in from another dimension or time, giving the ten words to Moses, who supplicates before him. And the scene is not the Middle East. It’s not Jerusalem. It’s Luther’s Germany—you know, a typical German countryside. And so what the purpose of that is, of course, is to contextualize these ten words, which were given thousands of years ago, to show their real applicability in terms of our own time as well. So artistically we can do that by painting it in that context.

On the right-hand side is a statue of something unclear—fortunately something, could be a little person, could be a woman, don’t know—but some bodily form on a big pillar, and two people who are looking at it and kind of worshiping it. And what they’re doing, also very importantly, is they’ve got their backs turned to God. And so what Cranach is showing us is that the first word requires the submission of everything to God. And when we take anything and exalt it above God and result in us turning our backs on God, we’re in violation of the first word.

And that thing could be all kinds of things. I don’t know what this particular statue with the staff at the top of this pillar inspired, but you know, it could be our children, right? When we exalt our children and our desire to help them and end up breaking God’s word or not trusting God for them, we’ve made an idol out of our own children. We can do that. It could be the human form itself, you know—humanism in its bad sense, as opposed to a proper form of humanism that flows out of Christianity. But with man as the standard or measure that’s replacing man as the standard or measure—the Lord Jesus Christ.

So humanity—humanity kind of deified, quasi-deified, and placed up—and that would be statism as well, as we’ve talked about from the earliest fall of man. Man’s desire to rule, to exercise the determination of good and evil, to rule apart from God’s word. It’s not just impatience by Adam. He’s deciding to assert his rule and authority over the world as opposed to learning submission to God’s word. And that’s what statism is. And that’s what we have today.

Whenever we see people treating President Obama—whether he wants to be treated that way or not, I don’t know. One could wonder. But whenever we do see people exalting him and treating him with the sort of reverence that really is to be given to God, we see statism at work. And when we see people so worried about everything, and only the state can solve it—the state can save us—that’s the garden all over again.

So I don’t know what particular thing is being depicted here in Cranach’s painting. But whatever it is, it’s drawing us away from God. It’s causing us to turn our backs upon God and to exalt something else, which is good and proper in its own particular place. People are image bearers of God. But to exalt them in a way that causes us to turn away from God—this is what Cranach is telling us is the violation of the first word.

So that means anything we do that’s exalted in that way really is a violation. From one perspective, all the rest of the commandments are really the working out of this single command. So if we commit adultery, we’ve taken some proper urge or some person and exalted that into an idol over us, and as a result turned our backs against God in that particular act.

So the light—Luther said of the first word—shines through all the rest of the words. It’s like the most important one if you want to look at it that way. It undergirds everything else. Where do we go to seek refuge in distress? Where do we go to look for help? That’s the source of our idol potentially.

And so in this country and its need, instead of getting on our knees to God and then taking action, to take action—collectivist man action—indicates, to some degree, that statism, which always is around in non-Christian circles, is becoming dominant again in American culture. So it’s the exaltation of people in the form of one person at the top of that pole. And that’s kind of like collective humanity being worshiped, and the state is sort of like the vision of collective humanity.

And when you have a particular ruler, instead of an equal balancing of authority amongst branches of government, when any one of them becomes kind of ascended, and particularly if it’s the presidency, you see this tendency toward violation of the first word, as depicted by Cranach’s nice painting.

So that’s just a visual reminder, a helpful reminder to us about what the first commandment is all about.

I wanted to quote from Luther. I have an article that Flynn A. found for me, a commentary on these paintings by Cranach, and the man writes: “We should then learn to use these material goods”—quoting from Luther—”no farther than as a shoemaker uses his needle and thread for work and then lays them aside. Or as a traveler uses an inn and food and his bed only for temporal necessity, each one in its station according to God’s order and without allowing any of these things to be our Lord or idol.”

So that’s Luther’s description of the first word, and that’s right on target. It’s good to have tools to be able to exercise power over a piece of leather. It’s good to have inns to refresh us. But when we take any one of those things and exalt them above the one who made them for their particular purpose, this is the violation of the first word.

Okay. Today, what we want to do then is move on and talk about the entire section Deuteronomy 6-11. We’ve done this a little bit up to now. And I’m going to show you some of the matching chapters. So the handout has this—which we’ll turn to in just a minute—has this done nicely for you, I think. And what we’re going to look at is just the first three of those matching sets: the A, B, and C sections.

And specifically, I’m going to look at it in terms of motivation. So we’ll see—hopefully you’ll be convinced after we look at these first few—of this structure that takes us to the heart of the matter at the center of Deuteronomy 6 through 11, which is an exposition of the first word. And along the way, we’ll also think about motivation.

It’s been a debate amongst commentators. Are chapters 6 through 11 a sermon on the first word, or are they an exhortation or introduction to chapter 12, which really is a discussion of the first and second word together? Chapter 12 clearly is demarcated off: “These are the statutes and judgments which you shall be careful to observe in the land which the Lord God of your fathers is giving you to possess. You shall utterly destroy all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess serve their gods.”

So chapter 12 delineates a new section. “These are the statutes and judgments,” and then the first statute and judgment addresses worship. And that’s why I think chapter 12 deals with mediation, violation of the second word. Additionally, Deuteronomy 6-11 contains seventeen references to Egypt. There are no references to Egypt in chapter 12.

Chapter twelve—or the first word, rather—is I think not just “you shall have no other gods before me,” but it is that preparatory statement: “I am the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me.” So Egypt is in the first word in a very heightened way—seventeen occurrences found in this long section, which I think then becomes understood as a sermon on the first word.

So there’s internal references. “The Lord your God” is another repeated phrase in chapters 6 through 11. So I believe 6 to 11 is a sermon on the first word and distinct from chapter 12, which we’ll turn to when we get to the second word.

Okay. So all that—don’t get too worried about it. But six to eleven is a sermon. It’s distinct. It’s a unit. And its message is primarily motivational. It’s addressing the first word. And so as we continue to think about the first word, it’ll be an interesting, instructive thing for us to do to think how God is motivating his people to keep his commandments.

You have that problem, motivating your children, motivating your wife, motivating your husband, motivating an employee at work, motivating yourself, motivating whoever it is—motivating your congressman to have a town hall and listen to you. Motivation—producing motivation in people—is quite important.

Now the statist idea of motivation, to the statist, is power. It’s all power. “You’re going to motivate people to do things? You’re going to force them to do things.” So that’s kind of the essence of statism: imposition by authority of particular things. And so if they have their way with health care, you won’t have the right to health care anymore. The right to health care is the ability to engage in free commercial transactions relative to your health care, and the present systems being discussed don’t want you to have that. They want to impose upon you from above.

God isn’t like that exactly. I mean, he does impose things, but it’ll be interesting for us to look at how God motivates us, how he motivated them to keep the first word. This is why I put in Daniel chapter 1. Daniel’s in Babylon. He’s writing back to these people trying to hold on to their faith in Yahweh in Judah, and he’s sending this stuff back. And in part, what God is doing is he’s motivating them to be faithful to him.

And so what does he do? The first story, the first word. Daniel, I believe, is a commentary on the Ten Commandments. The first word is: Daniel says, “At the beginning, I’m going to be a great servant to Nebuchadnezzar. I’m going to serve the king. I’m going to do a good job serving, but I’m going to make sure that Nebuchadnezzar knows that Yahweh is king. Yahweh is the King of Kings. He’s the Lord of Lords. And I’m going to use some test—a food test in this case—to demonstrate that.”

And so the heart of that story of Daniel 1 is Daniel being put to a test, resolving to do something, following through, and being blessed by God with his physical status through the test. And then the conclusion is he turns out even smarter than everybody else. But the point is his submission—that’s what’s being talked about. He’s telling the people back in Jerusalem: the way to live successfully in empire is not to hate Nebuchadnezzar. God used him. It is to serve the empire, but it’s to serve the empire in a way that lets them know that ultimately your allegiance is to Yahweh.

So it’s great motivation because Daniel does this and makes it happen, and Daniel actually turns out to not just pass the test, but he gains in weight at the end of this chapter. He’s smarter than anybody else in the whole country. He does best—you know, at the University. He’s top of the class, right, of this school of government. He does all that stuff. Some people think, “No, no, no, he can’t do anything,” but he does all that stuff, and the other thing is he doesn’t do it for what they want him to do it for. He does it out of his loyalty to Yahweh.

So it’s a motivational story. Daniel 1 is pure motivation—back to the folks trying to hang on in the context of Jerusalem.

Okay. So let’s talk now. Let’s turn to the big outline there after the picture. Oh yeah, let’s skip the next page. This big structure. We’ll come back to that in a moment. But I want to look at specific details now. And this differs from my handout from a couple of weeks ago in that instead of going—you got five chapters of material—and instead of going up here and way at the end of five chapters to look at its match, I put the A and the A prime together, the B and the B prime together, the C and the C prime together.

So I’ve given you the text that way, slightly indenting each new section to remind us that this moves us toward the heart of the matter—the heart of the sermon. The middle of the sermon is sort of the heart, the main deal of what’s going on. And so to help you to see that better and to follow along a little easier, I’ve given you that handout. If anybody doesn’t have one, you probably should go right there now and run and get one. It is kind of important. Otherwise, you’re going to have to keep two places in your Bible and flip back and forth.

Okay? No takers. All right. Suit yourself. I gave you the opportunity.

Statutes and judgments in the first three verses of chapter 6, and then statutes and judgments at the conclusion. And the specific indication here is this term “statutes and judgments.” So chapter 6, verse 1: “This is the commandment, and these are the statutes and judgments which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you.”

And at the end of this first little section—at the end of the first word sermon—he goes right back to the same thing: “You shall be careful to observe all the statutes and judgments which I set before you today.” So little bookmarks telling us that this is beginning and ending with a reference to these things as statutes and judgments.

And again here: see it says in chapter 6, verse 1, “Statutes and judgment which the Lord your God has commanded to teach you.” And that’s a repeated phrase. That’s first commandment language. “The Lord your God.” Okay? Yahweh is the God of all gods, God of all powers. “He’s commanded to teach you, that you may observe them in the land which you are crossing over to possess, that you may fear the Lord your God, to keep all his statutes and his commandments which I command you this day, you and your son and your grandson and all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged.”

Okay. So first of all, the law is given. The first word is being expounded to prepare them for the conquering of another land, going in, possessing it, sanctifying it. So again, if and you know, whatever length of time we end up planting church here, there, everywhere, the idea is if we’re preparing for evangelizing and transforming a city, culture, or area, then the law becomes very important for us. It’s the way God wants us to be thinking as we go about doing that.

And one of the first things you want to do with people in Portland is wean them away—warn them against their idolatries. They’ve taken a beautiful thing like art and made it idolatrous, as an example. So it’s preparation for conquest, first of all. And the end result of this is that “they may fear the Lord your God.”

Now, I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. Fear is kind of this comprehensive term. Part of the motivation that God uses for his people is he wants them to come to a proper and appropriate fear. Not the fear of the policeman—that you know he’s breaking his laws all the time, right? And not the reverence that says a cop—who cares if he’s got the badge or not? It makes no difference to me. It’s a proper fear of the authority of God, his power over you. He can, you know, remove his breath and you’re a dead man. It’s over. No ifs, ands, or buts. A proper fear of him. It’s mixed with all kinds of other things, but that is the first motivation listed.

Secondly, what does he say in verse 2? “He wants you to do these things all the days of your life, that your days may be prolonged.” Okay. “Therefore hear, O Israel, and be careful to observe it, that it may be well with you, that you may multiply greatly, okay? That in this land that God has given you—a land flowing with milk and honey.”

So the opening section of this sermon gives motivational aspects. He sums up the fear, but then he starts to lay out particular motivations to them to keep this commandment. And what are they? They’re blessings. There’s a repeated set of blessings here. The blessings of your days being prolonged. The blessings—implied blessings of having kids whose days are prolonged. The blessings that you’re going to multiply a lot—you’re going to have a lot of kids, a lot of influence in the world in which you live. And “that it may be well with you.”

Generally, well-being is the motivation that God gives for the obedience of his commandments. It’s going to be good for you. Okay? It’s going to be a real blessing to you in very specific ways, and then in general ways. “It’ll be well with you.” That’s how God motivates them at the beginning of this sermon.

Now, at the end of the sermon, it’s a little bit different. Verse 26, rather, of chapter 11: “Behold, I set before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God, which I command you today, and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God, but turn aside from the way which I command you today to go after other gods.” And see, again, this is first commandment. It’s a summation of the sermon on the first commandment. And the sin is defined as “going after other gods which you have not known.”

“Now it shall be when the Lord your God takes you into the land. You got to set up things on Mount Gerizim for the blessings and the curse.” So the way the sermon ends: he begins by promising them great blessings for obedience. And then as he gets to the end, his last piece of motivational speech is to tell them that two things are going to happen to them. Good things, which he’s promised them already and in abundance in the sermon leading up to this point, or curses—bad things.

I’ve been reading a book about motivating people. And they say, well, one of the big things you want to do with motivation is, you know, just tell people—help them to see and identify the consequences, the natural consequences of their actions, right? Well, you know, if you don’t weed the fence, the weeds, the blackberries, will grow over it, and then eventually the fence will be destroyed. And that’s a natural consequence of the action. On the other hand, if you weed the fence, those things will be kept away. The fence will look pretty. It’ll do its job of keeping people out, and whatever it is, it’ll demarcate the borders.

Well, that’s kind of what God does here. And he really sort of places them—I mean, they’re not neutral. Clearly, we’ve got God actively blessing or cursing. There’s nothing natural, apart from God, that’s going to happen. But in a way, that’s what he does. He says, “Look, when you go in there, when you leave this sermon today, there’s two ways you can go. And if you go this way, good things are going to happen. If you end up going over here, fence is going to be broken down. Lions will get into your garden. Whatever it is, bad consequences.”

So God motivates people, first of all, with a proper fear. Secondly, with a series of very specific blessings, right? He gives them very specific blessing statements. And then third, the way this opening and closing of the sermon shows us how he motivates people is through a discussion of what you could call the natural results of good things that you do or bad things that you do. Not to say—don’t get too worked up about it. Of course, it’s personal, but it’s phrased in such a way to say, “Well, here you go. You got two paths. Pick whichever way you’re going to go, and you’re going to suffer the consequences or reap the blessings of it.”

Okay? Statutes and judgments. He’s kind of wrapped up the blessing thing by adding the curse thing at the end. These are the bookmarks at the beginning and end of this particular sermon.

Now, the next one is real interesting too. Most of us are pretty familiar with Deuteronomy 6:4-9. Find that in your Bible. The great Shema. Shema is the Hebrew word for “hear.” Have big ears. Open up your ears. Now, a lot of parents I know over the times have said “Shema” to their kids to get them to listen and speak Hebrew. “Open those ears up. I’m going to speak to you here.”

“O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Big verse for the homeschoolers. Big verse for our church for years and years and years. And I’m going to talk on this verse, these verses, next week in more detail. So I’m not going to do that now. But what I do want to point out is that this is matched toward the end of the sermon in the B prime section in chapter 11, verses 18 to 25. And if you got your handout there and can hear over that sound, you can see—verse 18: “Therefore, you shall lay up these words of mine in your heart, in your soul. Bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall teach them to your children, speaking of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, that your days, and that the days of your children may be prolonged or multiplied, in the land in which the Lord swore to your fathers to give them—like the days of the heavens above the earth.”

“For if you carefully keep all these commandments which I command you today, to love the Lord your God, to walk in all his ways, and to hold fast to him, then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you.”

Now, most of us aren’t familiar with that part of it. If I would have read those last few verses and asked you where are those found, you probably, if you have biblical literacy, would have said Deuteronomy 6, because it basically just mirrors what was said in Deuteronomy 6. Why? Why use more room? Text, paper was expensive.

Well, God, among other things, he wants us to see there’s a structure going on. He puts a bookend in statutes and judgments. Statutes and judgments. The very next section: very obvious, easy to remember stuff—teach to your kids, bind them on your doorpost, put them on your hand and above your head, and all that stuff. We’ll talk next week about what that means. And he does the same thing as the sermon begins to come to its conclusion. He’s showing us that there is a structure to this sermon that’s drawing our attention to the heart of the matter at the middle.

Now, as I said, the other thing we want to do here is, as we go through these things, we want to also note the motivation that God uses for doing—as he presents this stuff out. Verse 4 is a declaration of reality. It doesn’t really command you to do anything. It’s a statement of truth here: “O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”

Boom. The motivation to keep the first word is reality. This is a statement of what the reality of the world is. This isn’t a statement saying, “Now we hope you’ll believe all this.” No, this is a statement of reality. You can either kick against reality or you can go with it.

So the statement of reality, rationality, is really portrayed here as a motivational device to get people to obey the word. A declaration is made. This is reality. And so as a result of this being a reality, this is the premise to the whole first word: the unity of God. And when you have various gods, all who compete on the same level for something, various gods, you’ve got idolatry, and you’ve got a violation of the first word.

This is why we can’t believe in, you know, Islam is one path and Judaism is another path, and all these different paths—all these different gods, polytheism. No, the Lord is one. He’s unity. And so that’s an essential attribute of God, which becomes then a determiner, a definer of reality for us.

So when you tell people things and try to motivate them, you give them reality. You help them to see what the reality of the matter is. And to do anything other than to act as if the Lord is one is to act nuts, right? To go turn your back on the God who is one and created everything, and bow down to a child—this is crazy. It’s irrational.

So part of the motivation is that. And then it goes on, gives us this heightened motivation. He says, “What about this reality? Your response is verse 5: ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.’”

Yeah, it’s a command, but it’s a motivational command, right? You’re going to keep the commandments because you love God. This is Old Testament. This is what Jesus was talking about in the New Testament. It’s one word from God. Love is a big part of the motivation.

And then if we look at the second half that I just read, of these bookends in chapter 11, verses 18-2 again—he gives them lots of blessings to think about. Your days will be prolonged and multiplied, and not only will they be prolonged and multiplied, he actually says that your days may be like the days of the heavens above the earth—uses this wonderfully poetic phrase. Your blessings are going to be heavenly blessings. We’ll talk about that again in a moment. But there’s this transition.

So that when it’s repeated in the second half of the sermon as it’s kind of wrapping it up, the same bind the word on yourself—now there’s an intensification of the blessing. Not just long days, but now long days like the days of heaven itself upon the earth. That’s very nice motivational talk. We experience that. Many of us experience that on the Lord’s day. They are sort of like the days of heaven. They can be other than that too, but sometimes they are. We should think on this verse about that.

And then he goes on to say, verse 23: “The Lord will drive out these nations, right?” And then he says, “Every place where your footstep treads, that’ll be yours.” So he’ll put the fear of God upon them, upon all your enemies as you walk into the land. So motivation again are blessings—blessings of long days, children, wonderful days at times, and blessings that will be able to dispossess those—was fearful of—was fearful stuff. War is fearful stuff.

I think there’s actually a text in scripture where it says that my wife told me this—that God led the people out of Egypt, and he took them on a way so they wouldn’t immediately enter into warfare because they’d get frightened. God cares for us. Eventually, after forty years, they’re ready to go in and fight. War is not for the faint-hearted. And so here he is blessing them with encouragement for the battle. If they keep the word of God, that will result in them having victory over their enemies.

George Washington knew this. In his battles against the British, he didn’t want the forces of providence against him. He wanted to win, even though he was outnumbered at times. So he insisted that the men not use profanity in the ranks. And he would, you know, severely punish people for swearing or using foul language. It wasn’t anything he was approving of. He knew the truth of these verses—that if we want the blessings of God, we’ve got to keep his word, and his word says don’t swear and of course don’t engage in filthy talk. “I need God’s blessing, or I’m not going to be successful.”

So God motivates people through the blessings of courage, right? What is he doing? He’s giving them hope. They stand on the verge of having to go do something, and they could be despairing about that. They could be very, you know, depressed about that. That could be a big problem with them. And when you get that way, you get demotivated. So what God is doing is he’s giving them hope for the future, specifically in the context of the greatest enemies you’d ever want to face—big, giant sort of people, horrible guys, filthy, you know, guys who would rape your kids as quick as they do anything else. Fearfulness.

And God says, “No, I give you hope for the future, in spite of the most difficult things you might dream are coming at you. There really is a lot of that. There are bad things you’re going to see, but I’m going to bless you through those things.”

When we’re trying to motivate people, we have to give them hope. We have to give them hope for the future. Not, you know, “Gee whiz” hope, but a hope based in God’s word. We can do that. We can take these same things that God did.

All right. The third section, and last section we’re going to look at before we get to the center, the heart of the matter, the blessings of heaven—the C sections, 11:8-17. “Therefore, you shall keep every commandment which I command you today, that you may be strong and go in and possess the land.”

See, after a while, you stop tracking the motivational statements and of what sort they are, because they’re just peppered throughout these whole six chapters. And here’s another one: “You’re going to possess the land. You’re going to be strong.” He’s going to prolong your days “in the land which he’s giving to you, to you and to your descendants—a land flowing with milk and honey.”

He promises them a beautiful thing that they’re moving toward. There’s a great horizon in front of them, and there’s blessings on the other side. That’s the Christian worldview. If we’re faithful, obedient, God has promised us a horizon with great blessings. At the end of our day, we get to come home to our wife and our kids, our family, our hearth, whatever it is. There’s blessings for us to keep us motivated to do what God has told us to do.

This is important. You know, are you thinking about this? You going to motivate people this week? How you going to do it? You going to be like the state? “Do it or else?” Or are you going to think about, “No, there’s a lot of other things to do with people.” Give them hope. They’re going to be discouraged at certain times. Give them the promise of God’s blessing for obedience. Yeah. Warn them that there’ll be natural consequences. There’ll be curses coming if they don’t do things, you know, things will fall apart. That’s the way things happen.

So you don’t—you know, it’s not all positive, but it’s a lot positive from what we’ve seen so far, right?

And then he goes on to say that he says, “Not like the land of Egypt from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and watered it by foot as a vegetable garden. But the land which you cast to possess is a land of hills and valleys that drink water from the rain of heaven, from the rain of heaven.”

I’m sorry, I moved right to the C prime section. So in the first section, the C section, he talks about the blessings of conquest and all that stuff. And he says that you’re going to have—yeah, I really—okay, so going back to the C section, verse 11 of chapter 6: “You’ll have houses full of good things which you did not fill, hewn wells which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees, and you which you did not plant, and you can eat them and be full. Don’t forget the Lord.”

Okay, so again, motivation is what he’s telling them. That if they obey him, they’re going to get lots of blessings, and it’s by his grace. Part of the motivational structure here. It’s been their present all along because he’s brought them out of Egypt. Motivation is that “I have graciously done these things for you.” You’re going to live in a place: houses you didn’t build, gardens you didn’t plant, wells you didn’t dig. “I’m gracious.”

God motivates us to obedience by reminding us of the grace of his provision. And we want to do that with ourselves, with those in our sphere of influence—motivate through a statement of the grace of God toward us. And so that goes on here. And then he says, “Don’t forget.” We want to motivate people to remember things, and we don’t take it for granted that if we don’t remind ourselves to be reminded, then we’re going to forget this stuff. We’re going to think that our hands did it. We’re going to forget it’s the grace of God.

So what do we do? We try to build in a structure like thanksgiving at the food table to remind ourselves of the grace of God on a daily basis. So motivation involves grace, and motivation involves a call for them not to be forgetful, but to remember. Okay. He’s brought them out of the house of bondage. He’s given them a new house, and it’s a better house.

Now, that was good. So he says in that C section at the beginning of the sermon, you’re going to get these nice cool wells that you can get water out of, and you didn’t have to dig them. But here in what I just read from the matching C prime section, what does he say? He says, “Well, this land that I’m taking you into, it’s got blessings of plenty”—which is what his point was in the matching C section.

But the blessings now are described as being heavenly blessings. At the beginning, he promised them he said there’d be wells, right? But at the end of the sermon, as he’s moving toward his conclusion, he says, “You know, you don’t have to water it on foot, which you do with a well. Actually, he says, “I’m going to give you land with hills and valleys that drinks water from the rain of heaven—a land for which the Lord your God cares. The eyes of the Lord your God are always on it.”

You see the motivational aspect is very positive here. You’re going to get blessings—not just earthly blessings that you don’t deserve, but the blessings of heaven itself. There’s others. The point is there’s movement in these structures. We go from earthly blessings to heavenly blessings being described. That movement in a structure happens because of what happens usually at the middle of the structure.

Okay. I get up, I get dressed, I go to work, I come home the same route I went to work, I get undressed, I go back to bed. My life is cyclical. But it’s not a cycle. It’s an upward spiraling cycle. But when I go to bed, I’m a changed person. I’ve obeyed or disobeyed. I’ve reminded myself. I’ve been aware of the grace of God. I’ve been motivated by his promises, and warned by his judgments and natural results—bad things happening to me. And I’m a better person at the end of the day, and the world has changed.

So these structures—something happens in the middle of the thing that moves it to this kind of poetic movement that we just saw, going from earthly blessings to heavenly blessings. It draws us in to a particular center point.

So we’ve seen some encouragement stuff in these sections. Now go back to that—I think it’s the fourth page—where the overall structure is given to you of chapters 6-11. Point out a couple of other quick things. Another movement, for instance, we don’t have time to look at this in detail, but look at the G section. It’s a command not to intermarry with the heathen, right? “Don’t intermarry with the heathen.” But then the matching G prime section at the bottom half of that overall structure—the matching G section—is that you’re supposed to love the heathen. You see that?

So this is the big page with one big long cyclical structure. The G sections that match up is their relationship to the heathen in the land. And they’re told not to intermarry with them. But then they’re also told, as it develops, to love the heathen. Okay? “To love the stranger, because they were strangers.”

And so again, there’s movement. There’s the commandments, you know, have a particular different aspects to them—things you can’t do, things you should do relative to people. And again, it shows the movements toward the center. There’s a transition.

He reminds them of the conquest in the J section. After being—he talks about the conquest. Well, let’s put it this way. The G section is “don’t intermarry.” The H section then he tells them, in the sermon, “You’re chosen by God. You weren’t chosen because there’s a lot of you or because you’re good. It’s the grace of God is why you’re here. So don’t think that you’re gonna not intermarry with him because you’re better.”

And then he reminds me at the end, “Well, actually, you got to love him. Don’t intermarry with him outside of the faith, but you got to love the stranger.” So it’s the grace of God. And then this becomes the time at which he describes the conquest and its blessings. The conquest will be easy. And then he reminds them of their transition into judgment at Mount Sinai.

So they got into judgment, and then something happens at the middle. He talks about the ten tablets of the law in the K section, and he has to have new tablets in the matching K section because of their idolatry at the center. And then they have a transition away from judgment. And as we move away from judgment based on the center, the heart of the matter, then we get to all that neat heavenly blessing stuff and not just earthly blessing—loving the stranger at the same time, not intermarrying with heathens, et cetera.

The whole thing’s moved because of the center section. And what’s at the center? The center section is the sin of the people. He receives the ten commandments, and then at Sinai in chapter 9, verses 12-17, God tells Moses bad stuff. The people are sitting down there. They’ve made the golden calf. They’re doing bad stuff. He’s going to destroy them. He says, “Uh, let me alone. I’ll destroy them and blot out their name from under the heavens. I will make of you,” this is in the section, chapter 9, verses 12-17. Verse 14 says, “I’m going to kill them. I’ll make of you a nation mightier and greater than they.”

So Moses says—he turned, he came down from the mountain, he saw what was going on, he broke the ten commandments, he goes back up to the mountain. Then, and the next section at the center—the matching section at the center—is his intercession. He says, “He fell down before the Lord at the first forty days and forty nights. I neither ate bread nor drank water.” But he prayed to God.

Now, let’s look, think about this. The center of the text, the heart of the matter, is the intercession by Moses. The intercession of a man who had been promised by the omnipotent, omniscient God that he’d be made—it would be from him. He’d be a new Abraham. Everybody be blessed in him. He was going to kill everybody else, but he’d make Moses into a great guy with a great life.

Moses says, “No.” Moses, you know, properly says, “No.” And in fact, what Moses does is he dies, right? Forty days and forty nights without food or water. That’s a symbolic picture of death. And of course, it’s what our Savior did in the wilderness. So Moses is clearly a picture of Christ, who is motivated by a divine love that seeks the well-being of the other. And so Jesus doesn’t seek his own well-being. He seeks the well-being of others. And that’s what Moses is doing. He’s putting the rest of the people, sinful though they were, above his own.

Do you do the same? This is motivational stuff for us. We want to be like Moses. We want to be remembered. We want to do good things. Well, the way that works, then, is: don’t complain about your state. Accept the state. You know, it’s true. Turn your back against blessings that will result in bad things for other people. Put other people—you know, consider them more important than yourself. That’s what Moses did. He went through forty days of hungering and thirsting when he could have had the whole thing. What a wonderful story.

And then even more amazing, at the center of this matter—the heart of the matter—it becomes a tale of motivation. Not for us, but it becomes a tale of motivation of how you motivate God. God’s going to kill everybody. Moses doesn’t want it to happen. Moses has to motivate God. Now, that’s at the center of this story. Moses has to figure a way to plead with God so that God doesn’t destroy everybody.

And Moses knows what to say. He says in verse 26: “Therefore I prayed to the Lord and said, ‘Oh Lord God, do not destroy your people and your inheritance whom you have redeemed through your greatness, whom you have brought out of Egypt with a mighty hand. Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’”

Moses was concerned. He was motivated by the glory of God. That God’s name and reputation were so tied to this venture that he pleaded with God not to provide, you know, mocking ability to the nations round about. “Don’t give them any tools that they can use to despise your name. Exalt your name through your grace now,” is what he’s telling him. “He’s motivating God by calling on God to glorify himself through the actions of sustaining his people and forgiving them in their sinfulness.”

The heart of the story—buttressed about by all kinds of motivational aspects where God tells us that we should obey his word and gives us all kinds of positive motivations, some negative of motivation, he does all this stuff. The heart of the matter that he wants us to keep out of this first word is his actions toward us—that it’s really ultimately about his glory. If you’re glorified by your life and you end up struggling, well, that’s okay, because the glory of God is the heart of the matter.

The heart of the matter is knowing to pray to God for the sake of his glory and his plan. And God says such prayer—actually, I mean, it’s an exaggeration, but we have to say that this was motivating to God to then act in a particular way. The heart of the commandment—the sermon on the commandment to place God as the ultimate priority in our lives over everything—is this prayer of intercession by Moses, picturing the prayer of intercession by the greater Moses, the Lord Jesus Christ.

Now, it’s interesting, because a few verses later, in the transition away from judgment, we have the death of the high priest. The children of Israel—this is verse 6 of chapter 10: “Children of Israel journeyed from the wells of Beonie Jakan to Moserah, where Aaron died and where he was buried, and Eleazar his son ministered as priest in his stead. From there they journeyed to Gudgad, and from Gudgad to Jabatha, a land of rivers of water.”

Well, that’s an interesting travel narrative. And if you translate the terms, here’s what it says. The children of Israel journeyed from the wells of affliction and oppression. And they went to the place of oppression. They went to this city—the place of oppression—where Aaron died and where he was buried. This place was a place of bonds. So they dwell, they go, they travel from the wells of oppression to the place of bondage. Aaron dies. He’s replaced by his son Eleazar. Resurrection imagery, of course.

From there, they journeyed to the place of cutting. And from the place of cutting, they went to a land, a valley of great pleasantness—a land of rivers of water—and the land whose name was pleasantness. That’s a picture of what’s happened here. God, at the middle of motivating us to obey him, tells us that through the death and resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, he has brought us out of oppression. He’s brought us out of bondage to the death and resurrection of Christ. He’s cut a covenant with us. And the end result of our obedience to that first word of the covenant is he takes us into a place—we journey into a place with rivers of water of pleasantness. Pleasantness. What a nice visual image of what the Lord our God has done for us.

May he grant us this week, when tempted to follow something other than his word, when we sin, may we quickly repent, remembering that we don’t want to turn back to the place of bondage and contention and contentiousness and struggles and trials and oppression. We want to keep journeying with the risen Lord Jesus Christ into places of pleasantness.

Let’s pray.