Fear the Lord

Chapter 10, verses 12 and 13 are the introduction to a sermon that Moses gives in the rest of this chapter 10 and all of chapter 11. And like a lot of times whenever someone gives a speech or a sermon or writes a book, they start out with a brief summary of what they're going to cover. And that's true in this one. Verses 12 and 13 are a summary of what God, of what Moses wants to declare to the people of Israel as they're getting ready to enter the land of promise. Verse 12 starts, And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and to observe the Lord's commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good? Now these two verses have repeatedly emphasized the presence of God in reference to Him. As I've indicated before, the word Lord when it's here is, and capitalized, it stands for the name of God. When Hebrews read this, this is the way where they would hear it. And now, O Israel, what does Yahweh your God ask of you but to fear Yahweh your God, and to walk in His ways, and to love Him, and to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and to observe Yahweh's commands and decrees that I'm giving to you today for your own good? The focus is on the person of God, who He is, what He's doing. The announcement is that God has declared His presence with His people. There are five things that are listed here that He asks them to remember. This is what God is trying to get across to you. It's very important that you fear Yahweh. This is as a relationship as a father to children, that you respect Him, that you respect His authority, you respect the position that He has in your life. And the word respect, or to fear, is really a word that characterizes what the Bible describes as worship. The Bible describes worship as a person who puts another person in a position of authority over them. So to recognize and respect God, or to fear Him, is to see His power and authority and submit yourself to it. So He begins this by talking about the first commandment that's in the Ten Commandments, you're to love, you're to have no other gods before me. There is to be a place of reserved respect for God above all else. The second thing He focuses on then is to say you're to walk in God's ways, which means you're to imitate God. What's different about the Hebrew religion than all the religions in the world that they were in was that the Hebrews had a special relationship with their God where they saw their calling to live a life imitating His character and behavior. Over and over again God said, you're to be holy as I am holy. So their devotion or their commitment was to live a life of imitation for God. Now see that characteristic is throughout the Bible is the same declaration. When Jesus called the disciples He said, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me or imitate me. I want you to live a lifestyle that is reflective of my character and my nature. And that's the basis on which God judges us. When you stand before Him in the last days He's going to look at your life based not on what you said about your relationship to Him, but whether or not your lifestyle and your character imitated the qualities that were reflected in God Himself. The intention of God in the Bible was that the people who imitated Him would have such an influence on the world around them that people would want to know the God that they were imitating. This is how witnessing is to be done. You're to live a life so that the people who come in contact with you will recognize that you don't live like an ordinary human being in this world. There's something different about you. And it is this imitation of God that is the evidence of His presence in our lives. So they're to hold Him in great respect and fear, imitate what He does. Then He uses the word love. You are to love Him. Now love is the central part of this. Oftentimes when we write a list of things we'll either start with the least important and end with the most important or start with the most important and go down to the least of them. Oftentimes in the Hebrew Bible they will put the most important element right in the middle of it so that what comes up to it and what follows it are both built on that central concept of love. Here it's love. Now when He talks about love it's not romance and it's not a feeling of emotional connection. Instead He's talking about something that would bind them together with God, that the relationship they'd have with God was of loyalty. The commitment to the covenant, the contract that they'd made with God at Mount Sinai was a big issue in all the Old Testament. Everything God is dealing with is focused on that. I even noted when I started this that the first commandment is where they start, the first element of that contract. And the love that they have was a key part of that. In fact there was a word that was used in Hebrew that was simply designated covenant love. Now we wouldn't use that language, say a contract love. That would seem to us like it was you were paid to love somebody or like you had to do it. But for the Hebrew mind this commitment that they'd made to God and the covenant they'd made with Him had a special connection. And this covenant love was a faithfulness. I am going to keep this promise that I made to you regardless of what happens in my life. And covenant love on God's part is that He would never negate the promise that He made to His people. I will be your God. So that from that moment on that promise was always true. There was a deep sense of loyalty that these are my people and I've made a promise to them. On the other side of it, the people of Israel would say this is my God and I've made a promise to Him. So that this loyalty that they felt toward each other was what bound them together. They had made a promise to say I will, on God's part, I will take care of you, guide, protect, give your life meaning and value on the part of the people of Israel that we will do everything you tell us that we should do. So those pledges of loyalty were like we would have in terms of a wedding vow. So when a man or woman pledges themselves to each other to be faithful until death parts them, there's a loyalty that binds them together. They remember the promise that they've made. It is that promise of loyalty and faithfulness to each other that holds them together. All the way through the Bible, God uses the example of a couple or marital arrangement to describe His arrangement with His people. So whenever you make a commitment of your life to Christ, it is like a marriage commitment, saying to God I will be faithful to live and imitating you the rest of my life. And God says I will be faithful never to turn my back on you. So that loyalty is described as love, covenant love that they had, that one, each side would have for the other. So that's the third element that he's talking about. The fourth one was he said I would, they were to serve the Lord, serve Yahweh, their God, with all your heart and with all your soul. Now the service part of this is in the New Testament what is seen as submission. If you look in the book of Ephesians where it talks about the marriage relationship and the family relationship and work relationships, it starts with a verse that said submit yourselves to one another. The key element in the life of Christ was submission. I do everything the Father tells me to do. I do everything He asked me to do. He was completely surrendered to the Father and when He asks us to come, He asks us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and be submissive to Him. Do whatever He asks us to do. The element of submission and surrender is a key element in the relationship that people have with God. He is in charge but we submit or we surrender to His authority. This is a key element in understanding what it means to be a follower of Christ or a Christian. We don't become a Christian by saying words. We don't become a Christian by going to the front of the church. We don't become a Christian by being baptized. It is when we say I will submit my life to your authority. So what you tell me to do with my time, I will do it. What you tell me to do with my money, I will do it. When you tell me how to be a husband or wife, I will do that. When you tell me how to raise my children, I will do that. When you tell me how to treat my parents, I will do that. When you tell me how to treat my neighbors around me, I will do that. Everything you tell me, I am surrendered in obedience to you. The element of rebellion against God is the opposite of this. And often times when the people of Israel were stubborn, stiff necked, the Bible often calls them, they were resistant to what God wanted. There is no place in the life of a follower of God for stubbornness and resistance to what he wants. You may have heard people talk about the fact they became a Christian, decided they would accept Christ and then had a list of things they wouldn't do. Well you see, whenever that happens, God has to make sure that every single one of those you said I'm not going to do, that you have to do it. Because if he allows you to have an area of your life that is resistant to him, then he doesn't control you. He's really not your Lord. He's not your Savior. And he's not God for you. He can only be God when the people he is over are absolutely surrendered to what his will and his wish is. So the love and loyalty that he's talking about is exemplified in the fact that we serve him because we love him and are loyal to him. We've made a promise to him as to what we're going to do. And the love part of it is the way we keep that day by day so we're doing what he asks us to do. The final thing that he says, and to observe the Lord's commands and decrees that I'm giving you today for your own good. Once you have committed to live in obedience to him, then he gives us the instructions as to what we're to do. And when he gives these in the Old Testament, he gives not only the Ten Commandments, but all the decrees and the instructions for those too. When Jesus called his disciples, the very first thing he did was to say, you come and follow me. You be submissive to what I want you to do. And then as Matthew tells a story, the next thing he sits down and begins with a sermon on the mount to explain exactly what they are to do. To commit your life to Christ without engaging and reading the Bible regularly will never result in the kind of success in your Christian life that God intends you to have. Now observing his commands is more than simply doing them. He's talked about covenant loyalty above. What he means is that we're to be conscientious in learning what they are. We're to be students of what God has asked us to do. It doesn't mean simply reading the Bible once in a while, but to make sure that the Bible is the central focus of what we're trying to get hold of, what we're trying to learn to do. He wants us to be conscientious students of the Bible, or of his words, or his instructions to us. God demands that we listen to him as a first step to being obedient to him, and as a first step to imitating what we need to do. So that this study of what God has said to us is a critical issue. And whenever a person doesn't want to read the Bible, doesn't want to make time for the Bible, or to hear it taught or preached, there is inside of them a resistance to obedience. Now maybe as you were growing up in your own home, or as parents, whenever you have children, you may have had a time when you were giving instructions to them, and you looked over and they had their fingers in their ears like this, making sure that they were letting you know they weren't going to listen. Any child that does that gets parental attention, generally rather stern attention, because you know if a child is determined not to listen to you, it is a preparation for refusing to do whatever it is you want them to do. That spirit of not listening is rebellion against God. Why would a person not want to hear the Bible or read it? Because you don't want to do it. And if you don't want to do it, then it's just boring to you. And when people say the Bible is boring, church is boring, Sunday school is boring, they oftentimes mean I'm not interested. For whenever you're interested in something, you love it. And you're passionate about hearing it. And you're passionate about doing it. If you sit down at the computer to play some kind of a game, and you get started with it, and you get bored with it, you quit. Because you're not interested. But there are stories of people who play video games so long that they die. I saw the other day a guy played 40 hours and died playing the game. When you're passionate about something, it possesses you and controls you until you're hungry for it. And that's one of the tests we have. If somebody tells you, you know, I just don't feel good and I don't want to eat, you know immediately they're sick. Someone tells you I don't read the Bible and I'm not interested in going to church, you know spiritually they're sick. There's something wrong. All of these are characteristics that Moses is telling the people of Israel as you go into the promised land, here are the qualities by which your life is tested. Then he starts a series of explanations sort of what these things mean. Beginning with verse 14, to Yahweh, or the Lord your God, belongs the heaven and even the highest heavens, the earth and everything in it. The Bible begins with the story of creation, saying that everything in the world belongs to God by means or the result of His creative activity. The reason the Bible begins with that is to let us know who is in charge, who has authority. And once you know who's in charge and who has authority, then you know where the rules and instructions are going to come from. It is critical for us to acknowledge the authority of God and ownership of everything that there is. And that's where he starts in this sermon, where he's talking about now connecting this with verse 12, you're to fear the Lord your God, you're to fear Him, you're to look up to Him with respect, and why? Verse 14 sort of answers that. One of the reasons why you're to do that is because He is the owner of everything that there is. When you're in your own house, you can do whatever you want to do, right? Well, until your wife tells you you can't do it. You can do anything you want to do until she says, get your feet off that or take your shoes off or whatever you have to do. When you're in your own house, that's true, but if you're in a guest's home, you're careful to live by the rules that they have. What God says is, this is my place. You're living in my world. My rules apply here. You can't act like this is just yours. Everything here belongs to me. The house you live in is really mine. The land that you're on is really mine. All the money that's in the world is really mine. If you have any of it, it's really mine. I want you to understand how things are. I am in charge. That's why the Bible starts with the story of creation. That's why in this message He's preaching, He begins with this realization. You should have respect for God because it is His place. All of it is His. Knowing how He wants you to live in His world is critical for your being acceptable to Him. Just like you're a guest in someone's home, so you're a guest in the Lord's house. Everything in the world belongs to Him. And then He says, the heavens and even the highest heavens. In the Old Testament and the New Testament too, people were fascinated, often times when they talked about God and His enormous nature, they were fascinated by the stars. They looked up at the stars and they could see the stars without number. We live in places where there's a lot of light. I remember one time, there was going to be some kind of a, I don't know, solar eclipse or something in the, happened and so we brought a telescope and they told us, you know, you can't look in the telescope and see this at night, you have to go outside the city far enough away so there are no lights around you. So we drove all the way up to the dunes corner and got that thing out in the field and set it up so we could see whatever it was we were going to watch with the kids. We had to wake them up in the middle of the night so they really weren't very interested in it by the time we got out there. But the stars were very visible when you get without any light around you. When people live in big cities, they're not conscious of how beautiful the stars are because the lights there make it hard to see the stars. People in the Bible, they had only candles and little lamps that weren't very effective and they were expensive so when dark came, they didn't have much light at all and you could look across the countryside and see nothing. I saw a picture, and maybe some of you saw it on the internet, of, from one of the satellites, they took a picture of the world at night and you could see all the lights all over the world. When it got to North Korea, there were no lights. You could see like a line right there. The poverty of that country, no lights. You look at the ancient world and you could take that kind of picture and you may see the whole world at night would be completely dark. So they could look at the stars and they could see what was there. It was amazing to them. We are a little bit jaded by that when we send people to the moon and we have flags now sitting on the moon with the United States flags up there and we're not as thoughtful about the natural order as maybe we should be. There's a fellow named Earl Guglio who has a video that talks about how indescribable God is and uses the natural order of the stars in the universe to describe that. When you look at what's happening in the stars, you see how amazing all of God's creation really is. I looked up some of the facts about what the heavens are like. Light travels at 186,000 miles per second. Our planet is on the Milky Way. If you look at the speed of light that travels in a year's time, it travels 630 miles per year. Our Milky Way is 1,000 light years deep and 100,000 light years across. It's 100,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light. It's 1,000 times faster than the speed of light.