Understanding God's Covenant and Our Faith

10 and also chapter 29. The book of Deuteronomy is a summary of what you find in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. The details of all God's instructions to his people about how they are to live are given in those books in more detail. Starting in the first of Deuteronomy, Moses sort of gives a summary of what God has already done. In chapter 10, he starts with the tablets of the Ten Commandments that he gives to them, and then he gives a shorter summary from chapter 10 to chapter 28. In that, Moses sort of summarizes what is found in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And it's longer than maybe a short summary you'd find, but it's shorter than those different books. Then he describes in Deuteronomy what the law is basically, a summary of it. Then he talks about what happens if you don't do what God tells, the curses that will come to you. He talks about the blessings all the way through the law that will come to you if you're obedient to God. Then in chapter 29, he starts a new section of Deuteronomy. Verse 1 says, these are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab, in addition to the covenant made with them at Horeb. Horeb is another name for Sinai. So here we have another discussion of the contract or the covenant that God made at Sinai, and then that Moses started talking about, and now here is a new covenant. A covenant that is summarized in even a shorter fashion. So chapter 29, 30, to the end of the book of Deuteronomy, is again a summary of the covenant or contract that God made with his people. Now this seems maybe repetitive to us as we look at it, but when the Bible repeats something, it's an indication of the significance of it. You'll notice, of course, when you turn to the New Testament, that there is Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. What are those books about? They all tell the same story, the story of Jesus' life. So we don't have one story of Jesus' life, we have four. So when you start through the Old Testament and you get the covenant in Exodus and Leviticus, and you say, wait a minute, we get over here in Deuteronomy, we're getting it again, now at the end of Deuteronomy, we're getting it again, it's the same kind of indication that this is something very important to God's people, so that it's the symbol of what they're supposed to do. Now why do you think that there's four stories of Jesus' life? Because they're all on the same page. Okay. Tell different things about Jesus, so they present the same idea. What? They have different perspectives. Okay, they have different perspectives. Why do you think they're trying to give us different perspectives? Why do you think they're trying to give us something that lets us know they're on the same page? Because people are different. It's just different people can pick it out and say, oh, I can understand that one, but I can't understand this one. Okay, better understanding. Some things in Luke, for instance, that are about the birth and giving story, they're not in the New Testament. Some of the things in Matthew, they're not in the New Testament. So they fill out some of the story in different ones. They all tell a story in a different way. Tell it in a different way. That's the point. It's just more people and more stories told in the same direction. Why do you think that's important? It's important for us to live those different lives. Mm-hmm. It's important for us to live those different lives. Mm-hmm. One witness is good. Two witnesses are better. Three is even better. Four is just so-so. So you have whenever the covenant is given in the Old Testament, three different pictures for the very same reason. This was their image of what they were supposed to live like. Christ is the model for us. This was the Bible that Jesus had to know what God wanted him to do. All of Jesus' life was based on the covenant. The disciples of Jesus and Jesus himself knew this covenant backward and forward. They knew what it was. When you read the story of Daniel, you know, and they've taken off to this foreign land, and they're going to be eating food that's not properly prepared or koshered. They refused to eat it because they knew what the law told them to do. And Jesus lived by this law. He said not one single comma or dot over an eye will be removed from the law. That's how critical it was. So the Old Testament places great emphasis on the repetition of this law, summarizing it, giving a little bit different perspective each time, putting it in a different context each time, because this was how you knew God wanted you to live. God told them, this is the way my people live. So when Jesus came, we look at him and say, this is the way God wants us people to live. All Jesus was doing was living out the law. That was all he was doing. Now we go back and look at that, and we can't connect those things together, but this was critical for them. This was the foundation stone on which all of our Christianity was built. And there are three separate ideas, three separate summaries of this law. One, the full page, and then another summary, and here a shorter summary in the last of this book. So he starts out by saying, Moses summoned all Israelites and said to them, starts off, this is sort of an introduction, verses, incidentally, if you look at verse 1, these are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with Israelites in Moab in addition to the covenant he made with them at Horeb. Now, some people think that this is sort of the end of chapter 28. As you know, the Bible wasn't written with chapters and verses, it was just written. And so people come along and try to figure it out. It sounds like, in some ways, that verse 1 is sort of the summary. Remember all the promises, all the curses, and all the blessings that were going to come, and all the law that was supposed to happen. And this sounds like a summary of that. These are the terms of the covenant. That was the terms that were used from 10 to 28. All the terms of the covenant, the basis of the covenant, that the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab in addition to the covenant made at Horeb or Sinai. Seldom in the Bible is the covenant at Moab mentioned. But here it's focused. Because the people of Israel are getting ready to go into the land of promise, and God has asked them to reaffirm this covenant. So what he's done in chapters 10 through 28, he's spelled out an abbreviated form of the covenant that's established in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. And now he's saying God has asked them to reaffirm the contract with God. So they're coming to this place at the end of this section where he's asking them to reaffirm their commitment to God. They weren't at Sinai. This is a whole new generation. They're getting ready to go in the land of promise. And now he's saying to them, before you go in, I ask you to review the covenant. You have the full details, but I want you to get a review of it. And now I want you to make a commitment to live the way God tells you to live. So here's what happens in this next part is the contract ceremony. Moses summoned the Israelites to them. Your eyes have seen all that the Lord did in Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials, to all his land. With your own eyes you saw these great trials, those miraculous signs and great wonders. So he starts off by grounding the covenant contract in genuine real historical circumstances. You saw with your own eyes what God did. You saw what happened in Egypt. You saw what God did to Pharaoh. You saw what happened to the officials. He emphasizes this again. With your own eyes you saw these great trials and miraculous signs and great wonders. He is grounding the reality of the covenant in the actual act of God. So when we see the New Testament and the story of Jesus is written, it's eyewitness accounts of what Jesus did. Our contract with God is not based on imagination. It's not based on abstract theology. It's not based on simply ideas like philosophy. All of the contract God makes with us is grounded in genuine real historical events. You saw with your own eyes, he says, you've seen with your own eyes all that God did, his actions with Pharaoh in Egypt. You saw the great trials and the miraculous signs and wonders. It is important for us to grasp that God does not work in abstract circumstances. He works in real human events. You saw with your own eyes. Now, you remember if you look at the New Testament, you see in the record of Jesus' life, they are telling you the story of Jesus as they actually experienced Jesus' life. So there are historical evidences that this takes place. The reason God does this is he wants us to understand that our lives lived out in this world in real historic circumstances are not different than what he asked the people of Israel to do, nor is it different than what he asked Jesus to do, nor is it different than what he asked the church to do in the New Testament. So if you were to sit down and say, OK, Jesus never really lived on the earth. This is in the minds of people an imagination of what a person ought to be like. You would say, well, that's not fair because it wasn't really lived out in this world. But all these stories in the Old Testament and in Jesus' life and the story of the church in Acts are real historical events. People like you, people like me, who were living in this world and encountered the reality of God. That's a critical part of what Moses is asking them to do. You have to believe that God has the power to do the things that he did, or you can't follow him. And so you are representatives because you saw what took place with your own eyes. You have seen what happened with your own eyes. So you testify to all the rest of us who don't see it, the reality that it's true. And when we face all the difficulties that life brings to us, we can go back to the Bible and find someone who faced the same kind of circumstances we have. We see what they did. We see how they acted. We see the power of God in their lives. And it gives us courage to trust God. Now they're going to be making a contract with God. They're going to say, we're going to do everything you tell us to do. In the process of that, they're going to need to believe that God has the ability and power to do those things in them as well as to the others. Verse 4, he picks up now to detail this. But to this day, he's talking about the Israelites who are standing there. That's an important phrase. To this day, they're getting ready to enter the promised land. What have they gone through? They've gone through being delivered from Pharaoh. They've gone through living, seeing the water open and the Egyptians drowned. They've gone through seeing manna come from heaven. They've gone through seeing water squirt out of rocks. They've gone through battles where they were outnumbered and they won those battles. Through all of that, this is what they're ready to see. Up to this day, the Lord has not given you a mind that understands or eyes to see or ears to hear. A very dramatic set of phrases he delivers. He just said to them, Your eyes have seen what the Lord did. Your eyes saw those great trials and miraculous signs and great wonders. Now he says to them, In spite of all that, to this day right now where you're standing, the Lord has not given you a mind to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear. You know the story of what happened to the Israelites all the way through the trip from Egypt to the promised land. They had great difficulty believing and trusting God. They saw what God did, but they didn't get it. They believed what God did, but it didn't register in their minds. They, with their own mind, understood what God did, but they didn't understand it. The Israelites themselves, even though they saw all these things, even though they experienced them themselves, they had great difficulty trusting God. Every step of the way, when they were asked to do something that was tremendously difficult, they stopped and had trouble accepting the reality that God could do this. You remember what happened with Thomas whenever he heard that Jesus was raised from the dead? The disciples said, We have seen Jesus. You know what he said? I can't believe, even when he saw Jesus, that it's you unless I can put my hand in the scar on your side. He saw Jesus with his eyes, but it was so enormous he couldn't grasp it. I think a lot of us are followers of Christ that are in this very boat. We really believe all the stories of the Scriptures. We've seen them. We've read them. We've heard them. But we get in a situation where it's bigger than we can handle on our own skills, our own wisdom, and we lock up. If you ask a believer who's got caught in these things and they're telling you how nervous they are about what's happening, how they're having trouble sleeping, how they're worried about this, that, or the other, and you say to them, Do you remember the story of God when he brought the people of Israel across the Red Sea on dry ground and the Egyptian armies drowned? Yeah, yeah. Do you believe that? Oh, yeah, I believe that. Then why are you worried? Well, you see, and they'll explain to you why they're worried. Their circumstance is different than that. If you're going to say, Do you remember the story about Jesus where they killed him, buried him in the ground, and three days he rose again, raised from the dead? Yeah. Well, is your problem bigger than that one? Well, no. Well, then you're not going to worry anymore, huh? Well, I know, but it's just hard for me to accept. Every one of us in this room gets there. We see with our eyes and with our mind, but we don't grasp it as a reality inside of ourselves. And Moses is saying to the people before they make their covenant contract, they're in this state of condition. I know you've seen this already. You have eyes to see, but you never really see. You have ears to hear, but you never really understand. And you have ears, but you never get the full meaning of what's happened. These three elements that Moses focused on, the first is knowledge. I want you to know, God said, that I am the Lord your God. He wants us to comprehend what it means that he is the ruler of the universe, and he is God, and no one else is, and he is our ruler, our personal ruler. He wants us to grasp that knowledge. That's what he's interested in. I want you to have eyes to see, so that they will become eyes of faith. I believe that what I've seen can also happen to me. He has eyes of faith. He wants us to have ears so that what's spoken, all the teachings that we read in the scriptures, we will find it necessary to obey. A lot of people, you know, in every generation come into the same problem. The people in Moses' day heard the law. They heard what it had to say. But when they got in the land of promise, they said, well, that worked in the desert. But here we're in this land where the Canaanites lived. And their farming practices, when they worshiped Baal, were very successful. And so when we were in the desert, we didn't need the help of this God Baal. But now that we're in this place, we need this help. And whenever you get in the New Testament, you see them doing the same thing. We know what the Old Testament says, but, you know, we think that there's some things that need to be adjusted. And when you meet people here in our times, and you talk about what the Bible says, they're likely to say, this is the modern times. The Bible was written hundreds of years ago, thousands of years ago. We have to adapt to what people think and believe and accept today. So we think that the Scripture, even though it presents the power of God as greater than any opposition that could ever come to us, is not able to apply to the circumstances in which we find ourselves. What Moses was saying to them is, you're going to make a promise to God, but I want you to understand right up front, you don't see this the way you should. You don't understand it the way you should. You don't know that He is the Lord the way you should be, knowing that. And whenever you face trouble, and you read in the Scripture what you should do, and you think, well, I should do that. And then you think of your own ability, and you think, well, you know, that was, God did all those things in the past. He's not going today to do something like that now. We see, but we don't understand that He is the Lord, even though we see things that He does. What God wants is the miraculous ability that He has to be demonstrated in the lives of people who understand He is the ruler of the universe. So He wants us to be able to know that He is the Lord. He wants us to be able to see the things that He did, so that that will cause us to believe that He not only did those things in the past, but can do them today. He wants us to have ears so that whenever we hear what the Scripture says we should do, we don't measure it against, am I as good as the other people around me? Do I read the Bible as much as the other people around me? Do I worship God as well as the other people around me? We look instead at the Scripture and say, what does God require of me? What does He tell me I ought to be? I'm satisfied to be good as anybody else around me, but I don't want to overwork this deal. And what He says is, I want you to be holy as I am holy. I want you to be perfect as I am perfect. So we have in our mind, in our heart, ears that say the teachings of God are given to us and to which we must radically obey what He tells us is true. They've seen all these things, they've heard all these things, but they still don't get it. And I think you could say that about most Christians in our time. We know the Bible, we believe it's true, but we live only doing the things that we could accomplish if there was no God. And Moses said, that's the situation you guys are in. And I think to some extent it was true, it's been true for all followers of God anywhere. Even Jesus' own disciples were perpetually, no matter what He did, were shocked by the amazing power God had. They could see Him feed 5,000 people with just a little bit of food, and the next time a bunch of hungry people, they say, oh Lord, what are we going to do? And He did it twice. The second time, they were as shocked as they were the first. There's something about us that makes it difficult for us to comprehend the enormous power of God, and to be able to trust ourselves to something that is bigger and beyond our capacities to do. But it didn't stop Moses from saying to the people, I'm ready for you to make a contract with God, a commitment to say, I place you as the Lord of my life. Because life is kind of a journey. It's a journey that takes place, and there are two dimensions to this journey. One is the willingness that you have to commit to make it. The second is the fact that God indeed Himself gives us the capacities that we actually need. I want to read a passage of Jeremiah where he talks about the new covenant, the covenant that we're in with God. Chapter 24 of the book of Jeremiah. He's predicting about the time in which this new covenant for God would come about. Verse 24. My eyes will watch over them for their good, and I will bring them back to this land. I will build them up and not tear them down. I will plant them and not uproot them. I will give them a heart to know me, that I am the Lord. They will be my people. I will be their God. They will return to me with all of their heart. Do you notice in here what he says? I will give them heart to know me. There's two parts to this. One is the commitment to want to know God, and the other one is the gift that God gives us to be able to know Him. You can't know all about God without this gift that God gives you. In Ezekiel chapter 36, verses 26 through 28, he says, I will give you a new heart. He's talking about this time of the new covenant. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you a heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. You will live in the land I gave your forefathers. You will be my people, and I will be your God. There's no doubt, no question, that God asks us to make a commitment to follow Him. But it's also true that we can never live up to that without the gift that God gives us. The ability to understand He is the Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth and all that that means. The gift that He gives us to be able to see things and believe that they're really possible for us. The ability to understand the teachings of God and to give ourselves an obedience to what God asks. Moses said to them, you're not there yet, but I'm going to ask you to make this commitment. Jeremiah and Ezekiel say to us in this New Testament era, the time is coming when I will give my people a heart to understand. I will give them the faith to believe and trust, and I will help them to know how to live in obedience to me. We're living in that time. Of all the things that have happened in the scriptures, we have all of it now for us. So that our minds can understand, because the Spirit is with us to tell us the truth. We can have faith above and beyond what anyone else in the past has had, because the Spirit gives us the gift of faith as we follow Christ. And we can understand and know what it is that God is doing in us as no one else can. We have the Old Testament, we have the law, we have the prophets, we have Jesus' life, and we have the story of the New Testament believers. And then on top of all of that, we have the Holy Spirit of God to give us ears to hear, heart to believe, and mind and ears to understand. Would you bow your heads for just a moment? I want to ask you if you're facing something now, maybe that seems bigger than you can handle, and you have trouble believing that God's going to work it out. I'd like you to say, God, I will do whatever you tell me, I'll obey. Whatever you tell me, I'll obey. And give me the eyes of faith. So, Father, we as your people, this church and this community, ask that you transform our minds to where we have a firm grip on the reality that you are the Lord of the universe. Nothing can stand in your way. Give us a firm grasp that by our eyes, the things that we can see, we can also see the power you have to overcome them. Help us, Father, that as we hear these things, we will be able to trust you to teach us the things we need to do that we might live this covenant that you've given us. In the name of Jesus, we ask it. Amen.