Renewing the Covenant: A Call to Genuine Commitment

This whole chapter is a renewal of the covenant that Israel had with the Lord. The reason the covenant is so important is that when God makes a contract or covenant with people, the same covenant is made to all people, all the time. He doesn't change the context of it, nor does He change the outcome of it. But His commitment is to say, here's what I expect of you, and here's what you have a right to expect of me. So, just before they enter the land of promise, all this beginning part of Deuteronomy is talking about what God expects of His people. And now He asks them to renew the contract that they had made before, for them to make their commitment or contract with Him. And the part that I want to start with, use, is chapter 29, verse 19. But when you read the first sentence, you see that there is a reference that needs to be addressed. When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself. So, he's referencing the oath that the people of God are supposed to make. So, you have to go back and see, when you begin this, what Moses was talking about when he was trying to address the issue of the covenant. Go back to chapter 29, verse 9. He's talking about the covenant. Carefully follow the terms of this covenant, so that you may prosper in everything you do. Verse 9 and verse 10. All of you are standing today in the presence of the Lord your God, your leaders, chief men, elders, officials, all the men of Israel, together with the children, their wives and aliens, living in your camps who chop your wood, carry your water. You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the Lord your God, a covenant the Lord is making with you this day and sealing with an oath. So, what he's faced with is this covenant that he's making. Now, we know in the covenant with Abraham and covenant with the people of Israel, basically the context was this, the shortened form of it. I will be your God and you will be my people. That's the abbreviated form of it. What does it mean to be a God? A God is the power that guides you, that tells you how to be able to live your life so you can make it in this world. A God, wherever you meet them, whatever they're at, whatever kind of God they are, they always promise their people something. I will provide for you. The gods of Baal provided crops and fruitfulness for their animals. And I will protect you. I'll stand between you and your enemies. And I will make your life better because you follow me. And all those are the same contract that God makes with us. They're the same contract he makes with... They're the same idea that any, even false, God promises. Now, what God requested of the people of Israel is one thing. I want you to do everything I tell you to do. With Abraham, his list was a little shorter. When he gets Sinai, the list of all the Ten Commandments and all of the laws in Deuteronomy and Exodus, Leviticus numbers, all of those things were rules that he gave to the people of Israel. And here, he is asking them to renew their commitment to all those things that he's given to them. So the two oaths that were made were one on God's part to say, I will be your God. I'll guide you and I'll provide for you and I'll protect you and I'll make your life a great benefit to the world. God's covenant for his people was always missionary. I will make you a blessing to the world. Even from the very beginning, it was a missionary covenant. The promise to the people that he asked from the people was, that you trust me absolutely. And you believe that I have the truth for you and you do the things I tell you. Trust and faith and obedience are all a part of one whole package. When you believe that someone is telling you the truth about what you ought to do, you do it. So if you're asking for directions or help and you trust the person you're talking to, you do what they tell you to do. Not part of it, but all of it. So he asked of them that you do everything that I tell you to do. That's the covenant oath that he wants them to make. Now, all that's a context for verse 19, which is the third part of this chapter. When such a person, a person who is getting ready to make this oath, well, let me go back to 16 and read that paragraph. You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt, how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images, the idols of wood, stone, silver, and gold. Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today, whose heart turns away from the Lord our God, to go and worship the gods of those nations. Make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison. So he's warning them about the opposite of making this promise. To say, not that I'm going to obey God, but that I'm holding back so that I don't make that promise to God. When such a person, and when such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, I will be safe even though I persist in going my own way. And what he's concerned about is that the people are going to make this covenant promise, and they're not going to have integrity about it. They're going to say the words of the covenant, Yes Lord, I will do everything you tell me to do, but actually in their heart and mind they're thinking, I don't really have to do this. All the nation of Israel is going to make this vow, but I don't have to do it. I can make the promise, but I'm not going to do everything God tells me. He talked about in chapter verses 16 through 18, that these idols of wood and stone, that they'd seen how dangerous they were. And he made a promise to them, he warned them that no man or woman, or any of the clans should turn themselves away from God, but they should accept the reality, he was the Lord, and live in obedience to him. Now, Moses is telling them that when it comes time to make the oath, and the way they did it was they would put, I think in this instance they put animals and they cut them in half, and they put them along the side, one group on one side who would say some of the laws of God, and on the other side the people would respond by saying, affirming, we will follow this, we will do this. And the animals cut in half were sort of a way of saying, and if we don't keep this promise that we've made to you, may we be cut in half like the animals. That was sort of the vow that they made. Now, here he's talking about someone who's a part of the community of faith, and he hears the words of these vows, and he sees all the people on the hillsides who are making these promises to God, and he thinks inside of himself, now all of us are safe. Because all these people have made these promises. So it doesn't matter very much for me, if I really don't keep them. Somebody else is going to keep them. And because of that, God has to bring rain on their crops, and he has to bring prosperity to them because they've made the promise to God. So he takes confidence in the fact that even though he's not really going to do all the things that he's promised to God, that it's going to be okay for him. It's what in the New Testament we call a play actor. The word hypocrite means somebody who's just acting. The idea of holding an ancient world. Men were only ones who were actors, but if they played a woman's role, they'd hold a sign up in front of them, a woman's face, so that you're acting like you're someone, but in reality you're a different person. The word hypocrite is not necessarily an evil word, because it just means an actor, really. But it becomes evil in the sense that you promise something to someone, and instead of being truthful, you're just acting like you're truthful. And if you have somebody that is selling you a car, and they're just acting like they're truthful, it's destructive to you. And if you trust somebody, and you stand before a person and make vows of promise of faithfulness the rest of your life, and the other person does not intend to keep those vows, it's very destructive to you. So an actor doesn't necessarily mean that they're a bad person, unless they don't tell you they're acting. Here he's saying, be careful among you, for there are people who are going to hear the oath when everyone makes them, and they're going to make the oath without really intending to live up to it. I think that this is an enormous problem for the people of Israel, and everywhere you go in the world where it is easy to become a follower of Christ, it remains a problem. In the places where they kill you if you profess your faith in Christ, like the Arab world, no one wants to act like you're a Christian because they'll kill you. So it sort of weeds out those that are not going to live what they say. But in a land like ours, it's not uncommon to find people who have made a profession of their commitment to Christ. They stand and say, I give my life to Jesus Christ, and they don't live that. You can go visit in any community you want to from house to house and find a lot of people who don't go to church, who don't read the Bible, who are very confident that they're saved and going to heaven. And if you talk to them about why they're confident about that, they'll say, well, I was baptized when I was born. Or they'll say, I made a profession of faith and was baptized in a church. Or they'll say, I'm a Christian. Or they'll say, well, of course, I'm a good person. They have all kinds of reasons why they have an assurance of their salvation without doing the things God says they should do. And if you ask them, well, do you know you should go to church if you're a follower of Christ, they'll say, well, yeah, I know that. But, you know, I have a lot of things on my mind and a lot of issues. And I go sometimes. They say, you know, the Bible commands you to read the Bible and put it in practice. And they will say, well, I know that, and I've read it some. But the Bible says you should go to church. Well, you know, I just have gotten out of the habit. There are all kinds of reasons why the fundamental things that God asks of His followers, they discard. And I've talked to people whose lives are in terrible messes. You know, they've lived their life in all kinds of chaos and all kinds of sin and all kinds of difficulties. And they will look you in the eye and say, but I'm saved. From what? They mean, when I die, I think I'm going to go to heaven. But their lives are filled with such chaos and disaster and sin in this world that it's not worth living for them. What God intended was that people would make a promise to Him and live that promise. He's saying here, you're going to face the issue, and some of you right here in this crowd, He said, they're going to hear this oath that's made and is going to say, now the blessings of God will come on me. And He will think, I will be safe even though I persist in going my own way. And you'll notice here that in His description of this person, the person says, I will insist on living my life the way I want to. Whenever we met last week and I asked you to talk about evidences that people were following idols, I talked about how a person makes decisions about their time in their life, what they're going to do with their time, what they're going to do with their money, how they're going to treat people around them. All of those are key issues that God wants to control about us. And many people profess to be followers of Christ and disregard Him altogether in the major areas of their life. They disregard God's instructions completely in all those areas and yet are convinced that they're going to be saved. Here He marks the clear evidence of someone who's not a follower of His. This person will say, I persist in going my own way. I don't meet very many people who don't want to go to heaven. But I meet a lot of people who want to do in their life exactly what they want to do and still go to heaven. It isn't going to happen. It just isn't going to happen. He paints a picture of exactly the problem so many religious people have in our world. Yet in the church, whenever we talk about the fallen state of our country or our world, seldom do I hear people who are concerned about that that are particularly concerned about their own failure to follow Christ. It's always the courts or the schools or the government or somewhere else. The problem, Moses points out, is in the hearts of people, individuals, who when they make choices about how they think and how they act, do what they want to do instead of what God says they ought to do. It's not an easy thing to promise God you're going to live for Him because He will inevitably ask you to make choices that are difficult and painless and appear to be dangerous. What He wants us to do is to believe that trusting Him and doing what He tells us, that we can trust Him, that He'll never ask us to do something, no matter how dangerous it appears, that really is destructive to us. That's what faith is. So here you have a person who wants the blessings of God. I will be safe even though I persist in going my own way. Why? Because everyone else around me has made the promise to God, and I can then piggy-tail on them and all the blessings of God will come to me even though I don't have to do all the things that God tells me. This will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. That's Moses' promise. When you have one person who is determined not to live in obedience to what God wants, it's destructive for the whole group. What Moses is talking about is that the person who thinks, I can hide in this land where people are doing the right things and God's blessings will fall on them, it's not true. For God's judgment comes to the person who fails to make this kind of promise to God inevitably. I can't think of anyone that I've ever met who has trouble in their life, I mean real trouble in their life, and when I sit down and talk to them I can't point to specific things that they're doing that are contrary to the will of God. Now they don't connect those things. They don't connect the fact that they don't pray regularly and ask God for direction. They don't connect that with their financial difficulties. They don't connect that with their marital problems. They think that one group's over here, that's the church business, and the finances is over here and they're just not connected in any way. It's not true. What God says is you can't get by by depending on the righteousness of other people to make your life what it ought to be. You can't count on the fact that God's going to say, well there's a hundred people here and there's 95 of them that are faithful to me, so I'm going to cut their rain off. You say, well it's going to rain on everybody because people all around me are righteous people. But what he's trying to say is that God has ways of making sure that even though the rain falls on everybody's crops, the drought comes on those as judgment that God is judging. How does it happen? Well, you can take two people who have the same income, the same size families, and one of them following the principles of God and their life seems to work out. The other one, they're constantly in trouble all the time. Everything seems to be the same except for their willingness to surrender their lives to obedience to God. Does it happen instantly? If you don't do what God wants, if judgment falls on you, no. But inevitably, over the time, the judgment of God comes. What Moses is pointing out, it's like, and he talked about this in verse 18, it's like a bitter poison among you. A root among you that produces a bitter poison. What happens whenever you're around people who are inclined not to be obedient to God and to do some things He wants them to do and not others? It's catching. It influences. The influence may be subtle, but it's a powerful influence. And you have one person in your community, he's saying, or one person in your family who's disobedient to God. He doesn't do everything God wants him to do. And then the kids growing up look at the uncle or aunt or whoever it is and say, why can't we do those things, Mom and Dad? Uncle Bob does them. Why can't we do those things? And the attraction of that rebellion grows like a bitter poison in the group, the whole group. The purity that God expects of us is difficult to hold on to. The obedience that God expects of us is very hard because it requires discipline and careful attention to our own spiritual condition and to the attention to what God says our spiritual condition ought to be. There's not any sin that you can participate in that you won't see a lot of church people doing the same thing. How do you get around this? You keep your eyes focused on the character of Christ and on the holiness of God. And when you look at yourself in comparison to who Jesus was and you see that this is what God expects of us, it makes our standards the same for everybody. I think we've kind of grown to the place, you know, where when we find that there's some rebellion in our own life toward God, that we take great comfort in saying, well, nobody's perfect. I can hide behind that one. It's true, though. Here's the other side of that. God expects us to be perfect, complete, totally faithful. He's provided a means for us when we fall short to confess our sins and ask for forgiveness. But that's a critical ingredient. Confessing your sins reminds you of how much you depend on the forgiveness and grace of God. Ignoring this by saying, well, nobody's perfect, allows you to excuse yourself for the failures of your own life. And in excusing yourself is not the same as getting forgiveness. For forgiveness comes when you acknowledge your failures and your flaw and you ask God for forgiveness and you pledge anew to him to be more diligent in your effort to be obedient. That's what God wants for us. You're going to find, he said, that there are some people who will take the oath and who will decide on themselves they're not going to do what it says and it will bring disaster to you. The Lord will never be willing to forgive him. His wrath and zeal will burn against that man. The person who is among the group who's determined to live their life the way they want to can be promising that God has his eye on them. I was watching a movie the other day and these people were in an airplane, a fighter jet, and somebody had launched a missile at them, you know, and they were trying to avoid that and they'd go through the canyons and curve and over the hills and all this kind of stuff trying to get away from them. It reminded me of this passage. God has his eye targeted on us. And whatever kind of crooks or turns or camouflage you might try to throw up that fools everybody in the world, but God, it just won't. For what he requires of us is faithfulness to him. Does he expect that we can ever live without sin? No. But what he expects is that we become aware of our failures, we're distressed by our failures, we ask for forgiveness for our failures, and we promise God again to be obedient to him as best we can and for his grace to help us. Our lives are a constant struggle to hold before us the very picture of what God wants for us as the passion of our lives. We shouldn't be overwhelmed by our sins so we think of ourselves as worthless, but we should never become complacent and be able to accept our sins as the normal state of the follower of Christ. For the man who's done this, the Lord will never be willing to forgive him because he's not asking for it. His wrath and zeal will burn against the man. All the curses written in this book will fall on him. Now he's a poison to the rest of the group, but the judgment will fall on the person who's doing this. And the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven. I meet a lot of people, Baptists especially, who like to hold on to the idea that one time I prayed a prayer and asked Christ to come into my life and I was baptized and now I'm safe. Nothing can ever change my life. And so I can live the way I want to and still go to heaven. The Bible doesn't contradict that once a person is saved, you're going to heaven. But what it does contradict is a person who says, I'm saved because I'm giving my life to the Lord when it really hasn't been given. See, that's the key. You can say Jesus Christ is my Lord in the Baptistry, but if you don't intend to try to live that, you really haven't done it. It's the same thing if a person gets married and they're standing up before the preacher and he says to the guy, do you promise to love and honor and obey this woman? And he says yes all the time. He's looking at one of the bridesmaids and thinking, maybe I can get her after this thing is over. That's really not a commitment to marriage. And a commitment to give your life to God is not a commitment to God if you haven't really done that. What Moses is trying to help us understand is that what God looks at is the lifestyle of the person. And he warns, all the curses written in this book will fall upon him and the Lord will blot out his name under heaven. He is not one of mine. The reality is that all the names on our church roll are not names that God reads off to get you into heaven. He has his own list. Because we can't tell what the person means when they say, I give my life to Jesus Christ. We can't look at the heart. But God hears the thoughts of the person's heart like they're trumpet sounds. He knows exactly where the person stands. And he keeps his own list. And what he's telling us is, you may sign your name on there, but when I see what you're doing with your life, that you really don't trust me, I just blot it out. The Lord will single him out of the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this book of the law. A terrible warning given to us, that God is not fooled by what takes place. He understands who we are. He understands our hearts and minds. And he keeps the promises made to his people, who make the promises, mean the promises, and try to live them. We should never be discouraged by the fact that we fail God in sin. We're going to do that. What we must be discouraged about is, when we fail God in sin and it doesn't seem to matter to us. We don't want to see our lives change. I have had a lot of people come to me in their hour of great distress, and they want God's help. Some of them I've never met before that is coming to church and say, I just need to pray and I'll talk to them. They say, your way out is to follow Christ. Okay, I'm ready to do that. Some of them kneel in my office and pray that prayer. I say, okay, here's your Bible. Start reading here in the book of Matthew. We have church this Sunday morning, Sunday school. Be there for that in church. And they never come. Never come. They want to get rid of their problems, but they do not really trust God. That's what he's talking about here. And the person who does that, if you watch their lives over and over through the years, they go from one disaster to another, to another, to another. And they never seem to put it together that it's a failure to listen to God and follow him. I wouldn't say that church people are better than all the people out there in the world. But whenever you've made really a commitment to God, to follow him, and you realize that you're not doing what God wants, you should be brokenhearted. And you should desire to live a different life. Not be satisfied just to get escape from this one problem, but a desire to become what God wants you to be. All the way from the Old Testament through the New, there's no work salvation. It's all by grace. But God expects us to trust him as the final authority for the way we think, the choices we make, and the lifestyle we live. That's what it means to say, Jesus Christ is my Lord. He controls my mind. He controls my behavior. He controls my lifestyle. And whenever he is the Lord of your life, no matter how many times you've sinned, if he's really the Lord of your life, you're safe in him, in this world and forever. Let's pray. Father, I want to ask that you would keep reminding me of the things in my life that don't measure up to what you want. I want to ask you to help me to see my own failures. Show me in my character the things you want to be different. I would like, whenever I read the Scriptures and I see something that I'm supposed to do or think that's different than the way I think, I hope that it breaks my heart. If I ever get complacent about that, show me the way you see me, a sinner, only forgiven by your grace and by my trust in you. I don't know how to pray for the church. Every church should be a place where the promise that we make to you is lived out. Help us each one to be conscious that our own holiness individually influences the holiness of our church. Our own faithfulness individually makes the church a faithful place. Help us not to take for granted your grace. In the name of Christ, I pray. Amen.