THROUGH THE BIBLE - Deuteron..

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com. That's cornerstonerbc.com. Deuteronomy chapter 6 from verse 1. Now this is the commandment, the statutes and the rules that the Lord your God commanded me to teach you.

that you may do them in the land to which you are going, over to possess it, that you may fear the Lord your God and your Son and your Son's Son by keeping all His statutes and His commandments, which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be long. Hear, therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in the land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. and with all your soul and with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children and shall talk to them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. And when the Lord your God brings you into the land, he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of goods that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant.

And when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord your God who you shall fear, Him you shall serve, and by His name you shall swear. You shall not go after other gods, the gods of the peoples who are around you, for the Lord your God in your midst is a jealous God, lest the anger of the Lord your God be kindled against you, and He destroy you from off the face of the earth. You shall not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested Him at Massa, You shall diligently keep the commandments of the Lord your God in his testimonies and his statutes, which he has commanded you. And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that he may go well with you and that you may go in to take possession of the good land that the Lord swore to give to your fathers by thrusting out all your enemies from before you, as the Lord has promised.

When your son asks you in time to come, What is the meaning of the testimonies and the statutes and the rules that the Lord our God has commanded you? That you shall say to your son, we were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. And the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand. And the Lord showed signs and wonders great and grievous against Egypt and against Pharaoh and against and all his household before our eyes. And He brought us out from there that He might bring us in and give us the land that He swore to give to our fathers.

And the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes to fear the Lord our God, for our good always, that He might preserve us alive as we are this day. And it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to do all this commandment before the Lord our God, as he has commanded us. Amen. Our Lord said that the heavens and the earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. Let's come before our Lord and have a word of prayer.

Lord, we come before you this afternoon and we ask that you would be amongst us. Lord, if you're not among us, then we gather in vain. Lord, all the activities that we are capable of doing with these hands, the eyes, our ears, our own minds, Lord, are meaningless if you don't presence yourself among us by your Holy Spirit and make your truth known to us and change us. that we would see Christ, our Saviour, our Lord, our God, all the more clearly that His beauty will shine in our hearts. And Lord, by this, we ask that you would bring your word to be manifest in our hearts, to be living and abiding, and to produce in us a likeness of our Saviour.

And it is in His name that we pray. Amen. Well, we've made our way through the fifth chapter, or up until the fifth chapter, or chapter six, obviously, of the book of Deuteronomy, and thus far we've seen many things. We've been following the people of Israel, this second generation, and we have an interesting chapter before us because things begin to change in the book of Deuteronomy. Now, it's not that the audience has changed.

The audience is still the same. We've said it enough. We know that approximately almost 40 years have passed, and this is the second generation of the wilderness people, of the people of Israel. They're there. So the audience is still the same, and it's not as though the setting has changed.

They're still in the same place. began, they're at the plains of Moab, they're only weeks away from crossing the Jordan, only weeks away from going over into what we've come to know as the conquest of the people of Israel, to lay hold and to grasp and possess the land flowing with milk and honey, the land that the Lord God had promised Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and the land that He promised this people, if they would trust and obey. if they would simply trust and obey. The formidable forces are before them, the Canaanites aren't going to give the land up just like that. They're going to go down.

If they're going to go down, they're going to go down with a fight. But the people are to look to God and God alone and trust Him, trust His word. When He says, I will give you the victory, it's to them, it's trust and obey. And not only is it necessary to trust the Lord, to walk in faith and in obedience to Yahweh in order to possess the land, but trust and obedience, obedience in particular what we see in this passage, is absolutely necessary for when they occupy the land. And this is how the people of God are to conduct themselves as the people who've been plucked out of Egypt by God chosen to be a covenant people with Yahweh.

They are to be defined as a people of Yahweh. People who have come to trust in Yahweh and to obey Him in all that He says. They've come to know Him. as the God who speaks. You might remember in chapter 4, that was the emphasis of that chapter a few weeks ago.

These people have come to know Yahweh as the God who speaks, a God who's being pleased to open his mouth and to declare to his people his will and to make himself known. What condescension. but also he is a God who not only has spoken to make himself known, but he's a God who's made his laws known. His commands, his precepts, his statutes, he's made them known. We've already read the passage that happened in real time for these people back in Exodus chapter 20.

And in the previous chapter, that was last week for us, we read chapter five, and chapter five is a reiteration of the 10 words or the 10 commandments spoken from the mouth of God to the people of God so that his people would obey the Lord. Trust him and then obey him. Now we read that passage last week together as a community of believers, yet I did not mention even one of the commandments. Bit odd? Come to the passage where you have the Ten Commandments but I didn't mention not one of the commandments instead.

I wanted us to see last week simply how or what the response of the people of God was when they were confronted with the Living God. What their response was when they were confronted with God who speaks when they came into His manifest presence. What was their reaction? What was their response? It was one of absolute fear.

I said last week there's two types of fear, one which is good and one that is not so good. And Moses tells them back in chapter 20 of Exodus that you are not to fear, but you are to fear if you remember. Don't fear the manifestations. Don't fear, you know, I'm afraid, my knee's knocking, something could happen to me, but rather fear God for who he is. Not the fire and the smoke and the thunder and the lightning, but rather fear who God is.

This God who is infinitely pure and holy. This God who is beautiful. This God who speaks with power. This only true God who has made himself known to you. Fear Him for who He is.

Because if you do fear Him for who He is, then you will recognize who you are when you compare yourself to this great God. When you compare yourself to His statutes, His precepts, His commands, not recommendations, laws. From the smallest to the greatest, all of them are laws. If they've been spoken by God, they are all important. And they are not to be broken.

And that leaves one with hands open, in a posture of surrender, and one seeking only mercy. That's at the point where you find you have no currency before this God. And you come humbly and say, give me mercy if you will, even though I don't deserve mercy. But it's also according to verse 29 of the previous chapter that this reverential fear that we spoke about is absolutely necessary for the people of God to obey him. That fear is essential to obedience, that biblical fear, the fear of who this God is.

True fear of the living God produces true obedience. That's why God requires of his people that type of fear. Now with that in mind, and the reason why I didn't mention any of the Ten Commandments last week is because beginning from Chapter 6 in the Book of Deuteronomy, we will actually see before us an inspired exposition of the Ten Words of God. That's what we'll see moving forward until about Chapter 26, 27 or thereabouts. We will see an inspired exposition of the Ten Words coming before us in the Book of Deuteronomy.

From Chapter 6 through to Chapter 11, we have the First Commandment. The first commandment is, Israel, I am your Lord, your God. I'm the one who brought you out of the land of Egypt and the house of slavery. Thou shalt have what? No other gods before me.

That is fleshed out in the next six chapters. And then from chapter, in chapter 12, the contents of chapter 12, fleshes out the second commandment. And from chapter 13 through 14, fleshes out the third commandment. And then from chapter 15, you have the chapter that fleshes out the forfeit, the commandment about the Sabbath, and so on, and so on. You get the picture.

This book of Deuteronomy, from this point on to the next 20 chapters, will exposit what God means when He opens His mouth and speaks the 10 words. But this evening, we'll only concentrate our efforts in the few moments that we have on the first of these, and very much the content. Chapter six itself. I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land or out of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me.

You can read those words and you can see them to mean different things. But in essence, God is not saying that I am to be number one in your list. God's not saying that you shall have no other gods before me. I want to be first and the next come next. No, that's obviously not what the Lord God is saying.

He's saying that you are to have no other gods before my eyes. And this is the only true God. There is no other God. Let me ask you something. Yahweh, how far does he see?

You shall have no other gods before my eyes. There's no nook or cranny that is unexposed before the eyes of God. You shall have no hint of another God in your heart. None. Zero.

And this is so pertinent for the people of Israel right now as they're only weeks away from crossing over the Jordan River and to be exposed and confronted with the people of Canaan. These people have a flurry of false pagan deities. They have ugly and disgusting worship practices. Horrible worship practices. And the people may be tempted to pray to the God of fertility, or to pray to the God of war, or the God of rain to bring some rain from Him, the God of famine.

These people may be tempted. God says, no, you shall have no other gods before Me. Why? Because there is no other gods. They're all false deities, concoctions of the mind, the evil depraved mind and heart.

There is no other God. There are gods, small g, but there's no other gods, capital G. Man has made the small g gods and they are infinitely offensive to this God. You shall have no other gods before me. You enter that land, you're going to see statues.

idols, images, erected in high places to these false deities. Your responsibility, Israel, is to destroy them, shatter them to pieces. I must not see a single remnant or a hint of a false deity in the land I am giving you among the people who call by my name. None. Absolutely zero.

But beyond that, not only in the physical sense are you to destroy all things that semblance of false deities, but you must have no other gods before me in your heart. Remember, it's as far as he can see. And he sees not only the physical. He sees right into your soul. Careful, Israel.

Thou shalt have no other gods, no other entity, No other cause for your affection and your love and your devotions. You must have no other gods before you. Then we hear these beautiful words, known to be the Shema. The Jews knew them quite well. Even in the day of Christ, they were reciting these beautiful words.

We find it in verse four. It ought to be ringing in their ears and in their hearts. Hear, O Israel. The Lord your God. The Lord is one.

No entity is to capture your heart. No entity is to capture your devotion. You're my people. I have covenanted with you. I have condescended and made myself known to a sinful people, you are to see how infinitely glorious that is.

That your eyes have been made open. The nations that are before you don't know me. Israel, you know me. I have bestowed my love upon you like a husband loves his wife. You are to show me the love and the respect and the honor and the obedience for who I am.

There shall be no other gods before me. You walk after another and you are prostituting your heart to another. Any time We derive satisfaction or pleasure, security, safety, joy, whatever it may be from another source when that belongs to God alone. That is the prostitution of the heart. That is one giving over their heart in unrighteousness.

It is idolatry. It is adultery of the heart. How dare you! Come to know the only living God and then turn your back on him as if to say, you're not satisfying enough for me Yahweh. I want more than what you can give me.

These gods over here are appealing. They can give me something that you don't. You're just not enough. You're just not enough. Beloved God is saying here in these words, that must never be.

The very first of his 10 words begins with this because it is the foundational command to everything else that follows. God's people will never, never be that way. Rather, our hearts will be always and forever satisfied in all that he has given and all that he withholds from us because we know it is for our good. It's not the heart of God's people to turn their back, to have other gods. But the one who has come to know Him, the one who has truly come to know Him as the only true God, the living God who speaks, he's one who knows and has come to know what God requires of him as well.

Beloved, we've said already that the reverential fear that we spoke about last week That fear that is rooted in a genuine knowledge of God. You cannot truly and genuinely fear God in the biblical way unless you know him. And you cannot know him unless he has revealed himself to you. But beloved, that reverential fear that I spoke about last week, that I said is essential unto obedience, which it is, as God says so in the previous chapter, so that they would fear me so they would not sin. Beloved, that reverential fear is rooted in something.

Do you know what? What is that reverential fear rooted in? Yes, it is predicated upon a true knowledge of God. You come and you're confronted with the realness of God, the word of God, the presence of God, because he has made himself known to you. But what is that fear rooted in?

Love it, it is rooted in love. Love. Love for God. You see, to truly know him is to truly love him. To love all He has revealed to us.

To love Him as His person, His being, His word, His mercy, His grace, His justice. To love His righteousness. To love Him in the way that He deserves. Listen to verse 5. Love the Lord your God with what?

Some? Most? All. Is that pretty definitive? All?

Bar? No. With all your heart. The very core. So the heart in the Hebrew is not just simply the seed of emotion like we've come to know in the Western world.

The heart in the Hebrew language is the very essence, the very core of a person, the entirety of one's being. That's the heart. Love Him with all of that. What's left over? Not much, but we're going to continue.

All your heart and all your soul. All your soul, nevas. That's the word that could be sometimes translated, all your desires, the very things that long, you're yearning within, but it's also breath, literally, not the same as ruh. spoken of spirit of God but it can be translated breath. So in other words love him with all your being, with the entirety of your being, with your core, with your essence, all that you are and love him with every breath.

I don't know about you but so far, and we're only two thirds in, this is a high order. This is an ultra high order. And then he goes on and says love him with all your might. Every kilojoule that you have, every calorie Every bit of strength, every bit of vigor, every force that you have within, you are to love Him with all of that. All of it.

That's how the Lord requires His people to love Him. And beloved, that's not a recommendation, it is a command. It is an absolute command from the mouth of Yahweh to His people. Do you love Him this way? Do I love him this way?

Automatically we can see we're in a pickle. We're in a pickle. But he's worthy. He's worthy of that type of love. And that is the type of love he says he demands of his people.

He's not playing with words. The Lord means every word he says. In your own time, beloved, if you have a chance, you can read through the chapter again. In fact, if you read through the book of Deuteronomy, and I encourage us to be doing this as we work our way through the book, just take note of how many times the prophet Moses tells the people to do or to obey. Thou shalt do, or thou shalt...

I think it's just even that word do in that passage. You shall do them. You shall do them. You shall do them. Maybe six or seven times.

I didn't count, but there's so many times in that passage speaking about the obedience that is required of the people of God. There's so many though. There's so many. So many precepts. So many rules.

So many commands. So many statutes before them. All of them. All of them. That last verse says, all the commands.

It doesn't say some. You can't pick and choose. It's all of the commands that it's spoken of. Even that one that we had before, love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and strength. It doesn't say you can contend with what he says.

It doesn't say you can argue with it. It doesn't say you are to obey only if you understand them fully. Do you realize that? Beloved, do you honestly think that these people, hundreds of commands, understood every one of them? No way!

We've had two thousand years, no, three and a half thousand years, just studying, studying, studying. We know some, but we don't know all the details. Why is it that the people were prohibited to mix their To mix their seed in their garden, you couldn't have two types of plants growing in the same... Why? We can tell you some reasons, but do we know definitively?

Well, why is it that these people were commanded to, that they wouldn't be, they weren't allowed to mix the fabric, the two types of fabric to make their clothing? No, you couldn't do that. I said, don't do it. Did they understand everything? I suspect they didn't.

Why is it that they were prohibited to eat bacon, but they can have a lamb chop? Why is it that they couldn't put a shrimp on the barbie? I don't know the details of those questions, and nor do I think they did, but it did not matter. Because God has spoken. He loved me first.

And I love Him. He's placed His love in my heart. And I love Him. So it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if I don't understand the fullness of what the Lord has given me.

I'm going to obey. Is that not the attitude of the heart that He requires of His people? Even if we don't fully understand why He's given us His laws and His precepts, we understand much. There are many in this day I believe that these people just did not know the intricate detail. It wasn't as though we will wait, hold off obedience until we understand, but rather obey and pursue by the grace of God and faith to study that we would understand.

Do you see the difference? He loved me first. I love him. I'm not going to question His ways. That's the essence.

But I'm going to submit. I'm going to trust and obey in love. Because everything, everything He does, I know is for my own good. Did you get that in verse 24? The final verses of this chapter we read, and the Lord commanded us to do all these statutes and fear of the Lord our God for our what?

Sometimes, right? For our good sometimes. So sometimes the things that God's commanded us is for our good. Even the ones we don't understand, our good what? Always.

Do we believe it? That He might preserve us alive to this day, and it will be righteousness for us. It will be deemed before the God of the universe that we are doing something right in His eyes, righteous in His eyes, because He is righteous. And if we are careful to do all the commandments. No.

Realize? Singular. All the commandments. That's interesting. hundreds of commandments, but he says in summary, the commandment, why?

Because there's a body of commandments for God's human that is collectively unified and it's all given by Yahweh and it all carries the authority of Yahweh. You break one, that James says, and you've broken them, you've broken them all. And then he goes on to say, before the Lord our God, and he has commanded us. And it all begins with loving the only true God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength. Beloved, that is the only way you or I can actually obey every one of his demands.

We're not antinomians. We are not under the Mosaic law as a whole. But Jesus has given us a law to obey. And so what we have here is we know that no matter what your calling is, no matter whether you're single or whether you're married, what color you are, whether you're working or not, it doesn't matter. It matters that the purpose of your life.

The goal and the intention of your heart is to love Him. For your heart, soul, strength, and mind. And here's the thing, unless you do, you cannot see Him, because you become unrighteous. And that's what brings us back to Christ. Every passage will always bring us back to our Lord Jesus Christ, because the position or righteousness that God requires, that 100% perfect obedience, has never been fulfilled by any one of us, or these people, or Moses, or the prophets, anyone.

That positional righteousness, that perfect righteousness fulfilled in the one who said, I have come to do the will of my Father and my will, my food, is to do His will. I only do that which is pleasing to Him. That positional righteousness is a vicarious righteousness. It's a righteousness that Jesus has obeyed in His earthly ministry, and then He's applied that to us by faith, those who come to believe in Him. And God looks upon us as though we are perfect, innocent, innocent, as though we had obeyed every one of His laws, the ones that Christ had given us.

But beloved, beyond that, praise be to His name, that we stand before the Lord, not based on our own performance or what we have done, but because of what Christ has done. We have been called to a life of wholeness, just like the people of Israel. They were called from the land of Egypt and they were told, be holy as the Lord your God is holy. We are too being called. This is the will of God, your what?

Your sanctification, that you become holy as He is holy. But this is the deal and this is the glorious glory of the grace of God and the mercy of God that in Christ Jesus He has fulfilled all righteousness. You remember when John the Baptist was baptizing him before he said no I can't you need to baptize me and Jesus says no This must be done to fulfill all righteousness. I'm not doing this for myself. I'm doing this for my people.

And it needs to be blemishless and perfect, because apart from perfection, you can't stand before the God of the universe. So Jesus fulfilled the perfect righteousness, died on the cross, so that you and I who come to trust in Him have that covering, that robe of righteousness upon us. That is our positional righteousness, but it's given us of His Spirit and empowered us to love Him. and to obey his law. If you love me, John chapter 14, 15, if you love me, you'll what?

You'll obey my commands. Beloved, it's not you or I who will or work, that is a work of the Spirit of God working in and through us. Obedience doesn't come naturally to us, but the desire of the Christian ought to be, at least ought to be one of obedience. Recognizing it's not in our own strength, but by the power of the Spirit of God that is working in us, who's transformed us, and continues to transform us, to give us hearts that really and genuinely love the Lord, and see Him in all things. And that great commandment, the summary of the commandment, you remember in Matthew 22, when the lawyer says to Christ, what is the greatest?

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind. The second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. The greatest commandment is one of love and beloved, even though you and I have not been able and will not be able to fulfill that in our own Christ task, but it's working in you and in my life in order to bring that to fruition also. The day upon day, as we look to Him, that He's creating in us a greater love for our great God, a greater devotion to Him. And He's creating in us to see those Bibles by God's grace as what, for what they really are.

Meaningless. That we'll cry to Him and say, you are sufficient. And you satisfy my soul because of what Christ has done. The one who loved me first. Let's pray.