The way that the Lord your God has Commanded
Introduction:
In many ways, our culture is lost in unfamiliar territory without a map. I was reading recently about a thing called the Index of Leading Cultural Indicators (Bennett 1999), made in America. Between 1960 and 1997 violent crime rose 467%, the number of prison inmates increased by 463% and out of marriage births rose 461%. Since 1960 the teen suicide rate doubled, the divorce rate doubled, and couples living together outside of marriage saw a ten fold increase. Since 1979 illegal drug use has risen 55%, and pornography is a 10’s of billions of dollars business.
The researcher behind the Index, William Bennett concludes, “During the last half of [the] century, we have made extraordinary progress in medicine, science, and technology … We have achieved unprecedented levels of wealth and affluence…But we have lost something in the process. The nation we live in today is more violent and vulgar, coarse and cynical, rude and remorseless, deviant and depressed than the one we once inhabited. A popular culture that is often brutal, gruesome, and enamored with death robs many children of their innocence. People kill other people and themselves more easily. Men and women abandon each other, and their children more readily. Marriage and the American family are weaker, [and] more unstable”.
• in ch 5, we begin this week a journey through the central section of Deuteronomy, one of the key shaping books of the Old Testament, and one which calls us to both a wonderfully rich private faith and a determinedly loud public faith. It’s a word from God which refuses to permit us to domesticate our belonging to and believing in God, and provides us with the spiritual and moral compass we so desparately need.
• the 10 commandments appear at the start of the second speech of Moses in this book. Remember that Deuteronomy is comprised basically of 3 speeches by Moses – 2 relatively short ones at either end of the book, with a much longer one in the middle; in his first speech, Moses summons Israel to urgent decision making, upon which her destiny hangs, 4.39:
39 So acknowledge today and take to heart that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other. 40 Keep his statutes and his commandments, which I am commanding you today for your own well-being and that of your descendants after you, so that you may long remain in the land that the LORD your God is giving you for all time.
• and the second speech begins at 4.44:
Deut. 4:44 This is the law that Moses set before the Israelites. 45 These are the decrees and the statutes and ordinances that Moses spoke to the Israelites when they had come out of Egypt,
• notice the 3 aspects of the law that Moses is about to set before the Israelites – there are the decrees, and then the statutes and ordinances. The decrees are the 10 commandments, which are rehearsed in ch 5, and then unfolded in chs 6–11, especially the commandments which relate to God; the statutes and ordinances are the various laws and instructions that give specific shape to those 10 foundational words – and they are spelt out in chs 12–25. And over the next few weeks, we are going to work hard at getting inside God’s head and heart, or at least, getting his head and heart inside ours.
• now the substance of that decision for obedience is outlined, 5. 1:
1. I am
Deut. 5:1 Moses convened all Israel, and said to them: Hear, O Israel, the statutes and ordinances that I am addressing to you today; you shall learn them and observe them diligently. 2 The LORD our God made a covenant with us at Horeb
… and picking it up at the end of v. 5:
And he said: 6 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery;
• from time to time, all of us are asked to identify ourselves; when you find yourself amongst a new group of people, say at a conference, half your time is spent saying the same basic things to other people, and sometimes wondering whether the other person was listening at all; occasionally I’ve tried saying a few different things, like my name is Hannibal Lector and I really like having people for dinner, and the other person just keeps nodding with a glazed over look. On of the things you hear occasionally, is that we ought not to identify ourselves by our work – that our identities ought not be too closely bound up with what we do, but who are are. Well, I’m sure there’s truth in that, but what’s interesting is the way that God identifies himself here.
• three things stand out:
God identifies himself by name here, and the word translated “LORD” in our English versions of the Bible is the Hebrew name Yahweh. When God revealed himself to Moses at the burning bush, Moses had asked for God’s name. God replied by saying, “I am that I am, so tell Israel I am has sent you” (Ex 3:14). The name Yahweh is derived from the Hebrew yahah verb “I am.”, and occurs 6,800 times in the Old Testament. One dictionary put the significance of the giving of God’s name like this: “Giving the name entails a certain kind of relationship; it opens up the possibility of…a certain intimacy…A relationship without a name inevitably means some distance…Naming makes true communication and encounter possible…By giving the name God makes himself accessible”. God is God to be known.
But second, this Lord is known fundamentally by his work, by his employment, by his deeds. At heart, it’s not so much that we know facts about God, rather we know the acts of God. God is the one who acts – he is the one who brought his people out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. The identity of God primarily a verb, and in particular, a rescuer. When we know God, we are not engaged is speculation, theory or philosophy; we know someone who has achieved the greatest of achievements, the greatest rescue.
Third, this God who gives himself to be known, and known primarily in his actions, is a God who acts with grace, pure, precious grace. What that means is the reason for God’s acts of rescue lie not in the people he has rescued, Israel’s beauty or loveliness, but rather only in the heart of God himself; it’s well spring is in the lover, not the beloved.
this then leads to a further point. Previously, in 4.20, the Exodus was put forward as the ground of God’s claim on Israel, as his own people; now the Exodus is put forward as the ground of God’s command of Israel, to be his obedient people, expressed in the 10 commandments. In both cases, what’s crucial to see is that in no way is the law opposed to grace; just as importantly, it’s not even that the law comes after grace, as the next stage. The law is grace, the law is the relationship into which Israel has been brought. Law in Christian circles often has a bad smell about it. That smell comes from the fights that Jesus and the Apostles had with those who used the law to restrict grace. But that is not a problem here – the grace of the Exodus, that the God of grace brought this people out of the house of slavery, is the God of the law, and it’s not as though he has changed hats.
2. Absolute loyalty
• so the law is grace – then come the first 3 commands, which spell out the claim God has on Israel and the way in which God’s character curbs familiarity with or presumption upon God. Although the term ‘holy’ is not used of God in these commands, it stands behind all of them. God is beyond Israel in majesty, power and authority; in fact, God is beyond all other small-g gods which claim loyalty and Israel is commanded to deal with God differently, in order to reflect the decisive difference of God. We are going to take them slowly – first v. 7:
7 you shall have no other gods before me.
• unlike any of the other God’s available, this God claims utterly undivided loyalty. The point is not so much that there is only one God, although that point has been made fiercely in 4.35 – the Lord is God, there is no other besides him. Here the point is rather that, like marriage, the relationship between this people and their God is exclusive – all demanding and all giving. Other gods might make a claim only to fertility or military success; the God of the Exodus makes an absolute claim to absolute loyalty.
• the second commandment deepens the point, v. 8:
Deut. 5:8 You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. 9 You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and fourth generation of those who reject me, 10 but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
• unlike the other gods available, this God refuses any religious form – you shall not make an idol, from any sphere of the imagination, heaven, earth or under the earth. At one level, this is because God is alone to be worshipped, not another God. But there is even more going on here than that – the point is that we are not even to worship this God by means of a representation or form. And the reason given is that God is a jealous God, punishing sin and iniquity, and showing steadfast love. In other words, the prohibition against images is on order to safeguard the freedom of God to be fully responsive, fully a personal, fully relational and involved in transactions between him and his people. This is a God who is jealous enough to punish, faithful enough to show steadfast love, capable of extreme and surprising reaction to his people. And the point is that any attempt to express the reality of God by means of some form is really just a way of detracting from that freedom of full engagement, it constitutes a prohibited attempt to tone down God, and make him malleable, to make God like something else – but he is not.
• the third commandment extends the point, v. 11:
Deut. 5:11 You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.
• unlike the other gods available, this God is not a god who lends his name to any earthly cause. Making wrongful use of the name of the Lord is not so much about swearing or what we call blaspheming, cursing using God’s name. Rather, what is prohibited here is employment of God’s power, authority or reputation for any ideology or cause, be that political, economic, moral or even ecclesiastical. In other words, co-opting the authority of God to back up my own puny authority. God is not ‘useful’ in some cause other than himself, he is always an end and never a means.
• this is the God who enacted the Exodus. This is the God who has claimed Israel. This is the God who commands Israel. And because this is her God, her loyalty to him is to be absolute.
• and it is to be public – and it is the 4th commandment which moves what it is to belong to this god out of the realm of private devotion and into the realm of visible practices and disciplines, v. 12:
3. Public loyalty
Deut. 5:12 Observe the sabbath day and keep it holy, as the LORD your God commanded you. 13 Six days you shall labor and do all your work. 14 But the seventh day is a sabbath to the LORD your God; you shall not do any work — you, or your son or your daughter, or your male or female slave, or your ox or your donkey, or any of your livestock, or the resident alien in your towns, so that your male and female slave may rest as well as you. 15 Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the LORD your God brought you out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; therefore the LORD your God commanded you to keep the sabbath day.
• this 4th commandment is unusual for a number of reasons. First, it is the only commandment that receives no explicit endorsement in the NT, as a specific requirement for God’s New Covenant people. At the same time, it is the only commandment that is laid upon those who are not Israelites – the resident alien and the male and female slave – they too are to rest on the seventh day, precisely because Israel herself was a slave in the land of Egypt, and knows what that’s like. Even further, apart from the next commandment, it is the only positive command, a ‘thou shall’, rather than a ‘thou shall not’, v. 16:
Deut. 5:16 Honor your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so that your days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.
• this of course is my personal favorite, and I will always be grateful to Colin Buchanan for producing a CD with all 10 commandments put to music. Of course, it makes no difference to my children, who led by their older brother, all cover their ears and yell when this one is sung! Actually, they may not be altogether wrong – both the context of the Israelites at the edge of the Promised land, as well as social realities, suggest that this commandment addresses not young children, but children who have come to maturity and power, so that they are no longer dependent upon their parents, and are in a position to neglect or mistreat them, especially parents who have become older and are no longer useful or productive.
• in other words, both of these 2 positive commands, to observe the Sabbath and honour parents, are getting at the same issue – that life does not consist in wealth maximisation, in productivity. Both sabbath and honoring of parents celebrate life beyond and outside of effectiveness and outputs. This is not so much about worship as work stoppage. Only recently in Egypt Israelites were ruthlessly pressured into the production necessities of the empire – making their quota of bricks without straw. But that is not to be the pattern of their lives in the promised land – life is rightly lived not at maximum productivity. This is both a great act of faith in God and a daring act of refusal to be defined by production, and for that matter consumption. Israel is to be different, publicly and obviously different, even at cost and risk.
• the next 5 commandments we are not going to deal with in any detail at all – you know them well – prohibitions on murder – that is unauthorised killing, not by the way, all killing, there are some circumstances where it is legitimate; on adultery, theft, bearing false witness, which is really about perjury, and coveteousness. All I want to highlight now is that the worship of the true God inescapably leads to a due sense of yourself in relation to neighbor, and vice versa, false worship of false gods inescapably leads to an inflated sense of self. These 2 go hand in glove, which is why a community that has at its heart the worship of the true and living God will be a community that is pro-life in the strongest sense of that word, life literally in the sense that murder will be rejected, but also pro the life of marriages and of livelihoods and of reputation of others even the life of the soul, by resisting greed for what belongs to someone else. The great god of our age, the great alternative worship is self – most important person in the world – you. We offer endless sacrifices to that god – flat screen TV’s, beautiful clothes, illicit drugs, gym membership, almost anything, including good things can be offered in sacrifice to the god of self. And when that is that case, it makes sense to interfere with another person’s life, or possessions or marriage or reputation if they get in your way. But not when you worship God.
Conclusion:
• let’s draw the threads together – this chapter of Deut stands as a magnificent call to and description of absolute loyalty to an absolute God, which is spelt out over the next few chapters.
• we live in the new covenant, and our struggle is not against flesh and blood, so we don’t kill people. But the temptation to merely a relative loyalty is every bit as real, and the ferocity with which God calls us to eliminate even the possibility of competition for him in our hearts is also real. Let me ask you directly – how undivided is your heart for God. Are there things in your life that so capture your heart that your loyalty is not absolute – at the level of banality, are you intimidated by the disparaging words and thoughts of others, making a god of social acceptance which forces you into being a purely private Christianity – you shall have no other gods before the Lord. Are there other goals that capture your dreams than living for this God in the situation of his blessing and purpose – a particular relationship which leads you unavoidably into sin; a group of friends whose approval you crave more than the Lord’s; a job which requires your complicity in dodgy deals; the comfort of purchases that prevent you from being generous with what God has given you – hear the word of the Lord – you shall have no other gods before me. It is the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of slavery, slavery to taskmaster much worse than Pharaoh, the slavery of sin.
• Augustine said: Idolatry is worshiping anything that ought to be used, or using anything that ought to be worshiped. Ours is a culture where things are worshipped and the Lord is utterly ignored. But it is not so amongst us.
Solid info.. hope to come back soon.