Deuteronomy 6:4-6
As we come to our text this morning, you can turn in your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 6. And as we come to this very familiar passage, it actually is very helpful to interpret the our own days that we are living in. As you know, these are some very interesting days that we live in. The entire world seems to be losing its mind. The world that I grew up with, much less those of you who go back a few more decades than I do. The world that I grew up in, many of you have enjoyed since the end of World War Two. It really seems to be fading.
This world of peace and prosperity with occasional threats to our homeland, such as when Russia was trying to put nuclear warheads in Cuba, 9/11 for my generation, these decades of peace have brought unparalleled prosperity to our land. The economy over those decades has morphed into a global economy where every nation is quite dependent on most other nations for the things that they need to function as a society, and with relatively few threats over those decades and really no near enemies to threaten the lives of Americans.
I would argue that the lack of a real threat to individual Americans and an individual American’s pursuit of happiness and prosperity. This lack has led to the vilification of the only enemy that stood in the way of people’s expressive individualism to live the way that they want to. The only thing that has really gotten in the way of people’s happiness in the last several decades is historical Christianity and its morality. And higher academia has succeeded in convincing entire generations that the real threat to America and their personal happiness is, hist is, Christianity and our oppressive moral codes.
In the last two decades in particular, we have witnessed our country, I mean it was happening before, but, but at an increasing rate. We have witnessed our country throw off the shackles of Christian morality and run headlong off the Cliff of degradation that Paul talks about in Romans chapter 1. We now live in a day and age where a Supreme Court Justice cannot define what a woman is and whole hosts of citizens are confused as well.
We live in a time when CEO’s are assassinated in cold blood on the street by anarchists, who think that they’re doing our country a favor by ridding us of these ultra wealthy greedy oppressors. And we live in a political climate where the left sees the only way forward is to assassinate the leaders of their opposing party and there are those on the right that hold the same kind of hatred in their hearts for those on the left and it might be restrained today by some sense of moral sanity that the left lacks, but that may not be there tomorrow.
The right is not inherently Christian. The norms of public decency and dignity, treating one another with dignity, they’re gone from the highest office in the country, downward; any kind of respect and decorum for those who are opposed to one another, it’s almost entirely gone. The world we once knew is gone. The sanctity of human life, both at the beginning of life and the end of life, has been desecrated. The holiness of marriage has been defiled. The family has been corrupted.
What it means to be a man or a woman has been masticated, pulverized, and twisted into a monstrous abomination of smashing the two into one another surgically. And while most Americans, or I shouldn’t say most, a minority of Americans, but a good number of Americans see this as an achievement, we see it for what it really is, a Frankenstein monster, that has desecrated the image of God and marred it nearly beyond recognition.
Everything that God tells us is holy and sacred in Scripture about us as human creatures has been desecrated and defiled. And it has all been done in the name of personal liberty and freedom, personal autonomy and the pursuit of happiness. Nearly everything that we hold sacred and dear has been defiled. Maybe much like when Antiochus Epiphanes, Greek king, he went into the temple in Jerusalem after conquering it and he sacrificed a pig on an altar to Zeus in Jerusalem in the Jews temple. He desecrated everything that the Jews held dear. That’s similar to that.
We’ve been watching this for years, like a massive train that has derailed, and these train cars just keep piling up, smashing into one another, ruining lives. Lives are smashed, and marred, and ruined, that’s what we’ve been watching for years. As we find ourselves in this strange new world, which is really nothing new, this is just really an old world of paganism, but it’s new to us.
There are a couple of questions that naturally arise in our minds. First, how did we get here? And second, where do we go from here? Is there any way back? And the passage that we’re going to look at today helps us answer those two questions. If you’re in Deuteronomy, go to Deuteronomy chapter 6. Our passage for this morning is going to be in verses 4 through 9. Very familiar passage to most of you, probably.
The Shema of Israel, so let’s read the text for us this morning. Deuteronomy 6:4 through 9, and Moses is speaking to the people of Israel. He says, “Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is One! You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and you shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as phylacteries between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
So in this passage we are going to see the answers to those two questions. How do we get here and where do we go from here? We’re going to see that in, in three points, three simple points: The creed, the command, and the code. The creed, the command, and the code. And if you want to put a colon after each of those three, you can add another word, a command, an imperative to a second part of each of those points.
So the creed and then believe; the command and then worship; and the code, repeat. So the creed, the command, the code, believe, worship, and repeat. We’re going to answer those two questions. How did we get here? Where do we go from here, in each of those points. And the first half of that outline, the creed, the command, and the code is indicating how we got here and then the second-half, believe, worship, and repeat, those are the short answers to the question, where do we go from here?
So point one: The creed, believe, verse 4. Look at that again with me, “Hear, O Israel! Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One!” We are dropping into the middle of Moses’s sermon here in Deuteronomy. It started in chapter 5 and it’s going to go all the way through chapter 28. One sermon from Moses to the people of Israel on one day. Moses is at the end of his life. He knows he’s not going any further with the people.
Moses has shepherded these people for over 40 years. He has shepherded them out of the Pagan idolatry that they learned in Egypt, through shepherding them into a covenant with Yahweh at Sinai, through the giving of the law, through all the failings of the people in the wilderness; the failings of their faith; through the wilderness wanderings, through rebellion after rebellion up to the doorstep of the Promised Land.
Moses comes to the end of his life. He’s a very wise man at this point, 120 years old, and he is attempting to exhort the people of Israel with what he thinks the people need, inspired by the Spirit, of course, but he’s exhorting the people with what he thinks they need in order to enter into the land and remain faithful to Yahweh, in contrast to a generation who forsake him in his covenant. He was telling them what they needed to know in order to remain faithful to Yahweh in a land where they would be tempted to go back to the old ways of Pagan idolatry.
Moses is giving them what they need to keep them from falling into unbelief, and he tells them the way forward to remain faithful from one generation to the next. This is exactly what Moses tells them. If maybe you have to turn the page, but just in verse 10. I don’t want to read this entire next paragraph, but I’m going to skip through and read a few verses. I’m going to read 10,12,17, and 24, and 25.
But verse 10, he’s kind of giving them the reason for the passage we just read. He said, “Then it will be when Yahweh your God brings you into the land which He swore to your father’s, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to give you great and good cities which you did not dwell.” Then go down to verse 12, “Then beware, lest you forget Yahweh who brought you up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and then skip down to verse 17, “You shall diligently keep the commandments of Yahweh your God and His testimonies and His statutes which He has commanded you.”
And then down to verse 24 and 25, “So Yahweh commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear Yahweh our God for our good all our days and for our survival, as it is today. And it will be righteousness for us if we are careful to do all this commandment before Yahweh our God, just as He commanded us.” So Moses, he’s trying to give them these parting words that he hopes will sink deeply into their hearts to keep them from drifting away in the faith, drifting away from the Lord like the previous generation.
So we come to verse 4, and this is after Moses has reiterated the ten commandments from Exodus 20. He reiterates them in Deuteronomy chapter 5 right before this. And then Moses puts this very basic creed before the people, just as we have a confession of faith, succinct confession of faith, trying to consolidate Scripture into succinct sayings. This creed from Moses is the same thing. But this is a very concise, but powerfully worded creed. “Yahweh is our God. Yahweh is One.”
It’s only four words in the Hebrew. “Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is One.” He puts this before the people as a foundational creed, which they must hold to in order to remain faithful to Yahweh. If they deviate from this very simple creed, all is lost. If we take Moses creed here that he gives Israel and we reverse engineer it, so to speak, what Moses is saying is we are, as Americans, where we are today, going back to rank paganism in our country. We are where we are today because we have departed from this very simple truth of God’s existence.
Friedrich Nietzsche published a work in 1882, in which he famously wrote, “God is dead, God remains dead and we have killed him.” What he meant by this was that science, secularism, and rational thought coming out of the Enlightenment had come to explain away so many of what people look to the Bible to explain. In other words, they had made the church, church authority, and the Bible, irrelevant by explaining the important things of life scientifically and philosophically.
They explained God away by science and rational thought. Therefore, there is no need for God, there was no need for a religion and that meant that they could cast aside its morality as well, which was really at the heart of what they wanted to do. And while there were many in that day who were celebrating the death of God.
Nietzsche became very concerned. He hated Christianity. He hated the Bible; he hated the morality of the Bible. But he knew that they had destroyed the foundation upon which the society had been built. They had eroded the foundation out from under them without thinking what would happen and without replacing it with anything else. Many people, no doubt, thought that everything would remain the same, except they’d be free from the shackles of Christian morality, they were. There’s no need to go to church.
They were free to live as they pleased without anything else changing and many did go on with life without much changing. There was no immediate discernible consequence for many, but Nietzsche tried to warn that there were future catastrophic consequences to this. That is if you make God and religion obsolete, if you tear the foundation of reality out from underneath you, you have to replace it with something else, or catastrophe will result.
In other words, if you destroy the foundation of reality, that provides the answers to questions like, what’s the meaning of life? What’s the purpose of life? Why do we get up every day? What are the limits to human behavior? What are our obligations to one another? If you destroy the foundational reality that answers those questions, you have to replace it with something. And Nietzsche foresaw the world really unraveling and falling apart as a result of the Enlightenment, making God obsolete.
Nietzsche wasn’t wrong. He was just a prophet who came long before his time. What he was concerned about nearly 150 years ago, that’s what’s in full bloom in our country today. It’s the downstream result of the death of God, or we might say the desecration of God and his truth, because we all know God’s alive and well. But what inevitably happens when you desecrate God, you cast him aside. You have to replace him with something and what people have replaced God with is themselves. Now each person is his or her own God.
In Carl Truman’s newest book, which he talks about much of this, he argues these very points, but he makes the observation that there is an inevitable lag time between the desecration of God and the desecration of man that we’re seeing today. It takes time to work out the ramifications of desecrating God and truth. But when each man is his own God, each man will make himself into his own image and therefore desecrate the image of God that he bears. That’s what we’re seeing all around us.
That’s how we got to where we are today. We have replaced this creed, so to speak. We might say we have an American creed, that is, you are your own God; God is you. That’s how we’ve gotten where we are today. This very simple creed has been desecrated and every man has become his own God and desecrated the image of God in himself.
That’s how we got where we are today. But where do we go from here? Is there any coming back from this? And the short answer is yes. And that’s that second part of the outline there. Believe that’s the short answer. Truman argues at the end of his book, that the only way back from desecration of God and man is consecration, the washing of regeneration by the gospel, believing in the full counsel of God’s word, repenting from all of our faith and trust we’ve put in ourselves, and understanding that we are not God, God is God. Repenting of all of our self, idolatry, turning back to God. That’s what we need to do as a nation.
But practically speaking, let’s look a little closer at this creed. Where do we go from here? The first word of that creed is Yahweh. Yahweh is the name God explains to Moses at the burning bush in Exodus 3:14 to 15. The name Yahweh has very close lexical roots to the verb haya, or the verb, to be. It’s a verb of existence. This is where God draws and explains himself from.
In seminary I wrote a paper on this name Yahweh and made the argument that this name indicates and even necessitates the divine attributes of eternality, aseity. Aseity is self-existence, immutability, blessedness, faithfulness. That this name Yahweh indicates and necessitates all of those attributes. But the theologian Herman Bavinck, he takes this a step further when he says of the name of Yahweh, and I quote, “His whole identity is wrapped up in this name. All God’s other perfections are derived from this name. All being is contained in Him. He is a boundless ocean of being. If you have said of God that He is good, great, blessed, wise, or any other such quality, it is summed up in a single word, the name of Yahweh.”
So we might say the way forward is you can’t just believe in a God, that won’t fix anything, that is no solid foundation, but we must believe in the fullness of the God of the Bible. But it must not be just an impersonal belief in this God. He must be our God. This is the second word of the creed. It’s the word, God, except it has a suffix on the end where we get that pronoun. It’s a pronominal suffix, but it’s all part of the same word. With this personal pronoun, there is both the declaration that this is the God that they themselves claim to be their God, and also God claims them to be his as well.
He is a jealous God. He has chosen them. They are his people. They entered into a covenant with him. Thus he is their God and they are his people. So Yahweh is their God in contrast to all the gods of Egypt that they had learned to worship, that their parents had learned to worship, and he is their God in contrast to all the gods of the Canaanites of the land that they’re entering into.
So the way forward is making sure that we have not, like the people of Israel, succumbed to worshipping the idols of all of those around them, whether it’s their parents who came out of Egypt or them who went in. And we know that they succumbed to idol worship. They didn’t follow Moses exhortation here beyond a generation. Is Yahweh our God or have we forsaken him to worship and devote our lives to other things?
We must claim him, but he also must claim us. If this God is not your God, you will not keep yourself from going down the path of desecration with the throngs of our society. The second two-word line of that creed is Yahweh is One. Both those verbs, the copulative, the, to be verb, is, is just supplied by the translators. It’s implied in the Hebrew a lot of times, but it’s supplied by the translators.
Really the only two, the only four words is God, Yahweh God, and now Yahweh one. You’ve probably heard that the word for, one, here in this verse is allows for a plurality of persons. The Hebrew word is ‘eḥāḏ, and some have argued that this is evidence for the Trinity, because it’s the word one, but it allows for a plurality of persons. You might have heard that before. What I had not heard before I studied this passage was something I found in Matthew Henry’s commentary and he says this and I quote, “Some have thought there is here a plain intimation or suggestion of the Trinity of Persons in the unity of the Godhead. For here is the name of God three times, and yet all declared to be One.”
As I said, there’s four words Yahweh, God, Yahweh, and then one more word One. Henry says here you have the name of God three times and yet all are declared to be one. Was Moses intent here to point to the Trinity? It could be possible in light of what I taught in a sermon years ago on Exodus 34, where Moses is there with God, he’s speaking with Yahweh in heaven, and Yahweh comes down from heaven and stands, and he’s both speaking to Yahweh in heaven and Yahweh the Lord, who is there and he says Yahweh, let the Lord go with us. If you’re not going to go with us, let him go with us. So it could be indicating that, Moses was clearly seeing multiple persons of Yahweh revealed to him.
I don’t think that’s Moses’s point here, but it certainly is interesting that this ancient Jewish creed can be recited by us in light of the New Testament, and it just shines greater revelation, it just illumines it further for us. But what I do agree with is that there is plain evidence for the Trinity in this passage in light of New Testament revelation. As I mentioned the word One here ‘eḥāḏ, allows for a plurality of persons within the one, which is in contrast to the Hebrew word, yahid, which is also one, but it doesn’t allow for a plurality of persons.
So the former ‘eḥāḏ is seen in the institution of marriage. God created Adam and Eve. He brought them together and said “the two shall become one.” ‘eḥāḏ, two persons, one flesh, and the latter is used to indicate, only, as in Abraham’s only son. In one seminary class I had, the professor was trying not to press this argument too far from the Shema to argue for the Trinity. He’s trying to be cautious to make sure that the text, not to make the text say something that Moses didn’t intend.
And one of the students in the class raised his hand and asked if he could make a comment. He was an Israeli, who came from Israel to attend the Masters Seminary. And he said that while Christians shy away from trying to make this passage say too much about the Trinity, he as a Jew thought it was pretty convincing, because he said the Jews in Israel, they recite the Shema twice daily. But he said when they recite it, they change that word ‘eḥāḏ, that it is in the text, to that other word for one, yahid, that disallows for a plurality of persons. So the Jews recite the Shema and they think it’s so convincing that it indicates the Trinity, that they change the word, which is really anathema.
So if the Jews have to change a word of the sacred text and recite it different differently, there’s a pretty convincing argument there that this indicates the Trinity, that the New Testament is right. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, aligns with this foundational creed of the Jewish faith. This is a little bit of a side note, but it’s interesting that they recite that every day, really denying Christ as their Lord every day.
But what is Moses’s point here? We mentioned that the name Yahweh indicates his eternality, his self-existence, etcetera. What Moses seems to be getting to here with this word one is that Yahweh is the one living and true God. There are no others. You must believe in this God, the one living and true God. You cannot add him to your pantheon of deities. You can’t just take all the other things you love about life, all the other things you worship, and just add him to those things. That’s not the way forward.
There is both the declaration that this is the God that they themselves claim to be their God, and also God claims them to be his as well.” Bret Hastings
There are many people out there today, I think Joe Rogan being one of them, who’s not a Christian by any means. He’s been saying we need Jesus. What he’s not saying is we need the gospel and repentance. Even many unbelievers are seeing that when you make God obsolete, you cast Jesus aside, chaos ensues and so their answer is to intellectually go back to Jesus and morality.
But to just add Jesus back to all this other nonsense going on in our world isn’t going to fix anything. We need repentance, wholehearted belief in the one true and living God. Which is what brings us to our next point, the command of worship. Look at verse 5 again, “You shall love Yahweh your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might.” It’s not just about intellectual belief in a certain creed of Christianity, going back to simply an intellectual ascent of morality in God’s existence. That’s not enough.
As we come to this verse, “You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Did you know? I didn’t know this before studying it, but did you know that this is the first time in the Bible? I mean we have four major books before this. Around 15% of the Bible has happened before this; covering thousands of years of history, but it isn’t until here. This is the first time that man is commanded to love God.
It’s the first time we have the explicit command in Scripture, you must love God. This is the Hebrew word ‘āhaḇ, and it’s used throughout the first few books of the Bible to speak of love between family members, even intimate love between a husband and wife. But only one time in the first four books of the Bible is it used to describe man’s love for God. And interestingly enough, the only place this is used in the first four books of the Bible to talk about man’s love for God is in the giving of the ten commandments.
Turn back with me to Exodus. There’s a repetition of it in Deuteronomy 5, but just turn back to Exodus chapter 20. The use of the word love is in the larger context of the second commandment. And if you remember, the second commandment is you shall not make for yourselves an idol. And then Moses goes on to say that they should not worship them, “for God is a jealous God, visiting the iniquity upon generation after generation.”
But then verse 6, this is the only occurrence in the first four books of the Bible that talk about man’s love for God. But showing loving kindness, this is what God does, showing loving kindness to thousands. Who does he show his loving kindness to? “To those who love me and keep my commandments.” So the only place in the first four books of the Bible that speak of God, man’s love for God, is in the ten commandments, it’s not where I would have guessed it would be found, but we’ll come back to that thought.
There’s another word in that first four books of the Bible that speak of man’s love for God or that speak of love. Another word there in that context is loving kindness. But showing loving kindness, that’s the word hesed, which is a type of love. It’s a steadfast love. It’s an enduring love of faithfulness that Yahweh promised Abraham to keep his covenant. It’s a covenantal love and while it’s a type of love, it’s not the same intimate or affectional love that that other word is.
The Bible holds this up as a higher form of love, encompassing the ideas of grace and mercy and faithfulness and love all wrapped up into one. But it’s different than the love Moses commands in our passage today. You can go back to Deuteronomy, but even considering these other kinds of love, they mostly are this word, loving kindness, is mostly used to describe an attribute of God.
There’s only four individuals in the Old Testament up to this point who are said to have been recipients of it, Lot, Abraham, Jacob, and Joseph. So the explicit statements before Deuteronomy concerning God’s love for man and man’s love for God, they’re actually pretty scarce. We see examples of it everywhere. It’s implied, but it’s not taught throughout, at least not until Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy is the book where Moses develops this idea of an intimate and personal relationship between man and God. Moses, over the next few chapters, he expounds on this verse of loving God, and he sets it in the context of the commands and the people’s obedience to him. He’s trying to impart to these people that God isn’t interested in just mere outward obedience. The commands were always meant to be done from a heart of love.
We saw that in Exodus 20:6, 20 verse 6. But we know that first generation had a heart problem. They didn’t love God. Moses knew that, or at least he learned that and came to know that over time. And I think that’s why he is developing this theme here for the next generation, that they not make the same mistake.
God is not interested in cold and indifferent sacrifice merely to appease his wrath, so they can go on doing whatever they want like other Pagan religions. No, God wants them and he wants their love and he wants their affection. But I want to look at just a few passages in Deuteronomy regarding how he developed this theme and he exhorted the people.
Flip over a page to Chapter 7. Maybe you don’t have to turn the page, but I do, to Chapter 7. And keep in mind that this is one sermon that Moses is preaching to them and chapters 5 through 11 are probably the first point of his sermon, which is really, love God. But look at Chapter 7, verse 5, and I’m going to read 5 through 11.
Moses said, “But thus you shall do to them: you shall,” when they go in, when you go into the land of Canaan, “you shall tear down their altars and shatter their sacred pillars and cut their Ashram in pieces and burn their graven images with fire. For you are a holy people to Yahweh your God; Yahweh your God has chosen you to be a people for His own treasured possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. Yahweh did not set His affection on you.” This is also the first book that those those kinds of words are used to describe our relationship with God and his relationship to us: Affection.
“Yahweh did not set His affection on you nor choose you, because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because Yahweh loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your Fathers. Yahweh brought you out with a strong hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
“You shall know therefore that Yahweh your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His loving kindness to a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; but repays those who hate Him to their faces, to make them perish; He will not delay with him who hates Him, He will repay him to his face. Therefore, you shall keep the commandment and the statutes and the judgments which I am commanding you today, to do them.”
So Moses is, he’s emphasizing this affectional love in the relationship aspect of keeping the covenant. Cold indifference was the first generation coming out of Egypt, Moses said God requires more of you and it’s going to take more to be faithful. Flip over a few more pages to chapter 10. Between chapters 7 and 10, Moses recounts how the first-generation provoked God to anger in the golden calf incident. And to prevent further incidences like that, Moses is trying to tell this generation, love God, love your God.
But Deuteronomy 10 beginning in verse 12, I’m going to read through the first verse of Chapter 11. “So now, Israel, what does Yahweh your God ask from you, but to fear Yahweh your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, and to serve Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments of Yahweh in His statutes, which I am commanding you today for your good. Behold, to Yahweh your God belong Heaven and the highest heavens, the earth and all that is in it.” You’re your Fathers.
“Yet on your Fathers did Yahweh set His affection to love them, and He chose their seed after them, even you above all peoples, as it is this day. So circumcise your heart, and stiffen your neck no longer. For Yahweh your God is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the fearsome God, who does not show partiality nor take a bribe. He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, He shows love for the sojourner by giving him food and clothing. So show love for the sojourner, for you are sojourners in the land of Egypt. Yahweh your God you shall fear; Him you shall serve, and to him you shall cling.” Notice the intimacy of those kinds of words.
“And by His name you shall swear. He is your praise, and He is your God, who has done these great and fearsome things for which your eyes have seen. Your Father’s went down to Egypt, seventy persons in all, and now Yahweh your God has made you as numerous as the stars of heaven. You shall therefore love Yahweh your God, and keep His charge, His statutes, His judgment, and His commandments all your days.”
Again, Moses, he is trying to repeatedly trying to instill these things into these people. Love God, in order for there to be success and obedience in the covenant, you have to love your God. This relational, personal, intimate love for God is necessary for covenant faithfulness. Just a couple more verses, verses in in Chapter 11, verses 13 and 14 also speak of loving God, the reason for loving God. But then at the end of this chapter, Chapter 11, Moses wraps up this point in his sermon and then he moves on to something else.
But this theme of love, it still comes up in Deuteronomy, But just look at the end of this chapter. The primary exhortation in this first point that he’s trying to instill in the people is love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength. And then he comes to the end to conclude with this verse 26, “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: the blessing, if you listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, which I am commanding you today; and the curse, if you do not listen to the commandments of Yahweh your God, but turn aside from the way which I am commanding you today, by walking after other gods which you have not known.”
And then skip down to the last verse in that chapter. “And you shall be careful to do all the statutes and judgments which I am setting before you today.” Essentially, what Moses is concluding with, his point here, the concluding emphasis he wants to put on here, is love God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, with all your strength, or die a curse of death like your parents in the wilderness.
Love God, receive innumerable blessings, great joy, prosperity and happiness in the land, or be consumed by death in a wasteland as you seek after all your own desires. To make that very short, love God or die, it’s very powerful. Moses had come to know, he knew it in his heart the whole time, but he had come to know the failings of the first generation. He came to know the importance of love in the relationship with God, that the relationship must be marked by a personal affection for God or the people are going to turn back to idolatry.
Okay, so as we get here, let’s pause for a moment and ask or answer our questions. How do we get here in our society? We arrived where we are today in our country because there were generations who claimed to be Christians, but there was really no love for God. There were generations who knew God’s commands and they sought to follow them outwardly, but their children saw the cold indifference and often hypocrisy, and they wanted nothing of it.
Not to mention when there’s a cold indifference, there’s the notion that you just obey, because that’s what we’ve always done, kind of mentality, that kind of keeps people in check until you get to a generation that cares nothing for tradition, nothing for that which is old. They want the newest and best thing, casting off what is old because it is antiquated and useless. The cultural pressure isn’t enough to keep that kind of generation in line, and that’s what we’re seeing.
And while many people, they’d like to just hold on to an outward form of Christianity, even the atheist Richard Dawkins wants this, just an outward holding on to tradition without real love for God. People will love themselves. They’ll still chase after everything that they desire. If there’s not a real love for God, there is no hope. What we’re seeing today is the inevitable outworking of denying God, which leaves only ourselves to worship.
So let’s answer the second question. Where do we go from here? The short answer in your outline, worship. Moses tells us to love Yahweh with three things. First, we are to love him with all of our heart. Last week, Travis spent a good deal of time explaining the biblical view of the heart. I’m not going to retread all that ground. I’m just going to summarize what he said. Biblically, the heart encompasses the intellect, the will, and the emotion.
There is an outward aspect to love. Obedience is an expression of love. But what Moses was trying to emphasize and get at with this generation was the necessity of the internal aspect of obedience. He was poking around in their hearts, wanting to exhort them to love God from the inside out. He wanted them to love God in the way that they thought about God, always thinking upon the love of God, as Bill was mentioning earlier; meditating on those things continually, keeping them in the forefront of our minds.
He wanted their thoughts to be on God, not on all their own personal aspirations. He wanted their thoughts to be on God. He wanted them to love God with all their intellect. He wanted them also to love God with the second aspect of their heart, their emotions, or their affections. He wanted them, he knew the necessity in order for them to obey, they had to have an affection for God. They could not merely recite intellectual knowledge about God. There had to have be a personal love and an affection for God like they had for their spouse, their friend, their child. They had to have that same kind of affection for God.
And if they loved God with all their intellect, with all their affections, they would have the willpower to obey all of God’s commands. Love is a powerful motivator. When you’re motivated with all your heart, nothing can stop you from doing what you know to be right. So Moses commands us to love God with all our heart.
Second, Moses commands us to love God with all our soul. One commentator says that this denotes the whole self. Again, I think the emphasis is on the internal, but it encompasses this word, soul, encompasses the whole person. But the heart of the problem in the past wasn’t that people refused to bring sacrifices outwardly, to obey God bodily. The problem was that there was no internal mechanism motivating them to do it. It was all external.
Moses wants this generation to know that their love for God must encompass the whole self, body and spirit, the inner working of man as well as the outward. And then finally Moses tells them that they must love God with all your strength. Strength here doesn’t so much refer to physical strength as it does to intensity. One commentator translated, as with love God with muchness.
God wants us to love him intensely, not with lackluster or mildness, but with intensity. Can your love for God be described as intense? Do you love with all that is in you? Or is your love for God and for his Word just take it or leave it? Maybe you serve here or there, because it’s what you’re supposed to do. Maybe even like serving. But it’s not because of an intent love for God.
An intense love for God doesn’t describe your love and obedience to him. We need to repent of a lack of this kind of love and seek to serve him with vigor and life and excitement and joy. This is the way forward, that our love for God and one another, because love for God always spills out onto one another. The way forward is that our love for God and one another be so intense that people see us and think that’s otherworldly. That’s not something humanly possible.
And I do want to stop here and pause and commend you Grace Church, because there was a man a couple years ago who came into our church as an atheist. But he saw the love that we had for his wife, who became a member here and for God. And he was convinced that there was a God, because of the love that he saw here. Now he they did move away, but he professes Christ now.
God wants us to love him intensely, not with lackluster or mildness, but with intensity.” Bret Hastings
So how do we move forward in this world that we find ourselves in? Well beloved, we just keep doing what we are doing in this sense, but excel still more. Love God more, love one another more. Love God with your whole being, inside and out. Love your neighbor as yourself, excel still more. Beloved, worship him in spirit and in truth, doing all things to the glory of God for the love of God. Let all that you do be done as an act of worship motivated by love.
But we must ask, okay Moses, give us some specifics on how to accomplish this. How can we love God this way and remain faithful? And that brings us to our final point, the Code, with the imperative, repeat. Verses 6 through 9, “These words which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall speak of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as phylacteries between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
These words that he says in verse 6 refers to the command of love, but it also includes all that he’s teaching them in this sermon through chapter 28. It’s a lot of content and it most certainly includes everything that they have had in their written word at the time; the first four books and soon afterwards they would have the completed Torah.
But he says, you shall teach them diligently to your sons. “So these things shall be upon your heart and you shall teach them diligently to your sons.” This is the phrase, “teach them diligently.” It’s two words in the Hebrew, the verb translated as teach here, and the noun for sons with pronominal suffixes and prefixes on there. But the typical Hebrew words in the Old Testament to indicate the idea of teaching are lamad, which means to instruct or to train, and yarah, which means to point out, direct or aim somebody. And this word is neither of those. This word at its most basic meaning means to repeat, to recount, to recite.
I had a seminary teacher who nearly every class period ad nauseam, he would tell us the key to learning is repetition, and the repetition is the key to learning. And he would repeat this nearly every class period ad nauseam. If he didn’t do it, he was having an off day. Moses wanted to emphasize the same thing to these people. Repeat it, all that I’m telling you today. Repeat it, repeat it, repeat it, repeat all that I am telling you.
So often in Scripture when you read through the Old Testament, what is God’s indictment of Israel? It’s that they had forgotten. They’d forgotten what he did for them, what they committed to. So Moses tells them, repeat, repeat, repeat to your children all these things to instill in them the same kind of love you have for God. But there’s also more to this word for teach. This word for teach or repeat, it’s in the PL form in the Hebrew, which indicates an intensification of the action.
We get this intensified idea again. So Moses commands them to repeat these things intensely. The LSB translates this idea with that word, diligently. I think that’s one adverb you could use, but I think Moses leaves it open-ended for a reason. There are any number of intensifications that might be appropriate when you are teaching these things to your children or passing them on to the next generation with many, many chapters of things that they are supposed to repeat intensely.
We might include any number of the following, and we might think of the way forward for us, as to do this as, as well. We might say that when we are repeating these things to our children, it is appropriate to speak passionately, repeat these things passionately, showing strong, deep emotion and intense belief. If we don’t believe it and we don’t communicate to our kids, they’re not going to believe it.
We have to speak eloquently, clear, effectively, powerfully. We have to speak vividly, that is, with bright and intense descriptions. We have to speak vivaciously, full of energy and life. We have to speak compellingly, captivating, demanding their attention. We have to speak acutely, pointedly, directly. We have to speak forcefully. We have to be strong and assertive when we repeat these things to our kids and to the next generation. We have to speak strenuously, giving great effort to it.
We have to speak convincingly, persuading them. We have to speak, speak exhortatively. Any number of these things can be implied when Moses tells them. Repeat these things intensely to the next generation. That’s how you move forward from here, Israel, in order to keep from falling off the Cliff into rank Pagan idolatry, you have to do this. Speak intensely, repeat intensely to the next generation all these things. In other words, teach your kids in this manner. Whichever one of these is appropriate for the time, use it to pass it on.
What we must not do is repeat these things to our kids, to the next generation, in a dispassionate manner, without clarity, without life, or with dullness. You must not repeat them in an uncompelling way, without strength, without great effort, unconvincingly or unpersuasively, or without great reason and logic. Just do this because God’s Word says, yes, we should, but that is not convincing people with reason and logic. That’s great for 2,3,4 year olds. When they get older, they need reasons, they need to be compelled. That’s the manner in which we are to do it.
We are to do it with great force, eloquence, passion, compellingly, acutely, all those things. Moses goes on to describe the means, that’s the manner how we’re to do it. And then the means in verse 7, “You shall teach them diligently to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up.” So this is a figure of speech called a merism.
A merism uses two or more opposite or complementary words to represent an entire concept. Such as when we say, instead of saying I have looked everywhere for this thing. Sometimes we say I’ve looked high and low, far and wide, I can’t find this thing. And then your wife says it’s right there. My wife has that gift, able to find anything that no one else can find, in a matter of seconds. But it’s used to create a sense of totality or comprehensiveness. And that’s exactly what Moses is doing here.
Eugene Merrill says of this passage, “The pairing of these sets of contrasting places and postures forms a double merism, using opposite terms to express an all-encompassing concept. Sitting suggests inactivity and walking, of course, activity. Together they encompass all of human effort. Likewise, to retire at night and rise up in the morning speaks of the totality of time.” So important, he goes on to say, “so important is covenant truth that it must be at the very center of all of one’s labor and life, all of life comprehensively.”
Moses didn’t say to the Israelites, make sure you pass these things on to your kids by doing daily devotions or family worship with them. Now, I’m not saying that those are, that’s bad. I’m not saying family devotions or family worship is bad, but your intensified repetition of these things must not be relegated to targeted times of the day.
Moses basically says that we need to make every effort and take every opportunity we have in life with the next generation, whether that’s your kids or somebody else in church your discipling. Take every opportunity to pass these things on to them, to pass on to them, why we do what we do, why we obey. Pass on to them our love for God, our love for others. We have to set everything we do in the context of the covenant, of the gospel with our kids. We teach them that obedience is not just outward, it’s of the heart, our love for God. Why we do what we do? Because we love God.
So central is this that Jesus says right here, this is where he gets it from, the first and greatest commandment. It’s in the fifth book of the Bible. How is he called the first? Because it’s the preeminent one, the preeminent command. And the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. But we must set all that we do in life in the context of our love for God and the covenant we have with him.
So just one brief example, when you’re teaching your kids household chores, are you studying all those in the context of stewardship of the things God has given us or do they just have to do it, because they, need you, need them to do it? Are you intensely passing on to your kids how every aspect of life is an act of worship and you obey, because you love God, even down to doing, doing the dishes at night, changing diapers, going to work every day.
Moses wanted them to know all of these things. You have to pass on. Set everything in the context of your love for God or the next generation isn’t going to have love for God and they’re going to go right back to where your parents were. Finally, Moses gives us the scope of these. We’ve seen the manner and the means. Now the scope in verses 8 to 9, “you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as phylacteries between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.”
Again, he’s just talking about all of life, the sphere of life, from personal all the way to, you know, putting a phylactery box on your head that contains a piece of scripture out into the public places of life. They’re to be marked by your faith in God, your love for God. It’s debated if this was meant to be taken literally or not. The Jews certainly took it that way, as they do bind scripture on themselves.
I have a hard time thinking that it’s just simply metaphorical, but I think the principle is that God’s people should be marked by his word and his commands and their love for him. Moses definitely focuses at the beginning on the heart, but there is an inevitable outworking of what is in your heart. And when God’s Word is deeply upon your heart, it ends up everywhere else as well.
Therefore, the scope of these things is from the privacy of your own home, your own person, out into the public square. God’s Word is to mark every aspect of our life. Does that mean that we need to wear little phylactery boxes between our eyes? No, I don’t think so. But I have encouraged many people to write verses on note cards and put them in their pocket, take them out, remind them of themselves and meditate on them.
Our homes and our public structures should bear the marks of what is in our heart. We even see remnants of this in our country in the Chamber of the Supreme Court justices. The ten commandments are still listed there. There’s something very important about God’s Word being publicly displayed. It bears the marks that we really shouldn’t take too lightly. And I think many of us have as Christians the importance of that. I think the fight in Texas to keep the ten commandments posted in schools that’s a good thing.
I think it would be a common grace to restrain sin even, and I think we’ve thought too flippantly about that. So very briefly, how do we get here and where do we go from here? We got here because this was not practiced. God’s Word was not repeated and passed on from one generation to the next, at least not the people’s love for God was not passed on. If it was repeated, it was a cold indifference to the commands.
What we are supposed to do is set these, all of these things in the context of our loving relationship with God. And where do we go from here? We don’t do. I mentioned Epiphanies, sacrificing a pig on the altar in Jerusalem. Where we go from here is not where the Jews went. That’s led to the Maccabean revolt, a lot of war, a lot of bloodshed. That’s not the way forward.
The way forward is not through war and violence. The way forward is to be faithful, to train our children, train the next generation to walk after us, to pass on the true faith to the next generation, to evangelize and disciple them, our neighbors, and the nations. Carl Truman ends his book The Desecration of Man with asking this question. Where do we go from here? Is there any way back? Where do we go when everything that we hold dear as Christians has been desecrated and defiled by the culture?
The only way forward is consecration of those things. The only way for consecration and renewal is through the gospel. And he gives three points at the end of his book to consider. Go, go buy it and read these for a further explanation. But he gives three points and they line up remarkably close with our three points today. He says the way forward is to have a right understanding and practice of creed, cult, and code.
We must, that is, we must hold to the sound doctrine of the faith once for all, delivered to the saints by the apostles and passed down to us. We have to make every effort to know our God, believe what the Bible says. Second, he uses the word cult, and by that he just means the worship of the church. We must love him and take the worship of him seriously and primarily the corporate worship of the church.
Taking worship seriously, baptism, communion, all that we do, our confessions, our singing. It’s all so vital. And finally, he says we have to take seriously the code of conduct in the Bible and live out what we say we believe, not shrinking back, but boldly living and proclaiming the gospel in a nation that really hates it. In other words, beloved, let’s continue doing what we have been doing, but let’s excel still more and pray that our love for God and our love for one another would only increase. Let’s pray.
Father, we marvel that we can look back to this creed that Moses gave Israel thousands of years ago, and it is just as relevant for us today as it was for them back then. The way to prevent apostasy in the next generation, the way back from the apostasy, we find in our own generation. Lord, we are so thankful for your word that you have given us the clear instructions, and I pray that you would give us great vigor, great zeal, that our love for you would be exceeding, and that it would pour out unto others.
That others would see our love for you and our love for one another, and that we would be the light in this city angrily that all could see. There’s something different about that place. We pray that you would do this in us, not for our glory, but for yours. We want people to see and find Christ and love him and be set free from the bondage of sin that entangles them and enslaves them. Would you please do this in us? For your glory and our great joy. We pray in Jesus’ name, Amen.