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The Book of Deuteronomy contains the last set of laws given by Moses. But do they mean anything for us today? Some Christians don't think so.

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Now that I'm forgiven freely by grace, I can live pretty much any way I like. The Lord doesn't really care, and Deuteronomy reminds us the Lord really does care and that the law is critical for Christians in the living of the Christian life.

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Welcome to Renewing youg Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and I'm glad you're joining us. We're a few months into the year, but perhaps in January you began a Bible in a year reading plan. Many Christians, including me, begin these plans with enthusiasm, quickly reading through the exciting narratives we find in Genesis and Exodus. But by the time we get to Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, it can be hard to persevere. Have you ever felt that way where you're not alone? And to help you in your reading of God's Word, this week we'll be taking a closer look at the Book of Deuteronomy. W. Robert Godfrey will be helping us understand a portion of Deuteronomy this week, but you can study the entire book when you request Digital access to this series and study guide along with the DVD set when you give a donation in support of renewing your mind@renewingyourmind.org well, as we begin today, Dr. Godfrey has already explained that Deuteronomy is organized like a pyramid with four steps, four up and four down. The first step is history, the next is warnings, then laws about loving God, and finally the pinnacle, the step at the peak of the pyramid, the laws about leadership. Well, let's pick up In Deuteronomy chapter four, here's Dr. Godfrey.

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We are looking at this final chapter of the first section of our step pyramid, the history section. Chapter four is rehearsing some of the history of Israel as they're about to enter the Promised Land, and is reiterating what the Lord taught them at Horeb about the importance of avoiding idolatry. And there at verse 15, we really come to the central teaching of this fourth chapter. And you remember we've seen in Hebrew literature how important centers are much of the time. And it begins with that repeated word. Therefore, watch yourselves very carefully. You saw no form on the day when the Lord spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of of the fire. Beware, lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves in the form of. And then he goes on to be very specific he doesn't want to leave any room for doubt. He does not want any images made of him that resemble human beings, that resemble animals or birds or things that creep on the earth or fish that swim in the sea, or sun or moon or stars. Have you got that? None of these things are appropriate representations of God. And very interestingly, he says those things, those created things, I gave to all people. And he doesn't really expand on that thought, but it's an intriguing thought when you think about it. What God is really saying to Israel is, as creator, I gave creation to everybody, but I'm giving myself to you. I'm your God. I'm the God who brought you out of Egypt out of the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods before me. And so the Lord is saying, not only is this a command that I give you, but it's a command with a real reason behind it. You must not replace the Creator with some part of the creation. It doesn't make any sense. But beyond not making any sense, it undermines the fundamental relationship that I have with you, my people. And part of what I wanna do as we go through this study of Deuteronomy is to see that God is not, I think, as we sometimes think of him in relation to the Old Testament law. God is not the great accountant in the SK with a ledger, seeing how well we're doing on every little point. God is above all else, a personal, saving, loving God. And he wants a personal relationship with his people. And all of these laws are designed to support that personal relationship that he has with people. If you go replacing him with an image of something he created, you've diminished him. But you've not only diminished him, but you have harmed the relationship he wants to have with you, and you've replaced him with something else. It's the great human temptation to replace God with something else. And we'll see as we go along that he warns people against the most particular things that we are inclined to replace him with. We do that individually, we do that as churches. And he's warning here, don't do it. I want to be your God. A God who has no image, who is not to be reduced to some part of his creation, but is to be appreciated for the great creator God that He is. He goes on verse 20 to say, the Lord took you out of Egypt to be his own. Then, intriguingly, he says again, verse 23 of chapter 4, Take care, lest you forget the covenant of the Lord your God, which he made with you. And Make a carved image, the form of anything that the Lord your God has forbidden you. For the Lord your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God. Now, we all know, don't we, that the idea that God is a consuming fire is just an Old Testament idea. This is a trick question. This is to see if you're paying attention. Is it true that it's just an Old Testament idea that God is a consuming fire? No, because this very verse, Deuteronomy 4:24, is quoted in Hebrews 12:29, when the author of the letter to the Hebrews is talking about the importance of worship and the seriousness of worship and how we're to worship God with reverence and awe. That's a New Testament command, not an Old Testament command. It's also an Old Testament command. It's a New Testament command. Worship God with reverence and with awe. Why? Because our God is a consuming fire. Quotes this verse from the Old Testament. There are a lot of people today who want to say in churches, well, it's a very different attitude in the New Testament from the Old Testament about worship. God was very serious and particular about worship in the Old Testament. But in the New Testament, you can pretty much do what you want. It's not true. Be careful how you worship. That's the message of the Scripture all the way through. Worship is a lot simpler in the New Covenant than it was in the Old, but it's no less serious. God is no less serious, and the relationship he wants with his people is no less serious and profound. And so here is one of the many places in Deuteronomy where we hear an echo in the New Testament that really deepens our understanding of that New Testament teaching itself. And then we get down to verse 25. And here, too is an important part of Deuteronomy, an important teaching of Deuteronomy. When you father children and children's children and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly, that really should be translated when you act corruptly. It would be nice if it were, if. If this were uncertain. But really, this is not what Moses is teaching here. This is not the instruction that Moses is giving here. And we'll see that picked up in more detail in Deuteronomy 28 when we get there. But Moses is really saying, I not only know the history past of God's people, but I know the history future of God's people. And I know what kind of a people you are, and I know the danger you're going to be in. And I have to warn you that when you act corruptly in future generations, there are gonna be terrible consequences. And the terrible consequence is you're gonna lose the land. There's going to be an exile. That's not a surprise that's going to come into the life of Israel. It's prophesied right here by Moses. And that prophecy will be reiterated and expanded in Deuteronomy 28. And so it's very important to see that Deuteronomy, in a variety of ways, is very much looking. It's talking not only about the past and about the present, but it's communicating to Israel to be aware that there are going to be great changes in their future. And they have to be prepared for that. They have to recognize what's going to happen. And we'll see in the very last chapter of Deuteronomy that what is said is, even though calamity is going to come upon Israel in the future, for a time, and yet God will raise up another prophet like Moses. And there is the great prophecy of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. The Old Testament situation described in Deuteronomy was never going to be the end. It was never the fulfillment. The Promised Land had a great purpose, but the purpose of the Promised land was preparatory to seeing the coming of the ultimate Messiah, the ultimate mediator, the true prophet, priest and king who would bring the new heaven and the new earth, not just a little bit of territory in the Near East. That's not what we're promised in the Scripture. What we're promised in the Scripture is the great day is coming when the whole earth will be renewed and the whole earth will belong to the people of God, because that's what God intended from the beginning. There's a real historical movement going on in Deuteronomy to cause the people to look forward with confidence, with hope, with expectation about what's going to happen in their future. And so this history is critical. And at the center of it always is this call to avoid idolatry. It's very tempting to invest physical objects with spiritual power. It's very tempting. It's very satisfying to think, there's a place I can go, there's a thing I can touch that will connect me to the divine. That's a pretty universal human experience. Some of you'll know I'm a minister in a Dutch Reformed denomination. And in the Dutch Reformed churches, unlike a lot of the Presbyterian churches, we have forms, we call them for things, readings that the minister reads for baptism, for Lord's Supper, for Profession of faith. I think it's because the Dutch Reformed are gloomier than the Presbyterians and know that ministers are not to be trusted to get things right. So you just give them something to read and they may be able to successfully do that. And interestingly, in one of the old communion forms, there's a list of gross sins. And the form says, anyone practicing these sins are not to come to to the Lord's table unless they repent of these sins. And in that list of gross sins, interestingly enough, one of the sins to be avoided is praying to saints. Well, this form was written in the 16th century. People were just coming out of Roman Catholicism and there were many people still devoted to the saints. So I knew a minister who was reading this form and he got into it and starts reading the list of gross sins and reads the one about not praying to saints. And he said, I remember thinking to myself, this is dumb. You know, this is so old fashioned. Why are we doing this? And he said, after the service, a person came up to him and said, thank you so much for that. I was still praying to saints. I'd never really been able to break with that. Well, it's a tendency of the human heart to invest something physical with spiritual presence and power because it makes life easier for us. We are visually centered. And so the Lord really warns us about that. Paul, in a sense, I think, echoes this. In 2 Corinthians 4:18, we look not to the things that are seen, but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. And that's really reflected there in chapter four of Deuteronomy as a great call to the spiritual character of our God. And then in one of those moves that sometimes surprises and confuses us, at the end of chapter four, verses 41 through 43, we have a statement about the establishment of three cities of refuge on the east side of the Jordan for people who are guilty of manslaughter. See, these are these head scratchers. Why? Why? Well, I think part of the reason is that Moses wants to make the point that we are all sinners, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally. And God makes a provision for sinners. In the ancient world. There was in the Middle east and in many places a profound sense of blood feuds. If you kill somebody in my family, I have to kill you. And those blood feuds would go on through generations, because of course, when I kill somebody in your family, then you have to kill somebody in my family. And back and forth it goes forever. And this provision says we want to end that in Israel, particularly in the cases where someone has accidentally killed someone else, not intentionally, not an act of murder, but there needs to be a place of refuge for such a person so he won't be killed by the relatives and establish a back and forth blood feud in Israel. So even these things make sense as we think about them as God wanting to establish a people of harmony and peace and love in the land that he is giving them. So in Deuteronomy 4, we see a fair bit of law, but it's very much in the context of history. And then as we move on to chapter five, we're moving on to a section that we find in our step pyramid here, the beginning of the section that I've called Warnings Five and a Half, chapters five through ten, verse eleven of various ways of warning Israel about the importance of keeping the law. On one level, we could say these chapters are remarkably repetitive. They say the same things in a lot of ways over and over again, but they come at them with slightly different angles. Chapter 5 and chapters 9 and 10 are looking at the warnings from the perspective of Sinai. And then chapter six looks at the warnings from the perspective of the family. And chapter seven looks at the warnings from the perspective of Israel's relationship to the world. And then chapter eight looks at the warnings from the perspective of Israel as a nation. And so God, I think, is saying, the law may always be the same, but that law comes with us in various relationships that we have as we live. And the law doesn't become irrelevant in those relationships. The law remains the great guide that we need and the great help that God in mercy has given us. And so in chapter five, Moses very deliberately goes back to Mount Sinai and reiterates the commandments that God gave there, reiterates the summary of the commandments that God gave there. So in Deuteronomy 5 we have the second statement in the Old Testament of the Ten Commandments, Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. And you'll be glad to learn that the Ten Commandments are the same. It's the same commandments in both places. God has not changed his law, but there is a significant change, not in the commandment, but in the reason for the commandment. And that is to be found in the fourth commandment, the commandment to remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Now, in the record of the Ten Commandments in Exodus, the reason we are to keep the Sabbath day holy is because of what God did at creation. You shall remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. In six days God created the heavens and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day, wherefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it. So it's a creation ordinance, as our reformed forebears used to say. It's a command grounded in creation. That's what Exodus 20 wants to emphasize. And that's important to know. I think it's very important for us Christians today to know because there are lots and lots of teachers who mean well, who say, well, you know, the Sabbath commandment was just for the Jews. It has nothing to do with the church. And now that the church has come, the church is free to worship anytime, to serve God on any day, because we are not bound to one day. One day was just for the Jews, not for us. Well, that's a problem when you think about it, because Exodus 20 doesn't say that God gave the Sabbath commandment to the Jews because they were Jews. It says, God gave the Sabbath commandment to all people because they were creatures. And I think that's really important for us. The whole history of the church has recognized that God set aside what one day as a holy day. And the history of the church has said, in the Old Covenant, it was the last day of the week, Saturday. And in the New Covenant, to mark Christ's resurrection from the dead, it's the first day of the week. And John seems to teach that in Revelation 1:10, where he said, I was in the Spirit on the Lord's day. Well, what's the Lord's day if all days are alike? In the New Covenant, as some people argue, there can't be a Lord's day. But John says there is a Lord's day. And it's intriguing the exact form of the Greek there, because the Greek is, it's not the day of the Lord, it's the Lord's day. It's the Dominical day. It's an adjectival form. And the only other place the word Lord is used adjectivally in the New Testament is in 1 Corinthians 11 about the Lord's Supper. There are many suppers, but there's only one Lord's Supper. And so there are many days. But the Lord's day has a specificity to it. And we see from apostolic practice they meet for worship on the first day of the week. And so I think the church has always rightly taught that in the resurrection of Christ, the Sabbath, instead of coming at the end of time comes at the beginning of our week because we already rest in the fulfillment of Christ's resurrection. Well, that's a long Sabbath argument in a very brief amount of time. But that's what we find in Exodus 20. A day is set aside by God as Creator. And what he means by that is, not only do we need that time to fellowship with him, but we need that time to rest. A culture that has no time for rest is in a lot of trouble, and a culture that has no time for God is in a lot of trouble. And that's increasingly where we find ourselves. It's curious to me as a historian, how many churches that 50, 60 years ago were very strict about Sunday have sort of given up on Sunday altogether. And I don't think the church is any better off for it. In any case, Sabbath because of creation in Exodus 20. But here in Deuteronomy 5, the reason given is because of God's redemptive work. Deuteronomy 5:13, Six days you shall labor and do all your work. But the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work. You or your son, or your daughter, or your male servant, or your female servant, or your ox, or your donkey, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. So far the same as Exodus 20, that your male servant and your female servant may rest as well as you. You shall 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. So it's not only because of creation we keep the Sabbath day, but because of redemption we keep the Sabbath day day. We used to be slaves who had to work at our master's bidding all the time. And God delivered us from that slavery, and God gave us rest. And so one day a week we rest in him to remember him as the rescuer of slaves. And what we'll see is that this has resonance through the whole of Deuteronomy and through the whole Old Testament. If we are to rest and our servants are to rest, and the stranger with us is to rest, it changes the whole character of society and of relationships. Our relationships are no longer just economic, but there's a communal spirit of mutuality. We were all slaves. One of the great problems America wrestles with is the legacy of slavery, that some were slaves and some were not. But here we're taught our legacy Our history is that we are all slaves and therefore we're all equal. And therefore we're all to rest before God and to enjoy his blessing. So the Lord is warning his people a great deal about himself. He's the rescuer, but he's also warning us a lot about ourselves, who we are, how we're to understand ourselves, and how we're to understand our relationship with one another. You remember one of the things out of Deuteronomy 17 about the king? He was not to lift himself in pride above his brothers. Why is that? Because we were all slaves in Egypt. No nobility came out of Egypt, only slaves came out of Egypt. And it creates a community of mutuality.