Lesson 11
Foundation of all True Spirituality – Deut.
5:1-21
Open God’s Word to Deut. 5. We
have been careful to point out the book of Deuteronomy is written in a treaty
format which means that it adheres to all of the legal formats of the time and
uses a lot of the vocabulary of the Ancient Near East jurisprudence. It is not just a law code. Scholars have made
comparisons between the Pentateuch and things like the Code of Hammurabi but
that’s not really a bona fide
comparison because the Old Testament is written, in the Pentateuch at least,
under the form of a treaty; not just a law, a treaty. A treaty which implies a relationship between
what is known in the Ancient Near East as a suzerain, or a great king and the
vassal kings.
You had a structure set up like this, you had the great king up here
with his vassal kings down here, and they would make treaties with these vassal
kings and these treaties would have a certain format to them. It turns out that the book of Deuteronomy,
the outline of this book is exactly in the legal format of a treaty. So that we have the analogy, God is the great
king and the twelve tribes are the vassal kings. This opens up the book of Deuteronomy as well
as the Old Testament Law to us for now we can understand some things that we
couldn’t understand before. We can
understand why things are said like we are going to see in the Ten Commandments
and why things are omitted. But we want
to see where we are.
We said the first chapter contained the preamble, this was the
introduction to the treaty, and then from chapters 1-4 we had what is known as
the historical prologue. The historical
prologue section of a treaty was that section of the treaty which indebted the
vassal king to the great king. In other
words, it said look, I have done this and this for you, now you are indebted to
do this and this and this for me. So the
historical prologue is a tale of God’s grace to
From chapters 5-26 we have the so-called stipulation section. This is the details of the Law, what you’re
supposed to do here, what you’re supposed to do there, etc. Here is the Law
proper and as we come to this Law proper we want to understand certain
principles and to clarify one basic concept that exists in the minds of many
Christians I want to spend a few moments introducing the Law under the two
terms, Law and Grace. Both are involved
in living the Christian life, but you have to understand something. The Law actually is an expression of the will
of God, that’s simply put, just briefly what the Law is, it’s an expression of
the absolute will of God. This obviously
plays a role in the Christian life. So
Law is there, you never have lawlessness any more than you would have a person
living in a vacuum. We don’t live the
Christian life in a vacuum. We have to
live under instructions. We live with a
defined will of God before us and that defined will of God is the Law, so the
Law, you might say, is the end of the Christian or the goal.
Grace does not dissolve Law. What grace does, it enables one to
accomplish the Law. Grace is the
means. For example, take the unbeliever,
he is confronted with the will of God, absolute perfection; there’s the Law
that faces him. Before that Law he
stands helpless. Now God’s grace comes
in and that grace never once compromised with Law because the Lord Jesus Christ
lived a perfect life under the Law. So even in the accomplishment of divine
grace God never violated His Law. Grace is the process by which God goes about
to secure the means so that we can live properly for Him. We cannot live the
Law, the will of God, in the energy of our flesh. We have to live it by divine
grace. So grace is the means and not the
end. We’ll show you how this plays a
tremendous role in the Law.
When we began the historical prologue I read you a section from a
research worker who had been investigating the treaties of the ancient east and
one of the findings that this man says concerning love, remember this Law is a
command to love the Lord with all your heart and with all your soul. This researcher found this: “Covenantal love
can be commanded and is defined in terms of loyalty, service, and obedience.”
For example, there was a man who was known in the ancient east as Ribaddu
[sp?], and Ribaddu made a treaty with the Pharaoh of Egypt. The Pharaoh of Egypt was the great king,
Ribaddu was the vassal king. So you have
this kind of a flow of allegiance. Here’s Pharaoh, Ribaddu is expressing his
loyalty to him, and he says this, he writes to Pharaoh and he says: “To love
Pharaoh is to serve him and to remain faithful to the status of vassal.”
Notice something. Do you see
what’s happening here? Understand the
word “love” as it was expressed in the Ancient Near East. We want to understand the word as it existed
in the times in which this book was written and the word “love” when used in an
international treaty meant loyalty. That
robbed it, perhaps, of some of the emotional connotations that you may
associate with the word “love.” You
might say it gets it down to the brass tacks of the issue. But love in the ancient east simply meant
obedience. It means obedience, so
Ribaddu was obedient to Pharaoh.
Let’s see how this works out. We
know it works out in Deuteronomy but hold the place and turn to John 13:34 and
you’ll see that this is not a concept that’s foreign to the whole Scriptural
pattern. I want you to notice the
context of the command that Jesus Christ gave believers toward Himself when He
told them that I gave you a commandment to love Me. I want you to see what He meant. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye
love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another. [35] By this shall all men know that ye are
my disciples, if ye have love one to another.”
In other words, the first thing we notice about love is that it is an
empirical proof that the spiritual truths are really true. In other words, there’s an outer testimony
that accompanies this love. It is not
something just on the inside; it’s something that men can see. Otherwise, if men couldn’t see it, then what
evidence would it be to them? So the
love that Jesus is speaking of is one that at least shows forth on the
outside.
John 14:21, here it’s even more explicit, Jesus again speaking to His
disciples, “He that has My commandments, and keeps them, he it is that loves Me
[and he that loves Me shall be loved of My Father, and I will love him, and
will manifest Myself to him.]” Turn to
John 15:10, “If ye keep My commandments, ye shall abide in my love….” I just ran you through the upper room discourse
to show you that Jesus’ concept of love was exactly the same as the Ancient
Near East Treaty format, and that is that love simply meant loyalty and
obedience. Loyalty and obedience!
Now we come to the problem of balancing these two and this is a
perpetual problem in the Christian life, to balance these two and people go off
the deep end in two respects. First we
have people that talk about God’s grace and they forget there’s content and
they dissolve the Law and so they say we believe in grace; we believe in grace,
God is going to lead me all over the place.
There are no absolute objective controls to their life and you walked up
to them and said what’s God’s will for you, give me some principles, and they’d
probably look at you with a blank stare on their face of give some wild
eccentric answer. So there’s one
tendency and that is to make grace the end.
Grace can’t be the end; grace is only the means to an end. Like, for example, taking a car to a
designated point, you have point X out here, you have an automobile and you can
be driving the automobile around all over the place randomly if you didn’t have
a point to which you were going. Therefore it is useless to talk about grace
unless you have direction to grace.
Grace is an enablement to do something. Therefore grace always has to be
built upon a base of law, i.e. an expression of God’s will. We’ll see this in the New Testament how this
works out. That’s one extreme. You can
emphasize grace to the point where it becomes end and not means and this
becomes sentimentalism, you get into the mystics, you get into all sorts of
eccentricities along this line.
But then we have Christians that forget about grace and try to live the
Law, and they try to live the Law as thought the Law not only were the end of
their life but it was the means, that I am spiritual because I keep the
Law. And I’m going to grit my teeth and
I’m going to obey, obey, obey, obey.
This is the wrong concept and it leads either (1) to a person for a fast
trip to the funny farm because he can’t make it, or (2) it leads to the problem
of legalism.
What is legalism? Legalism is the
thing that has destroyed fundamentalism in the United States because what
legalism has done is ignored divine grace and say that I can live the Christian
life in my own power. Obviously if
you’re a sane, intelligent person and you say this, what you really mean is
that you’re setting up out here a set of dos and don’ts, a taboo system. I have a set of dos and don’ts and they’re
easy enough for me to keep so therefore I can be spiritual by keeping the
law. Of course they never tell you that
it’s their own man-made law system, it’s their own little list of taboos. So they list these taboos and they say I
don’t do this, I don’t do this, I do this, I don’t do this, I do this, I don’t
do this, this is the Christian life, I’m a spiritual giant. This is legalism. You always have to watch this, particularly
around new believers that will come into a Christian group and some guy will
come up to them and give them a card of dos and don’ts, now you’re a Christian,
you’re saved by grace but forget grace, now it’s works, so do this, do this and
don’t do this, etc.
Legalism is one of the greatest enemies historically that fundamentalism
has ever faced and nine out of ten people in the area from which I come from
identify fundamentalism and legalism. I
know people who are not saved because they have been presented with a set of
taboos and someone has said if you are a Christian if you do this and don’t do
this, they liked that and they’re not a Christian. This has gone on in many areas of the
country, this business of setting up an absolute to run someone else’s
life. If you believe this is God’s will
for you, fine, you do it, but you have no right to impose your man made, unless
it’s in the will of expressed Scripture, you have no right to impress your
friends with your own absolutes.
Legalism is a tremendous enemy and a tremendous detriment to the
Christian life.
These are two extremes; you can go the extreme of making grace an end or
go the extreme of making Law the means.
Now let’s look at some passages from God’s Word that show how the Word
balances these perfectly. First let’s
turn to Jer. 31:31 and I want you to see how God’s grace is introduced. This is speaking of the New Covenant which
God promised Israel in the Old Testament, which God came through on the day of
Pentecost but Israel as a nation did not receive it. Therefore there are certain elements of this
covenant that are not yet true, but certain elements that do apply to us
today. “Behold, the days come, saith the
LORD, that I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel, and with the
house of Judah. [32] Not according to the covenant that I made with their
fathers,” that’s the covenant we’re going to see tonight, not according to this
covenant. Verse 33, “But this shall be
the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, saith
the LORD, I will put My law in their inward parts, and write it in their
hearts, and will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
Do you notice the Law? There it
is, this new covenant of grace is actually a provision that God is going to
give to the nation that it can live the law.
So grace always leads to fulfillment of the law. Always!
Or if you don’t want to use the word “law,” will of God. But grace always moves to this end, you never
have grace alone, never. It’s not in
Scripture. Grace is always a means to
this end.
Ezekiel 36, again speaking of this New Covenant, this new enablement,
the giving of the Holy Spirit on a massive scale, and notice the end, notice
the goal, the reason why this grace is given.
Verse 25-27, “Then will I sprinkle clean water upon you, and you shall
be clean; from all your filthiness, and from all your idols, will I cleanse
you. [26] A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within
you; and I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give
you an heart of flesh. [27] And I will put My Spirit within you, and cause you
to walk in my statutes, and ye shall keep mine judgments, and do them.”
By the way, notice the different verbs used with statutes and judgments
there. That shows what I’ve said, that
“statutes” refer to personal matters of conscience; “judgments” are actual case
histories of legal jurisprudence. So
verses 25-27 again show that God’s grace under the New Covenant is to lead to
the fulfillment of God’s will.
Romans 8:4, speaking again of the righteousness of the law, “That the
righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the
flesh, but after the Spirit.” There
again you have grace, the filling of the Holy Spirit controlling the Christian
life; what does it lead to? It leads to the fulfillment of the righteousness of
the Law. There’s a difference, you don’t go sacrificing under the Old Testament
Law. The righteousness of the Law is
generally the will of God for the individual believer. You always see grace is pointed as an arrow;
think of grace as an arrow and that arrow is pointing to a target and the
target is the will of God. That’s the
grace is; always think of grace in this terms, the will of God.
One further reference, Eph. 5:14, here’s the famous passage on the
filling of the Holy Spirit but I want you to notice what comes before
5:18. Verse 14, “Wherefore, he saith,
Awake thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee
light. [15] See, then, that ye walk carefully [circumspectly], not as fools but
as wise, [16] Redeeming the time, because the days are evil. [17] Wherefore, be
ye not unwise but understanding what the will of the Lord is.” And then verse
18, “Be not drunk with wine, in which is excess, but be filled with the
Spirit.”
Do you see the context in which the promise of the filling of the Spirit
is given? It is given in the context of
understanding first the will of God.
Understanding the will of God precedes the requirements for the filling
of the Spirit. Obviously you can’t
accomplish the will of God or sometimes even know it without the filling of the
Holy Spirit. But I’m talking as a principle that grace is an arrow pointing to
the will of God. The filling of the Holy
Spirit is one of the gracious God has given to us, also is an arrow pointing to
the will of God. Understand what the
will of God is and then understanding this, realize that you can’t accomplish
it in the energy of the flesh; you have to be controlled by God’s Spirit.
This is the point to tie together in your thinking Law and grace. You have to do this again and again because
in the Law, we’re going back to the Law, you have to understand that this is
all we’re getting, Law, we’re not getting gracious enablement under the Mosaic
Covenant, there is no gracious enablement under the Mosaic Covenant. Any gracious enablement given the Old
Testament believers was given in terms of the Abrahamic Covenant. It was given on a grace basis. The Mosaic Covenant is just looking at the
will of God, that’s all, just will of God.
It doesn’t give any help to accomplish the will of God. This is what Paul’s making a whole point
about in the New Testament. Grace didn’t
come by Moses, only the Law came.
If you want another word for Law to replace the word in your thinking
just say will of God, the will of God. So the Law of the Old Testament is the
will of God for the nation. It doesn’t
say anything about how to do it; it just says this is the will of God. As we will see, periodically you get glimpses
through the Law of how they were supposed to do this and it was accomplished by
grace but that gracious provision was rooted back in the Abrahamic Covenant,
not the Mosaic Covenant.
Turn back to Deut. 5. Deut. 5
begins a section from chapters 5-26. We
have divided this section in half, chapters 5-11 and chapters 12-26. It’s going to be a long haul so remember the
picture, we’re moving through chapters 5-16; we’re dividing it 5-11 and
12-26. Why? Because chapters 5-11 deal with the general
provisions and mental attitudes.
Chapters 5-11 deal with mental attitudes, they deal with the heart. So we could say that chapters 5-11 are the
general outline of the heart requirements; this is the will of God for you
mentally under the Old Testament economy, the will of God for a person
mentally. Chapters 12-26 are the
soul. This is why, by the way, the Bible
says in the Old Testament “thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,
and with all thy soul.” The “soul” here
is a reference to outward things, things that you accomplish in your life. You will immediately detect a switch.
Chapters 5-11 are talking about when you get into the land we don’t want
you to think this way. Don’t let it
enter into your heart that such and such is true, heart, mind, heart, heart,
mind, mind, mental attitude. But then
you get into chapters 12 and it starts off this way: if so and so does
something, then such and such should happen; if so and so does something, then
such and such should happen, and the whole tone shifts. And the shift is emphasis on the outward
thing. Chapters 5-11, emphasis on the
inward thing; chapters 12-26 emphasis on the outward thing.
We want to clear up something and that is the word “soul” and
“life.” You have to have this in your
vocabulary and understand how the Old Testament is defining these two words if
you are to understand the Law and if you are to understand such things as
eternal life in the New Testament.
First the concept of soul. In the
Old Testament the soul had several meanings.
It is best seen in Genesis 2:7, God made Adam of the earth; He made the man’s
body. And then into that body He put a
spirit, and then after the spirit came into the body, the whole man was called
a soul. Normally we think of the word
“soul” and technically it’s true, as the immaterial part of man. But soul also had a larger meaning for the
whole person. So when Adam was called “a
living soul” it referred both to his body and to his spirit in some cases. There is a narrow technical word but the general
word “soul” can be used for the whole person.
I have just spent about forty hours tracing this word “soul” out and
after studying practically every reference in Scripture and trying to summarize
it I’ve come up with two meanings to this word.
It is definitely used of things including the body, and we see this
again and again throughout Scripture.
So soul refers to both the body and the spirit, and when you come to
life, man is called “a living soul” and here is one of the most crucial
concepts of the Old Testament. What did the Old Testament mean by he is
alive. In the Old Testament life meant
that you were living as… your spirit was alive and your body was alive together
in union. And to the Old Testament way
of thinking, of course the spirit would be spiritually dead in some cases and
alive in other cases but I’m pointing now to body. The Old Testament mind, if you died and your
body was dead you were not alive in their sense of the word. In the Old Testament life is confined to a
working union of the spirit and the body together in one, and if this is not
true, then to them it’s no longer life.
Real life is living in a physical, material world as a spirit embodied
in a body. That’s the concept of life.
Now you begin to see why the hope of the Old Testament is not in
heaven. Has it ever occurred to you that
never in the Old Testament does a man go to heaven? Has it ever occurred to you that there’s
never a promise of a person who dies in the Old Testament going to be face to
face with the Lord. There’s never that
promise, and yet in the New Testament there is.
The reason is that in the Old Testament the hope, because of this
concept of life, the hope wasn’t just to be absent from the body is to be face
to face with the Lord, that wasn’t the ultimate hope for them. The ultimate hope to be alive forever meant
that I will have a resurrection body. So
therefore to them there was a gap in their eschatology. Here they are walking down through life and
they drop dead. Boom, there’s a gap, and
they don’t consider themselves living until their resurrection bodies are in existence. You want to see this; this is why the Old
Testament is so physical in its outlook.
Life had to be physical, not just spiritual, physical. And this is a tremendous balance for thinking
in our day. The great German 19th
century Hebrew scholar, Delitzsch, I think summarizes this very well when he
says the following about their concept of death. “The state of the spirit,” now he’s speaking
of the spirit’s departed from the body at the point of physical death. Here’s what he says about it, and I think
from my research that this is a very, very adequate statement:
“The state of the spirit or of the soul was not conceived of as an
enfranchised or more perfect state but since all the life of man is naturally
carried on by means of the body, death was conceived as a state deprived of
actuality, bound and as a half-life in the darkness of the abyss.”
Do you see this? You want to
understand it so you understand the hope of the Old Testament. The hope of the Old Testament is not to be
absent from the body; the hope of the Old Testament is to be in the body;
that’s the hope of the Old Testament.
Therefore the resurrection becomes crucial; the resurrection is the central hope of the Old
Testament. This carries over from phase
three of God’s plan of salvation, and let’s look at the plan of salvation as
the Old Testament saint would have looked at it. Here you have the point of salvation when he
accepted what he knew of Jesus Christ under the dispensational provisions that
were given him in his time. Then we have
phase two of his life that extends from the point when he trusted the Lord up
until the point he died. And His phase
three began with the resurrection body.
That’s what he looked for. And if
there was a gap in here and he had to spend a few thousand years in Sheol, that
was fine, but he wanted to make sure on the other side there was light and
there would be a resurrection body awaiting him.
That’s the Old Testament way of thinking and it’s a legitimate way of
thinking. The only reason why death for
us, and what I repeat at funerals and try to say it five different ways so
everyone can hear it, and that is the reason that we have hope after
death. You usually have a funeral and
they have this open casket and everyone is crying because there’s a body
there. The first thing you do if you
have any doctrine is to get someone to shut the coffin. People sit there and worship the body, it’s
ridiculous, there’s nothing in the body is just a discarded piece of trash,
worth about 75 cents chemically. This
whole area of doctrine is that we are absent from the body, the body is
worthless. Yes, this existing body is
worthless, and as believers we have a hope for this interim period that the Old
Testament saint didn’t have and that is what makes a Christian funeral
different from anything in the Old Testament and different from anything
outside Christianity and that is that within this interim we have a
promise.
Not that we are going to be fulfilled, heaven is not the permanent abode
of the believer. The permanent abode of
the believer is in his resurrection body which he will receive at the Second
Advent of Jesus Christ. The “heaven
period” when you are face to face with the Lord is a time when you will have
special fellowship and privileges because we now live in a different age. Now, since the resurrection of Christ and the
new creation we have a special deal open to us that the Old Testament saints
did not have. And this is the difference
in a Christian funeral and this is why we never give the body a second
thought.
The Old Testament varies in their attitude toward the body because of
the doctrine of resurrection but we have an extra doctrine that teaches us
something, that in this interim it’s not all black. In this interim, a believer when he dies is
not going to spend his time in some purgatory or Sheol somewhere, he is going
to go directly to be face to face with the Lord. And that is the hope of the believer and this
is why it is blasphemous to have a funeral where the body is glorified. What kind of a testimony is that? A Christian funeral should be a testimony to
divine truth. It’s in a funeral where
the Christian has his greatest opportunity to witness. Yet believer after believer gets into that
situation and acts just like an unbeliever.
That doesn’t mean you don’t feel sad, of course you feel sad. If you’ve lost a loved one it is obviously
sadness, but it is not the same kind of sadness because it’s not permanent
departure. If that loved one was a
believer and you are a believer you will be rejoined.
This all goes to show you that in the New Testament we have something
the Old Testament didn’t have and you’re going to have to sort of blank this
out in your mind to appreciate the Old Testament way. We have to take ourselves,
transport ourselves back to the Old Testament, think the way they did, and even
though we know we have this truth, and that’s why I’ve taken a few minutes to
show you that I believe it, what I’m trying to teach you now is to eliminate
this from your thinking to appreciate what the Old Testament was looking
at. He didn’t have this and so what he
felt was that when he died he would go to Sheol, into a place of
nothingness. This is why in the Psalms
the phrase comes up again and again, Lord, don’t let me die because in Sheol
who is going to praise You, there’s nothing going on down there, nothing
happening. So this is the prayer to not
die and this is what you have in the Psalms.
This is the way the Old Testament man looked at life and this was his viewpoint.
Now we come to chapter 5 and we can appreciate some of the things that
are going to be said in this Decalogue.
“And Moses called all Israel, and said unto them, Hear, O Israel, the
statutes and judgments which I speak in your ears this day, that ye may learn
them, and keep, and do them.” Chapter 5
could be outlined the following way: verses 1-5 the introduction, verses 6-21
the Decalogue, and verse 22-33 you have the conclusion and the need of a mediator. So the first section the introduction; the
second session the Decalogue; the third section the need of a mediator.
Verses 1-5, the introduction: here Moses is simply illustrating the fact
that he is going to do some teaching and in order to do some teaching he is
going to speak it in their ears. This is
a Hebrew idiom; it shows you how they taught.
They taught largely by the lecture method in the Old Testament. “That you may learn them, keep them, and do
them.” “Keep” and “do” is a phrase from
now on you’re going to find again and again and again and I won’t comment on it
again because it’s going to come up so often that’s all I’d do is comment on
it. “Keep and do” simply would be
translated, or you get the thrust of it by this word, let me give it to you in
the original Hebrew: guard to do. That
means that you pay attention and you make sure that you do this. Idiom: do it faithfully. It means guard; it requires an act of
volition on your part to do this. You
have to mentally pay attention to what’s going on in the Old Testament. This is what Moses is saying. “Guard” means that you have to personally
exert yourself to sit down, concentrate and take in the Word of God. It’s not going to leak in by osmosis. It’s going to come because you pay attention
to the Word of God. This is how it
operates in the Old Testament and how it should operate in our day.
Verse 2, “The LORD our God made a covenant with us in Horeb.” And in verse 3 he makes an important
statement, “The LORD made not this covenant with our fathers, but with us, even
us, who are all of us here alive this day.” This covenant is new and God did
not make it with the fathers and here we have the introduction of a new
dispensation. A dispensation simply
stated is just an age of history looked at from God’s viewpoint, that’s all.
God looks down at history and He classifies it, this is the age of so and so,
the age of so and so. We do the same
thing, every historian breaks down history into categories, the age of Greece,
the age of Rome, the Renaissance period, the Middle Ages, and you have
categories. That’s all a dispensation
basically is is a divine category of history.
And here he’s going to start doing something new.
With this dispensation things are going to change and other things are
not. So that you will not be confused
let me give you this diagram. Here’s
dispensation #1, you can use this on any dispensation; think of dispensation
one as Israel, dispensation two the church, any one you want. Think of any two dispensations, your
choice. The basis of salvation is the
cross of Christ in every dispensation.
There is no other base for salvation in any dispensation except the
cross of Christ. Now you have the means
of salvation is always by faith… ALWAYS by faith! In every dispensation the means never
changes, the base never changes. Well
then what does change? Only one thing:
revelation changes. In different dispensations
they know different amounts of information about Christ, that’s all. Abraham knew very little about Jesus Christ
but what he did know he responded to and therefore was saved. In our day we know a lot about Jesus Christ
and we respond to this and we are saved.
So what changes from dispensation to dispensation is not the way of
salvation, in fact not even the way of spirituality changes. What changes is the revelation. And in the area of spirituality there is one
more factor that changes and that is the will of God. The will of God after salvation does change
from dispensation to dispensation.
Believers are to act different ways.
These are the only two variables as we switch dispensations and we begin
this new covenant, the base of the new dispensation of Israel, or the Law.
Verse 4, “The LORD talked with you face to face in the mount out of the
midst of the fire,” and here is the base of this whole Law. We had a whole chapter on this, that God’s
Law in the Old Testament depended upon a literal miracle, just as in our day
our faith depends upon resurrection. If
Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, just forget it. In the Old Testament if God had not literally
spoken to these people it’s all over.
Moses didn’t go up on the mountain and he had a headache, he couldn’t
decide what to do, he’d run out of aspirin and he had a vision and saw
something and came back down and started the world’s great religion. That’s not
the point of the Old Testament. The
point of the Old Testament is that God divinely, by His own initiative spoke
the words so that if you had been there with a tape recorder you could have
recorded God’s words in the Hebrew language. That’s what we’re talking about.
That’s the kind of miracle that is the ground of the Old Testament, verse 4,
God spoke with you face to face.
Verse 5, “(Moses is trying to contradict a problem even believers
have. “I stood between the LORD and you
at that time, to show you the word of the LORD; for ye were afraid by reason of
the fire, and went not up into the mount), saying,” what’s Moses saying here? He’s saying look, there are two parts to the
Law. You have the “Ten Words,” they’re
not called Ten Commandments, they’re called Ten Words, and then you have the
statutes and then you have the judgments. These are the parts of the Law. The Ten Words were spoken by God
directly…directly! These were not
direct, they were indirect, God spoke through Moses. Those people didn’t hear these statutes and
judgments being given. They were down
there and then Moses comes down the mountain and says here they are, God spoke
them.
What Moses is trying to fight here is a tendency that even believers in
our day have of making the authority of revelation dependent upon the
directness of revelation. In other
words, if God didn’t speak it directly you ought to be suspicious. So we have red letter editions of the Bible
and somehow the red letters, those words that Jesus spoke are somehow more
authoritative than the words of the apostles.
That’s false dichotomy. It’s not
true. It’s not true! Every word is as authoritative as any other
word and I am not blaspheming when I say that Paul’s word is just as important
as God’s dictated word here in the Old Testament. It’s just as important because it’s just as
much the Word of God. Moses is putting
this in here in verse 5 to show you that even though verse 4 is true, even
though God did speak face to face, he wants you to understand that I stood
between the Lord and you at that general period of time in history, and
therefore at that time my mediated word is as authoritative as the verse 4
kinds of words; two kinds of words but it has nothing to do with the authority.
The rest of your Bible is as important as any red letter that you will ever
find. That red letter edition concept,
someone had a lot of red ink and a false concept and went to work and it became
a popular thing to do.
Beginning in verse 6 we have the famous Ten Commandments. “I am the LORD thy God, who brought thee out
of the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” At this point you want to understand
something about the Ten Commandments, and that is that again notice the Jew’s
attitude. If this is not based upon a
real miracle, upon real historical fact, it’s a waste of time. They’re not going to obey God unless He’s
done something for them. This is what
He’s done in verse 6, I brought you out, that’s the miracle, that’s the
historical act and that is why they listened to him. The Jew has been trained in the Old Testament
not to listen to any God that doesn’t perform.
That’s the way they operate; if this God is really there then He’s going
to do something and if He doesn’t do anything, forget it. That’s the
attitude. It’s a very pragmatic attitude
and it’s the base of the whole Old Testament.
It should be our base too.
We don’t come to Christ because of the attractiveness of Christianity;
we come to Christ because of the historical facts of Christianity. It’s the same thing in the Old
Testament. There are four things that
you want to observe about the Decalogue before we go any further. One thing I’ve already given to you is direct
revelation. God dictated these words,
not mediated through any man. Those
people sat at the bottom of that mountain and God spoke and they heard His
words every last one of them heard every one of these words. Even the little babies heard it though they couldn’t
understand it, they heard God’s Word.
The second thing to notice about the Ten Commandment is that they’re
all, with two exceptions, negatives.
Why negatives? Because they are
given in legal format and they were designed to expose sin and they utilize a
construction in the Hebrew known as the absolute negative. There are two kinds of construction in
Hebrew, the relative negative and the absolute negative. The relative negative would mean “don’t do
that” you’d say to someone. But if you
said “never do that” you’d be using the absolute negative, in other words,
under no condition will you ever do this.
Relative, just don’t do it now, maybe you can later but absolute
negatives are given because legal format is designed to expose sin.
The third thing to notice about the Ten Commandments is that they are
based on mental attitude, not overt activity because of the tenth; look at
verse 21, that is not an overt activity.
“Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor’s wife, neither shalt thou covet
thy neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant,” etc. That is an inner mental attitude and that
proves to you that the entire complex of the Ten Commandments is mental. This is what Jesus was trying to explain in
the Sermon on the Mount. When it comes to
the New Testament and the Pharisees have made it totally external, Jesus says
no, you misunderstand this, you totally misunderstand this. This business about “Thou shalt not kill,” do
you know the Pharisees in Jesus’ time did with that. Legalists decided they were going to get
saved by keeping the Law so they had to make the Law easy enough so they could
get saved, so the Pharisees said look, don’t kill because if you do the
policeman might get you. That’s basically
what they said and Jesus came along and said isn’t that sweet, “you’ve heard it
said that thou shalt not kill,” and that’s when he launched into this “if you
hate your brother you’ve already killed him.”
What Jesus was trying to show them was you can’t externalize these
things, they begin on the inside, in your mind.
So the Ten Commandments therefore are addressed to the mental
attitude. By the way, do you remember
in Romans 7 what was the commandment that just bugged Paul? What was that one commandment that he
cites? It’s verse 21, and the Law came
and said thou shalt not covet, and then all of a sudden I realized my sin. There’s a legitimate case of the conviction
of the Law, it worked because Paul identified it with mental attitude.
The fourth thing to notice about the Decalogue is that it is given in
itself in treaty format. The whole book
of Deuteronomy is outlined in treaty format and this little block of material
in the Ten Commandments is a treaty within a treaty because here it begins, “I
am the LORD, thy God,” there’s your preamble, “who brought you out of the land
of Egypt, from the house of bondage,” that’s what I’ve done for you, the
historical prologue; and the rest of it is the stipulations. So the Ten Commandments aren’t just a moral
code; they are a code that is controlling a relationship that is legally
defined. It’s not an absolute code that
just anybody obeyed. No, the Ten Commandments
are given for the people within this covenant; the whole thing is set in a
covenant format.
Beginning with the first commandment, verse 7, “Thou shalt have no other
gods before Me.” Immediately with the
first commandment we face a problem, the little word “before Me.” Does this mean thou shalt have no other gods
before Me because there aren’t any other gods, or does it mean thou shalt have
no other gods before me, there may be others but you’re not going to have them,
I am yours. See there’s a problem
here. And the monotheism, people say the
monotheism is proved by the first commandment.
It isn’t proved by the first commandment. Monotheism is proved by the whole Old
Testament; it was proved in chapter 4, you remember the culmination of chapter
4, in verses 35-39 was that this was given to show you that there is no other
God like this. In other words, God is
totally unique. There’s where your monotheism is structured. This commandment in verse 1 is not saying you
won’t believe in other gods, this is a commandment of allegiance and it doesn’t
mean monotheism. It’s built assuming
monotheism. That’s the assumption of this commandment, but the commandment
itself is saying don’t go chasing around, stick to me. That’s the force of the commandment.
To show you this, and show you I’m not just talking through my hat here,
turn to Deut. 21:16 and you will see the exact phrase used in the way I’m
speaking, proving that the first commandment is a commandment of absolute
allegiance. That’s the issue, it’s not
just talking about intellectual belief in one God, it’s talking about
loyalty. “Then it shall be, when he
maketh his sons to inherit that which he has,” here’s the father, the old man
is about ready to pass away and he’s making out his will. And he has one brat and he has one son that
he likes. The tendency of any father, of
course, is to shower blessings on the good son and let the brat go
somewhere. Therefore when he designed
his will he’s going to design it deliberately to exclude the brat. So this is a phrase to prohibit this. “When the father makes his sons to inherit
that which he has, that he may not make the son of the beloved first-born
before the son of the hated, which is indeed the first-born.” What he’s talking about, do you see the word
“before?” That’s the same Hebrew
construction as in the first commandment.
And it’s not talking about only one son, it’s talking about [blank
spot].
… and don’t understand it in the context in which it was given. So let’s look carefully at the context in
which it was given and discuss what we call the law of culpability. The first point under the law of culpability
is found in Deut. 24:16, I want to show you this to show you that this is not
Clough, this is Deuteronomy. I want to
show you that what I’m about to tell you is contained in the Scripture text,
just to show you there’s nothing unfair, nothing unjust about this. “The fathers shall not be put to death for
the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers; every
man shall be put to death for his own sin.”
What does this mean? It means
that however you interpret what the verse in Deut. 5, you’ve got to interpret
it so that you will not destroy Deut. 24:16; you’ve got to keep logical
consistency here or you’re going to have a contradiction. And Moses was too intelligent a person to
have contradiction. What is it
saying? It is saying first of all that
it means that only the deserving parties are punished. If you look carefully at the original
commandment it says “I will visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children
to the third and fourth generation,” and then it adds, “of them who hate
Me.” Then in verse 10 it says “of them
who love Me.” That shows you something;
it shows you that God’s discipline goes against those who hate Him, those who
hate Me; God’s blessing goes on “those who love Me.” So it’s not saying that the innocent are
going to be cursed because of something their fathers did. They only get cursed
under the law of culpability when they engage in the same sin their fathers
did.
The first point under the law of culpability is that only those
deserving it are going to get it.
There’s no violation of justice here.
The second point, it refers not to justice coming upon an innocent party
or some other person, it refers to a continuity. It is actually a law of continuity. Let’s illustrate this: here’s father, here’s
his son, his son’s son and here’s his son’s son. What the law of culpability is saying is that
this man commits sin X. If the son
commits sin X he’s going to get the same discipline his father did and if this
son commits sin X, the same discipline, and this discipline is going to
continue on through the family, but in order for the discipline to continue
these children have to keep committing the same sin. That’s what it’s saying, there’s a continuity
here of discipline.
To show you how this worked out and it’s quoted many times in the Old
Testament, Lev. 26:39, here you have one of the great verses on the law
culpability. “And they who are left of
you” this is discipline,” shall pine away in their iniquity in your enemies’
lands; and also in the iniquities of their fathers shall they pine away with
them.” What’s that saying? Here’s their fathers, they committed sin X,
their sons committed the same iniquity and so they’re getting clobbered. It’s like a snowball. You get a little snowball and start rolling
it around and the first thing you know you get a real big one. That’s what it’s talking about, the
discipline snowballs from generation to generation because these sons persist
in the sins of their fathers. It’s
talking about the discipline.
Turn to Isaiah 65:7 and you’ll see another reference where the law of
culpability is operating. This is a
clear-cut case. “Your iniquities, and
the iniquities of your fathers together, saith the LORD,” now here’s the
definition of the iniquity, “who have burned incense upon the mountains, and
blasphemed me upon the hills; therefore will I measure their former work into
their bosom.” What has happened? The fathers committed a sin; the sons went
ahead and did the same thing and God says all right, your father got
disciplined and I am going to discipline you more.
The point is that the child is disciplined because he participates in
the same sin of his fathers. Other
references are Jer. 16:11 and Dan. 9:16.
The third point to remember about the law of culpability and that is
it’s a gracious law because if you look at it carefully what it’s saying is
that I am going to let this thing snowball for three or four generations, but I
will let snowball My blessing for a thousand generations. Do you see the difference; the cursing only
goes to four generations, the blessing goes to one thousand generations. There
is God’s grace. Far from showing God’s
wrath it shows His grace. He says I’m
going to cut off the discipline after the third and fourth generation, but I am
not going to cut off My blessing, My blessing is going to go on and on and on
through history.
The fourth thing, we have to explain why this was given. There are two
explanations and I think they are both true, why this works out in
history. You can see this work out, for
example if you’ve ever taken a course in ancient history and done a study on
the life of the Herod family. The Herod
family, Herod the Great, the man who was in charge when Christ was born and
Herod Antipas and you can trace it down through the Herodian dynasty and you
will see where God disciplined that family and people died horrible deaths
because of that family. You can just see
it accumulate within the family.
There are two reasons for this, first one suggested by Joe Temple and I
think this has a lot of merit to it. He
backs it up with references. It is
hereditary. Why does this happen, why is
it you have the father, son, son, son and often times in history you’ll observe
the children follow the same sin pattern as their parents. Some of it may be hereditary and Dr. Temple
points this out very well by a tremendous illustration out of Genesis. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob all had the one sin
of lying. Abraham went down into Egypt
and he lied and then Isaac, his son, went down there and what did he do, he did
the same thing, and by the time you come to the third generation, Jacob, he’s
called a liar. He’s such a big liar that
he gyps his brother out of the birthright.
Then if that’s enough, you come to Jacob’s sons and they are all liars,
all of them except Joseph. Do you see
how this snow-balled in that historical case.
There’s another explanation given by Dr. Kline and I think this
parallels Dr. Temple’s explanation and that is that it’s not only a hereditary
factor but it’s enforced by a sociological factor of the home. There’s a reason for this third and fourth
generation. The third and fourth generation as Dr. Kline says is the limit of a
household in the ancient east. In other
words, you didn’t have the father like we have in our society, you had a
hierarchy, and if gramps was alive he was the king of the mountain. You may be married and have children and you
may be a grandfather but if your father is alive, he’s the hauncho, and he runs
the show the way he wants to run it, whether you like it or not. So the ancient home was constructed on the
oldest man principle. And the oldest
man, obviously, would be the third and fourth generation, so therefore this may
be true in the sense that the whole family participates. So this old man sets off the sin pattern, he
teaches his sons to do it, his son marries a girl and they have children and
because they’re in the same family they pick up the same tendency, so on down
to the third and fourth generation. So
you have these people doing the same kind of things.
The fifth point of the doctrine of the law of culpability says this: why
was it given? It was directed to parents, to warn parents that you parents can
set in motion sin patterns that will culminate three or four generations down
in history. Why in this country are
parents and our parents set in motion certain political concepts, certain
economic concepts in this nation, that our next generation is going to face if
we don’t. We have started welfarism in
this country and it is a sin by God’s Word the kind of welfarism we have
because it’s plagued with corruption for one thing, and it’s founded on
unbiblical principles for another.
And I am not against welfare, but there are different types of welfare
and a lot of our welfare is nothing but bread and circus. We have started this thing in motion and we
can’t get off. And it’s all going to
come crashing down on our heads and it’ll be in the third or fourth
generation. Over a sequence of time we
have cultivated concepts and these concepts have been passed from parents to
children, from children to their children and from their children on down, to
the point where now in certain communities in certain areas in the slum
sections you have people on the rolls permanently because their parents and
their parent’s parents were on the rolls.
Why? Because you started in
motion something that is going to persist until God disciplines, until God
steps in and someone is going to suffer.
So this law of culpability, this commandment is not a light thing. “You will not make any graven image,” that’s
one point. But you want to notice the
last part of that, the threat that God makes.
That’s not an idle threat, that’s a threat from the God who controls
history. And He’s telling you if you are
parents, just be careful that you don’t set in motion… you may have an area of
weakness; your area of weakness may be that you are a crook or a thief. So here
you are, thievery and that’s your area of weakness, you can’t walk in a store
without walking out with their merchandise, you have big pockets. All of a sudden your kids see you do that,
ooh, mommy and daddy do that, so they learn it.
And they cultivate an area of weakness and by the time they get to be
adults they’ve not only got their own area of weakness they’ve built on
watching you. So they come along and
they’re big crooks. Then by the third generation their kids live in this home
where private property is not respected, you can do anything with it, just make
sure you don’t get caught, so the third generation… by the time you get to the
third and fourth generation they are all kleptomaniacs. Why?
Because the parents set in motion a sin pattern that they passed on to
their children. This is what God is
getting at, this is not just an idle threat, this is part of the mechanics of
history.
As we go through the rest of these Ten Commandments we’re going to see
some very serious things that apply to us today.