Lesson 13

Results of the Decalogue – 5:22-23

We will continue in Deuteronomy 5 and I want to remind you where we’re moving in the book of Deuteronomy so we don’t lose the forest for the trees. There will be many times when we go on to certain details and I want to continually bring your mind back to the pattern of motion. For one reason this pattern of motion or movement in the book of Deuteronomy is going to lay the foundation for the techniques of the Christian life. In Deut. 5-11 you have the heart requirements. The theme of this book is “Thou shalt love the Lord they God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul.” From chapters 5-11 is the heart; in chapters 12-26 is the soul and we said loving God with all your soul means that you love God in all these situations life finds you. You take all the details of life, you can take money, friends, loved ones, sex, your job, you can take whatever it is and all these things form the details of your life. And those details are going to be covered in chapters 12-26. Loving God with all your soul means with all the activities that you will live in, all the situations that you will be involved with.

However, before Moses gets there he does something. He goes back to the first principle from chapters 5-11 and that is the principle, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart,” emphasizing that spirituality is always something that comes from your mental attitude and out flows into your outer life. It’s putting the cart before the horse to give people instructions on what they should or should not do, what the will of God for them is in all these areas, money, friends, loved ones, sex, job and whatever else you want to add to all these details. It is useless to explain God’s will in these areas unless you first concentrate on the mental attitude, for this is where we actually fight our greatest battles and if this is straight the other things automatically follow.

So how is this going to work? In chapter 5 we pick up a principle. You might say this is the first requirement; chapter 5 gives you the Ten Commandments and you may wonder as we start with the inner mental attitude, why does God being with the Ten Commandments. Why this all of a sudden? The reason that God wants us to understand, and by the way, remember that this book is written to believers, not unbelievers, therefore the Law was not a way of salvation; the law was a way of life for the Old Testament saint living in a national entity.

So chapters 5-11, since they deal with phase two, God’s plan, at this point you receive Jesus Christ, we call that phase one, and phase two extends from the moment in your life when you accept Christ on down to the time you die or the rapture, whichever occurs first, when you begin phase three. In phase two of your Christian life you have a certain set of principles that we apply and sometimes don’t apply, but these principles control our life in phase two. So this is the objective of chapters 5-11, to explain this under the Old Testament system, phase two in the Old Testament, area—mental attitude.

In chapter 5 Moses begins with a principle that God has absolutes. This is the point he wants to get across and something that you have to realize chapters 5-11 are written in logical order, so therefore chapter 5 forms the base, then he’s going to build on it in chapter 6, then chapter 7 will build on chapters 5 and 6; then chapter 8 will build on chapters 5-7; chapter 9 will build on chapters 5-8; etc. All of it is in logical sequence, but you notice where it begins. It begins on the base of an absolute. There are certain absolutes and we are going to see that these absolutes, these things that are true throughout all space and time, throughout any situation, these absolutes are based on God’s character. This is a principle of all living in phase two that God’s character is the base of absolutes. You want to understand that we’re not talking about legalism and we’re not distorting grace.

Remember grace is the means of fulfilling the will of God. The Law is an expression of the will of God. Legalism is an attempt by man to accomplish the will of God in the energy of the flesh. And in order to do this two things usually happen. One, he sets up absolutes that are not absolutes, things that are never declared to be true in Scripture so he has extra absolutes. And he has no authority for doing these. You might watch out for this, Christians have this tendency, certain taboos that are associated in fundamental circles; thou shalt not do this, thou shalt not do that, etc. etc. etc. These are not given as absolutes in Scripture. You may, as you understand spirituality, wind up doing exactly the same thing and in fact fulfilling all of these taboos, but you’re going to do it because you want to do it and you’re going to do it out of the filling of the Spirit and that’s different. You may wind up doing them; you may wind up observing some of these taboos. But it’s going to be for a different reason. So legalism will add extra absolutes, extra Biblical absolutes.

The second thing they do is that they take the absolutes that are in Scripture and they lower them. For example, they make them a mere matter of externals and these are always two characteristics of legalism. They will take an absolute like “thou shalt not kill” and say that just refers to murder. Last time we showed you that in the area of law this is true. But his Law, the Ten Commandments goes deeper than this; it goes to the mental attitude so therefore the person who hates someone else has already violated this commandment. Therefore you find out that a person has lowered [can’t understand word] in Jesus day, Jesus had to upgrade the Pharisees for this reason, that they were legalists, they had lowered absolutes and they had added extra ones.

The Pharisees are a very interesting study in history because the Pharisees were a group of people who represented legalism par excellence. These people, the Pharisees, did two things, they added absolutes, they added commandments to God’s commands because they said, for example you shall not cook on the Sabbath day, which was authorized; there’s nothing in Scripture wrong with that. They had all sorts of laws what ladies could do and could not prepare; they had laws about what men should and should not do on the Sabbath day, etc. Never implied, never mentioned in God’s Word, but they made the whole concept of living for the Lord burdensome, horrible, and beyond description as far as comfort and peace are concerned. If a person was in his right mind he’d just take the Pharisees and tell them to forget it, if that’s the way the Christian life is I’m not interested. They made the Christian life very obnoxious to everyone around them because they added absolutes that had no business being added, and then the absolutes that were bona fide, that were legitimate expressions of the will of God, these they lowered. They said in Jesus day “thou shalt not kill” means just be careful because if you kill the courts are going to get you. And that’s all, that’s their interpretation of the Law. It’s utter nonsense. Legalism always has these two tendencies.

When we come to Deut. 5 we find these Ten Commandments and last time we left off in verse 17 with “Thou shalt not kill,” with the area of capital punishment. To bring our minds back to the issue so that we won’t get confused by the capital punishment issue, this commandment is one that refers, like all of the commandments, to a basic inner mental attitude. And it refers to the idea of hating someone else.

Verse 18, “Neither shalt thou commit adultery,” and here we have another commandment which is very interesting for what it is not saying. “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” the emphasis on verse 18 is not upon sex. The reason for this is the verb that is used to “commit adultery.” “Commit adultery” looks like this in the Hebrew, na’aph, and na’aph is always the verb that is used of extramarital relationship and only, therefore, refers to married people, not unmarried people. The objective of this command has nothing to do with sex as such; the objective of this command has to do with the upholding of the divine institution of marriage. That’s the reason for this commandment in here. The sex problem comes in in verse 21, but in verse 18, “thou shalt not commit adultery,” the issue there is not the sex.

The issue in verse 18 has to do with a violation of the divine institution of marriage, because if Moses wanted to refer to sex he would have used a verb that looks like this, zanah, and zanah means to commit illicit sex, etc. If he had meant sex here as such he would have used this verb, but he didn’t. He used na’aph referring to the institution of marriage.

Here again we find something very interesting about these Ten Commandments. Do you notice, these are God’s expressed will to a nation? Always conceive of this as addressed to a nation and you won’t get in trouble with the Sabbath and everything else. This is a national address, God’s will for a nation. So verse 16, we said “honor thy father and thy mother.” Here we have the institution of family upheld. Actually we could say this: there are four divine institutions in Scripture that theologians have classified as institutions. If you read one theology they’ll call them divine institutions, if you read something else they’ll call them ordinances for the human race, etc. You want to know these four divine institutions because these are true for all members of the human race.

The first one is volition and that is that every person has the right to choose. And this is why socialism is anti-scriptural and all forms of totalitarian government are anti-scriptural because they violate volition. They minimize the area of choice of the individual. Man has been given the right to choose because God wants you to mature, and the only way we can mature is making free choices and looking at the results of those choices. That is how we learn. Therefore we have to do this; people always learn by choice and by volition.

The second divine institution that applies to the whole human race is marriage, the union of male and female. And this is valid for all men, whether believers or unbelievers.

The third divine institution is family. And of course this is the procreation and the brining up of children inside a legitimate home. This applies to the entire human race.

Finally, the fourth divine institution which was not instituted until Genesis 9 is nation or we might say government; not world government, it was shown not to be world government by the tower of Babel incident which was the first United Nations building in history, the first attempt at one world government and God destroyed it by breaking it up and by saying that this is not in My will because once you get a world government and once you get a union of the human race you will have apostasy on a world-wide scale. So the nations have been divided into national entities by cultural boundaries, linguistic boundaries, for the express purpose of saving the human race from utter terrorism and apostasy.

It’s the same principle, if you were in the navy and you have a ship. Ships were designed with various holds so that if they got a hole it wouldn’t sink the whole ship, it would just flood one particular hold. Same principle in the human race, so that if a culture goes apostate there will be other cultures that will not have gone apostate and these cultures can be the source and instruments of God in judging the apostate culture. So this is why we do not have world government and why any movement toward world government is anti-scriptural.

So these four divine institutions are always protected in Scripture. And wherever you go in God’s Word you will find these commandments; it is God’s will not only to protect you as a believer but to protect the entire human race. Do you know why? Because He is interested that the human race hear the gospel and the human race cannot hear the gospel if any one of these or all four of these are destroyed. If volition is destroyed people cannot choose. If marriage is destroyed then you have no protection for children, you have no development of the male and female in the highest form. If family is destroyed, children cannot grow up, children can never hear the gospel and you cannot have an adult population raised with stability. And if nations are destroyed you cannot preach the gospel under a mob situation. You can’t go out in the middle of a mob and say hold it, believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved. You’ll get run over faster than you would with a Mack truck. Mob rule is always antithetical to the gospel and therefore any toleration of mob rule, riot, etc. is also anti-scriptural because it destroys people’s right to choose.

These are the four divine institutions and you will see all of these four protected by the Ten Commandments. Verse 16 protects divine institution number three, “honor thy father and thy mother.” This is for all men. The principle was given to Israel as a national entity but we can extrapolate the principle over to all people. And verse 18, “thou shalt not commit adultery” protects marriage. That is the reason for this commandment.

Then in verse 19, “Neither shalt thou steal.” Why is this given? Again, respect of property. I want you to notice something because some of you who may have been influenced by preachers of a more liberal stripe than myself, those in the clergy and there are many of them who do not know God’s Word and who are not teaching it will tell you that the greatest panacea for all men’s social ills is some form of socialism, remove private property from private ownership, etc. I want you to notice that you go back to the Ten Commandments and it presumes private property. In verse 21 it presumes private property. “Thou shalt not steal” presumes private property because if there’s no private property you can’t steal it. Are you going to go down and steal the post office? That’s kind of absurd; you can’t steal the post office. You can steal someone else’s private possessions.

So the very Ten Commandments imply private property and don’t ever find yourself apologizing for private property in capitalism. The Bible is pro-capitalism and anti-socialism. That doesn’t mean we tolerate all forms of evil, it is simply saying that as systems the Bible is against socialism because of the destruction of volition and the idea of reduction of private property, etc. communism, etc. But stealing implies private property and the Bible has a very definite doctrine of private property.

What is this doctrine of private property? It consists of several things. The first thing is that private property throughout all of Scripture is the means by which you can make real decisions and carry them out. Big deal; if you don’t have any private property how significant are your decisions, unless you have something to do, something to invest, something not to invest, something to buy, something not to buy, these are the decisions and real decisions mean real property. The manipulation and control of real property is one means by which man edifies his volition. So the first point of the doctrine of private property in Scripture is that it is the means by which real decisions are made.

This should give you perspective if you’ve ever had the tendency to be jealous of someone that has a lot more than you do. Just think if you had, say a million dollars, what a headache you would inherit. Just think of the tax problem with the IRS. That would be enough for you to take aspirin from now until April. The more property you have the more responsible you are and the more decisions you have to make, and the brighter and more intelligent and more spiritually mature you have to be. So to me it’s not a temptation to look at someone that has more than I have; every time I see someone with something more in the material area that I have I just think to myself well, he’s got a lot more headaches than I do. So it doesn’t bother me at all. Your enjoyment is not a function of how much you have; it’s a function of how you use what you already have. You can be miserable with a little or you can be miserable with a lot, what you have, the amount you have doesn’t matter. It is how you use what you have. So the first point of private property is that it serious, it is a means by which real decisions are made.

The second thing about private property is that it insures freedom. Every individual, as long as he has a certain amount of private property in some sense has freedom, economically and politically. And every movement toward totalitarianism in history has had one basic motivation; keep private property away from individuals because if you can keep them from owning private property you make them suckers of the government. That’s always the first move.

The third point of private property, it gives the opportunity for charity. You cannot have charity without private property. Socialism is not charity; it’s not charitable to say yeah, we vote three million dollars for the poor. You don’t have three million dollars to vote, it’s not your money you’re being charitable with, it’s someone else’s. It’s not an act of charity for some nitwit politician in Washington DC to say oh I’m so great, I voted for such and such a program and we’re going to help all the poor clods in the world. We’re not against welfare in certain forms but I’m just pointing out this is an illegitimate reasoning. Let’s vote for so and so because so and so always votes for the poor; whose money is he voting? He’s voting someone else’s money, that’s not an act of charity, charity means you take of your own private property and give it to someone else, and that is all charity is; it’s not charity to vote someone else’s money. You find this in the church, oh let’s give $300 or $400 gifts to missionary so and so. Find, do you want to give the $400? Oh no, just give them church funds. Well other people in the congregation have a right to say, it’s their money as much as it’s yours. Charity depends on private property.

Four, the danger of private property in Scripture is that property may possess the possessor. You are lord over your property; that is yours to use the way you want to, but the danger in Scripture is that property begins to use you and you become so attached too property and you worry about it and it becomes such an obsession with you that you’re a victim. You’re no longer managing your property; your property is managing you. If you’re ever in a situation like that, get rid of it because how horrible to live in this life and be managed by things, and worry about where things are going, etc. It’s a horrible way to live. You always make sure that you have enough property and the limits of it, Charles Wesley said that you own enough that you can take care of it and if you own more than you can take care of, you own too much if you can’t handle it and control it.

The fifth thing, private property can only be enjoyed by being in fellowship with God, so fellowship with God is the key to enjoying private property. You can be miserable and horrible, etc. and be out of fellowship, and of course you can enjoy things. This is one of the great things about the Christian life, if you’re in fellowship, if you have utilized 1 John 1:9 and said Father, I acknowledge responsibility for such and such and He puts you back into fellowship immediately when you use 1 John 1:9, then you can enjoy property. You can enjoy prosperity and you can enjoy poverty. So this is the key of enjoying and it all comes out of the commandment of stealing.

“Thou shalt not steal implies the existence of private property and goes along with this Biblical doctrine which we will meet again and again in Deuteronomy.

Verse 20, “Neither shalt thou bear false witness against thy neighbor.” This has to do with the protection of divine institution number four. Go back to the divine institutions again; we have all of these divine institutions, and four depends on some orderly system of government. One of the implications of this commandment is that law is founded basically on the justice, the sense of justice of the mass citizenry, not on the police department. By the way, in Israel you notice there were no police. Do you know who enforced the Law? The citizens. There was no police department; they didn’t have squad cars running around Jerusalem up down Mt. Zion, over the Mount of Olives, and you go to bed in Bethlehem some night and hear sirens. They didn’t have any police department; they didn’t have bells on the chariots or whatever a policeman would have had in those days. There was no police department there, the citizens did it and the citizens didn’t stand around let a group of kids take over some piece of property and say ooh, you shouldn’t touch that, etc. because they were the ones who enforced the Law. The citizens enforced the Law and they didn’t see someone break in and say “can’t get involved.”

So part of the court procedure was testimony of what so and so did and to protect this divine institution God said I will not tolerate false witness against thy neighbor, i.e. accusing someone of something he didn’t do. And this has another implication in the sense of mental attitude, again all of these have a mental attitude background and the mental attitude background of this is about gossip. There are three kinds of sin that you can commit as a believer. You can commit mental attitude sins; those are sins you commit up here, only you see those, and God. Then if you commit enough of these, sooner or later you are going to commit sins of the tongue because sooner or later it’s going to come out. And after a while you will commit overt sins. I want you to see those three categories and these commandments always have mental attitude sin.

Let’s look at verse 20, “bearing false witness” literally means lifting up the name of your neighbor to vanity or nothingness. So here it is, you hate this person, you can’t stand this person. This person just rubs you the wrong way so here you are and you have a mental attitude sin against this person. He just walks in the room and you get out of fellowship right there, you can’t stand him. So you have this mental attitude sin and sooner or later you start to call people on the phone and say hey, did you hear what do and so did? Of course what you say may be very true and gossip has nothing to do with the falsity of the issue, the gossip issue has to do with the reason why you’re spreading this around. So and so might have done something; that’s his business, not yours. We have people in the local church that call up someone and they say do you know what so and so did? Sooner or later… it goes in direct proportion to the number of phone calls, person one calls person two, then person two calls person three, and by the time it gets down to person five you’d think this guy assassinated the President. It just grows on the phone. This kind of thing has got to be cut off or people can be hurt and I mean seriously hurt, hurt to the point where they can be driven away from the gospel and driven away from the congregation by this kind of activity. So you find that false witness also applies to the gossip issue.

Now verse 21, here again we have the doctrine of private property, “Neither shalt thou desire thy neighbor’s wife, neither shalt thou covet thy neighbor’s house, his field, or his manservant, or his maidservant, his ox, or his ass, or anything that is thy neighbor’s.” Obviously implying private property, obviously implying that this is a legitimate domain of private concern. Notice again in verse 21 that we have what we have said again and again in this series, that the Law basically is mental. Mental! If you missed the boat on all of the previous commandments, you can’t possibly do it on this one. It’s mental; “thou shalt not covet” is a mental attitude. You can sit there and covet and covet and covet and no one is going to be the wiser, it’s your privacy, it goes on on the inside, it’s up to you. Nevertheless, you can do this and someone else can sit right next to you and never know it.

So coveting is a mental attitude and is a key. By the way, do you remember what commandment really got to Paul in Romans 7, when the Law said thou shalt not covet, then I realized my sin, because Paul could give an interpretation, say of verse 17, I haven’t killed anyone, verse 18, I’ve never committed adultery, he couldn’t commit adultery anyway, he never married anyone, verse 19, he never stole anything, verse 20, never bore false witness. But then he got down to verse 21, thou shalt not covet anything and that was it. That takes the air out of everyone’s balloon.

That shows you therefore that every person falls into these commandments and we want to, as we conclude the Decalogue and move on to the next section, the results of the Decalogue, remember those four observations we made so they will be fresh in your mind. The Ten Commandments were given directly by God without mediation. This means that this is the only part of the Law that God Himself spoke. It’s going to be very important because in verse 22 you’re going to see something happen and you will not understand what happened unless you realize this is the only part of the Law that was personally spoken by God.

The second thing to remember about the Ten Commandments that it is phrased in the absolute negative. There are two ways of phrasing in the Hebrew, the relative negative which would be go do that, or the absolute negative means you will never do that. This is the absolute negative, and therefore shows you that this is a legal form of love, “thou shalt love the Lord thy God,” and the Ten Commandments define love negatively because what you’re having here is hate. What is defined in the Ten Commandments actually is hate. Law is always expressed in a system of negatives, “thou shalt not, thou shalt not, thou shalt not.” So here we actually have love in the Ten Commandments, people say it isn’t there; oh yes it is because the Ten Commandments are just simply negative love. “Thou shalt not” be negative love equal hate; so the Ten Commandments show you what hate is and therefore they define love by opposition.

The third thing to remember about the Ten Commandments is that it is addressed to the mental attitude.

The fourth thing to remember about the Ten Commandments is that it was given as a treaty and not as a moral code for everyone. There are absolutes that are carried over, yes, but the form in which these were given are addressed only to the nation, and not to every individual. This was the reason for the Sabbath issue that we covered.

Now we begin verse 22 and in verse 22 something happens; the people realize a tremendous problem, and here we have the basic reason behind the Ten Commandments and here we are now introduced at last to the first principle of spirituality in the Old Testament. “These words the LORD spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and He added no more.” This means the Ten Commandments are a unique revelation in history and there never has been a revelation like this before and never will be again. This is an absolutely unique revelation. God spoke these Ten Words and that was it, He stopped. And from this point on everything that you are going to read, God said this, God said that, God said this, is always a mediated word where you have God, you have the prophet here and you have the people down here and it always comes through the prophet to the people, never directly. The Ten Commandments are the only one where God bypassed the prophet and went directly to the people.

So verse 22, “And He wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me. [23] And it came to pass, when ye heard the voice out of the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn with fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the heads of your tribes, and your elders. [24] And ye said, Behold, the LORD our God hath shown us His glory and His greatness, and we have heard his voice out of the midst of the fire; we have seen this day that God does talk with man, and live.”

Now here’s the key to the Ten Commandments and why they were given. What was shown? God’s glory; what is God’s glory? The essence box, here you have God’s sovereignty, God’s righteousness, God’s justice, God’s love, God’s eternality, God’s omniscience, God’s omnipresence, God’s omnipotence and God’s immutability and this it the character of God that He shows them. And here is the foundation stone of phase two truth. Here is the foundation stone of the set of principles that control your life and the Christian also and that is all principles in the Christian life, whether they concern actually either phase one or phase three, salvation or ultimate sanctification, all hinge on this. Without this essence box everything falls. Every principle of the Word of God hinges on this and in particular the Law is going to show these two attributes, righteousness and justice. This is what was shown in these Ten Commandments and God spoke them.

Therefore the people said God has shown us His divine essence and this is going to be the foundation of all spirituality, this is going to be the basis of motion in the Christian life. How is it going to be the basis of motion? There’s not a problem in your Christian life that you cannot solve by looking at this essence box. That’s why I think this diagram is one of the greatest diagrams that man has ever worked out. It’s not mine originally and the fellow that worked this out has had a lot of counseling experience, and there’s not one problem in your life that you can’t handle by reference to this box. You don’t even need a promise of the Word of God if you understand these attributes and these characteristics.

God is sovereign, what does this mean? It means there are no accidents, ever, in anyone’s life, at any point in history, and whatever has happened, whatever will ever come into your life is never an accident, it always has a design, it always has a plan. Therefore if you’re shocked some day by something that happens to a loved one or something that happens in your family, just remember sovereignty of God said that this was not an accident, this has a meaning to it, it has a purpose to it, Rom. 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them that are the called according to his purpose.” Rom. 8:28 is the means by which you claim the sovereignty of God in your life.

Then you come down to righteousness and justice and this means that no matter where you are in the Christian life, whether you’re an unbeliever, you cannot have fellowship with God unless these attributes are totally satisfied. God never works with any individual without totally satisfying righteousness and justice. If you have never accepted Christ as your Savior, this means that you can never have fellowship apart from God’s way of satisfying His own attributes, which is by Jesus Christ on the cross. If you are a Christian on the phase two route, every day of your life has to be satisfying +R and justice. How are you going to do this? Only one way, by the filling of the Holy Spirit, “For we walk by faith, not by sight,” Rom. 8:4 says that the law of spirituality is the one that is produced is us; the law of Christ is reproduced in us when we are filled with the Spirit. How are you filled with the Spirit? I John 1:9.

You have a tremendous battle to fight, you may not be aware of the fact but every moment of your life you’ve got two problems as a Christian. You’ve got the problem of producing divine good or human good. That’s the big battle every Christian faces. What’s human good? Human good is all good works done in the energy of the flesh. Divine good is good works done in the power of the Holy Spirit. You can counterfeit Christianity in a marvelous way; you can come to church service, sit there, you may study your Bible, you may live a good moral and ethical life and never once be filled with the Spirit and your life is going to amount to a big pile of human good. And in 1 Cor. 3 God is going to take a match to that and pfft, there it goes. No rewards, all of it burned because it is of the energy of the flesh. Why is God so nasty? Why is He such a big meany to destroy all these nice good works? For one reason; why have you been left on this earth?

Why is a believer left in this life after he’s accepted Christ? It’s not because God likes us, he could just as easily take us to heaven the moment we accept Christ, why leave you around? Because he wants our lives to glorify Him and our lives cannot glorify Him as long as we’re walking in the energy of the flesh. As long as the good works we’re doing can be explained away by any unbeliever, as long as you do human good the unbeliever can walk up to you and say I can do the same thing. You do that, I can do that, so where’s the testimony. You give money to the church because you’re trying to impress so and so, I give money to the United Fund to impress so and so. Big deal! All the human good in the world isn’t going to testify to Christ and this is a great struggle every believer faces. Are you at any given moment in your life producing human good or divine good?

Divine good is the only kind of good that satisfies +R and justice, the only kind. All the rest of it, human good, never satisfies God’s righteousness and justice. This is the danger in legalism. In legalism you set out a code of taboos and you tell so and so to live up to these good deeds without telling about the filling of the Spirit. So what happens? A person goes on his Christian life, he’s weak because he doesn’t know how to be filled with the Spirit and he produces human good all down the line, never once producing for Christ, and sooner or later, particularly young people, get involved in some situation and they are going to fall apart, get involved in trouble, etc. It happens to Christian kids because they’ve never been taught to move into these situations in the power of the Spirit, they’ve been given a set of taboos, thou shalt not do this or that, and sooner or later they are going to get out from under mother’s apron strings and they’re going to go away to college and then they’re going to really let go. It’s all because they were fed human good, human good, legalism, never given the techniques for the victorious life.

Finally we have phase three and that is eternity when we have a resurrection body, when our old sin nature is purged. At the point that we die, suppose we live to the rapture and we are raptured, we become the bride of Christ. The Church is not now the bride of Christ, it becomes the bride of Christ during the Tribulation when the Church is in the presence of the Father, when Jesus Christ judges the Church, 2 Cor. 5 and when He knocks out all human good. Three things are going to happen. First He is going to destroy human good; He is going to trot out all your good works and all the things that we have done in the energy of the flesh and that’s going to be the end of those. The second thing He is going to do is remove our sin nature. The third thing He’s going to do is give us a resurrection body at the Second Advent. All of that is going to be done for the Church during the seven years of the Tribulation for the Church. The bride has to be prepared for her marriage and she doesn’t come walking down the aisle made of some dirty filthy gown made of human good. When that bride gets to the wedding that bride is going to have an absolutely perfect white beautiful garment and that garment is going to be divine good, in resurrection body, etc.

So this is the great thing that we have to face and remember that God’s character is always satisfied. Sovereignty, +R, justice, love, eternality, omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence and immutability and this always must be satisfied, in every area of the Christian life and this is the story of the Ten Commandments.

Verse 24, “…the LORD our God hath shown us His glory,” that’s what it means by the phrase “His glory,” His essence. The other word, He has shown us His “greatness” simply means the ability that God has to manipulate inside history, manipulate history. If you’re concerned with the problem of prayer this should be a source of tremendous concern to you. When you pray do you believe that God actually can work His will inside history inside natural law or if He wants to by direct miracle. But by one of the two processes, either by direct miracle or by providence working through natural law God can manipulate and work His will, in response to prayer. This is a big issue in prayer, and the greatness of God is His ability to manipulate history and his ability to move in and to work His will throughout all situations.

Now we come to verse 25, this is a great switch and here’s what happened to the people. “Now, therefore, why should we die? For this great fire will consume us; if we hear the voice of the LORD our God anymore, then we shall die.” “Now therefore” is a strong conjunction of contrast and it simply means look, we have seen this God and we’re terrified. These people were shaking in their boots, and these people couldn’t stand the sight any longer so they said look Moses, you go up there and handle the problem. So in verse 27, “Go thou near, and hear all that the LORD our God shall say; and speak thou unto us all that the LORD our God shall speak unto thee, and we will hear, and do it.” Why was this given?

Here you have the rise of a prophet. A prophet is one who stands between God and man. There are two duties here, there are actually two duties, there’s a priest too. There’s a famous cliché, just remember it and you’ll have these words in your vocabulary. Here’s God and here’s man. A prophet takes God’s word and bring it to man; a priest takes man’s sins and his confession and brings it to God. That’s the difference. A prophet is one who takes God’s Word and brings it to you; a priest is one who takes your sins or your confession of sins and brings it to the Lord. In the Church Age you are a priest, in 1 Timothy you are called a believer priest. If you have accepted Christ you are a priest and this makes you as equal as any member of the clergy; there’s no such thing as clergy/laity in the doctrine of the universal priesthood of the believer. You have the priesthood and you don’t have to buy this line, someone and saying God in the latter days God has just set up His own priesthood. He set up His priesthood at Pentecost and every believer is in it. Therefore you are a priest, and you receive the ministry of prophet through reading your Bible. How do you receive prophecy? By study of God’s Word. Priesthood, you exercise priesthood every time you use 1 John 1:9.

Turn to Exodus 20 and you will see the reasoning that is behind this great change in the mental attitude of these people, why they’re afraid. All of a sudden after hearing these Ten Commandments they are afraid and they begin to get upset, excited, etc. and God says something to Moses and the key is given in Exodus 20:20, “And Moses said unto the people, Fear not; for God is come to test you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.” By the way, this verse is just a parallel reference to the event you’re looking at; this is simply another narration of the same event. So right at this point, although it’s not mentioned in Deut. 5 it is mentioned in Exodus 20, “Moses said unto the people, Fear not” and here you have the relative verb of fear, here it’s a “don’t fear,” don’t get shook up, don’t worry about it, don’t fear. Why? Because these are believers, that’s why, there’s no fear in the believer in the sense that these people are afraid of being destroyed by God’s judgment. And Moses says there is no condemnation for you, as we have been taught in Rom. 8:1, “There is now therefore no condemnation for them that are in Christ Jesus. So no believer has to fear God’s presence because he is already saved; because he has the righteousness of Christ imputed to his account.

But in verse 20 Moses says “And Moses said unto the people, Fear not; for God is come to test you, and that his fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.” Here is why God showed Himself in the Ten Commandments, to test you, and this word, nacah, the word to test is the verb which means to put pressure on someone for the purpose of revealing their true inner character. God is going to put on the fire works, so to speak. He’s going to put on the dramatics because He wants to see, not that He doesn’t understand His omniscience, but He wants to bring forth the inner character of these people and see whether deep down on the inside these people have the right attitude, the right heart attitude. Remember Deut.5-11 is the heart requirement. And this word in verse 20, “is come to test you” means God wants to see what the response of the people are to His divine essence.

Second reason for testing, “that His fear may be before your faces, that ye sin not.” Do you see that? This is why Deut. 5 is the first part of Old Testament spirituality. Why? Because “that you sin not” means that you should have a good idea of the essence of God. You should be able to recite this in your sleep, so that this becomes ingrained. And if you have this concept that God is absolutely righteousness and absolutely just it is a tremendous mental inhibition to be flippant with God and to despise His Word and to engage in all forms of carnality. If this is firmly impressed in your mind, if you have the character of God in your mind and can worship Him, and by the way, worship means nothing more than a conscious recitation of the doctrines that you know. This is why you can’t worship unless you know all these doctrines.

Have you ever noticed Paul’s prayers, the doctrine that man prayed, it takes us hours and hours to study his prayer in Eph. 1 and 3 because when that man prayed every word was packed with doctrine, which shows you that when he sat down and worshiped it wasn’t a lot of sweet music, etc. they may have had music, I’ve nothing against music but the point is that they had something in their mind, it wasn’t just empty, it wasn’t looking at the lady’s hat in the second pew, it wasn’t dreaming about the boy down at the end of the pew or the girl in the front pew, it was looking at divine truth. This is worship and this is the way true worship should be.

So Moses said “that his fear may be before your faces, that you sin not.” Notice, Moses said I am not going to establish a legalistic system to keep people from sinning. I’m not going to go around, “have you sinned today, how many sins have you done today,” go around with all sorts of silly systems worked out as human means to prevent people from sinning. He never did that because His emphasis was upon the mental attitude. He taught the Word of God and he said if you know God’s Word you will have no problem. [Blank spot]

Turning back to Deut. 5 now we can appreciate the response of the people in verse 27. In verse 27 they tell Moses, look Moses, we prefer to go back to our tents, we’ve seen enough of this thing and our knees have been knocking the last half hour while this has all been going on so Moses if you’ll just pardon us, we’ll be excused and you go up and you get the word and we’ll obey your word. So here we have the origin of the prophet.

But I want you to notice an important principle in verse 28, here’s the logical conclusion of the matter. “And the LORD heard the voice of your words, when ye spoke unto me; and the LORD said unto me, I have heard the voice of the words of this people, which they have spoken unto thee; they have well said all that they have spoken.” Why was God pleased? Because this means that they would have the proper attitude toward the Word of God. He knew if these people kept in mind the same attitude they had here, kept in mind His essence, that He was absolutely righteous and they wanted to obey Him, they were serious about Him, knowing His character there would never be a question about the Word of God being boring to them. There would never be a question of sitting through preaching of the Word of God without taking it in for the express purpose of applying it. There would never be any of these problems if they kept firmly in their minds God’s character, that this is a very serious thing and as long as this attitude was on the inside, then God was pleased because He realized they would pay attention to His Word.

So in verse 29 He makes this declaration. “Oh, that there were such an heart in them, that they would fear Me, and keep all my commandments always, that it might be well with them and with their children forever!” Here He’s making reference to history. This command was expressed in 1400 BC. At that time in history the entire nation was made up of believers. As we go on down in history, the nation gets bigger and bigger, finally you have this element that comes in and you have a greater and greater proportion of the nation unbelievers until finally down in Isaiah’s day, this little remnant, called the remnant in Isaiah, is just a small portion of the nation, just a very, very small portion. And here’s where the nation… remember this again is the concept of a collective nation, the heart of the nation would become corrupt because the individual hearts are not hearts of unbelief and will no longer pay attention to His Word. So although at this time in history God says this is good He knows what’s going to happen.

Verse 30, “Go say to them, Get you into your tents again. [31] But as for thee,” and the word “thee” in your KJ Bible at the beginning of verse 31 is emphasized. It’s a strong contrast and in the Hebrew it reads “But you, YOU come with me.” It’s repeated and emphasized so therefore Moses is set apart for a prophetic ministry. “But as for thee, stand thou here by me,” and here is prophecy; some of you talk about inspiration, if you want to see how Scriptures are inspired just look carefully at verse 31 and you’ll have all the steps. “… and I will speak unto thee all the commandments, and the statutes, and the judgments,” period, that’s the first step of inspiration, God speaks to the prophet or the writer of Scripture. Here’s the doctrine of inspiration. God speaks; this means God speaks with words; this means that God doesn’t speak ideas, He speaks words because you cannot have an idea without having words, you cannot think without words.

So here we have God speaking. That’s the first step in inspiration. Then, “which thou shalt teach them,” in other words, the prophet goes back and he teaches people after hearing God’s Word. Now of course some of these prophets wrote their words, other prophets did not write their words and probably thousands and thousands of words revealed in history by God are lost and never received in history. But those that He intended recovered were recovered in Scripture. But the teaching ministry is the ministry of the prophet. And this is the ministry of the pastor of the local church. He is to take God’s Word and teach, teach, teach. If there are five people that pay attention, fine, you teach to five people and if 150 don’t, fine, that’s their problem. But the responsibility of the pastor-teacher is to act as a prophet in this sense, that God has spoken, not verbally, God doesn’t speak to me, God speaks to me through His Word, and my job as a pastor is to communicate this word, not change it, not water it down and not add to it but to simply communicate it to the flock.

“Thou shalt teach them, that they may do them I the land which I give them to possess.” Notice the responsibility of Moses is not to do it himself. He can’t obey this for the nation, the nation has to take the Word of God and here you have the fourth step, you have volition of the people. That is that the people are free to accept and reject. This is why I like to keep you free so that you can do what you want to. We fulfill our responsibility in presenting the Word and from that point you can accept it, you can reject it, you can do what you want to with it but our responsibility is fulfilled. Your responsibility begins as you receive the Word; the issue becomes what you do with it.

Verses 32-33, “Ye shall observe to do, therefore, as the LORD your God has commanded you; ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left. [33] Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God has commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.”

There’s a perfect principle here, that this is perfect obedience and it is through this prophet. I want you to notice something here? Who stands between the people and God? Moses does, and Moses actually acts as a mediator. He is a prophet, as we have just said, doctrine of inspiration. He is also a priest. He is the mediator that has to stand between a holy God and a sinful people. Who is our Mediator? Jesus Christ, 1 Tim. 2:5 says there is only mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus. Have you ever noticed that: “the man Christ Jesus.” Why? Because to have a mediator you have to have one equal with both parties; therefore our mediator, the perfect mediator between God and man has to be one who is both God and man. And that is why Jesus Christ is God and man because He is the mediator; this is the contact point between God and His creation, the person of the God-man Jesus Christ. This is why salvation comes only through Jesus Christ; this is why all God’s Word comes through Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is both God and man, period. Therefore He is our mediator.

In verse 32, “Ye shall observe to do, therefore, as the LORD your God has commanded you; ye shall not turn aside to the right hand or to the left” means that you take these words seriously. God is trying to correct something because He knows how we think. You can see the attitude setting up. He knows that the moment He stops talking to the people directly they’re going to relax and they’re going to get the attitude well, Moses said, that’s somehow less than when God spoke it. If you had a red letter edition of the Old Testament all the Ten Commandments would be in red letters and all Moses words would be in black letters and the tendency would be to take seriously the red letters. That’s where God says oh no, take your red-letter editions and send them back or something. Red-letter editions are wrong emphasis. The red letters are no more important than the black letters. All of the Word of God is the Word of God and God knows something, just as soon as He stops talking these people are going to have the tendency to say all right Moses, those are your words, not God’s words.

Deut. 5 is given for the basic spiritual principle that if you will concentrate on the character of God this is the base of all true spirituality. Without an emphasis on occupation of the character of God you will never have any respect for the Word of God. How does a person react toward God? A person says oh, if Jesus were here things would be different. Oh no they wouldn’t, because your reaction to the Word of God is exactly the same as your reaction to God. If these are His words your reaction is the same thing; if Jesus Christ was speaking, your attitude would be exactly the same, barring personality differences etc. in any minister. No difference. Why? Because the words are true and the truth value of the words is not a function of who speaks them. It’s a function of the content and the content is the same. Therefore the truth is the same.

So chapter 5 of this book has been given for an express purpose of correcting an attitude. So before you can live the Christian life and this carries over to us and we can look at the application now, remember your attitude toward the Word of God… the Word of God is your food for the Christian life. But how can you have the proper attitude toward the Word of God? Only one way, proper attitude toward divine essence. That’s why that doctrine of divine essence is the most important doctrine you will ever learn in all of your Christian life. Your attitude toward that doctrine and your attitude toward God’s character will be expressed. You can’t help it, you couldn’t walk into a room today without expressing your attitude toward God’s character and it’s seen by your response to the Word of God, both your response in taking it in and your response in giving it out, and in your response in applying it.

Verse 33, “Ye shall walk in all the ways which the LORD your God has commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which ye will possess.” Prosperity in phase two of the Christian life depends upon carrying forth God’s Word. And you cannot carry forth God’s Word until you have His divine essence firmly planted in your mind. So if as a Christian you feel the Bible doesn’t mean too much to you and it’s not a serious thing to bother with, my suggestion would be to look at that essence box very closely. My suggestion would be to study and get that essence box down so you can use it so whatever situation yourself in you begin to apply it. When you encounter a situation that frustrates you, that causes you problems in your life, remember divine essence. This is how you can cultivate an attitude toward the Word of God. When you realize God has such and such a character and you mean business then you will be interested in what His Word has to say, but you will not be unless you first have this adherence.