Lesson 14
Living in the Word – 6:1-9
Open the Word to Deut. 6; this is part of a section of Deuteronomy that
begins with the basics of the Law, the Law being the way of life for the nation
Israel in phase two of that nation, i.e. from the time that nation was redeemed
until the time of the appearance of the Lord Jesus Christ and of course the
Second Advent, the termination of its mission on earth. During this interim period the Law is the way
of life for believers. Moses, in this
book, is not copying the Law, he is explaining the Law. This is not just simply a reiteration of
phrase by phrase of the Law but it an explanation of the mechanics of the
Law. We see this because in chapters
5-11 Moses concentrates on the mental attitudes that must accompany a true
obedience on the part of believers to God’s will. Then from chapters 12-26 Moses deals with the
details of life. So here you have the
mental attitude and here you have the details of life. All the details from fellowship with other
believers to enjoyment of life with loved ones, you have sex, money, food, you
have jobs, education, you can have all of these details of life. In fact, chapters 12-26 deal with all these
details of life but before he gets to these details of life in chapters 5-11 he
is going to deal with the mental attitude that must accompany obedient
believers throughout all of these activities.
Last time we finished with chapter 5. You can divide these chapters up
into different topics. In other words,
they’re all heart requirements. Every
chapter from chapters 5-11 has an application as far as spirituality of the Old
Testament and as far as we are concerned.
You can break it down this way.
You can say chapter 5 is the basis, gives you the basis of spirituality;
chapter 6 gives you the essence of spirituality. The basis of spirituality is that we have a
personal relationship with God in history and this God has definite divine
attributes, namely righteousness and justice which can never be violated,
therefore our personal relationship with this Lord in phase two must always
satisfy in some way God’s attributes of righteousness and justice. So the basis of spirituality is a
relationship, a personal relationship with a God who has definite attributes
that can never be violated. Put another
way, God can never act contrary to His essence.
God can never violate any of His attributes, even with believers.
Now we come to chapter 6 and this deals with the essence of
spirituality. Then chapter 7 is going to deal with the conflict of
spirituality. Chapters 8 and 9 deal with
the hazards of spirituality. Here you’re going to deal with two of the greatest
dangers that face believers at any point in their life, self-righteousness and
reliance upon the flesh. Then chapters
10 and 11 deal with what I call the either/or of spirituality, i.e. the
decision that every believer has to make moment by moment in his life. Here is a basic outline of spirituality that
Moses is going to give because he wants people to understand the before you can
obey the Law you have to have a proper mental attitude and you have to have the
obedience on the inside. So chapters
5-11 are very important.
Last time we finished chapter 5 and I want to pick up where we left off,
with 5:32, “Ye shall observe to do, therefore, as the LORD your God hath
commanded you; ye shall not turn aside
to the right hand or to the left. [33] You shall walk in all the ways which the
LORD your God has commanded you….” The
first thing to remember about verse 32 as it concludes chapter 5 is the word
“therefore.” Moses is building up to a
point in this chapter and now he makes his grand application. “Therefore, as the LORD your God has
commanded,” why does he say this?
Because this verse, in fact the whole chapter 5 would be equivalent to
the New Testament passage in 1 John 1:5-7, “And this is the message which we
have heard of Him and declare unto you, that God is light, and in Him is no
darkness at all. [6] If we say that we
have fellowship with him, and walk in darkness, we lie, and do not the truth;
[7] But if we walk in the light, as he is in the light, we have fellowship one
with another, and the blood of Jesus Christ, his Son, cleanses us from all
sin.” John wants to make very clear in
his epistle that “God is light, in Him is no darkness at all,” and he starts
his epistle this way. Then he moves into
the Christian life.
Moses is going to begin the same way, instead of saying “God is light”
He simply gives and reiterates the Ten Commandments to show you what God’s attributes
of righteousness and justice are. So
since God has this character of being sovereign, being righteous, being just,
being loving, being eternal, being omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent and
immutable, having all of these attributes God, no matter what you do in the
Christian life, He is never going to violate any of these attributes. In particular Moses is emphasizing
righteousness and justice. These can never be compromised at any point in the
Christian life so if God deals with us it is going to have to be in such a way
and on such a basis that these attributes are never violated. That’s the point
of chapter 5, that the basis of our spirituality, the basis of our Christian
life is grounded in a personal relationship with the God. Everything flows out
of this.
This immediately raises a problem that we aren’t perfect. Sooner or later we come short of these
attributes; sooner or later we fall short of righteousness for example, then
what do we do? The Bible tells what we
do and we now are introduced to the doctrine of restoration or confession;
restoration in the Christian life and restoration is the basic thing for a believer.
If a believer doesn’t know restoration he can’t get to first base in the
Christian life. So here we begin with the doctrine of confession of sin or
forgiveness and this automatically flows out of chapter 5. We have to take this up before we get to
chapter 6 because in chapter 6 we are going to deal with the essence of
spirituality and we are going to run into this problem again. So before we go any further I want to take a
few minutes to go through about six points in the doctrine of confession. Again, this is the basic doctrine of Christian life, practical living.
The first problem is that God has a standard, absolute righteousness and
justice, I fall short of that standard; there’s the problem.
Secondly, what is the solution to the problem? The solution to the problem is based on a
hint given in
The mediator is the Lord Jesus Christ but we can freely come to God
because we, in the New Testament are called believer priests. We therefore have the absolute privilege and
it is a tremendous privilege, one which the reformers of the Reformation fought
for and fought for and that is the doctrine of the universal priesthood of the
believer. Every person who has ever
accepted Jesus Christ has the privilege and the opportunity of coming directly
to God. This you may not realize, you
may think this is just another little thing and it’s cute to hear until you
realize history and until you realize some men laid down their lives because of
this doctrine. If you do not have the doctrine
of the universal priesthood of the believer you set up ecclesiastical tyranny.
Every totalitarian system is grounded on a denial of this doctrine. Absolutely, every believer has the privilege
of coming before the throne of grace.
This is what equalizes every believer.
You have just as much privilege to come to the throne of grace as any
other believer. This negates a certain
statement that you often hear, do you suppose so and so could pray for me. You can pray for yourself just as efficiently
as anyone else can, doctrine of the priesthood of the believer.
So we come here and see that confession, our ability to be completely
restored, is based on two things, it’s based on the mediatorship of Jesus
Christ and it’s based upon our universal priesthood. As a believer priest I can come and make
confession for my own personal sin, I Peter 2:5.
Thirdly, what is confession?
Confession is that I agree that I am responsible for some particular
sin. That’s basically what it is; I
agree that I am personally responsible for some particular sin. There are three categories of sin; you can
divide sin up into many ways but I like to divide it up three ways. First you have mental attitude sins; these
are sins that no one else sees, these are the sins that enable you to sit in
the pew or me to stand up here in the pulpit, we can look at each other and
have poker faces and still commit mental attitude sin, mental attitude sin,
mental attitude sin while we’re doing it and nobody is going to be the wiser
because it’s all on the inside.
Then you can have sins of the tongue.
These are the sins where all of a sudden it begins to slip, sooner or
later mental attitudes slip out, you can’t help it and your tongue shows
it. And finally we have overt sins. So in one of these three categories you may
have sinned. This sin falls short of
God’s righteousness and justice so therefore as a believer priest you have to
confess. This doesn’t mean oh Lord, so
and so got me annoyed and I couldn’t help it because so and so stepped on my
toe and it hurt, blaming it on environment, blaming it on personality, blaming
it on something else. That’s not confession. Confession means you acknowledge
your responsibility and that it was an act of your volition that did it. You don’t blame it on someone else and as
long as you are blaming things on someone else you can never confess your
sin. Confession requires acknowledgement
that you have done it, you are responsible for it.
At this point I want to caution you about what confession is not because
when I was a young Christian I was confused on this point and I found other
Christians confused on this point, and that is that you don’t confess
temptation. Temptation is not a subject
of confession because temptation is not sin.
Jesus Christ was sinless and yet Jesus Christ was tempted, therefore
temptation cannot be sin. So if you have
solicitations to the flesh, etc. temptations are not to be confessed, do not
have to be confessed, temptations do not separate you from God, it’s when you
act mentally or overtly on these temptations that it becomes a sin.
The fourth thing to remember about restoration is that forgiveness is
immediate, total, and based not upon your faith but upon Christ’s work on the
cross. Forgiveness is immediate. In the Hebrew of Psalm 32:5 David said I will
name my sin unto You and immediately You cleanse from my sin. So in Psalm 32:5
we find that confession is immediate. In
1 John 1:9, “If we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to forgive us our
sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” shows you the totality of
forgiveness. Forgiveness is absolutely
total.
And here’s something that’s hard for some believers. Many believers fall down at this point
because mane believers have a guilt complex.
I have talked with believers who cannot believe that God will totally
forgive them. These people are
miserable, and they are sorrowful examples of children of God. These people make themselves miserable and
make their families miserable. Usually
it’s because of some sin that they may have committed, some sin that people
look upon as ooh, isn’t that horrible, etc. and it works on them to the point
that they do not believe God can forgive them totally. The reason for this is that no person has
forgiven them totally and they think God acts like people do. Therefore they see people, nobody forgives
me, so they turn to God and they don’t believe God is going to forgive
them. I’ve told you the example I had
early in my seminary training of a man who believed this and walked into an office
in downtown Houston and shot his brains out because he believed that nobody
would forgive him and he couldn’t believe God would forgive him so that was it,
he took his life.
That’s how bad it can get when believers fail to recognize this doctrine,
that forgiveness is immediate, it is total, and another point, forgiveness is
based not upon your faith; forgiveness is based on the work of Christ, your
faith is what appropriates the work, but your faith is not what causes it. It’s like these lights. When I flip on the switch it’s not the
flipping on the switch that’s supplying energy to the light; it’s the power
system that’s supplying energy to the light, all the switch does is turn it on
or off. And that’s all your faith does, it turns on or off but the power of the
work that’s done in forgiveness comes directly from the cross of Christ. And all your faith does is it’s a little
switch; it either says no I won’t accept forgiveness at this point, I reject
grace or I accept grace. Remember the basis of your forgiveness; that’s why it
can be total. A lot of people think that
unless they have this tremendous feeling on the inside, they work up this great
emotional feeling, etc. and unless they have all these emotional fireworks they
can’t be forgiven. And it’s nonsense
because the fireworks aren’t what forgives you.
The fireworks and the emotions have nothing to do with the basis of your
forgiveness. The basis for your forgiveness
is the historical work of Christ on the cross.
Finally, a fifth point about confession is that you are to forget
it. Once you have confessed your sin,
forget it and move on. Phil. 3:13 says
“Forgetting those things which are past and pressing on to the things that are
ahead, etc. That means that you don’t
have skeletons in the closet, etc.
Here’s where Christians fall down on two points. Instead of forgetting they either do one of
two things. They either don’t believe
that God can forgive them and they have a guilt complex, here’s the first
problem. Christians have a guilt complex
and they can’t really get it through their head that God will forget it and
move on. So if you find a Christian that
has committed some sin, they may have wronged somebody, they confess it and
then they keep harboring this thing and they play with it like a little
toy. You’ve seen people with an injury
and they like to pull the bandage up and look at it and say did you see what I
got here? They enjoy this and this is
the way Christians do with their sin.
They may or may not talk about it with others but in their secret
moments they’ll start pulling the spiritual bandage off and looking at it. This is not Scriptural, when you’ve confessed
it, forget it and move on and don’t sit around with a guilt complex about some
sin that you’ve done; that’s nonsense.
Another way Christians fall down is they feel like what we would call
penance; this was fashionable in the middle Ages where we had monks taking
these whips and beating themselves. This
emanates not from a lack of faith so much as a lack of appreciation of
grace. We have believers who think that
if they feel sorry long enough then God will forgive, finally. So you have sort of a confession by works
kind of operation going on. And this is
anti-scriptural. So the point about this
step in rebound, or confession, or restoration, whatever you want to call it,
is to forget it. Once you have confessed
your sins, forget it and don’t worry about other believers. You may have other believers, carnal
believers, some up to you and look down their big long beak at you and try to
make you feel lousy and miserable because you fouled up somewhere along the
line. You just forget it and move on;
the Lord’s forgiven you and if they can’t that’s their problem. If fact, if they’re doing that they’re out of
fellowship. Just move on and if they sit
around and start condemning you, just move on, just forget it; don’t bother
with them, find some other friends.
The last point of restoration and this is a common thing that you can
use on any of the promises of God but I think confession sometimes… if you have
a problem at this point or this point, if you have a problem where you’ve
committed some sin and you have the problem of really believing that God
forgives you, one of the ways that you can break through this mentally is to
thank God for His forgiveness, 1 Thess. 5:18; Eph. 5:20, “In everything give
thanks for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” If you
can’t break out of this cycle, it seems like you confess your sin and then you
immediately start playing with it mentally, and it goes through your mind, you
just can’t get rid of it, try thanking God for His forgiveness. You name it to God and thank Him for it,
“Father I thank you that You have totally, personally and wholly cleansed me from
my sin.”
These things are something that we have to remember and always
understand when we come face to face with God’s absolute righteousness. We always will come short of God’s absolute
righteousness, but the solution is not to have a guilt complex. The solution is
to find out where we come short, confess it and move on.
Now we come to chapter 6 and in chapter 6 we have the essence of
spirituality and I think this is particularly instructive because in the Old
Testament spirituality has a little different shading than it does in the New
Testament. If you look at spirituality
in the Old Testament you will find an emphasis that you will not find in a lot
of Christian circles today. I think
you’ll begin to see this as we go through here.
The essence of spirituality in the Old Testament means to live in the
Word of God. What do I mean by
this? I mean that the divine viewpoint
that you find in Scripture dominates your thinking; your thought life is
dominated by the Word of God. It’s not
just that you can quote 25 verses every hour or something like this, it means
that the concepts and the doctrines of God’s Word permeate your mind so that
when you think you’re thinking in terms of the Word, you’re thinking in terms
of Doctrine. This is one phase of living
in the Word.
Another phase of living in the Word is that these people not only
thought this but because they did think this way they lived it out. We might say they just started from where
they were, believing the Word of God to be the Word of God and they lived
consistently with it. So my phrase to
describe as best I can the concept of spirituality you get in Deuteronomy is
living in the Word. I want to take the first
3 verses.
Chapter 6 can be divided down into various subsections. Verses 1-3 I would call the benefits of
living in the Word. Here is outlined the
various advantages that accrue for the believer when we live in the Word. In verses 4-9 we have the practice of living
in the Word, very important section, the practice of living in the Word. And verses 10-15 we have the danger of
blessing. We sang Showers of Blessing; this chapter is going to explain why
there are only mercy drops and not showers of blessing often times. And then verses 16-19 we have another
danger; danger number two and that is the danger of adversity, the danger of
pressure and adversity in the life.
These are two things that can cause you to not live in the Word of
God. Finally in verses 20-25 we have the
results of living in the Word. So this
chapter breaks down very nicely and very completely and for once the chapter
break is good because it does break the subject down.
Verses 1-3, the benefits of living in the Word. “Now these are the commandments, the statues
and the judgments,” there’s one correction in your translation, it should be
“the commandment,” singular. The
commandment here is singular, it refers to the whole Law, comma, statutes and
judgments break the commandment down and tell you the different parts of the
commandment. Statutes—those directions
in the Word of God that are directed to your conscience; judgments—those
statutes that are directed to the civil authorities in the nation Israel. “…which the LORD your God commanded to teach
you, that ye might do them in the land to which you go to possess it.” Now you notice, the first thing that has to
happen in living in the Word is that people have to be taught the Word of
God. This doesn’t leak in by osmosis,
you know, put a Bible under your pillow and go to sleep for 8 hours. That’s not
the way it happens. People have to be
taught and this is why God has given pastor-teachers to His church and why any
pastor who is not teaching the Word of God is not performing his duties to the
Lord.
Beginning in verse 2 we have the result of this, purpose clause, “In
order that you might fear the LORD thy God,” the “that” that you see there is a
strong purpose clause or phraseology in the Hebrew. You couldn’t get any stronger purpose
expressible in the Hebrew language than you have right here in verse 2. Why are the people taught the Word? “In order that they may fear the Lord.” Now fearing the Lord may sound abstract to
you but I want you to see that this verse defines what fearing the Lord
means. You notice in the King James you
have an infinitive right after that, it says “that you might fear the LORD thy
God” and then you see this infinitive, “to keep.” That infinitive is what we call an
epexegetical infinitive. All this means
is that you have a main verb and the main verb is explained and amplified by
what follows and the phrase that follows the main verb is introduced with an
infinitive.
So the infinitive introduces a phrase of description or amplification
that amplifies the main verb. What’s the
main verb? The main verb is “that you might
fear the LORD thy God,” so therefore here is the amplification of what the Old
Testament people thought of when they said fear the Lord. That’s important because we use this word
“fear the Lord,” etc. Now you are going
to see, it couldn’t be clearer what went through their mind when they used that
term “fear of the Lord,” and it’s explained right here, very simply, “to keep
all his statutes and his commandments” that infinitive opens up an explanatory
phrase, the explanatory phrase amplifies the main verb. The main verb is “fear of the Lord,” and
therefore the amplification defines what fear means and it simply means keeping
all of His statutes and His commandments which means a person who fears the
Lord in Israel in the Old Testament is one who is obsessed with the Word and
keeping it, in his thought life and in his overt life. That’s what fearing the Lord means, as it’s
defined in Scripture.
“That you may keep all His commandments and statutes” and notice
something here and I want to define this word “keep” just so it will be
clear. Oftentimes we’ve had this word
“keep to do” or “observe to do,” so let’s look at this word keep. It’s shamar,
and shamar is a word that actually
means to guard. Usually you will find it
in conjunction with the word “to do,” and in your Bibles it will be translated
“observe to do,” “keep to do” sometimes “watch to do” but what it means is you
have to exercise attention. You have to
exercise constant vigilance to do this.
So you have this verb, asah,
“do” and you have the verb that includes a larger amount, “to guard.” Doing a commandment is not just the issue
here, the issue is that you guard the commandments, it means that you look out
on life and you watch very carefully where human viewpoint, anti-Biblical thinking
is coming in and you cut it off. But you
can’t cut it off if you’re not watchful, if you’re not vigilant.
So God here emphasizes vigilance; it takes an active vigilance to do
this and Moses recognized this. “…which
I command thee, thou, and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy
lives; and that thy days may be prolonged.” Here’s another point and that’s the
concept of lives, this is a plural in the Hebrew, “lives,” not “life.” The reason for this is that many times the
Hebrew language has what we call an abstract noun or an abstract plural
noun. We have a case of this, for
example, water; water is an abstract plural noun in the Heb, you never have
“water” in the singular. You say
why? What is the image or the picture
behind water? The image of water to the ancient Hebrew was one of a
conglomeration of droplets. You have
many droplets, so when they conceive, for example, of a glass of water they
conceived of it as a conglomeration of droplets, of many droplets in one
body. So they looked upon water as
complicated, as a summation of all these particles.
Now what does life mean. The abstract
plural for lives meant that when they looked at life they looked at life as a succession
of moments in time and so they used this abstract plural to denote a life
meaning that you have many points in time, that your life, your physical life
and your spiritual life together is made up of a succession of moments and you
can only live in the present, not in the past, not in the future. This is the only place you can live and this
is why we have this abstract plural in the Hebrew, “lives,” a succession of
moments. So from this word we can deduce
a philosophy of utilization of time from Scripture.
How did they view life? Let’s
take an excerpt and go into the utilization of time in God’s Word and how
people looked upon the utilization of time in their life. The first thing they understood about time
was that life is brief. James 4:14 says
life is but a vapor, it passes away, etc.
Life can disappear at any moment.
The first thing about utilization of time is that life is brief and the
Jews recognized this and this is a theme throughout Scripture, that life is
brief. Another thing they noticed, found
in Matt. 6:27, life cannot be changed in its length. It’s brief and Jesus said you cannot add one
cubit to your stature and you probably though that means your physical height. It does not mean your physical height. When Jesus said you cannot add one cubit to
your stature, the word stature doesn’t mean height physically, it means
duration of life and Jesus says you can’t add one cubit, one extra cubit of
length to your life. You have a fixed
life span given to you by God and no matter what you do you can’t change it,
Jesus says. Eccl. 8:8 is another
reference.
A third thing about utilization of time in God’s Word is that the only
profitable way of utilizing time and we’re going to see this in this reference,
the only profitable way of utilizing time is to walk in obedience to God, Eph.
5:16 says “redeeming the time for the days are evil,” and the word “redeem”
there means to buy back. You’ve been
given a certain amount of time to live and this amount of time is lived in a
sinful world, and you’ve got to redeem this moment, this moment, this moment,
this moment, this moment. How are you
going to redeem it? How are you going to
make your life count? By redeeming every
moment as you pass through that moment in the present of making sure you are
walking in fellowship with the Lord; making sure you’re walking in the
Spirit. In Eph. 5:16; Psalm 90:10-12 we
have the fact that profitable life is only brought into existence by walking in
the Spirit.
Finally, the fourth thing about utilization of time in God’s Word is the
very obvious thing, that you can only live your life in the now, right now, the
present. You can’t change your past; you
may love to go back and try to change the mistakes you made. You may like to go back and correct things. You can’t do that. You may be wary about the future, what’s
going to happen in the future? Jesus
said in Matt. 6:33-34 “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” so Jesus
recognized the principle, there’s no sense in trying to live in the past, no
sense in trying to live in the future, you live right now, in the present.
So here we have a brief utilization of time philosophy given to us in
God’s Word, and here we have it once again as we look upon verse 2 when it says
“and thy son, and thy son’s son, all the days of thy life; and that thy days
may be prolonged.” The word “prolonged”
here means not length of your life. That would violate point 2; Jesus said you
can’t change the length of your life.
The days prolonged means days in the land. Here’s the nation and the
nation is occupying the land. Remember
the Mosaic Law was a conditional covenant and there were two basic things given
in Lev. 26, Deut. 28, they could have occupation of the land, they could have
prosperity, they would have a testimony to the world etc., and if they were out
of line God would take them out of the land. They’d be taken out in dispersion;
instead of prosperity they’d have calamity and instead of testimony they’d be a
reproach to the world. That was the
either/or facing the nation, whether they got with it spiritually or not. They would not be destroyed, they could not
be destroyed, the Abrahamic Covenant.
But they could be knocked out of that land any time, any time through
disobedience. Therefore this “days may
be prolonged” refers not to the length of life; it refers to the occupation in
the land.
It would be analogous in our lives as believers to being in fellowship
with God. Let’s look at your past
week. Here’s seven days, the first day
you may start out and you last about one-fourth of the day in fellowship so you
logged 25% for that day. The next day
you manage to get 50% of the time in fellowship. I’m being very optimistic of course. Then 25% of the next day you’re in
fellowship. Then you get up on the wrong
side of the bed or something and you’re zero for that day. Then the next day you may make 50%, etc. So how much have you got: you’ve got one and
a half days out of seven and that’s how much time you’ve redeemed. In other words, five and a half days of your
life are just wasted spiritually speaking.
That’s the philosophy of time given to us in God’s Word. You utilize time moment by moment and as the
moments pass by, as the time flows to us from the future into the present back
into the past. We only have this moment to make our record count.
God’s Word has a lot of things to say about this point of utilization of
time, “all the days of thy life; and that thy days may be prolonged,” for those
of you who may be skeptical and you think that this refers to duration of life
and not duration of time in the land, turn back to 4:40, here you have the same
phrase and it’s amplified so you know what it means. “…and with thy children
after thee, and that thou mayest prolong thy days upon the earth,” not the
earth but “upon the land” and it has an article and it refers to the Promised
Land. Other references are found in
5:33; 17:20; 30:18 and 32:47. So it
occurs again and again through this passage and it’s easy to understand. “…that thy days may be prolonged,” that is
that your life may have a high percent of productivity. That’s the way we translate it as believers
today. If you want to apply this
principle in your life read it this way: I want to learn the Word of God, verse
1, for the sake of, beginning in verse 2, “in order that I may guard” or watch
“all of God’s will for me, that my days may be productive.” That’s the way we’d
translate it into our Christian experience.
Verse 3 is the conclusion, “Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it,
that it may be well with you, and that ye may increase mightily, as the LORD
God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and
honey.” So here in the first three
verses we have the benefits of living in the Word. Living in the Word in the Old Testament is
the only way of bona fide production,
and when we face the believer’s judgment we are going to have to stand before
the throne and there’s going to be one question—what was the production in your
life. This doesn’t mean you have to go
out and volunteer for the Christian service corps, or some fulltime Christian
service. That’s not what we’re talking
about. We’re talking about being in the
center of God’s will, wherever it may be; the center of God’s will for a
housewife, for example. It could be a
man on the job, it could be anywhere, we’re not talking about where, we’re just
simply saying God’s will for you is the issue, and your production is a percent figure that will
be revealed at the throne of judgment.
Now we come to the interesting section, verses 4-9. I think every Sunday school teacher and every
person concerned with teaching children should understand verses 4-9. If you have some Jewish friends you will
recognize this Scripture as one of the most sacred portions of the Word of God
to these people. Verse 4, “Hear, O
Israel: The LORD our God” it says in your Bibles “is one LORD.” This is what we call the Shema. If you have some Jewish friends and you hear
them talk about the Shema [Scofield note says pronounced Sh’mah]. Why do they call it a Shema? Because the word in the Hebrew is shama‘ and that’s how it’s translated in
the English, it’s the first word and it means hear, that’s the Hebrew verb to
hear.
So in verse 4 it’s simply “Hear, O Israel,” and here’s your Shema and
here’s the most famous of all things. It
was recited by Jews in the ancient world twice a day, when they got up in the
morning and when they went to bed at night they’d have to recite verses 4 and
5, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD,” etc. What does this say? If you have an RSV or an ASV if you look in
the margin you’ll see four translations for this, or there will be three in the
margin or at the bottom and one in the text.
The fourth translation is one that is one that has been discredited for
ages and yet it’s suddenly become probably the most obvious translation of all
and that is the fourth one in the RSV or ASV, “the Lord is our God, the Lord
alone.” There are no verbs in this
thing, that’s the trouble. In the Hebrew
you just have “the Lord our God one Lord,” so you have to fit the verbs in,
depending on how you want to take it. The key is the word “one” before
Lord. The question is, is this teaching
monotheism. Is this teaching they only
have one God or is it teaching that they are only going to be in allegiance to
one God? Is it talking about loyalty or
is it talking about existence of God? In
the context, taken in context with chapter 5, it would indicate it’s not
talking about existence of God. That was
given in Deut. 4:35; it’s talking about loyalty.
Therefore we translate it, “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God,” this
is a phrase that’s very normal. Now we
have the problem with the last two words, “one LORD.” How do you explain this? Turn to 1 Chron. 29:1 you see how this word
“one” is used and see that this is a legitimate translation. For some strange reason this verse was never
noticed and it’s been a source of amusement to me because I’ve gone through several
commentaries on this and you get here and they say this fourth option is
unprecedented, it never occurs in the Hebrew.
Yet if you look carefully it does.
“Furthermore David, the king, said unto al the congregation, Solomon, my
son, whom alone God has chosen,” guess what the Hebrew word for “alone”
is? “echad,”
one. So here you have a clear cut case
in the Old Testament where “one” is translated “alone.” Solomon isn’t alone, Solomon has brothers,
Solomon has sisters, he’s not alone, it’s not talking about his existence, it’s
talking about his position, Solomon and Solomon alone.
Now come back to Deut. 6 and we’ll explain something. If you look on the present doctrinal
statement of this church as well as the doctrinal statements of other churches
you will find Deut. 6:4 always quoted as the proof of monotheism. We’re rewriting a doctrinal statement and
that is going to be removed because Deut. 6:4 does not teach monotheism and it
can’t be used to teach monotheism; it’s talking about loyalty. So you have to have different verses to prove
your point; it’s easily proved but you have to use other verses, you can’t use
this particular verse.
Hear, O Israel: the LORD is our God, the LORD alone.” What has happened down through the ages is
that this word “one” can be two Hebrew words.
Here’s the confusion. There is one Hebrew word, echad, there is another Hebrew word, yachid; yachid is an absolute one, echad is a relative one. Yachid would be used, for example in
Gen. 22:2 where you have an only begotten son, he’s yachid, meaning he is my only son.
For example, this would be God speaking of Jesus Christ, My only Son,
that would be yachid. Yachid means absolutely one like it. Now if this had been intended to teach God’s
existence you would have had yachid,
or an absolute one and if he had used that we would have had trouble with the
doctrine of the Trinity. But the Holy
Spirit didn’t use that, the Holy Spirit used echad, a relative oneness.
And whenever you have echad in
the Hebrew it has to be defined on the basis of context. It has no implicit meaning itself. It always has to be defined on the basis of
context, therefore we have the word “relative one,” therefore this verse cannot
be used to downgrade the Trinity. In
fact, it really can’t even be used to teach monotheism. “The Lord is our God,
the Lord alone.” It refers to loyalty
and allegiance. It is a summary of the
Ten Words or the Ten Commandments.
Verse 5, here’s the logical implication.” “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with
all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Here’s where we have these two words, “heart”
and soul.” Here’s why I suggest that
heart can be used to deal with the subject material from chapters 5-11 and
chapters 12-26 the soul. Why? Because heart emphasizes mental attitude and
soul emphasizes the details of life.
This is just the way it is and this is the way that you’ll see this
operate. “Heart,” what are you thinking
right now? “Soul” what are you doing,
how are you affecting your environment, what impact are you making. A modern translation maybe for “love the Lord
with all thy soul” is make waves, affecting your environment. So loving the Lord with your soul means that
you make waves for him, you affect people with it.
“With all thy might” refers to capacity and this takes into account the
fact that there are two dimensions to your Christian life. There is an absolute dimension, either you
are in the will of God or you are out of the will of God at any moment in time. I would call this spirituality. But there is another dimension to your life
and that is a relative dimension and that would be maturity. At any given point
you may be in the will of God but because of your immaturity you can’t produce
as much for God in His will as an older believer could produce for God in His
will.
Example: every believer has been given a spiritual gift; the average
congregation doesn’t know this, it’s the best kept military secret since the
Manhattan project. The point is that
every believer does have a spiritual gift, but there’s only one problem, God
isn’t going to strike you with a lightening bolt so you’ll glow in the head,
sparks fly off your ears, and this is going to give an impact. You have to develop your gift through
usage. This is why a man can have the
gift of pastor-teacher but unless he’s trained, unless he develops it, it’s
useless. A man sitting in the
congregation can have the gift of administration; he could be the most
fantastic board member that any church could ever have but because he has never
taken in the Word of God, because he’s never thought about it, never digested
it, never used it in his life, his gift is just there, it’s never been
developed. So loving the Lord with all
your might refers to loving the Lord to your capacity at that point in your
Christian experience and refers to your maturity.
Verses 6-9 I think are the most interesting section of this whole
chapter because it tells us how they conceived of living in the Word. Watch this. Those of you who think the Church has to have
a big program. I was asked why we didn’t
have a program for our teenagers; all the churches in town have programs,
what’s the matter with you, don’t you have any program for your teenagers. Deut. 6:6 tells you how, verse 6, “And these
words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart,” it’s not “shall
be,” it’s “let them be.” This is an
imperative, he’s saying look people, “let this be in your heart.”
Here’s how, and in verse 7 we are exposed to, I think one of the
greatest teaching passages in all of the Word of God. If you want to find out how people taught in
the Old Testament, here is how they taught. “And you shalt teach them
diligently unto your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your
house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise
up.” I want to caution you about what
it’s not saying. First let’s look at the
word “teach.” “You will teach them
diligently,” and this word “teach” is a word which means to sharpen an
arrow. When the warriors went out in the
ancient world they had to sharpen their arrows.
Many times in a march, for example, the soldiers would march and these
arrows would smash against one another and get dull. The spears would get dull because they used
spears for many things. They even used
spears to hold up the tents, etc. and in the course of time these implements of
war became dull. So they had to be sharpened. Arrows had to be sharpened; many
of them were just simply wood heads and these wood pieces had to be sharpened.
So this word came to mean sharpen. For
those of you interested in a word study I suggest Deut. 32:41 where this occurs
in that context.
This verb normally means sharpen an arrow, but here we have the word
come over, this is what we call a qal stem, this is the basic stem in the
Hebrew language. When the person wanted to intensify the meaning of a verb he
brought it over into what we call a piel stem.
For example, take dabar, it
means to speak. If I wanted to write
this as piel I’d just put a dot in the middle of it and there’s the piel stem
and it means to intensify and in English if we transliterated this the qal
would look like this, d-b-r; if I
intensified it by putting a dot there it would be d-b-b-r, you just held up that middle consonant and you emphasized
it when you spoke. So the piel stem came
to mean a word to intensify. Here the
person who wrote this is using the piel stem of sharpen; he means to SHARPEN
it; to sharpen it and make it very, very sharp.
What’s the imagery? “You will
make very, very sharp them,” what’s the “Them?”
“Them” is the commandments of the Lord, “them” is the Word, “diligently
to your children.” The word “diligently”
is not there; diligently is just the translator trying to get across the
meaning of this verb so we could translate this basically. “You will sharpen them to your
children.” How is this going to be?
What’s the imagery? He simply says this: when you teach the Word teach it so
they know they’re getting hit. That’s
the point. Teach it so they can’t forget
it, teach it so they know it, they may rebel, they may reject but at least you
had some action. It’s often times
interesting to preach in the pulpit because you see all kinds of
reactions. It’s very interesting. This verb means you teach the Word so that
you get reaction, it’s like putting a pin in somebody, they may hate you or
they may like you but at least you know you’ve got something.
This word “teach,” to sharpen is a word that means to teach so that they
get it. But the most interesting phrase
isn’t here at all. The most interesting
phrase is the next word, “and you will talk of them,” and it’s not “talk of
them,” if you look at this you’d think this means you’ve got to get up in the
morning and talk about the Word, you got to talk about the Word in the evening,
you’ve got to have verses here and verses there, when you pour the cereal
instead of getting cereal he gets Bible verses or something. What is this? Talking about the Word? No, the Hebrew preposition is not talking
about which would be ow, it is be, and that means “in.” So what this is
talking about, it means talk in them when you talk with your children. What does this mean, “talk in the Word?” This doesn’t mean talk about the Word, it
means talking in terms of the Word. It
means, for example, you can discuss any subject with your children and the
discussion proceeds along the lines of the Word of God. It doesn’t mean you have to quote verse after
verse after verse, it means you capture the doctrines so that when that child
looks out on life he sees life from the divine viewpoint because when he’s
listened to you and he’s listened to the discussion at the dinner table and
he’s listened to the discussion in the household, he has always seen you
looking at life from the Word’s viewpoint.
This is how they taught. It does
not mean they sat down and memorized twenty verses in the evening, and twenty
more in the morning. That’s not what it’s talking about. It’s talking about looking at life within the
framework of the Word of God. I know
people aren’t too sharp at this because when we started our Sunday school we
made available Sunday school material to any parent who wanted it. If it was my child in Sunday school I would
like to know what he’s getting in Sunday school. How do you know what’s going on back
there? I’d find out if I were you. Yet I can count on one hand the number of
parents who have taken advantage of our offer to provide Sunday school material
so that you could see what your kid is getting.
That tells me what the interest is at home. We have a town of about 170,000; how many
parents know what their kid is getting in the public school, let alone what
they’re getting in Sunday school. How
can you discuss things in the Word if you don’t know what your child is
getting? Your kid could be getting fed
poison in small amounts; it just takes a little human viewpoint here and a
little human viewpoint there. I can tell
in the teenage class by their reaction; some of them could care less what God’s
Word is saying because over the years they’ve getting this stuff, a little
here, a little there and now they’re insulated.
Now it takes hours and hours and hours of time to filter all this stuff
out. It could be so easy if the parents
would remain alert.
Some TV shows are an assault on the authority of the man in the home and
people sit there and say wasn’t that funny, I enjoyed that program, not
realizing the human view point that was fed all during that humor. And unless
you sat down with your children after that program and said what was wrong with
that that program? Did you notice such
and such? Teach them to analyze. It only takes five or ten minutes to
neutralize the effect of that program.
I’m not saying don’t listen to it, that’s hot house Christianity and
you’ll get weak Christians. They’re
going to get it whether you like it or not so you might as well teach them to
let them look at it but then simply sit down and discuss it with them, what is
wrong and what is right according to God’s Word. And you will set in motion powers of judgment
and discernment in their life.
This is how these people did it in the Old Testament; a tremendous
thing. “You will talk in terms of the Word when you sit in your house,” that refers
to the night time; sitting in the house refers to 6:00 p.m., the Jewish day
starts at 6:00 p.m. and the day begins at 6:00 a.m. and goes to 6:00 p.m. There’s the two parts of the day, a
twenty-four hour operation. Talking in
terms of the Word, again it does not mean to say oh, we’ve got to have the
story of Samson and Delilah this morning, and got to have something else the
next morning. It’s not talking about
Bible stories. It’s talking about Bible
doctrine. If you want to have a story to
teach it, fine. But it’s to get those
ideas across, teach your child to look at life from God’s viewpoint, teach him
to analyze from God’s viewpoint, and this is the way the Jews produced a virile
group of believers.
Verse 8, “And you shall bind them for a sign upon your hand, and they
sill be as frontlets between thine eyes.” This is a figurative expression and
not literal. We can see this from
various references in Proverbs, Exodus, etc.
This refers to a figurative thing. What does it mean? “Sign on your arms” means soul life, “sign on
your arms” means whatever you do let the Word of God dominate. “Arm” is the word for activity, “Let the Word
of God dominate your activities. The
other phrase, “they shall be as frontlets between your eyes,” a frontlet was a
band that was always in front of their eyes so they could see it. What is he is saying is always be occupied
with the Word, always be considering the Word.
So here we have the mental occupation with it.
Of course in Jesus’ day in Matt. 23:5 Jesus talked about a thing called
the phylacteries and here you had religion operating. Religion can never understand that
Christianity is mental attitude; it always has to externalize it. So the people
in Jesus day said oh, look what it says we need signs on the arms, need
frontlets on the head, so they took a little piece of paper, a manuscript, a
parchment, and they wrote a little section of Scripture on it and they
actually put it on their forehead and walked around with it, and they had some
on their left hand. So here they walked
around with this on; now isn’t that asinine?
Instead talking about a few verses it’s the whole canon of
Scripture. Can you imagine putting the
whole canon of Scripture; you’d have to have it on microfilm to stick it up on
a thing between your eyes. They lost the
point of it. The point is that you have
it up here inside, not on a little piece of paper. Here’s where religion
literalizes and externalizes the principle in God’s Word that this is supposed
to be external.
I don’t know if Christians still do this but I was in a place when I was
in the Air Force in Oregon where the Christians had the habit that you weren’t
spiritual unless you took your Bible to school and unless when you walked into
class you had this big Bible and you always put it down on the desk, everybody
could see the Bible; this was the great spiritual thing to do. That may or not be fine, it’s a good tactic
sometimes to generate conversation, etc. but that’s not the point. You take the Bible to school up here, not in
a book. The Bible has to be taken to
school up here. The only time I ever took a Bible into class was on the college
class after I became a believer and I found a professor that used to ridicule
Christians and he loved to tear them apart. So I went into the library and I
checked out the biggest Bible I possibly could and I walked in there and sat in
the front row right in front of his desk and plopped it down. That was the only reason I ever brought a Bible
to class in college, just to annoy him because he always used to pick on the
Christians and I wanted to show him that he wasn’t bothering me in the
least. The real issue about taking a
Bible to school is taking it to school up here, and this is the frontlets
between the eyes that are mentioned.
Now let’s summarize. What is
living in the Word? Living in the Word
consists of six things as I deduce it from this chapter. The first thing is that it involved a
constant study of God’s Word. You find
this in many passages. Deut. 6:7-9 tell you
this, a constant taking in over the years, not any flash in the pan deal, over
the years a slow but steady intake of the Word.
This is the first thing about living in the Word.
The second thing, that you organize it mentally in your mind. It doesn’t do any good just to study the Word
if you don’t adopt a mental framework; you adopt categories in your mind to
organize it, to structure it so that you can use it. A verse on this would be Isaiah 28:10, that
famous verse of pedagogy, “Precept upon precept, line upon line, hear a little,
there a little,” etc. You build
categories up. You don’t get all this
overnight.
The third thing to remember about living in the Word, not only do you
take a constant intake, not only do you organize it mentally, the third thing
that you do is that you begin the process of evaluating human viewpoint in
terms of divine viewpoint. You let
divine viewpoint be superior to human viewpoint, 2 Cor. 10:5, “Casting down
vain imaginations and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge
of God, and bringing every thought into captivity to obedience to Christ.” See the point, Paul is challenging believers
to utilize divine viewpoint and start judging and this can only come through
practice. You can’t do this overnight,
it takes time.
The fourth thing about living in the Word in the Old Testament, you find
that there is a diligence in believing the promises. God’s Word has given many
promises. Heb. 4:1-3 give you a lot of
this, an exhortation to constantly be alert, never fail; if God has promised
you something, Romans 8:28, “All things work together for good to them that
love God, to them that are the called according to His purpose,” it takes diligence
to remember this when the catastrophe strikes.
Yes, it does, and to give thanks for it.
The fifth thing, diligence in living out its implications, here you have
diligence in believing the promises and here you have diligence in living it
out into experience. In other words take
the Word of God and live consistently with it.
An example of this in Christian activity where evangelicals generally
aren’t doing this is in the area of evangelism.
We say we believe that man is a personality; we say we believe man is a
precious individual, God knows people by name.
So what do we do with our evangelism?
We’ve got 5,000 that came forward tonight, great, just mass evangelism
and I’m not knocking mass evangelism, I’m talking about this idea of getting
scalps; oh, we got so many scalps tonight, oh, tremendous. You’re treating people as though they had no
face, no name, just entities. And that’s
a denial of the very Biblical doctrine that God knows men by their name. So here you have a very spiritual activity
that in its conduct and living it out denies the heart of the Biblical doctrine
of man. This is why the world doesn’t
respect fundamental evangelical Christians, because in our practice we deny the
very doctrines we say we believe.
Finally, the sixth thing, that is an alertness for quick analysis and
immediate confession of sin. This means
that when you know the Word of God it’ll do something for you. When you know
the Word of God you’ll know when you sin.
You’ll just catch it immediately.
This is a problem with a younger believer, he doesn’t know enough of the
Word. Frequently you’ll get a young believer and he’ll go on in the Christian
life and all of a sudden he’ll get out of fellowship through some mental
attitude sin and he’ll not realize he’s out of fellowship, he’ll fall and he’ll
wonder what happened, because he got out of fellowship and failed to realize it
immediately. You will sharpen your
ability to discern your own carnality the more of the Word of God that you
know.
Next week we’ll finish up the concept of living in the Word and see the
various dangers and conflicts involved in it, finishing out chapter 6.