Lesson 60
The Loyalty Oath – 27:1-15
We begin a new section of the book of Deuteronomy and in order that we
might introduce this I’d like to review the sections of the suzerainty vassal
treaty of the Ancient Near East. These
suzerainty vassal treaties have been recently discovered and what they are is
an international document that ties a great king into these smaller kings. You might have four of these smaller kings
that are heads of city states, etc. and they make alliances, mutual defense
pacts is what it amounts to and pledges of allegiance to this great king. In history a great king illustration would be
Pharaoh of Egypt, or some of the kings of the Hittites and these smaller
city-states might be things like
Now the relationship that exists between the great king and these vassal
kings is defined by the word “love.” The
word “love” had a different connotation, however. And it’s here where we can learn something
very precious about the Word of God. We
tend to think in terms of sentimentalism or emotionalism when we think of the
word “love.” Yet if we examine these
treaties time and again you will find the word “love” used by the vassal king
toward his superior, saying “I love you.”
Now this is not some emotional thing; this is not some sentimental
thing. The word “love” here meant to
respect and obey, and that’s the connotation this word had in these legal
documents of the Ancient Near East. This
is why in this book the people of
The love that is commanded in this book of Deuteronomy we know from
parallels of these suzerainty vassal treaties is a love of obedience. It is this that illuminates the Gospel of
John, for when the Lord Jesus Christ said those who love Me are those who keep
My commandments. He was talking about
the same kind of love and this is the connotation you want to catch in these
suzerainty vassal treaties. Now as far
as we are concerned as believers this is an exciting discovery because this
says what we have been saying all along; namely that Moses wrote the book of
Deuteronomy. Moses lived in 1400 BC,
however the liberals over the years have said that this book could not have
been written in 1400 BC, it must have been written about 600 BC, some eight
centuries later and what we have here is a complete impersonation of Moses, a
complete imaginary reconstruction of the Law of Israel, and it’s just a
hypothetical thing.
Yet let’s test this. This is what we
say; this is what the liberals say. What
do the facts of archeology tell us?
Fortunately now we can divide the ancient time periods into two parts,
called the first millennium and the second millennium. In the first millennium the suzerainty vassal
treaties had one form; in the second millennium, between 1000 and 2000 BC they
had another form, and they form they had back here was preamble, these were the
sections, historical prologue, stipulations, and then we have the blessings and
the cursings, and finally we have miscellaneous clauses. But in the first
millennium, it’s interesting, you have the preamble, no historical prologue,
stipulations, cursings and blessings, and the reverse and a few minor things. But the first millennium treaties don’t have
any historical prologue.
Now here’s the way of scientifically testing, are the conservatives
right or are the liberals right. Well
when we go back and look at Deuteronomy, verses 1-5 of chapter 1 deal with the
preamble. Chapter 1:6 through the end of
chapter 4 are the historical prologue.
So this book, having the format of these suzerainty vassal treaties,
this book with all of the parallel, proves that itself, from the archeological
data, that it too was written when the conservatives have said; namely it was
written in the second millennium, not the first, because this book has a
historical prologue. Books written after
this couldn’t. If the liberals are
right, and the book was written down here, then it should not have a historical
prologue; the conservatives are right as the Word of God always verifies itself
when you ask enough questions and research it out.
Now we come to a new section; for months and months we have been dealing
with a whole set of stipulations that stretched all the way from chapter 5 down
to the end of chapter 26. Therefore as
we have looked at these stipulations we’ve seen they divide themselves neatly
into two sections. “Thou shalt love the
Lord thy God with all thy heart,” “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all
thy soul.” Loving the Lord with all your
heart means that you love Him inwardly, the mental attitude; loving the Lord
with all your soul means in the details of life. So from chapter 5 through chapter 11, this
first section dealt with mental attitudes, the problem of mental
attitudes. Chapter 12-26 dealt with the
details of life. And this is what we’ve
been studying week after week, going through all of these stipulations. Tonight we’ve come to the end of it.
Beginning in chapter 27 and through the end of chapter 30, chapters 27,
28, 29 and chapter 30 all those four chapters now deal with the procedures of
covenant ratification. In other words,
we’ve finished with the main treaty; we’ve finished with the main legal
documents and now we are going to deal with how it was historically that this
set of 12 tribes formally and legally entered into an agreement with
Jehovah. And it’s the certain procedures
they went through, the first of these we will see in chapter 27. Chapter 27 in particular deals with a
ceremony of ratification. Other sections
and other chapters, such as chapter 28, are going to deal in detail with the
blessings and the cursing. And in
chapter 28-30 you will have in prophetic form the entire history of the world,
for chapters 28, 29 and 30 give you the outlines of history. H.G. Wells didn’t give man the outlines of
history; Moses gave it in chapters 28-30 of this book. And in these chapters he will give you the
principles that control history, are controlling history, on down to the
present day. It has to do with the
But in chapter 27 before going into the details of history, Moses takes
a break. If you notice verse 19 of
chapter 26 and read it, and then skip chapter 27 completely and after you’ve
finished reading 26:19 skip all the way over to 28:1 you will see there’s no
break. In other words, they fit
perfectly together. Deut. 26:19, this is
the Moses speaking about God, “And to make thee high above all nations whom He
has made, in praise, and in name, and in honor, and that thou may be an holy
people unto the LORD thy God, as He has spoken.” Skip to 28:1, “And it shall come to pass, if
thou shalt hearken diligently unto the voice of the LORD thy God, to observe
and to do all his commandments which I command thee this day, that the LORD thy
God will set thee on high above all nations of the earth.” So you see in sense these two hang together
very neatly. Now why is it then that
this book has this interruption. Why is it that chapter 27 comes right in
here?
This is a style of writing of this book that you have to understand.
We’ve seen this before, we saw it back in chapter 10, that Moses would go on
and relate events like this: suppose we have a set of events in time, 1, 2, 3,
4, 5. Now Moses is going to teach you
something but when he goes to relate it he relates it 1, 2, 4, 5, 3, and he’ll
relate it in sequence like this. In
other words, when Moses goes to describe to you something that is very
important that he wants you to learn, he doesn’t always follow chronological
order; he does it because he prefers logical order.
Again, the nearest thing that I can think of in this kind of writing
today is your newspaper; your news story.
The news story, when you read it on the front page, the headlines or the
lead story doesn’t always give you the complete story in all its chronological
detail. For example, take the lead story
when man set foot on the moon. If you
read that carefully you would notice that the writer did not give you the
chronological steps that at such and such a time they blasted off from Cape
Kennedy, at such and such a time they moved out beyond the orbit of the earth,
at such and such a time they were enclosed within the gravitational field of
the moon, at such and such a time… etc.
He didn’t tell you that; that would be too dry. In order to communicate the news he would
pick out the most important thing, give you that to entice you to read further
on down through the paragraph. This is
how Moses preached and he will interrupt the chronological flow of material to
give you something that’s completely out of order, but he wants you to see
something.
And the reason why he interrupts at this point is in verse 18-19 of
chapter 26. “And the LORD has avowed
this day to be his peculiar people,” it means that the Lord has caused this
people to confess that they are His people, and so now he’s going to break, and
in chapter 27 you are given the account of the ceremonial procedure by which
they officially became the people of God.
So in 27:1 it starts out, “And Moses, with the elders of Israel,
commanded the people, saying, Keep all the commandments which I command you
this day.” Now this may strike you as
kind of flowing along, yet there’s a word in here that hasn’t occurred in the
whole book of Deuteronomy in connection with Moses, and that is “Moses, with
the elders,” this is the first time so far in this book that Moses has taken a
joint action of identifying himself with the elders of the people. Why? Because the elders are the representatives
of the people at large. And what Moses
is giving them now is something… he’s going to drop dead when he finishes this
sermon, this is the last sermon Moses preaches and when he finishes he walks up
the mountain and drops dead. One of the
most phenomenal funerals, incidentally, in all of history; the man dies without
ever being sick; he was in absolute perfect health until the second he dropped
dead. He just walked up and said I’m
dying, bang, he was dead. But because he
is keeping his people prepared for what is coming, he wants to provide
continuity of leadership and so now he gathers the elders around and he tells
them this what you must do.
Verse 2, “And it shall be on the day when ye shall pass over the Jordan
unto the land which the LORD thy God gives thee, that thou shalt set thee up
great stones, and plaster them with plaster,” now there’s another thing here
that you want to understand about the Old Testament and if you understand this
it will save you grief, because oftentimes you’ll take a new Christian, he
believes the Bible is the Word of God and then you have some clever unbeliever
come up to him and say, oh, but do you see this little conflict here. I’ve seen it again and again, a believer all
upset simply because he didn’t understand the style of writing of the Old
Testament. If you look in verse 2 you
will see the statement, “it shall be on the day when you shall pass over the
Jordan,” now what is happening here did not happen on the day they crossed over
Jordan. When they crossed over Jordan
was in Joshua chapter 3 and the ceremony recorded here was not until Joshua
chapter 8. Turn to Joshua so you can see
this. Turn first to Joshua 3:6, here
they are crossing the Jordan, “And Joshua spoke unto the priests, saying, Take
up the Ark of the Covenant, and pass over before the people. And they took up the Ark of the Covenant, and
went before the people.” And this is the
procedure of crossing the Jordan. That
happened in Joshua 3, but you have to turn all the way over to Joshua 8 before
the ceremony described in Deuteronomy actually occurred. In Joshua 8:30 you find the generation of
Joshua fulfilling Moses commandments in Deut. 27 on the day, according to
Moses, that they crossed the Jordan. So in verse 30 it says, “Then Joshua built
an altar unto the LORD God of Israel in Mount Ebal, [31] And Moses, the servant
of the LORD, commanded the children of Israel, as it is written in the book of
the Law of Moses,” that’s Deut. 27, our passage before us tonight, “an altar of
whole stones, over which no man has lifted up any iron; and they offered
thereon burnt offerings unto the LORD, and sacrificed peace offerings. [32] And
he wrote there upon the stones a copy of the Law of Moses, which he wrote in
the presence of the children of Israel,” etc. in other words, in Joshua 8 was
when this ceremony finally came to be.
What then are we to make of this statement back in Deut. 27, “On the day
that you cross” you will do this. Here
you have to understand idiom, idiomatic expression in the language. Translators in these native tongues have to
use idiom. Sometimes they can’t even
find a good word for God, and oftentimes when they walk into a tribe they’ve
got this word for God and it’s so slopped up by human viewpoint that they can’t
use it so they have to invent, they actually have to invent a word for God and
then teach the people what that word means.
And sometimes they find this is better to do than starting with a word
that’s all slopped up because at least they start with a clean slate, the
people don’t know anything about the word but sometimes that’s better than
inheriting a whole set of false ideas.
I’m often convinced that we ought to start over in the English language
for such words as God, faith, Christianity, etc. it would be one of the
greatest blessings and just start out with a whole new clean slate of
vocabulary because people are so fouled up in this.
This is an idiom, “and on the day” in Hebrew looks this way; the word
“day” is yom, and you take a beth, which is a “b” and you add it, Hebrew reads from right to left
and so you add the beth onto the
front of this word, byom, “in the
day.” Now that word when hooked together
as one unit means “when” and it doesn’t mean on the literal day, it means
“when.” That’s the expression. Now the
King James translators give you the feeling when they translated this that it
means on the literal day. But it
doesn’t, it means when. And this solves also the problem of Gen. 2:4 where God
has just said it took seven days to create and rest, and then Gen. 2:4 comes
along and says “in the day that God created,” boom, boom, boom, it goes
on. Well “in the day,” whenever you see
that expression you can lay 9 to 1 odds that it’s this thing here, “when,” and
that’s the way it really should be translated.
So going back to Deut. 27 now we understand this idiom and there is no
conflict, it’s rightly understood. So
verse 2, “And it shall be when you shall pass over Jordan unto the land which
the LORD thy God gives thee, that thou shalt set thee up great stones, and
plaster them with plaster,” now this plastering of stones was a technique that
we know today archeologically occurred in Egypt. Whether Moses started it or something I don’t
know. But it was used by the Egyptians
and what it consisted of was taking great stone steles, oblong pieces of rock,
and then they would coat it over with lime or gypsum, which would produce a
hard covering over this, not plaster.
The concept of plaster you’d think somebody would chip it off. Well, this was a lot stronger than just sheer
plaster. Then they would take ink, black
ink, made of some various materials that they had, a lot of it was bone black,
and they would write over this plaster or this lime or gypsum covering that
they had coated the rock with, and this was a temporary inscription.
Now when they wanted to make a permanent inscription they dug into the
rock and chiseled it into the rock, or they took soft clay, and you can see
some places they took a little tool that looks like the end of a pencil except
it has a triangular form at the end of the pencil and they would press in; we
call that cuneiform writing, and they would press into this rock and then
they’d put in the oven and heat it and it would turn to solid rock, and that
would be their solid inscription. But
the fact they did not use it here in verse 2 tells you something very
interesting about the ceremony. This was
not to be a permanent inscription of the Word of God; this was to be for the
sake of the ceremony. We might say they
put up a billboard and the billboard wasn’t going to be there forever but it
was going to be there during, before and after this ceremony. And from this we’re going to get a tremendous
principle, verse 3.
Verse 3, “And thou shalt write upon them all the words of this law, when
thou art passed over, that you may go in unto the land which the LORD thy God
gives thee, a land that flows with milk and honey, as the LORD God of thy
fathers has promised thee.” What God is
saying here is that during the ratification of the treaty, He wants all the
words of the Word of God on those rocks.
So they would start up here with Genesis and they’d write down all over
this rock, on the sides and the back, and everything, so that every person that
was involved in the ceremony knew the Word of God. They didn’t have Bibles, how are people going
to know the treaty; only if you plaster it all over the place so they can read
it. So what God is doing here during
this covenant ceremony is that He is making sure that every believer who enters
into covenant with Him understands the terms of the covenant, and He’s going to
do it very clearly, and we’ll find this again and again throughout this
passage, that every person, EVERY person is not to go blindly through the
ceremony, just like baptism and communion, a person can just sit there and go
blindly through the motions and it means nothing, absolutely nothing. This is why we always stop to explain what
we’re going and Moses did here.
God commanded that “all the words of the Law” be clear, absolutely clear
that no one could say well, I didn’t understand it, I just didn’t understand
what I was voting for, etc. There won’t
be any of that here because people say you read the stuff on the rock and you
saw the issue and you went along with it, so tough. It’s your baby, you bought it. So this is how God always works, qualifies
the issue so that no one will be confused.
Let’s finish this purpose clause, “that thou mayest go in unto the
land,” now isn’t that kind of interesting?
Isn’t it interesting that in order for them to go into the land, they’re
already in the land, that should catch your eye immediately, then you have this
strange purpose in there, “that you may go into all the land,” what’s that
doing in here, and what does that purpose clause have to do with writing the
Word of God on a rock. Well, it tells us something tremendous about the Old
Testament. It goes back to the concept
of a treaty or a contract or covenant and that is that God has promised… do you
see that verb, the last verb in the sentence, “as the Lord thy God has
promised,” God promised the land to Israel but in order for them to possess the
land they had to know the Word of God and appropriate it by faith. So therefore they had to understand the Word
in order that they might believe, in order that they might take the land, so
that the word, the belief step is out of it, it’s not given here but you have
to understand, so here you have understand, that’s the first step, understand
the Word, then you believe, second step, and then they were to conquer the
land. Now you just have this outlined in
the purpose clause, conquer the land, “that they may go into the land,” and
this step is skipped. It’s included in
other passages, but that’s the point that’s trying to be made here.
Now I want to show you, this business that God has promised, I want to
show you a little bit about the Old Testament covenants. There are two kinds of covenants in your
Bible. You must be clear; we have two
kinds of covenants in the Bible. We have one kind of covenant that is the one
party covenant, it’s made up of one nation or one group of people or one
person, that’s called a one-party contract.
A two party contract is an agreement between two people in which they
both mutually agree to obey a certain provision of that treaty. Now all of the covenants of the Word of God
are one-party contracts except one, the Mosaic Law.
Let’s look at this a moment. Our
greatest one-party contract is the Abraham contract, we’ll put covenant, but
that is a one-party contract. What do we
mean by one-party contract? Turn back to
Gen. 15 for a moment. If you see this,
it’s another argument for eternal security, a one-party contract. Gen. 15:7, now God is talking to Abraham in a
dream and Abraham is a little upset here, and he wants God to sign on the
dotted line; he says you know God, I heard what you said but let’s get it in
writing. So what Abraham is trying to do
is get God to sign on the dotted line.
So in verse 7, “And he said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee
out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give thee this land to inherit it. [8] And he said, Lord God, whereby shall I
know that I shall inherit it?” Of course
God had just told him about ten times but he still wants to know. So God says all right, Abraham, “[9] And He
said unto him, Take me an heifer of three years old, and a she-goat of three
years old, and a ram of three years old, and a turtledove, and a young pigeon,
[10] And he took unto him all these, and divided them in the midst, and laid
each piece one against another: but the birds divided he not. [1] And when the
fowls came down upon the carcasses, Abram drove them away. [12] And when the
sun was going down, a deep sleep,” supernatural sleep, “fell on Abram; and, lo
an horror of great darkness fell upon him. [13] And He said unto Abram,” this
is in the dream, “Know of a surety that thy seed shall be a stranger in a land
that is not theirs, and shall serve them; and they shall afflict them four
hundred years.” And he goes on to prophecy, in verse 16, “But in the fourth
generation they shall come here again; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not
yet full.”
Now verse 17, “And it came to pass that, when the sun went down, and it
was dark, behold, a smoking furnace, and a burning lamp passed between the two
pieces.” What does this mean? During the ancient world, business contracts,
they’d take the animals divide them; you’d have business man A and business man
B. Businessman A, in order to sign a contract, and they didn’t have paper to
sign on the dotted line, he would walk between the two pieces of animal and
businessman B, when he signed he would walk between them. How many people walked between it here? Abraham was sacked out; God deliberately put
him asleep so he wouldn’t get in the process.
God walked between the two pieces and only God; this is a one-party
contract which means that God is the one that does the promising, I will do
this Abram and you have nothing whatever to do with it, I will take care of
it. That is a one-party contract. It has nothing to do with what Abram is going
to do, he doesn’t even sign the contract, he doesn’t agree to anything. God is the one who promises, Abraham doesn’t
agree to a thing in this contract, not a thing, it’s all from God.
All right, now the Abrahamic Contract had three great provisions in
it. It had many provision but we’ll just
take three. It promised Abraham a real
estate; I think in you look in verse 18 you’ll see the domain of the land
promised to Abraham, “Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of
Egypt unto the great river, the river Euphrates.” You look at a map and think of Israel as some
little small land, just look at this verse again, the river Euphrates is the
boundary so next time you look at a map of the Middle East think what Israel is
going to possess; keep it a big secret from the Arabs. But the Canaanites and all these people,
they’re going to be dispossessed. That
is what Israel is going to have, that’s her promise. The Abrahamic contract gives this promise of
real estate.
The second great thing the Abrahamic Covenant promised was that the
people would survive forever; Israel under the great tumult and chaos of
history would never, never, never be annihilated; this people would live
forever and they survive every anti-Semitic movement that’s ever been
made. This people would go down in
history and never be annihilated; there would come times when they would come
close to being annihilated but never could they be totally annihilated from
history. That is the great promise that
God has given them.
The third great promise was that they would be a source of blessing to
the entire world. All three of these
provisions of the Abrahamic contract were promises by God to do it independent
of what Israel did. Of course in history
it turns out that God isn’t going to bless someone unless they’re obedient,
true, but this prophecy includes the prophecy of their obedience. It means that Israel at certain crucial times
in history is going to go on positive volition, so this contract is a one-party
contract; God is going to do the doing and the prophecy includes, not just what
God is going to do but the prophecy actually includes that when God gets ready
in history to do His work these people will be ready. That’s what the prophecy includes, even man’s
volition.
So we have the Abrahamic contract with three clauses. The entire rest of the Old Testament, as
startling as this may seem, is basically only an amplification of the Abrahamic
Covenant. Do you see why it’s so
important to understand the Abrahamic Covenant?
Understand these three principles of the Abrahamic contract and the rest
of the Old Testament falls together in a nutshell for the entire rest of the
Old Testament merely amplifies these three great clauses. Let me show this to you; let’s take the first
clause. I said that the Abrahamic
Covenant promised real estate. You saw
this when you looked at Gen. 15; let’s see where God confirmed and amplified
this to the nation later. Deut. 30, this
is sometimes called by theologians the Palestinian Covenant. Basically the Palestinian Covenant is nothing
more than an amplification of clause number one of the Abrahamic Covenant and
it means that this land is promised to Abraham.
But when it was given to Abraham it was given in a brief form. Now in Deut. 30 God is going to amplify it
and we’re going to see some of the amplifications of this later.
Deut. 30:1-5, “And it shall come to pass, when all these things are come
upon thee, the blessing and the curse, which I have set before thee, and thou
shalt call them to mind among all the nations, to which the LORD thy God has
driven thee, [2] And shall return unto the LORD thy God, and shall obey His
voice according to all that I command thee this day, thou and thy children,
with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, [3] That then the LORD thy God
will turn” or change “thy captivity, and have compassion upon thee, and will
return and gather thee from all the nations where the LORD thy God has scattered
thee. [4] If any of thine be driven out unto the outmost parts of heaven, from
there will the LORD thy God gather thee, and from there will He fetch thee. [5]
And the LORD thy God will bring thee into the land which thy fathers possessed,
and thou shalt possess it; and He will do thee good, and multiply thee above
thy fathers.”
There we have clause one of the Abrahamic Covenant reaffirmed, amplified
and expanded under Moses’ time, known to theologians as the Palestinian
Covenant. But that’s not all, not only
is the first clause of the Abrahamic Covenant amplified but if we go back, what
was the second clause of the Abrahamic Covenant? It was that these people would
survive forever and never be annihilated. We have amplification of clause two. 2 Sam. 7, God is going to build on the
promises already given to Abraham and He’s going to say now I promise you even
more, and this is what I promise to you.
Verse 11, “And since the time that I commanded judges to be over My
people, Israel, and have caused thee to rest from all thine enemies. Also the
LORD tells thee that He will make thee an house.” This amplifies one section
and that is the dynasty, namely that there will be a Davidic dynasty. This is why Jesus Christ physically is the
son of David; He is the son of David because He is part of the Davidic
dynasty. So in verse 11 it says I will
“make thee an house.” In verse 13, “He
shall build an house for My name, and I will establish the throne of his
kingdom forever.” Verse 16, “And thy
house and thy kingdom shall be established forever before thee; thy throne
shall be established forever.” So God
has amplified one part of the second clause, not only do these people survive
but included in the group and the mass of people there will be a dynasty, a
royal family, and that royal family will survive forever; that royal family is
the house of David.
Then the third clause, we said that there was a third clause, the
blessing clause, that God would bless the world through this nation. How is He going to do this? Turn to Jer. 31 we have how He is going to
bless. In Jer. 31:31 we have the promise
that God makes to the nation, “Behold, the days come, saith the LORD, that I
will make a new covenant with the house of Israel; and with the house of Judah,
[32] Not according to the covenant that I made with their fathers in the day
that I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, [which my
covenant, they broke, although I was an husband unto them, saith the LORD]” do
you know why that’s in there? Because that refers to the Mosaic Covenant which
is a two-party covenant, God is not interested in the long run of making
two-party contracts, it’s always one party where He and what He alone
does. So He says this New Covenant that
I’m going to make isn’t going to be like the Mosaic two-party contract, this
covenant is going to expand clause three of the Abrahamic Covenant, the
blessing clause, and this is the covenant, verse 33, “But this shall be the
covenant that I will make with the house of Israel: After those days, saith the
LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts,
and will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
This is amplified in the book of Hebrews and refers to what we actually
partake of in one sense as the church, although it wasn’t addressed to us, we
share in the benefits of the New Covenant.
Remember in the communion service when I get up to the point where I say
“this cup is the blood of the new contract.”
What am I talking about? I’m talking
about this, I’m talking about right there you have before you when you take of
that cup an amplification of the Abrahamic Covenant. You couldn’t even have communion service
without it because what I’m saying at that point is that the third clause from
the Abrahamic Covenant, God’s spiritual blessing was poured out upon the world,
that is promised… that is promised here under the New Covenant. So we have here throughout the Old Testament
simply a development of this one great covenant, the Abrahamic Covenant.
That was a one-party contract; we have before us a two-party
contract. There’s only of these in
Scripture ant that is the Mosaic Law.
Under this contract the people take upon themselves obligations. That
was not true of Abraham, it’s not true of the Palestinian, it’s not true of the
Davidic, it’s not true of the New Covenant.
But in the Mosaic Covenant it is true, namely that the people now are
going to take upon themselves the responsibility to fulfill the Word of God,
and very serious, as we get into this you’ll see.
Back to Deut. 27, you’ll see what these people are doing. Put in quite blunt language, when these
people are ratifying this contract they are sentencing themselves to hell;
that’s how serious this contract ceremony is because what they are going to say
in this contract ceremony is “cursed be the one who doesn’t follow all the
words of the law,” and the word “curse” means to hell with them. That’s what they’re saying and that’s what
this two-party contract means and now you can see why no one can be saved under
the Law, it’s absolutely stupid for someone to be think they’re going to be
saved under the Law, when the Law was ratified what did they say, the last
verse of chapter 27, “Cursed be he who confirms not all the words of this law
to do them. And all the people shall say, Amen,” and the word “amen” was a
formal word used in the Ancient Near East to refer to the fact that this clause
hangs on me. In other words, that clause
there in the contract applies to me personally.
And after the contract was made and you stepped forward at attention and
said “amen” that meant that you were included in that contract. And so every time these series of cursings
which we will study, when these cursings are given individually, one by one, the
people are saying “Cursed be the one” who doesn’t follow totally the entire
Law.
I think after you’ve gone through this chapter none of you again will be
tempted to think that you can be saved by keeping the Mosaic Law. It’s utterly impossible, it’s utterly
impossible! The people here prove it by
their two-party contract. God is going
to agree to bless and the people are going to agree to obey, but there’s only
one problem with a two-party contract, you can’t get obedience perfect. God is absolute righteousness, He needs
perfect obedience and you can’t get perfect obedience; there was only one
member of the human race who ever was perfect and that was Jesus Christ and so
therefore, since that is true, you aren’t perfect, therefore you can never be saved. This is why in the New Testament you are
warned again and again, this is why Paul does it in Galatians, James does it in
his epistle, if you try to keep the law and you break one clause, you have had
it. This is why James says “whoso keeps
the whole law and transgresses one point,” boom, that’s it. Why?
Because of verse 26, “Cursed be he who confirms not all the words of
this Law to do them.” That is what a
two-party contract means, and that basically is what everybody who does not
believe in eternal security thinks the Christian life is operating under. And the whole Old Testament refutes it, it’s
what God does, it’s grace, what He promises to do for me, not my
obedience. How the heck can I hold on to
my salvation by being perfectly obedient?
The only possible way I can hold on… if I had a system of salvation that
depended on works, this would be the system and the system here is if you don’t
perfectly obey you lose your salvation.
Therefore, according to these clauses, it’s obvious no one ever can be
saved under some system of works. People
are saved only by a system of grace, a one-party contract that we have in Jesus
Christ.
We’re going to close early because of our business meeting.