The Words Which Moses Spoke

Well, it's a joy to be back with you guys. We were back last Sunday, but I wasn't preaching or teaching, and so Dan commented to me. He says, you had a lot to say last week after Sunday school class, and when you talk for a living and don't get to talk, it sort of wells up inside of you. I'm very glad to be back with you guys. I've been both looking forward to and sort of... Well, dreading is not the right word, but being nervous about starting this new sermon series. Not really a sermon series, but really a sermon, I don't even know what to call it. We're starting the book of Deuteronomy. It's not going to be short, but I hope it's very good. Deuteronomy is the fifth book in the Pentateuch, or the first law of God written by Moses.

Deuteronomy literally means second telling of the law or second law. Deuteronomy is not the first telling, that's in Exodus and Leviticus, but it's the second telling of the law. And so the vast majority, the balance of this book is a restatement of what has already been said and been in practice with the Israelites during their wandering in the wilderness. I chose this book for a couple of reasons. The first is that I think a lot of the trouble that we have in our lives, meaning a lot of the sins that we've fallen into or that we struggle with or a lot of the weaknesses that we have, are directly related to our lack of knowledge of God's law. I don't think it's something we talk about a whole lot or something we have a great knowledge of. I think it's something that's sort of been hidden from our eyes. And because of that, we're ignorant and also weak.

And so I do think it's really important, first of all, to know what God has required of us. And more importantly, or at least equally importantly, why he requires it of us. The law is not simply just a list of do's and don'ts. It's not simply a checklist of make sure to do this and make sure not to do that. And if you do, it'll be bad. And if you do this other, it'll be good. There's lots of blessing and lots of warning and lots of real-life solutions. represented in the law of God. And the law of God is, as a whole, a representation of God's character. He's not telling us to do anything or requiring anything of us that isn't true of him already. And so the law is almost him taking us through a character analysis of himself. And so if you don't have a good knowledge of the law of God, you don't have a good knowledge of God.

And so we need this. I think it will be a help to us. I've also chose to preach through this book because I think that God's law is generally looked down upon by Christians. We just kind of wrinkle up our noses at it and aren't interested in it. It's not the sort of thing that we're accustomed to. Meaning, if you went to an ethnic restaurant or went to another country and you had to eat their food, You might wrinkle up your nose at it. Why would you wrinkle up your nose at it? I don't like that. Well, why don't you like that? Well, because you've never eaten it before. Your tastes have not been accustomed to that diet or that meal. The problem with, and so if we were to take that same analogy and apply it to our life, what diet have we been fed? A diet of grace without any context for that grace. This is not the law and grace, the law and the gospel. They're not opposed to each other.

There's not an internal conflict between the two. And one is not more important or more prominent or more special or more necessary than the other. But as you are, an American, you've grown up with a lot of talk of grace, a lot of talk of forgiveness, a lot of talk of healing, a lot of talk of redemption, a lot of talk of meeting where you're at, a lot of talk of acceptance, a lot of talk of it's going to be okay, but not a lot of talk of, Why did you do that? How did you get here? This is what that deserves. Here's what's going to happen. And that's just in this life. That's not even to talk about what's going to happen in the life to come. We've had a lot of the former and precious little of the latter. And so our tastes, our Christian appetite has been affected by this. We're not interested in being told how to live. And I think that's to our harm.

Typically now, if we are to talk about our sins, we don't talk about them as sins, but rather mistakes. And those mistakes are grounded not in a willful rebellion, but in a lack of education or a preponderance of extenuating circumstances that are beyond our ability to manipulate. And we're quick even then to pass over our sins and get to, we want you to feel better. We want you to get better. We want you to not be angry at God anymore. Here's the thing about the law and becoming a Christian or being a Christian. Paul tells us in Galatians that the law is our tutor unto Christ. It's like the training wheels. It is the one who takes us by the hand and leads us through our lives in every situation to our Savior. And so the question I propose to you and the question that's motivated me to preach through Deuteronomy is, how do we find our Savior if we fired the guide?

if we've said, I don't need a guide, I can find my way to the cross, just find myself, I think we will end up wandering from God. And that is the testimony of what does happen when we leave aside the law of God. And so this is what we're going to be doing. How long will we be in Deuteronomy? My guess is that we will be here for years. Calvin preached 200 sermons on Deuteronomy. Sometimes he preached four of them in a week. And sometimes he didn't preach. you know for 10 days but um it took him 200 sermons and from the past i've not tended to vary a ton from his pace or martin lloyd jones pace as we went through the uh the sermon on the mount martin lloyd jones preached 60 sermons i think that on the sermon on the mount i think i preached like 58 or something it was pretty close to that pace through it and so i expect that we're going to be in deuteronomy for a while i'm sure along the way we'll have occasion to take breaks or to do other things

as we're going through it. But this is what we're going to be studying for probably the next four to five years on and off. And so I'm looking forward to it because it's an area where I feel as a Christian and as a pastor, I need to grow. So I have to learn how to preach through a book. I have to meet Moses in a way that I've never met Moses before. By the time I'm done preaching through the gospel of Luke, when we went through that, I felt like I was saying goodbye to my friend Luke. by the end of it. And the same with Paul as we finish the pastoral epistles, or Jesus when we finish the Sermon on the Mount. You get to know something about the man who wrote it as you're writing it. So we're all going to get to know Moses. And he's a humble man, a godly man, and I don't know what the word is. He is a Jew. The things he says, and we'll see some of it in our passage to the people, it's pretty intense. It's not the sort of way that Americans talk. And so it's somewhat refreshing. It's often jolting.

the way he puts things. So I'm looking forward to being stretched in those ways. Now, how is the book of Deuteronomy organized? Well, it's largely, as I said already, a restatement of the law of God. That's the vast majority of it. Picking up in chapter 5 and running through about... I can't remember if it's chapter 31 or 33, somewhere in there. The vast majority of the book is just a restatement of the law. These first four chapters at the beginning are a retelling of the wanderings in the wilderness. Deuteronomy is spoken by Moses as the Israelites are actually about to enter into the promised land after they've been wandering for 40 years. As they're about to enter in, and Moses is about to die, that's what the end of the book of Deuteronomy is, is that Moses says, Look what we've been doing for 40 years. Then he says, here's what the law of God says that I've been telling you we've been practicing for 40 years. Then he praises God, then he blesses the people, and then he dies. And that's the book of Deuteronomy in a nutshell. And so they're standing, preparing to enter into the land of Canaan, the land that God's promised to them, that they've been forbidden from entering for the last 40 years because of their sin. And so as they go in, Moses wants to recount to them the law of God to remind them.

And so this morning, we're going to be studying just the first three verses of Deuteronomy, chapter 1, verses 3. And my hope this morning is that God will give us soft hearts toward his law, and that he'll be doing that work over the course of months and years as we study it. And really, after we finish it, what I hope we come away with is not platitudes about God's law and t-shirts that say, you know, Jesus is the standard, or things like that, though he is. What I hope we come away with is a better understanding of God's character and his desire for his people. This is preparatory as they're about to go in to receive an enormous blessing. He's preparing them to enter into that and reminding them of what their obligations are to him because he's giving them this land. And so I hope that God will soften our hearts to his word. I also hope that particularly this morning, God will help us to see our own...

to forget the things that we've been heard. You have to remember, this is not the first time they've heard this. In fact, they've been living under these laws for a generation. And as we get into these first things Moses has said, we're going to find out they've not been doing quite as well as you might hope, having had this spoken to them directly by God and then practicing it for decades and now again being retooled. So our text is Deuteronomy 1, verses 1 to 3. Would you please stand as we read the word of the Lord? This is the word of the Lord, and it is eternally true. These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel across the Jordan in the wilderness, in Ereba opposite Suph, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab. It is eleven days' journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. In the fortieth year, on the first day of the eleventh month, Moses spoke to the children of Israel.

according to all that the Lord had commanded him to give to them. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. So the main point of the sermon today, what I want you to take away, and I want to impress upon you, is that you remember your past sins. I just watched Paige's faith when I said that. She was like, that's what you want me to do? That's what I want you to do. And what I hope is that throughout this sermon, I can... prove to you from Scripture that that's a good thing to do. Now, does that sound like something that you would hear regularly, normally, about how to live the Christian life? No, normally what we would hear or be told is those things are all washed away. They're forgiven. They're done with. You don't need to think about them. You don't need to worry about them. You don't need to remember them. That's all in the past. I don't think that's helpful. And I know if you're like me, when you hear me say just that, you're like, but our sins are forgiven.

But we're not supposed to live in them anymore. And I want to assure you that everything I'm telling you is not opposed to you being forgiven or your sins being behind you, or at least the ones in the past are behind you. Those things are not opposed to each other. I think we need to remember who we are and what we've done so that we don't do it again. And so what about this idea of, Forgetting. Well, how do you know if someone remembers the things that they're taught? Well, if we were in school, you would know perhaps by testing them, right? You go to class and you're studying a new unit and that is on whatever.

In science, you're learning about biology and you're learning about the different components of the cell and the kids learn about it and they have to write about it and they answer questions about it and they have to make a diagram or a poster board of a cell and then they have to give a presentation about it and we say, oh, the kids know about the cell. Good for them. We could test for knowledge. Could you do all of those things and not actually learn about a cell? Oh yeah, you could just have a smart neighbor, right? Or get in the group with a smart kid.

for the project. Or you could just take that knowledge just as abstract little tidbits of interesting things, let it float around in your brain until something else pushes it out of the way. If we came back a year or two or five later and said, hey, Mr. Ninth Grader, could you draw me a picture of a cell and label the different parts or components in it? Then we would have some indication of whether this kid has learned anything. or retained anything, maybe a better way to say it. The thing about remembering and retaining is that you have to interact with and have a touch point with it or you forget it. And so one of the sweet things about God's law is that we always are bumping into it. We're always needing it. The New Testament says that the law came in because of sin. And so we're bumping into the law constantly. The problem is we don't understand why it's there.

or what it's meant to accomplish. And many times the law stands in the way between us and the thing that we want. Being told no or finding a locked door or what have you is a frustration to us. We say, well, I wish that law wasn't there. I wish that prohibition didn't exist. I wish I could get to what I want. And that inclination in us is not unique to us. This was true of the Israelites. Back before they left Egypt and Moses had become the leader, They were wearing him out, right? He was a judge. They were wearing him out. And his father-in-law comes to him and says, this isn't good. You need to appoint judges. What were those judges supposed to do? What were the people wearing Moses out with from before the sun came up until after the sun went down? All their sins, all their conflicts, all their disputes, all their problems. And so they all come to Moses, and Moses isn't supposed to be the judge. He's supposed to adjudicate. He's supposed to say what's just and what's...

what's unjust, what's right, what's wrong, and he's supposed to deliver the remedy. And so he goes on and he does this and he does this and he does this and the work is too much for him. And what you realize with the work being too much was, one, there needed to be more people and there also needed to be a standard by which to process these things. Laws don't replace judges and judges don't replace laws. The two work together. Judges need laws. And the reason that we need both judges and laws is because of our sins. We can get into a mess really quickly and really frequently and really get stuck into it. And so we need guidance. When you were a kid, if you had siblings, how common was it for you to end up in a fight with your brother or your sister? Was that a monthly occurrence? Twice a month? Weekly? Just once a week? Was it like once or twice a week? Was it daily? Or was it like morning, noon, and night?

With an extra helping on the weekends when you weren't at school all day. Wasn't that pretty constant? That there was conflict, that there were problems, that you heard, that one of you or one of your siblings was saying, I'm going to tell dad. Or your sibling went and ran, or maybe you were the one who went and ran, crying to your mommy. Mommy, mommy, look what he did. The problems are constant. They're constant. We're constantly needing someone to solve our problems and to tell us what was right and what was wrong. Now, if you've ever done that, Have you ever been disappointed by what the judge said? What your mom or dad said? No, I'm sorry. He hit me, he hit me. And then your sibling comes and says, I did hit him. He hit me first. Completely changes the story. And so this reality of just needing judges, like needing a way to resolve these problems is constant. And we're going to need this until we die or Jesus returns. There's no getting past it. There's no outgrowing it.

There's no moving beyond it. As long as we have sins, we're going to need a law and judges to guide us, to instruct us. Hopefully, as we bump into it time and again, we learn from it so that we're not doing the same things over and over and over again. But for that to happen, we have to interact with the law in such a way that we learn from it, that we receive it, that we remember it, so that the next time we don't do the exact same thing again. All of this is to say, these words which Moses was about to speak to Israel, this entire book, should have been familiar to them. They should have known this stuff. Sadly, they didn't. If you go back to Sinai or Horeb, Mount Sinai or Mount Horeb, what is one of the first things that the people did? They leave Egypt, they wander around, they go to the mountain, they go to Horeb.

God makes a covenant with them, says, I'll be your God. If you'll be my people, you got to do everything I say, I'll give you a good land. Basically the Mosaic covenant and, you know, cliff notes. They say, we'll do it. And he says, okay, purify yourself. Don't touch this mountain. Don't even let your animals touch it. It's holy ground. I'm going to come back in a few days. Moses goes up, communes with God, comes down. Moses is back up on the mountain. Moses has gone for a while. The people from the visitation were scared. About God, what do they say to Moses? You speak to us. We can't have him speaking to us. Moses is gone. Then what do they do? Immediately, yeah, you probably know, don't you? They collect all their jewelry, their earrings and their necklaces and their bracelets and all of this stuff of value, and they make a golden calf. And what's the golden calf supposed to be? A representation of God, right? I don't think they actually believe this is God. It was actually their point of reference. I learned a new word this week.

Apis. Any of you guys know what Apis is? A-P-I-S or C if it's the archaic spelling, it's a Latin word. It is a Latin word for sacred bull that used to be worshipped in Egypt. It was the name of the god that the Egyptians worshipped at the time of, in the ancient, when Israel was there. So this is a god that they would have known. Have you ever wondered, why did they make a golden calf? Like of all the things you could do, why a golden cow? Because that was their point of reference for God, having been in Egypt and having observed the Egyptians' worship. And I don't think that they were saying, well, we're going to go back and we're going to worship the God of the Egyptians. They were saying, we need to have a form, have a thing, have a manifestation of God among us. Aaron, make for us.

Something familiar that they had known and said, this will be our representation of our God, the one who's just come down to us and covenanted with us. This will be a physical representation for us to worship him through. What's the problem with that? Well, the problem with that is God had just told them not to do that. Eric just preached on the second half of the second commandment. You shall have no other gods before me in the first world. I am the Lord your God who brought you down out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Therefore, you shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a graven image of anything like in the heavens above or in the earth or in the seas beneath. You shall not make for them. You shall not worship them. For I, your God, am a jealous God. They just got told that. Moses takes a little too long up on the mountain. They're scared. They forget. Or they rebel.

And they're right back to where they were before. And it's quite incredible when you think of what had just happened to them. It's all fresh in their minds that we were backed up to the Red Sea. Forget all the other plagues that came before that that led up to this, which were miraculous. The Egyptian magicians fell out at number four or five. I don't remember which one exactly. They couldn't replicate the stuff anymore. Then it keeps going, keeps going, and it gets to the death of the firstborn. Get out of here, says Pharaoh. No, get back here. We're going to kill you. They're backed up against the Red Sea. They have nowhere to go and the Egyptian army is coming. And then God parts the sea. They walk through on dry land. The whole Egyptian army is destroyed. They're on their way to the mountain. This is not like that happened 50 years ago. It's like this happened in last week's news. Like this was brand new. Then they go up to the mountain. They meet with God. Be my people. Yes, I'll be your God. They have all this stuff. And right away.

They're making a golden calf. They're returning back to Egypt. Are you that dumb? Are you sure? We say yes. The real test of whether the answer is truly yes is when someone recounts your past failures, how do you respond to it? Does this thing inside of you well up and say, why are you telling me about, why are we talking about this again? You don't have any business saying that. It was forgiven. There's something to be addressed in terms of how it's brought up or why it's brought up. But if you're generally opposed to someone saying, these have been the failures of your past, and not just a one-off here and then a one-off there and then another thing, but a repetitive, a habit, a cycle, if you will, of a setting sin. How do you respond when people say, you know, I think you've done this enough that you should not be making the same mistakes again still? Do you say, yes, I know? Or do you say, why do you keep bringing that up? My sins are forgiven.

It's not actually antithetical to say your sins are forgiven and do you remember what you did and why you did it. If we're opposed to knowledge and to remembrance, we're going to be in a cycle. And we're not going to figure out why. And so these Israelites are very foolish and stubborn people. And we should find ourselves in them. If we were to look back over our lives, we should be able to say, you know, I'm like that. I dig in my heels. I do the same stupid stuff again and again and again. One of the interesting things, probably the most strange or foreign part of this passage to us, is this list of places. Moses says, we're across the Jordan River right there. We're in the wilderness. We're familiar. Been here for 40 years in the desert. Opposite of Suph. And he starts naming these places, Suph and Paran and Thophel and Laban and Hazaroth and Dizahab. We're all like, I don't know what. I mean, how many of us know ancient?

Hebrew topography and know where these places are, what they were, what they represented. They were places, they were towns, the people would have known them. What's interesting is that the commentators, the Jewish commentators that write on this say that the reason Moses included all of those things is because there were sins that the people committed in each one of those places. And that as he points them out, he's like, you remember over there where you did this? You remember over there where you did that? You remember over here where you did the other? Do you remember right here where we're standing? We've been here before.

Do you remember? Do you want to remember? Are you willing to remember? Moses' purpose in recording these things for us, these places, and to remind the people, to put them in remembrance of them, was to humble them. When you remember your past sins, it's a humbling thing. Part of the reason we don't want to remember them is because of our pride. We don't want our past failures ever being recounted or remembered. As though they're not forgiven if we remember them. So what can we learn from Moses recalling these places? Well, simply that God's people often need to remember their failures and their sins, as hard as that may be to hear. We're about to study four chapters of Moses recounting the last 40 years of them wandering in the wilderness and all of the stuff they did that was bad. And there at one point, we'll come to it.

where Moses says, you remember our fathers? They're not able to go into the land because of their sins. And even I'm not allowed to go into the land because of your sins. He blames them for why he can't go into the promised land. And I would understand him to be upset about that. What's he referring to? Well, he's referring to when the people were grumbling and complaining, would you bring us out here in the wilderness to die? We don't have any meat to eat. We don't have any food. We need water. And the first time God said, strike the rock with, you know, miraculous, strike the rock and water will come out of it.

Well, then Moses was like, oh, that's how we get water when the people. And so in anger, and you're like, well, Moses was angry. And I'm like, yeah, but the people pushed him to it. Like they were a difficult people. And so in anger, he strikes the rock and water comes out. And God says to him, you shouldn't have done that. And because of that, you're not going to enter my promised land. And so this book of Deuteronomy is sort of Moses' swan song. It's his last bit of work before he dies. And so he speaks honestly and forthrightly and directly to the people regarding their sins and sets all of the law of God in the context of their sins. Do you remember where we've been and what we've done these last 40 years? And if you think about the people who are standing there, that congregation would have been a strange congregation to have been in. Every woman there, every woman there would have been a widow.

That was not young. And by young, I mean like 20. It would have been a widow. Every young person there, their fathers were dead. There were no old men. There were no old men. And there weren't no old men because the old men didn't like this. There were no old men because part of the consequence of their rebellion 40 years prior was that they would all be wiped out because of their unbelief. And so these people have come back. to the place where they behaved in such a way that all of their fathers and all of their husbands and all of their uncles and grandfathers were told, you will not make it back here. And then they spent 40 years all dying. It would have been a sad time. It would have been like going back to the scene of the crime where a great murder had happened. And in that context, Moses says, do you remember? Do you remember these places and these things? We're going to spend time talking about it as we work our way through these.

through these first few chapters of Deuteronomy, the only gray hairs among them were Moses, Caleb, and Joshua. They're the only ones left. Here's a question. Did Moses love the people he was talking to? Yes. He loved them. He found himself among them. He didn't see himself as being the one who was to minister to them and to sit above them and to teach them. He lived among them. laughed with them and cried with them and lost with them and won with them. He was one of them. He loved them. They were his people. And so as Moses says these hard things to them, as he recounts all of their sins, we need to keep in mind that it can often be love that causes us to do these sorts of things, to inflict these sorts of wounds. But it's not only Moses' love for them, it's God's love for them. We'll get into this a little bit more. I want to read to you the text again. It's short.

With some of this backdrop that I've given to you. And I want you to hear, there's something very sharp that Moses says in this. By way of rebuke. Just in these first verses. Listen and see if you can find it before I tell you. These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel across the Jordan and the wilderness. And the Arab opposite Suph between Piran and Tophel and Laban and Hazeroth and Dizahab. It is 11 days journey from Horeb by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. In the 40th year, on the first day of the 11th month, Moses spoke to the children of Israel according to all that the Lord had commanded to him to give to him. Did you hear it? Huh? Yeah. In effect, if we could put this, if we were to describe what does this passage contain by way of information, it contains a speaker and an audience, Moses, all Israel. It records their location. They're in the Araba, in the desert, near the wilderness, wilderness, desert, river.

They're in the wilderness, or they're on the edge of the wilderness. They're gathered together. And he says, this place is 11 days journey from Mount Horeb, which they all would have known as being the place where the law was first given. It's 11 days away. You remember the route by Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. That's where we're at. This is the region. It's what it's called. 11 days away. And then he gives the date of his proclamation. He says, this is when I'm saying these things to you. I'm saying it to you in the 40th year on the first day of the 11th month. So we have people, we have location, we have time. Two times, actually. A comparison of time, if you will. On the one hand, 11 days. On the other hand, 40 years. What exactly is Moses saying to them? What he's saying to them, if we were going to restate it in our own words, is this. We stood here in this place 40 years ago.

revealed himself to us in his law. Eleven days it took us to get here. We were prepared to go into that land over there across the river, a land flowing with milk and honey, a land full of rebels and unbelievers. But we didn't go into that land. Rather, we spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness, losing all of our men, our fathers and our elders, because we wouldn't listen to the things that God had told us just 11 days previous. Are you ready to listen now as we go in, as you go in? Because I can't. And the reason I can't is because of you. Now, he doesn't say that in this text, but in the verses and chapters that come, he says exactly that. Can you feel the rebuke? Can you feel the weight and the shame that he's speaking to them about their sins? It's not the kind of thing you would be happy to hear. We should have been doing what we're doing now 40 years ago.

And we should have been doing it with our fathers and our grandfathers, with our husbands and our brothers. Can you feel it? It's not the kind of feeling we like to have, is it? Because if you're listening to them and you've grown up, these young men and their wives and their mothers, they've grown up wandering in the wilderness, having known nothing but the struggles of this, and being told, this is why we're wandering around the wilderness. We went. To this place. And we sent spies in. This is what we'll get into the first telling of it is Moses saying, well, we went there and you came to me and said, let's send spies in there. We sent spies. They came back. The report was, it's a wonderful place, but there's people we can't defeat in there. And God got angry, said, fine, 40 years. And they said, no, no, no, we'll go up. And then they all died. This is the first wave of death. And for 40 years, we've wandered around. We've had troubles. We've gotten into wars. As our men are dying, we've gotten into wars.

Most recently, Og and Sihon, these kings that they've just defeated. Life's been hard. It's been miserable. We've been without food. We've been without water. All because of our faithlessness and our unwillingness to trust God. Even though, at that time, it was recent memory that God had delivered us, not from these people, but from the Egyptians. You wouldn't want to pick your head up and make eye contact with anybody in that congregation. You'd feel shamed and guilty. maybe you're inclined to think that Moses, in the way that he spoke to the people, was inappropriate. The things he's saying or the things I'm arguing to do are wrong. That Moses shouldn't have spoken this way. That he was out of line. Did you read the end of the passage? Flip to the next screen, Canaan. What's that say? You missed that. The verse before you didn't see. According to all that the Lord commanded him to give to them.

It was God's will for them to have these things said to them. It wasn't Moses being a jerk or ungracious or overly burdensome or angry with them. Moses was a mouthpiece of God saying to the people of God the exact things that God wanted said to them. So do we have a category in our minds for this sort of interaction in our lives? That's the question before us. That we're left pondering, can anybody speak to me about my sins without me bristling and getting angry about it? I think part of the reason we bristle and get angry about it is because we think the only reason anyone would do that would be to manipulate us, to grind us in the ground, that it would simply be an expression of their anger or frustration with us. And I'm here to tell you, that's not what Moses is doing or what God's intention in telling him to do. It was. It wasn't, I hate these people.

why don't you make them feel really bad for all the stuff they've done? You do realize they're about to go into the promised land. They're about to receive the biggest blessing that they could imagine straight from the hand of God. They are being put in remembrance of their sins as a matter of training and preparation so that they don't stay in the cycle in this new place that they've been in in the wilderness. So is it loving to say to someone, I don't want you to continue in the sins that you've been in bondage to for so long. I want you to be free from them. As you receive this kindness from me, I want you to be free from them. And the way for you to be free from them is first for you to remember how it all happens. I've said to you guys before, when it comes to falling into sin, one of the things you'll say is, I never meant to get where I'm at. Wherever you're at now, you're like, I didn't mean for it to turn out like this. And I believe you.

You didn't mean, none of us mean to destroy our lives or the lives of people around us. We don't mean to ruin things. But part of the reason we do ruin things is because we're not put in remembrance of how those things happen and how they've happened to us in the past. What lies are we susceptible to? What temptations are particular to us? How do I get off the straight and narrow path? How do I? Fall into sins. The sins that I struggle with. Not the sins you struggle with. What's the path for me? I need to remember those things. And every time I rub up against the law of God, reading and studying and praying, I should be being put in remembrance of those things. But if you don't have the law of God, if you do your best to not rub up against it, then you really will have no idea why and how these things have come to be.

I don't know what happened to my marriage. It started out well. We loved each other. We loved the Lord. And it's just by, you know, step by step, by year, by... We've come to this place. We hate each other. We want a divorce. How does that happen? Does anyone know? If anyone knows, will they say? This is how that happens. This is how it's happened for you. These are the dangers for you. And you need to be forever remembering your own weaknesses so that you don't end up divorced. And that's just as an example. You see, we have to remember these things. And I don't mean that we have to remember our sins so that we can feel guilty about them again. And I don't mean that we have to remember our sins so that we can punish ourselves with them. I mean simply that you have to remember the past so that you don't repeat it. And so it should be our habit as Christians to both believe in the forgiveness of sins and to cling to the cross of Jesus Christ.

where he bled and died for our sins, and to remember who drove the nails and how we did it. That's how Christians ought to live. That's how we ought to live. There ought to be an ever-present pulse of humility for our own sins, some knowledge. And if someone opens the door up to that room in our hearts, you say, yes, there's the knowledge of who I am. There it is. These are the kind of things I've done. These are the kind of things I'm inclined to. These are the kind of things that I struggle with. These are the ways I've fallen into it in the past.

And Lord, help me not to fall into them again. The way that Lord will help you not to fall into them again is to put you in regular remembrance of them. That's humility. And that's the order of the day and what we need. We need to be humble. We need to remember our shortcomings. Because in remembering your shortcomings and remembering the ways in which you have fallen short, I want you to get this and understand it. It's not God's intention to leave you there. This is at the beginning of the book of Deuteronomy, not the end. He's saying these things to them as they go in to receive the blessing. We are to remember the things of the past as we receive the mercy and the grace of God. It's really incredible if you think about the kinds of sins that the Israelites committed leading up to and while they were in the wilderness. At some point, you would just think that God would be done with them. Or at least that Moses would be done with them. That Moses would say, I don't like my job. I don't like my people.

And yet for all the sins they committed and all the struggles that they had and how repetitive they were at and how hard-hearted they were and how blasphemous they were and how wicked they were in attacking Moses, God was merciful to them for all of their sins and was still standing ready just after this to give them this land. And that land that they're promised, a physical land, is representative of glory and heaven and what's stored up for everyone who calls on the name of Jesus Christ. Sinful as they may be, wicked as they are, you resemble the Jews at this point, the Hebrews, the Israelites. We have to get out of our minds that if we make light of our sin ourselves, somehow it will bolster our case before God. Like, I don't know that any of you would want to say, you want to run around with these guys for 40 years? You want these to be your people? I don't think any of us would say, yep, those are the people I want to run around with.

Go through the churches in the New Testament that Paul planted and that Paul written. You want to be a Corinthian? You want to go move to Corinth? A lot of industry there. You can make a good living. You want to go to Corinth and be part of that church? You see, we just have this thing in us that says sin's not real. And when it is real, it's to be gotten past as quickly as possible. And we're to learn as little as we can from it. And that's to our harm. And so there's a time in our lives, and there are particular times in our life, where we need to be reminded.

of our sins and our failures. And there are times when our consciences are afflicted where it's not a set of circumstances or someone else, but it's simply the Holy Spirit working through our conscience where he calls to mind our sins and failures, where we not work immediately to distract ourselves from it, but rather that we sit and say, why is the Lord recalling this to my mind? And what is it that I'm to learn from it or remember from it? Because the temptations still reside in me. This is the life of a Christian. This is the life of those who are about to enter the land and to receive the blessing of God. And so our part in it, our desire in it, should simply be to be prepared as well as we can to receive God's blessings that he's promised to us in Christ Jesus. Not to be found out wandering when our Lord comes, but to be prepared and ready to see him and ready to receive him with a shout of joy, seeking to bring our treasures and our trophies to him for reward, our obedience, our faith.

This is the life of a Christian. It's a peaceful life. It's much more peaceful than wandering in the wilderness. And so as we study the book of Deuteronomy, these are the things we're going to be looking at. The law of God is not simply a checklist. Do this and don't do that, and if you do, it'll go poorly, and if you don't, then that's just what you were supposed to do anyway. My goal in preaching through Deuteronomy and for us to study it is not simply to manipulate you, to grind you into the ground, to not ever talk to you about forgiveness or mercy or grace.

but to show you the context in which and the sins that exist and that you commit that God sent his son to pay for. And so you ought to be excited to study the book of Deuteronomy. It's not always going to be fun. It's not always going to be exciting. But it's going to be helpful in getting to see ourselves because it will largely be God showing us, look at my character, and then holding up a mirror for us and saying, do you look like me? you should look like me you have my image in you let's pray