You Came Near And Stood At The Foot Of The Mountain

So this morning, we're going to be continuing in Deuteronomy chapter 4. In this text, Moses recounts the people of God coming up to the mountain, Mount Horeb or Mount Sinai, to receive the law. If you were here last week, you'll remember that the theme of last week's sermon was the fear of the Lord, that that was what the people were being brought for and that was what they needed to learn. And that theme continues this week as Moses teaches them that this is the primary lesson that they're supposed to learn coming up to the mountain. To receive the law. They're supposed to learn to fear the Lord. Proverbs 1.8 tells us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. And Proverbs 8.13 tells us that the fear of the Lord is to hate evil. These are the things that they were to learn as they came up to the mountain. They couldn't have wisdom without the fear of the Lord. They couldn't hate evil without the fear of the Lord. They wouldn't know what evil was without the fear of the Lord and without the giving of his law.

And so the fear of the Lord is the key to understanding and to obeying God. And this is the missing element in the American church today and among American Christians today. We don't fear the Lord as we should. We didn't stand at the foot of Mount Horeb. If we had, we would fear. Or we would have feared then at least as they did. Instead, we tend to ignore, to deny the present manifestations of God's power. That's what was on display on that mountain was God's power, his ability to destroy and to consume. And as we see those things going on around us, we either ignore them or we don't attribute them to God and take heed and warning from them as we should. And so my goal this morning, the goal of this sermon is to impress upon us the necessity of fearing God, but also to convince us that the fear of the Lord doesn't lead to us fleeing from him. That's the natural trajectory of things is that we get away from things we fear. We want to be away from them. But those who fear the Lord don't flee from him.

but draw near to him. As a scared child, when he's afraid, flees to his parents. After your child has sat on your lap and been spanked and disciplined and they were afraid of it, what is it that they do after the fact? What should they do? They should snuggle into you, put their head on your shoulder and cry while you rub their back and you comfort them and you instruct them. So fear and love are joined together. Fear and drawing near. Joins together. That's what I hope we see this morning. I hope that God will help us to fear him. And to draw near to him. Especially when we see our sins in light of his perfect holiness. Which was on display at this mountain. Would you please stand now as we read the word of the Lord. From Deuteronomy chapter 4 verses 10 to 14. Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb. When the Lord said to me, assemble the people to me. That I may let them hear my words so that they may learn to fear me.

all the days they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children. You came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, and the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens, darkness, cloud, and thick gloom. Then the Lord spoke to you from the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but you saw no form, only a voice. So he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone. The Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments that you might perform them in the land where you are going over to possess it. This is the word of the Lord. You may be seated. As I said in my introduction, the goal of them getting together at this mountain, when they left Egypt, they said, we need to go out and we need to offer sacrifices to our God. But here the Lord, or Moses, tells us that the reason the Lord was assembling them there was to teach them the fear of the Lord.

The goal simply wasn't to communicate information. They weren't just coming to get an information dump, a data dump of what the law was to be. That wasn't actually the primary goal. The goal wasn't to outline the details of the covenant that they were entering into, though that did happen as well. The goal of them coming to the mountain and into the presence of God was to instill an abiding fear in the hearts of the people. As the passage says, All the days that they live on the earth. Something was supposed to happen at that mountain that was so memorable that they would remember it until they died. That it would become their true north. It would become the thing that they took all of their other directions off of. It was what they were to orient towards, the fear of the Lord. Do you have any memories from your past that strike fear into your heart? Maybe from when you were a kid. Maybe from when you were an adult.

You still get nervous and maybe break out in a sweat or your heart starts to race just when you think about it. However many years or decades ago it was, there's terror and it's in you. That was the goal at the mountain, to put a fear into the people, a fear unto death. Am I the only one who hears this sort of like tinny feedback? Is it just me who hears it? I know you don't hear well, but it's driving me nuts. Am I the only one who hears it? Do I just have to bear with it? No, they hear it. We have two people and now three working on it.

We're working on it. I'll keep talking. Okay. The goal of them coming to the mountain was to place in them a fear, a fear of their own death, their own mortality, a fear that they would never forget. Did it work? Depends on how long you want it to work. Did it work in the moment? Yes. Did it work for the rest of their lives? No. What did the people say to Moses after they saw the smoke and the earthquakes and the blasts of the trumpet and the fire? And they heard God's law. What they did was they begged Moses to never let the Lord speak to them again, but for Moses to stand in his place and to speak on the Lord's behalf. In Exodus 20, 19, they say, speak to us yourself and we will listen, but let not God speak to us or we will die. What was it they were afraid of? It was a lot of things they were afraid of. They were afraid of an earthquake in the same way we would be afraid of an earthquake. You ever had the ground shake while you're on it? I remember

In Bloomington, there was this little, little tiny earthquake one time, like tremor. And it woke both Vanessa and I up. We were living there. And what woke us up was the stuff on our dresser was rattling. And we're on the second story and the whole house is rattling. And it was only for a few seconds. It was enough to wake us up. And we were all the way awake. And it was memorable. And you just think, this is a building. It's not supposed to shake. And it was shaking. That's enough to scare us. Thick smoke. blasts of trumpets, the sound of war, God speaking himself to you, how could you forget it? How could you bear it? Would you want to stand there in that time? I think many times we say, well, what I want to do is draw near to God. I want to draw near to God. I want to be close to God. I want God to be near to me. But when we read passages like this, do you ever wonder if you'd actually want to be close to God, like in his presence? It's a hard question because sometimes we're like, well, yes, I want to be close to God. And on the other hand, it's like,

That God? No, no. And depending on your temperament or the sins you've been involved in or how you've grown up, you may have a conception of God as being not fearful, or you may have a conception of God that he's always fearful. In this instance, the goal was to teach them to fear the Lord, and they got the message. They didn't want to be near him anymore. They understood his holiness. They understood his perfection and they said, I don't want to be here. It's not good or safe for me to be here. The problem they had is the same problem that we have. The problem is that our fears fade. They did fear God in that moment, but they didn't stay or abide in that fear. And so they, like we, need constant reminders of what God has done and what God has said. And so one of the things we should learn to do as Christians is to interpret what goes on around us in society or in the world as coming to us from the hand of God. There are things that are scary that happen, and we should say, God did that. Why don't we say God did that when hard things happen, when fearful things happen? Why don't we have acts of God anymore? Why do we have natural disasters? Because we don't want to fear God. We've been taught that that's an inappropriate

response to God. It's been scrubbed from our understanding. We're told that it's sinful and wrong for us to have any fear of God. And yet in this passage, the Lord wants them to learn the fear of the Lord. And not only themselves, he wants them to do what? To teach it to their children. Teach your children to fear me, says the Lord. When our lives end as parents, the fear of the Lord should continue on in our children. This is the primary lesson you as parents have to teach your children. You have to teach them to fear God. And you can't teach them to fear God if you don't fear God. This is a lesson that children ought to learn early, and it's a lesson that they will learn as they learn to fear their fathers in their homes. Now, is it good parenting advice, as far as the society is concerned, to say that it's good for children to fear their parents, and particularly their fathers? If a father,

child was afraid of him, how might his manhood be described as being toxic? Bad. This is toxic masculinity. It's not so. We live in a time where many of us didn't have fathers who taught us to fear them if we had fathers at all. Were you afraid of your dad when you were growing up? Some of you. I suppose if you had a dad, there was at least some point at which you were like, don't mess with him. Some of you might have feared your mother. It may have been your mom that was the one you better not cross. But typically in a home, there's a parent that you're like, don't mess with them. They're not the ones to be trifled with. We'll go to the other one. Here's the problem, though, with this. This is where it falls short, is when we feared our parents, the thing that we lost was that they loved us. Somehow those things are separated. If I asked you a question with a little more detail,

Were you convinced of your father's love for you as you were afraid of him? Like, well, no, not in the moment. Maybe not at all. Maybe I realized later, years, decades later, that my dad did love me. But all I learned when I was a kid was to fear him. And so the two things have been separated. We either fear or we love. And we've been taught that the thing you can't both fear and love. What I described at the beginning of my sermon with a child who's been disciplined, the idea that a child who's just been disciplined and who is just scared of being disciplined, okay? If you've got little kids, they should have some like, I don't want that. Not some whimpering, whining, like, please don't do that. I won't do it again. But I mean just a plain old fear of it. Just that this isn't good for me. I'm scared of this. And then they have to learn not to go run and hide, but to come. And they come.

And they get their disciplines, and then they get their love. And it's been love through the whole thing. Love when they were called, love when they were disciplined, love when they were reconciled. It's the sweetest thing you'll have as a parent. When your kids figure out that it's not love or fear, it's not anger or kindness, it's that you discipline them because you love them. When they get that figured out, you will have taught them something invaluable in their relationship toward the Lord. And if you don't teach them that, you've paralyzed them when it comes to them coming to the Lord. They won't know how to process who God is. They won't know how to read this passage and say that God loves his people. He knows what's good for them. And he knows that the best way to protect them and the best way to keep them safe is to teach them to fear him because them fearing him will lead to them obeying him. And he will keep them out of harm and danger.

But if they don't fear him and they do what they want to do, there's nothing but destruction and pain and misery for them. Proverbs 13.24 says, He who withholds his rod hates his son, but he who loves him disciplines him diligently. We have to put back together the fear of the Lord and the love of God. So when you discipline your kids and you want to teach them to fear you, do not withhold your heart from them or your love for them as you do it. Okay? Don't think that you have to empty yourself of emotion to discipline them, to explain to them the goings-on and why they're being disciplined. What was the goal of the mountain? To teach them fear. Remember I said earlier, it wasn't just a data dump. It was an interaction between people so that they could see their sinfulness and God so they could see his holiness. And it was meant to teach them and to imprint upon them the fear of the Lord.

they forgot and it cost them dearly for generations and generations and generations. Can we learn from them and make it our goal not to do the same things they did expecting a different outcome? We need to fear the Lord. The passage goes on and says, you came near and you stood at the foot of the mountain and the mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens. Can you even conceive of what that means or what it would have looked like? The best I can come up with is standing at the foot of a volcano that's erupting and having to stay there with loud trumpets and with a voice on top of it. The mountain burned with fire to the very heart of the heavens, darkness, cloud, and thick gloom. And God spoke out of that fire, using the fire and the darkness, the cloud and the gloom, to reinforce the authority, his authority, and the importance of his law. In the New Testament,

There are a lot of miracles that we read about, healings. They were blind. They were deaf. They were lame. In some cases, they were dead. They were demon-possessed. And all of this healing is going on. All of this restoration is going on. And we're left being like, well, why did all of that happen? And why doesn't that happen anymore? The reason those miracles happened in Jesus' time in the New Testament, in the very early church, was to reinforce the authority of what was being said. The people were to look at those things and they say, listen, only God can do this. Only he can make a blind man see or a dead man alive or a lame man walk. Only God can do these things. So the things that they're saying to us must come from God. This is what the people were supposed to learn. We have a similar thing going on here. There's a word being spoken, a law being given, and the elements.

The fire and the darkness and the cloud and the gloom were meant to reinforce the authority and the importance of the law that was being given. God used those miraculous events to get their attention and to impress upon them that this is what he had to say. They were to fear, but they were also to believe, to take seriously what was being said. You might look at this and think, well, how could that not happen? And I would just say, If you're like, how could these people respond poorly to this? How could they not do exactly what was expected of them? Just go back and read in Exodus what happens. Like they're called up to the mountain. They're told to purify themselves. Will you be my people? I'll be your God. There's terms of the covenant given. They said, yes, surely we will. Moses goes away. And what is it that they do? Make themselves a golden calf. We're going to talk about the fact that God doesn't reveal himself as a...

with an image or a form or anything like that. It's actually in the next couple of verses, it comes back to it. So we're not going to focus on in our passage where it says that they had only a voice until next week. But they were not likely to listen in a serious way, in a life-changing way, in a way that says, I'm going to now conform to what I have heard. They heard what was said, but they didn't heed what was said. And that often is our problem. If someone asked us for factual information, we could offer it. But if they asked us, do you live according to that stuff you know? You'd be like, well, our options are to be like the rich young ruler who's like, well, I've kept all these things from the ground up. That's not true. The other option is to be like the publican at the temple who's beating his breast with his head down saying, have mercy on me, a sinner. Because we know that we haven't kept it the way that we should. We've done like the Israelites did. And we've seen far more.

than they have in terms of how God's revealed himself. It's very easy to pay lip service to the word of God and to obeying it. It's also very easy to dismiss our rebellion because of our circumstances or our ignorance or the pressures that we face. The intensity of the situation there at the mountain was meant to overcome their excuses. It was meant to convict them that God's word was supreme, that whatever else was going on in their lives or would go on in their lives, the fear of the Lord was to be at the top and to guide them. What sorts of things do we put in place of the word of God to direct us, to guide us, to instruct us, to lead us? It's a good question. What gets at us? What motivates us? What makes us want to get up and go do something? Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's an emotional experience or connection. Sometimes it's our feelings.

Sometimes we say, God told me to do this. Sometimes it's a commentator. It's someone we trust, whether that commentator is theological or political. They motivate us to do stuff, to think things need to be done. Certain podcasts, maybe certain pastors or famous Christians, maybe just the world. There's all kinds of things that supplant and replace the word of God that we say, okay, what is it I'm supposed to do today? Even if it's just our own desires. I'm trying to get you to see we all obey something. We're careful to obey it, and we're afraid of what will happen if we don't. Do you go with me that far? Do you agree? None of us are like, well, I'm above all of that. No, you're not. I'm not. None of these things, whatever it is that's gotten above God's word in our heart, his own speaking belongs there. There's some incredible stories in Scripture. I think one of the most incredible stories was when God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. It's just incredible. Who would do that? Why would God require him to do that? And if God required him to do it, then it's just a seamless transition from hearing to judging. Well, that's just not right, and I'm not going to do it. But that's not what Abraham did, is it? Abraham didn't argue. Abraham didn't fuss. Abraham didn't tell his wife. They left early in the morning. I suspect Sarah did not know what was going on.

And he took his son away to do what God said for him to do. Why? What was Abraham's priority? What would lead him to do that sort of thing? Not just like play at it or like point, well, yeah, we should do this. But I mean, literally get to the point where his son's like going, hey, we got the wood and we got the fire. And you know, where's the sacrifice? God's words to Abraham were the most important. There was no excuse. There was no explanation. for why he wouldn't do it, he was going to kill his son. As Christians, we believe in what's, in theological terms, is called the plenary verbal inspiration of Scripture. It's a big bunch of words. You may or may not know what they all mean. All plenary means is like all of it, the whole bunch of it. Verbal just means originally spoken. What we have in our Bibles are not the words that God spoke here at the mountain. They were in a different language.

For one, we believe that all of the words that God spoke came from him. And as such, they have supreme authority in our lives. This is something that if you deny this, you're just not a Christian, okay? It's that foundational to being a Christian. If God says it, then you believe that it has authority. And if you deny that, you've denied the faith. So here God has spoken, and it's to be above everything else in their lives. If God requires us to do something that's distasteful to us, no matter. Our job is to do what God said. Everything else has to get in line behind God's word. So once the people had gathered, the passage goes on and says that he, the Lord, declared his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is the Ten Commandments. And he wrote them on two tablets of stone. The Lord commanded me, this is Moses, at that time to teach you statutes and judgments that you might perform them in the land.

where you're going over to possess it. So God's declaration to the people of God came in the form of a covenant. What's a covenant? What's the catechism answer for what is a covenant? A covenant is, say it, it's a promise, a solemn bond between two or more persons, between God and man. It's this like unbreakable, unalterable, indelible agreement between two parties. It can't. It can't be broken. And so when God comes to them and says, I'll be your God if you'll be my people. I'm paraphrasing the covenant. If you went back and read it in Exodus, it's a little more nuanced than that. But that's the gist of it. I'll be your God. Will you be my people? And they say, yes, all that the Lord commands, we'll do. God declares his relationship to them by way of covenant. I will be your God. You will be my people. I will command you. You will obey me.

Now, one thing I want to say about covenants is that this is how God always deals with his people. He deals with us by way of covenants, okay? We are individuals and individually members of covenant obligations, but he deals with his people covenantally. He makes obligations to us, we make obligations to him. When we are baptized, we are entering into or demonstrating the terms of a covenant between God and us. We are saying, By this water, you are declaring that I am your child and I am declaring that I am your child and that I will do as you say. And we're committed to this until I die. These are the terms of the covenant. These people at that time were fearful because of what they had seen. God declares to them that he's their God, that they'll be his people, that they'll listen. What they needed was to be taught to fear.

I want to change into, go back to the idea of parents and their children, fathers and their children and fear. Is the fear of a child who's two the same as the fear of a child that's 20 with relation to their parent? Maybe another way of asking it is, what's a two-year-old afraid of with regard to his dad? Probably a spanking, right? Is a 20-year-old afraid of a spanking from his dad? Does a 20-year-old still fear his dad? But the fear changed, didn't it? Because the relationship changed. And what caused the relationship to change? The child grew up, right? No longer a two-year-old anymore. No longer wiping his nose and his bottom and saying it's bedtime and eat your peas and that type of thing. The same thing is true with the Israelites and with this covenant. This covenant was given to them. This event happened at a particular time in history. And if we were to describe the people of God or the church of God, the people of Israel, they were in their infancy.

Very young. They hadn't even gone into their land yet. There was no government set up. They were just receiving what the laws should be when they go in and complete the conquest of Canaan. They were in their infancy. How did things change between, say, this time and when Jesus came? Well, a lot changed. For one, the nation grew and expanded and had a government and had all kinds of... The captivities and deliverances and judges and kings and all of these different things happened. They matured and they grew into a nation, right? They built a temple. They worshiped at it. They were taken away and it was destroyed. They came back and they rebuilt it. There's a lot that's gone on. In Hebrews 12, it refers back to this time when they came to the mountain Horeb, to Mount Horeb. And it says, basically, I'm going to read you the passage and we'll talk about it a little bit. He says, this is something that happened a long time ago, but things have changed and things have matured and things have grown now. What you're to learn and who you are is to be like the 20-year-old sphere of the Lord, not like the two-year-old sphere of the Lord, okay? This is what Hebrews chapter 12 says regarding this mountain when they came. He says, for you have not come to a mountain that can be touched and to a blazing fire, remember, fire to the center of heaven, and to darkness and gloom and whirlwind, and to the blast of the trumpet and the sound of words.

which sound was such that you who heard it begged that no further would be spoken to them. So this is Hebrews' description of Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, this thing that we're reading about in Deuteronomy chapter 4. He says, you're not come to that mountain, for they, the Israelites at that time, as he was referring to, for they could not bear the command, if even a beast touches the mountain, it will be stoned. And so terrible was the sight that Moses said, I am full of fear and trembling. But you have come to Mount Zion. So now we had the old mountain. Now we've got the new mountain. We've got Mount Sinai. We've got described here Mount Zion. But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to myriads of angels, to the general assembly and church of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant.

and to the sprinkled blood, which speaks better than the blood of Abel. So what the author of Hebrews is doing here, and the reason we're talking about Hebrews is it would be foolish for us to come to the 20-year-old and say, you should fear spanking, like they're two. The church is not two anymore, okay? The church is still the bride of Christ. We are still collectively the children of God, but we're not in the same season. And it would be foolish for us to go back and try to act like it is. Things have changed. What has changed? Well, what we're approaching, what mountain we're approaching has changed, and what's gone on there has changed. What were the people to learn at the mountain, Mount Horeb? They learned fear. What are you to learn at the foot of Mount Zion, which is, from our perspective, still in the past, a closer past than Mount Horeb? What were they to learn when they came to Mount Zion, to this heavenly city, to this

assembly. What were they to learn when they came to Jesus, the mediator of the new covenant? What were they to learn when they came to the sprinkled blood, which was better than the blood of Abel? Were there new lessons, more mature lessons, better lessons for them to learn? Yes. We have to remember that what happened when they were young was preparing them and training them for what was to come in the future. A lot of the reason that Jesus And believing the gospel and being a Christian is something that people are content to claim and to set aside without any real concern or care or gravity is because they never started at Mount Horeb. They just see the good stuff, the blessing, the kindness and the grace of the gospel, but have never been taught or understood the cost of the gospel. What were the people supposed to be afraid of at Mount Horeb? They're supposed to be afraid of the Lord.

What was supposed to communicate that fear to them? Well, his holiness and his power and their sinfulness. Like the disparity between the two. They were supposed to be scared because they realized he could kill us. And he would be right to kill us. We need a savior. We need a savior. And he's promised us one. In the law, this lesson of needing salvation, this lesson of... death, this blessing of payment and blood and all the sacrifices were meant to point towards the Savior who was to come. We were driving to church today, and one of the kids asked, essentially, how did the people before Jesus came, how were they saved? Like, he hadn't come and died yet. How were they saved from their sins? And I said, they looked forward in faith. They looked to God's covenant or to his promise.

And they said, God said something, and because he said it, it's so sure that they looked forward to it and hoped that it would happen and were saved by faith in something that had not yet taken place yet. Those were the terms of the covenant. A lot of that was hidden at Mount Horeb. The people couldn't understand it. If you went to your two-year-old and tried to explain to them how to drive a car, they just couldn't comprehend it yet, right? But they could comprehend that cars get you places and that cars can be dangerous and cars can be helpful and you need to maintain cars. They can learn as they grow up lots of things about cars. But ultimately, someday, the goal is that they're going to drive a car. The same sort of maturation is going on here between Mount Horeb and Mount Zion. The people of God and God's revelation of himself and his plan and the salvation that was accomplished by Jesus was hidden at Mount Horeb, was on display at Mount Zion.

So we don't come to God now as little children who are afraid of spankings, but we come to them having been little children who at one time were aware of our need of discipline and of God's gracious provision to keep us from receiving what we deserve, pay for our own sins. And so we have to learn two things here. You remember at the beginning of the sermon, I said that love and fear go together. They're not divorced from each other. It's not either or. At Mount Horeb, fear was the thing that was primary and it was on display. But I asked you, I said, when dads discipline their kids, do they withdraw their love as they discipline them, as they teach them to fear? No. But the fear wasn't apparent to the child then. But now at Mount Zion, the love of God, the fulfillment of what was being presented in seed form at Mount Horeb has now grown and blossomed and borne its fruit. So as we come to Mount Zion, which...

Could refer to a number of things, a real mountain to Jerusalem, to the cross. What we're really coming to is God's fulfillment of our salvation. So when we fear, it's important that we not run away, but that we draw near. Because the one who disciplines us, the one who spanks us, the one who withholds from us, is the one who saves us. And saves us by sending us his own son, who's the mediator of a new covenant. and a better covenant. Mount Horeb is supposed to teach us that we need Mount Zion. The law is supposed to teach us that we need Jesus. That's the point of this text. The goal is not to return to a slavish, childish fear. If an adult child was still scared of being taken over their dad's knee, he'd realize something was wrong. But he would fear displeasing his father, whom he's grown to see loves him dearly.

even as he still disciplines him and even as he still instructs him. And so our fear matures to the point that we recognize the love of our father for us in the face of the hardships that we endure. And this is where we have to get to as Christians. Because if we don't get to this point in our lives where when hardships come to us, we can say, I serve a God who's loved me and sent his son for me and who disciplines me for my good. And I don't always understand it, but I do believe it. We're always going to be susceptible to questioning God and to disobeying him. Until we've settled in our hearts and in our minds that God is for us and good to us and hasn't withheld anything from us because he's given us his son, we just live in this sort of fear that causes us to flee instead of causes us to draw near.

And so there really is a shift that has to go on in our hearts and our minds where when hard things come, difficult things come, where desires are left unmet, where we say, you know what? If God can save me from my sins, then he can bear me through these things. No question. No question. And so if my marriage is tough, God is faithful. If my kids are disobedient, God is faithful. If I'm single and want to be married, God is faithful. If my parents are sick, God is faithful. What can separate you from the love of God? What does Paul say in Romans? In a big long list, it amounts to him saying there is nothing anywhere, even outside of this world, that can separate you from the love of God in Jesus Christ. We have to get that message. We're not standing at Mount Horeb anymore like little kids. We're standing at the cross, looking at our Savior, who's died to pay for our sins and who's been raised from the dead and who's ascended into heaven.

to prepare a place for us so that we can go be with him. That's our hope. That's our hope. And if we take hold of that hope, then the things that go on in our lives here and in the future will find their place behind it. They need to find their place behind it. We need to relegate them to their place far behind it. This is very simple. It's a simple message. It's a simple gospel. But it's something that we never outgrow. And however theological you get or however reformed you get or however old you get or however mature you become, this is it. If God would send his son to save me from my sins, then he can do whatever else in the world he wants to with me. Because at the end, he's going to receive me into his presence and into his rest. He promised us that that's what he would do. It gives a completely different...

backdrop to Moses saying, the Lord commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and judgments. It sounds so cold and so sterile and so unappealing and bland until you realize what God's put into this. He's not simply extracting obedience from us, delighting in our hardships. He's come and spoken to them at that time, teaching them what was good. so that they would be safe and so they would be prepared to enter into his presence finally and fully. And the same is true of us today. We should seek to do what God commands of us and requires of us, not simply because he's owed our obedience. It's true that he has owed our obedience. And if that were all that was going on, was simply that God said so, we would still be under obligation to do it.

But we need to consider what God's end of the bargain is. The covenant is not simply do what I said. Terms of the covenant are, I'll give my son for you to save you from your sins. Sins you could never pay for. Now do what I say. This has to be our goal as Christians. Whatever the world has to say about it, whatever your flesh has to say about it, whatever Satan whispers in your ear about it, this is what it means to be a Christian. It's to take God at his word. and to take God and his son to love him and to obey him. Let's pray.