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Hold Fast to the Lord
Hold Fast to the Lord Deuteronomy 13:1-18 Key verse: 13:4 “It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.” God wants His people to obey His commands and decrees as a lifelong commitment. As we know, this is not an easy thing to do. According to Deuteronomy 6:5, this requires that we love the Lord our God with all of our heart, with all of our soul and with all of our strength all of the time. Someone might ask, where do we start? Last week we studied in chapter 12 that God instructed the Israelites to start by completely destroying all the places where the Canaanites worshipped their gods, and Moses continues this theme into today’s passage. In it, Moses instructs the Israelites to beware of three types of people who might lead the Israelites into idol worship: 1) a false prophet who claims to able to predict the future, 2) a close family member or friend who secretly tries to entice them into worshipping other God’s, or 3) false religious teachers (wicked men) in one of the Canaanite towns who lead the whole town astray. If we look carefully at chapters 12 and 13, and think about the questions raised about where we should start, I think the answer is clear – we should start at the beginning of God’s 10 Commandments. So, before we get into chapter 13, I want to take a few minutes to review the preamble (an introduction statement) for God’s 10 commandments and God’s first commandment for his people. Look Deuteronomy 5:6-7. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. “You shall have no other gods before me.” These verses are really the key, not just for today’s passage but for our Christian life as well. They are the only firm foundation we can build our faith upon, so it is good to review them for a few minutes. First, who is God? (1,9b-10). Verse 1 is sort of a preamble and it gives us a very short statement about who God is. It says simply, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” This verse says nothing about what God looks like, what his characteristics are, what His name is or why He did what He did. It doesn’t seem to tell us very much at all. However, it tells us all the Israelites needed to know about God. They had been suffering as slaves in Egyptian for the past 400 years and they had no hope of every escaping that slavery on their own. It took the acts of an all-powerful God to free them from slavery. They witnessed these acts, but they never saw God and they never even heard His voice until He spoke these words to them at Mt. Sinai. They simply saw what He had done. They could not see this God with their eyes, and they could not fully understand Him with their minds, but they could see the mighty works He had done to get them to where they were. It was this God, the God who rescued them from their bondage of slavery that they must hold fast to. The same is true for us today. All our lives we have been suffering under the slavery of sin. There was nothing we could do humanly to free ourselves from that slavery. But God has freed us from it Himself. Like the Israelites, we couldn’t see Him as He did this work, but we can see the results in our lives. It is this God who saves that wee too must hold fast to. In order to understand and accept today’s passage, I think it is also important understand one of God’s characteristics. To see this, we must jump down to verses 9b. “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God,” The first characteristic of God that we see is that God is a jealous God. How can we say that the God of all the universe is jealous? Isn’t that a little petty? It might be if you think about jealousy from a purely human point of view. Our jealousy is based upon our emotions which are as changeable as the surface of the sea. God’s jealousy is not like this. His jealousy is based on truth. The truth is He created us and He has given us everything we have. He created us to glorify Himself. But, the most amazing thing is He desires to share fellowship with us. We can see this from the very beginning of the Bible when we see God walking in the Garden in the cool of the day looking for the man. The culmination of this can be seen in the Gospel in which God sends His One and Only Son to pay off the price of our sins and restore us to have a right relationship with Him so that we can be His children and He can live in us. God has every right to be jealous if we give our heart to something else instead of Him. God also created that other thing that we give our hearts to, but He did not create that thing to take His place in our heart. God’s jealousy is not based on emotion at all. it is based on His truth; how He created us and what he created us for. Now let’s briefly look at the first commandment that God gave His people. The command in verse 7 deals directly with today’s passage. The first command God gave His people was that they should have no other gods before Him. This should not have to be said, because there is no other god than the God of the Bible – the God who gave us these commands – and yet sinful human beings are constantly trying to put other things in God’s place. If God is not in God’s proper place in our hearts, the rest of the commandments and the Bible in general are meaningless. It is a very serious matter if someone tries to lead us into putting something or someone else in God’s place in our hearts. God must always come first in our hearts – this means He must even come before family and friends as we will see. Now we are ready to look at Chapter 13. First, beware of the false prophet (1-5). The first type of person that Moses warned the Israelites to watch out for was the false prophet. Look at verses 1 and 2. “If a prophet, or one who foretells by dreams, appears among you and announces to you a sign or wonder, and if the sign or wonder spoken of takes place, and the prophet says, “Let us follow other gods” (gods you have not known) “and let us worship them…” It is important to note here that a prophet, or one who foretells the future by dreams are not necessarily bad people. The Old Testament is full of the works of prophets who spoke to the people on God’s behalf, but their job was to turn the hearts of the people back to the Lord their God, whom they had turned away from. There are also two very good examples of people who foretold the future based on the Dreams of others: Joseph son of Jacob who foretold what Pharaoh’s dream meant, and Daniel, the Israelite captive in Babylon, who foretold what Nebuchadnezzar’s dream meant. Having special gifts from God is not the problem. The problem is what a person does with those special gifts. The prophet Moses warns the people about is a person who sees that a miraculous sign or wonder is about to take place, but how he/she came about that knowledge is a problem. According to what that person tells the Israelites to do after the events takes place, that prophet or fortune-teller was praying to something other than God. That person believed they received the information from whoever or whatever it was that they were praying to, so they tell the Israelites that they should follow that god. It might seem logical to follow this person because what they said had come true, so why not follow the god that they claimed gave them the information. The answer is quite simple and the key to this answer can be found in verse 3. “you must not listen to the words of that prophet or dreamer. The Lord your God is testing you to find out whether you love him with all your heart and with all your soul.” This verse says that it is not the prophet’s false god that provided the information, it was God, Himself, who enabled the false prophet to get the information. The false prophet may have been full of the spirit of some powerful demon that had convinced that person that they were a real god. It is also possible that that demon may had have some access to God’s plans that humans just don’t have and it provided the false prophet with that information. I don’t have any idea how that false prophet actually got the information, but what I do know is that God is alone the Sovereign ruler of the universe. He alone, sees the end from the beginning. Only he can truly predict the future because the past, present and future are all in His hands. Moses, knew this, so he told the Israelites that this was God testing them to see whether the people loved God with all of their heart and soul. Moses told the people, “It is the Lord your God you must follow, and him you must revere. Keep his commands and obey him; serve him and hold fast to him.” The real question was, did the Israelites believe that there really is only one true God who is absolutely sovereign – who is in complete control of everything that happens in the universe? It was this sovereign God who had rescued them from slavery in Egypt and led them to the borders of the Promised Land. No other god, or anything else could have done this for them. This is the God they must follow and revere alone, keeping and obeying his commands. Moses ends by saying they must serve God and “Hold fast to Him.” The Israelites needed to remember what God had done for them and simply hold fast to Him. Chapter 11 taught us that they could do this by fixing God’s words in their hearts and minds, and teaching to their children by talking about God’s words as they sat at home or walked along the road or when they laid down or got up. They could even posts God’s words on the door frames of their houses to remind them as they went in and out of their houses. This questions has not changed in the past 4000 years or so since Moses’ time. All that thime there have been false prophets trying to lead God’s people astray using this same technique. We must be on our guard against such people and defeat them by knowing in our hearts that only God is sovereign. Only God is in control of history and only God can save us from our own slavery to sin. This is the God of the Bible and we must hold fast to Him by studying His word, knowing who He is and remembering what He has already done for us. The way to hold fast to God is through diligent Bible study and prayer every day. So, what should be done with the false prophet? In verse five, Moses said that he must be put to death, because evil needed to be purged from their community. This may sound harsh by today’s standards, but when we think about what this man was trying to do by leading the people away from God, we can understand why God commanded this. God is the source of our life. He offers us forgiveness of sins and eternal life with him in paradise. False prophets are trying to take away these gifts of God. In effect, they are trying to murder God’s chosen people. They must be dealt with seriously. It might surprise some of you, but Jesus says the essentially the same thing about people like these false prophets in Matthew 18 and Mark 9. Matthew 18:6 says, “If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Second, a close family member or friend acting as a false prophet. (6-11). In verses 6-11, we see the same situation as we saw in verses 1-5, except this time it is not some stranger who is trying to lead one of God’s chosen people astray by following some other God, it is a family member or a close friend. We should not be surprised at this, because the false prophet spoken of in verses 1-5 was also someone’s son or brother, husband or wife, or very close friend. Anyone is capable of being enticed by Satan to do his work, so we must be on our guard against even our own family members and closest friends. The principle for the Israelites is absolutely the same – they must hold fast to the Lord their God and put the person who is trying to lead them astray to death. Moses even says in verse 9 that person who is being tempted to follow other gods must be the first one to cast a stone at their own family member or friend. This also sounds too harsh, but if we turn to Jesus’ words, we can see that God does not change over time. Matthew 10:37 says, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” Luke 14:26 is even stronger. “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” Jesus doesn’t say these things because he wants us to hate our family and friends – in fact, Jesus commands us to love them and everyone else. He says these things so that we can understand the importance of putting God first in our hearts and minds. Only God can save us from our sins, restore a right relationship with Him and give us everlasting life together with Him forever in paradise. God must simply be more important to us than anything else. Nothing should stand in our way of holding on to God – not even our family and friends. Third, evil men leading a town astray. (12-18) Again, the situation in verses 12-18 is very similar to the situations in the previous two sections except this time the people being led astray are in a town separated from the people that hear about what is happening. In this situation, God commands His people to make a careful investigation about what is going on, and if it found out that what has been reported is true, drastic measure needed to be taken. The drastic measures involve killing everyone in the town, all the towns livestock as well and burning the town and all of the plunder of the town as a burnt offering to God. This sounds even harsher than the first two forms of punishment. After all, maybe some people in the town hadn’t been led astray, so wouldn’t they being killing the innocent along with the guilty. That is possible, but when it comes to threatening to interfere with the relationship between God and His chosen people God will take no chances. It actually shows us how much God loves His chosen people. The Bible tells us again and again that bad influence among God’s people needs to be cut out and dealt with very seriously. Think of it like cancer. When a person is diagnosed with cancer, it is usually after it has already grown to a dangerous level. In order to treat many types of cancer, patients are given very strong medications that kill the cancer cells. However, these medicines don’t only kill the cancer cells, they pretty much attach the whole body. The idea is to kill all the cancer cells before they have an opportunity to kill the entire body, but in doing so, some of the bodies good cells must be killed as well. It is a very painful thing, but if it is successful the whole body is saved. The town spoken of in this passage is like that cancer tumor that has just been discovered. In order to protect the larger body of God’s people, drastic measures must be taken to get rid of it. In today’s passage, we are warned about three types of people who all want to do the same thing – lead us away from God and make us serve other gods. That is, they want us to break God’s first commandment for His people and put something else before Him in our hearts. The punishments that God commanded for these people often seem harsh to us by today’s standards. However, if we take time to think about them, we can see that they come about because of God’s intense love for His chosen people. God loves us more than we can imagine and He wants to share fellowship with us. If He is to do this we must love Him with all of our heart, all of our soul and all of our strength, all of the time. This means that nothing can come before God in our hearts. Decide to fast to God as of first importance. |
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