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What God Requires of You
What God Requires of You Deuteronomy 10:1-22 Key Verse: 10:12,13 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?” Last week we thought about how it is God who goes ahead of us and accomplishes His purposes in our lives. On our own we can do nothing, but with God’s help we can do everything – even things that seem impossible like conquering the Promised Land. In today’s passage, God teaches us the secret to accomplishing everything. The secret is to remember who God is and who we are. God is the creator and we are the creatures. As the creator, God sets certain requirements on His creatures. God’s requirements are not hard and burdensome, nor are there a lot of them. In today’s passage, we learn what God’s requirements for us are. May God open our spiritual eyes and ears to hear His words and learn the secret to accomplishing all things. First, Chisel out two stone tablets and come up to me (1-11). Last week Moses retold the story of what happened at Mt. Sinai. When Moses first went up the mountain to receive the Ten Commandments from God, the Israelites quickly fell into sin by pressuring Aaron to make idols for them to worship. This is amazing considering all that these people had witnessed God doing among them. God had even come down on Mt. Sinai as a consuming fire and had spoken to them, yet somehow, after just forty days without Moses they forgot who the true God was and they wanted to make their own gods. In some ways, this seems unimaginable to us, but this is our sinful nature. Instead of worshipping the one true God, who is ruler over all, we want to make our own gods who we can see, understand and control. This simply doesn’t work and it is a great sin. God had sent Moses down to the people with the two stone tablets that God had cut out of the mountain and written on with His own finger. When Moses got down the mountain and saw what the people had done he became so enraged that he threw the two stone tablets, smashing them to pieces. After rebuking the people and helping them to repent, God called Moses to the top of the mountain again. This time, however, God required Moses to do something before he came up the mountain. The first time, Moses just went up the mountain and God cut out the stones and wrote on them for Moses. This time God told Moses to cut out the stones and bring them up the mountain with him. He also instructed Moses to make an ark where these stone tablets would be kept. Moses, knowing who God was, obeyed immediately. He went up the mountain again and fasted and prayed to the Lord for forty more days and God wrote the ten commandments on the stones. I found verse 10 to be particularly interesting. Let’s look at verse 10. “Now I had stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, as I did the first time, and the Lord listened to me at this time also. It was not his will to destroy you.” Moses says that he stayed on the mountain forty days and forty nights, just like the first time and he says that the Lord listened to him again. Moses was a man of prayer, but not just an ordinary man of prayer. He wasn’t praying for himself, he was constantly praying for the Israelite people. They were as stiff-necked and rebellious people who constantly turned away from God and complained about their situation. Time and time again, Moses interceded for them before God. Moses was afraid that any moment God’s patience was going to run out and He would completely destroy these people. The way verse 10 is written, it seems that the first time Moses went up the mountain, he was also pleading with God to spare these people. The Israelites were God’s chosen people, but that did not mean that they were not sinners and needed someone to intercede for them before God. Likewise, I believe that we are God’s chosen people in this generation, yet we are also helpless sinners who need someone to intercede for us before God every day. For this, each of us has Jesus. However, there are millions of people out there who don’t have Jesus and they need someone like Moses to intercede for them in prayer. This is our job as Bible teachers and shepherds. We need to get down on ours knees every day and pray for a world that is truly lost and in danger of complete destruction by a righteous God. Just as God listened to Moses, I believe God will listen to us. God know those He has chosen and He is not willing that any of them be lost to the evil one, but they need shepherds and Bible teachers who will pray for them and guide them to Jesus. Notice that this is precisely what God instructed Moses to do in verse 11. “’Go,’ the Lord said to me, ‘and lead the people on their way, so that they may enter and possess the land I swore to their ancestors to give them.’” Second, what God requires of us (12-16). As I mentioned last week and at the beginning of this message, on our own we are completely unable to do anything. However, God still requires us to do something. How can this be? Well, let’s look at our key verses. “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in obedience to him, to love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?” Paul tells us in the new testament that we are save by faith alone in Jesus Christ and not by anything that we might do. A lot Christians these days might think that Jews of the Old testament times were living under a different set of rules or under a different covenant. They think that the Jews were required to earn their salvation through strict obedience to the law and following the rituals and sacrifices found in it. In a certain sense, this was true because Christ had not been revealed. However, in another sense this is not true. The law was given to the Israelites to lead them to Jesus. It was there to show them that no one is righteous because no one can keep the law perfectly. It was there to show them that they needed a savior – that they needed to live by faith alone in the goodness of God who would provide that savior. If we look carefully at our key verses we will see that everything God requires comes from our accepting God as God – that is salvation comes from faith in God alone. The solid foundation of verses 12 and 13 is belief in God and God’s desire to do good in our lives. Let’s take a very close look at these two verses. The first requirement of God is to fear God. Well, what does this mean? In order to fear God, we need to know exactly who God is. God is our creator. He alone has the power to give us life and He alone has the power to take it away. You may think, that the world is a very dangerous place and that there are many people who can take our life away. For instance, Kim Jong-un might decide bomb Seoul today and take away all our lives. It is true that he and many other people can take away our physical life, but they can’t do anything to take away or destroy our actual existence. Our life, our existence, who we are, was given to us by God and only He can take it away from us. Jesus said it best when He was giving instruction to His twelve apostles before sending them out on their first missionary journey. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” God’s first requirement – the one that comes before anything else – is simply acknowledging, or believing, who God is. This is done by faith and not by anything that we do. The next thing that God requires is that we walk in obedience to Him. This, it might be argued, is us doing something. However, looked at on a different level, it is not us doing anything other than what God created us to do. A very simplistic analogy of what I have in mind is the watch on my wrist. The person that created this watch created it to keep time accurately. As long as the watch does what it was created to do – which it has for the las three years – it is walking in obedience to its creator. If it suddenly decides not to act in obedience I can send it back to its creator and the creator will correct the defect. Well, in a much more complicated way, we are like this. God created us to walk in obedience to him. By doing this we are really not doing anything that He didn’t create us to do. It is when we decide not to walk in obedience to him that things get serious. At that point He corrects us. He rebukes us or punishes in the hope that we will turn back and walk in the way that He created us to walk. God didn’t create us like a watch, but He did create us to live a certain way and do certain things – that is God created this, we didn’t do it. What we are to “do” is live the way God intends us to live. Well, you might ask yourself how is that? Look at the remainder of verse 12. “To love him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,” Again, this is all about faith in God. We cannot love God unless we believe that he exists and we can’t serve him if we don’t believe that he rewards those who do. Hebrews 11:6 makes this point. “And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists and that he rewards those who earnestly seek him.” In verse 12, it doesn’t say what kind of actions we should serve God with it says that we must serve Him with all our heart and soul. It’s all about faith in God. Look at verse 13. “And to observe the Lord’s commands and decrees that I am giving you today for your own good?” This verse does talk about actions. We are to observe all the Lord’s commands and decrees. However, these actions all begin with faith. We simply cannot please God without faith. Moreover, our faith must be in the goodness of God and not just in God himself. Jesus says that even demons believe in the one true God, but their belief causes them to shudder in fear. Our belief in God must be based on the knowledge that fearing Him, walking in His ways, serving him with all our heart and soul and obeying His commands and decrees is for our own good. Everything we do must be based on our faith that God created us, God loves us and God wants to reward us. Everything begins with faith in God. Verse 14 tells us that God is the owner of all things. There is nothing in all the universe that does not belong to God. Yet verse 15 tells us something very special about the Israelites and I believe it applies to us today. “Yet the Lord set his affection on your ancestors and loved them, and he chose you, their descendants, above all the nations—as it is today.” This knowledge, or this belief should cause us to do something for God. What is that? According to verse 16 we should circumcise our hearts and turn from our stiff-necked rebellion of God. God is so great that we can’t even imagine His being, and yet He chose the Israelites and I believe He chose us. How can we go on living in rebellion to Him? We can’t. We must humble ourselves and submit to His will thankfully and lovingly. Third, who is God? (17-22). I hope that it is clear now that everything begins with faith in God. But who is this God that we should believe in? Look at verse 17 and 18. “For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality and accepts no bribes. He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigner residing among you, giving them food and clothing.” When I think of these verses along with verse 14 I am overwhelmed. God is the owner, the creator of everything that exists. His mighty power and awesomeness is more than I can conceive of – He is simply greater than anything that I can think of. At the same time this awesome creator is a personal God who cares for even the most neglected and downcast among us. Verse 18 tells us that he even defends people who cannot defend themselves and importantly (at least from my point of view), He loves the foreigner living among you. In verse 19, Moses commands the Israelites to love the foreigner because God loved them when they were foreigners in Egypt. Likewise, we were all foreigners of God when we were living in a land of sin, but God loved us and brought us out of that land. Now we must love those who are still living in their own land of sin. Too often, we tend to look down on these people and despise them, but God didn’t look at us that way. He loved us and led us out of that land mostly through using our shepherds and Bible teachers. I believe He wants us to do this for the foreigners, those still living in their land of sin, living among us now. Moses ends this chapter by telling the Israelites to fear the Lord, serve Him and praise His name. In verse 22 he tells them why they should do this. “Your ancestors who went down into Egypt were seventy in all, and now the Lord your God has made you as numerous as the stars in the sky.” In short, Moses tells the people to remember what God had done for them. This is a key for us today. It is very easy to forget what God has done for us in the past. The worries of this life and the difficulties we face day in and day out easily overwhelm us and we forget about what God has done for us in the past. When we forget that, we quickly forget about God altogether and go on living our life as we see fit. This is not what God wants. God wants us to live by faith in Him – Fearing Him, walking in obedience to Him, serving Him with all our heart and soul and keeping His commands and decrees. This is not always easy, but if we remember what God has already done for, we can live with the great hope and knowledge that God wants to do even greater things for us in the future. May God richly bless each of us and help each of us to live our lives by faith in Him alone. |
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