“16 You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. 17 You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold. 18 Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.
19 When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way.” This will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. 20 The Lord will never be willing to forgive him; his wrath and zeal will burn against that man. All the curses written in this book will fall upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under heaven. 21 The Lord will single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.
22 Your children who follow you in later generations and foreigners who come from distant lands will see the calamities that have fallen on the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it. 23 The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. 24 All the nations will ask: “Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?” 25 And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, the covenant He made with them when He brought them out of Egypt. 26 They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods He had not given them. 27 Therefore the Lord’s anger burned against this land, so that He brought on it all the curses written in this book. 28 In furious anger and in great wrath the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.”
29 The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.
1 When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, 2 and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, 3 then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you. 4 Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. 5 He will bring you to the land that belonged to your fathers, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your fathers. 6 The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love Him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. 7 The Lord your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. 8 You will again obey the Lord and follow all his commands I am giving you today. 9 Then the Lord your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The Lord will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your fathers, 10 if you obey the Lord your God and keep His commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
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This morning some of you need to be warned. You are presuming upon being a Christian rather than living for Christ. You need to be warned that God does not tolerate covenant breaking.
This morning some of you need to know that grace is available. You have sinned and you are wondering if God would take you back and, if so, why God would take you back. You need proofs of grace.
I don’t know if you need a warning or a proof of grace this morning, but I do know that you need to listen. God’s Word is being preached and He has something to say to you. He warns you against sin and He offers grace to any sinner who would repent. That is the claim of this sermon: God warns you against sin and He offers grace to any sinner who would repent.
We will study this in three points. First: exiled for sin. Second: the secret and revealed things of God. Third: extravagant grace. We see Israel exiled for sin in verses 16-28 of chapter 29. We see the secret and revealed things of God in verse 29 of chapter 29. We see God call His people back in extravagant grace in verses 1-10 of chapter 30.
First: exiled for sin. We’ve been studying Deuteronomy to see what total allegiance to God looks like. Israel was about to enter the Promised Land where they would encounter the Canaanites. Moses called the people to live differently from these people for the sake of the nations around them. They were to love God so the nations around them would see God as lovely. Israel didn’t. The Israelites didn’t change others. The nations changed the Israelites. The books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings show what happened. They show that the people entered the land, broke the covenant, and that God responded by taking the Promised Land away.
Now God knew this would happen when He made the covenant. As He said to Moses, “You are going to rest with your ancestors, and these people will soon prostitute themselves to the foreign gods of the land they are entering. They will forsake me and break the covenant I made with them.”
God warned them against the sins that He knew they would commit; verse 16, “You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold.”
Idolatry—putting something in the place of God—is the great sin that causes all other sins. It is the denial of total allegiance to God—loving the Lord with all your heart, soul, and strength.
Idolatry was normal in the Canaanite culture and it is normal today. Idolatry, putting something else in the place of God—be it family, success, identity—is expected and celebrated. The people worshipped idols because it was the normal thing to do then; it is the normal thing today. All you need to do to break covenant with God is to go with the flow. Even Moses’ grandson became a priest of one of these foreign gods. You can read about it in the book of Judges. It didn’t take too many generations before total devotion to God became open apostasy. You might need that warning. Your children might need that warning.
Even though God knew they would sin, He warned them against giving sin a foothold; verse 18, “Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.”
When a member of the covenant community then or now breaks covenant it affects the whole covenant community. How could it not? We are a community that has promised to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, and strength. Every time any of us breaks that promise, it effects this church as a whole.
If you live like the world, your choices will have an effect on this community. Others might follow you into whatever sin has entangled you. Now we like to excuse sin by saying, ‘it isn’t hurting anybody’, but sin always hurts people. Sin is hurting this church just like individual’s sins hurt all of Israel. Repent for your sake and for the sake of others.
The man Moses had in mind did not repent, ‘When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, “I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way.”’
Souls fall into this today too. They go the way of the world but find security in the fact that they are members of a church. Their lives are marked by sin but that seems irrelevant to them because they are Christians just like Moses’ grandson was an Israelite.
This is a call for prayer and loving correction of church members. If this correction is ignored or scoffed at, this is a call for further prayer and rebuke. If this rebuke is ignored or scoffed at, this is a call to start moving towards church discipline; “make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.” Church discipline is a process of calling souls in sin to repent for their own sake as well as for the sake of others. You see the disastrous consequences of tolerating sin in Israel’s history as they move to embrace sin defend sin and then persecute the prophets who called for the repentance from these sins. It is a sad story of self-deception. God is not deceived by the lies we tell ourselves. Be warned.
We tend to think that our insider status shields us from any consequences. That is not the case. Moses pictures the nations looking at Israel after the exile and asking, ‘“Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?” And the answer will be: “It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, the covenant He made with them when He brought them out of Egypt.”’
Israel thought that God would never punish His own people for unrepentant sin. They thought, ‘we’re Israelites,’ when it is obvious that they weren’t keeping the covenant like many people today think, ‘we’re Christians,’ when it is obvious that they aren’t keeping covenant with God.
Jesus called out the chief priests and teachers of the law for such thinking. He said, “I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you. For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did. And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.” The prostitutes and men who earned their living ripping their countrymen off heard John and recognized that God meant business. The chief priests and teachers of the law heard John and thought the fact that God meant business didn’t apply to them.
God means business. He warns against sin because sin leads to death. He did judge Israel for their sin by exiling them to Babylon and He warns us that He will judge the world. That is not a sign that He doesn’t love the world. He warns because He loves. He also loved the world in this way: He sent His one and only Son that whoever follows him, which is the same as believes in him, should not perish but have eternal life.
God warned Israel against giving Satan a foothold in their community, but they did not listen. God knew that they wouldn’t listen. So why did He bother to make a covenant at all? We see the answer in our second point: the secret and revealed things of God.
Moses had to wonder, ‘what is the point of all of this?’ What is the point of leaving it all on the field, as Moses is clearly doing in this sermon, if the people wouldn’t listen? And what is the point of God making a covenant with people if He knows that they won’t keep it? And why in the world would God renew a relationship with people who had betrayed Him? That leads us to verse 29, “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
The revealed things which belonged to Israel and belong to us are the expectations of the covenant. Left to himself man has no idea why he was created. That should be obvious as you look at the culture around us. These people are miserable. They obviously have no clue about life. They need divine help.
Now Israel knew why they were created. God told them why they were created. God told them how to live out the reason for their creation. This reason is very simple: they were created to love the Lord our God with all their heart, soul, and strength. If you have ever wondered why you exist, at some point everyone does, that is why you exist – to love the Lord with all your heart, soul, and strength. We tend to make life very complicated when God has made it very simple. “Trust and obey for there is no other way to be happy in Jesus but to trust and obey.” If that knowledge doesn’t seem like a gift, please spend some time talking to people who don’t know that truth.
Israel knew why they were created. They had the expectations for life as it should be laid out for them in the covenant. They heard warnings that showed the utter folly of abandoning God and they still broke the covenant. God knew that would happen. We will see that He also restores the covenant with these people. Why?
Why endure such betrayal? Covenant breaking is like adultery. God warns against covenant breaking because He experiences it the way a husband experiences adultery. That is the book of Hosea in a nutshell. God told Hosea to take Gomer back time and time again so the people would wonder, ‘why does he keep taking her back?’ When the people asked that, Hosea could answer them, ‘for the same reason that God keeps taking you back.’ What is that reason? “The secret things belong to the Lord our God.”
“How could the gracious Redeemer who had been abandoned in favor of other gods even contemplate ultimate renewal of the covenant?” asks Daniel Block. “This is the mystery of divine providence.”
This divine providence, this plan of salvation, would unfold throughout history. Like the return from the exile laid out in Chapter 30, they were promised but their particularities were secrets. Israel knew they would return from exile; they didn’t know how. Israel knew to expect a Messiah; they didn’t know who.
This divine providence is also secret because it is motivated by grace, and it is secret because there is no answer as to why God should grace other than the fact that He chooses to give grace. You can’t get deeper than that. The apostle Paul’s lengthy study on grace ends with these words’ “Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments, and His paths beyond tracing out! “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Or who has been His counselor?” “Who has ever given to God, that God should repay him? For from Him and through Him and for Him are all things. To Him be the glory forever! Amen.” That is the proper response to the fact that you can’t understand why God should be gracious unto you.
This grace also explains Jesus to the extent that he can be explained. Why would God choose humiliation, rejection, offense upon offence from priests who vowed to spend their lives in his service, condemnation at the hands of a Roman governor, and being stripped naked in front of everyone before execution? The answer is not the intrinsic worth of humanity. The answer is grace. It isn’t a secret thing of God because it can’t be known; it is a secret thing of God because it can’t be fathomed.
It is inexplicable. It is also extravagant. Some of you need to be warned this morning, but some of you need to know that you too can receive grace. We see that in our final point: extravagant grace.
There are consequences for sin. Israel would suffer them. Some of the exiles would take losing the land as a call to repent. They would see in this exile from the Promised Land a confirmation of what Moses said when they entered the Promised Land. They would take the blessings and curses to heart as Moses put it. They would, “return to their senses,” as one Deuteronomy scholar put it. “When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey Him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where He scattered you.”
God’s desired outcome was not the death of sinners although some never did repent; his desired outcome was salvation by grace. Listen to one returning from exile describe the experience of it, ‘When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dreamed. Our mouths were filled with laughter, our tongues with songs of joy. Then it was said among the nations, “The Lord has done great things for them.” The Lord has done great things for us, and we are filled with joy.’
This is Amazing Grace in covenant language. “Amazing grace how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me; I once was lost but now am found was blind but now I see.”
This is the amazing grace of which Jesus spoke in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The son, like Israel, goes off into a foreign country and works for a Gentile master. He comes to his senses and says, “How many of my father’s hired servants have food to spare, and here I am starving to death! I will set out and go back to my father and say to him: father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me like one of your hired servants. So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him. The son said to him, “father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’ So they began to celebrate.” That is, among other truths, a picture of the return from exile. That is a revelation of the heart of God for any who would repent.
That celebration is the reason God made covenant with sinners even though He knew that He would be betrayed. What CS Lewis said about us is true about God, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, and irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
God is willing to suffer for that love as seen in this covenant with Israel. God is willing to suffer for that love as seen on the cross. He was willing to take the covenant curses upon himself so that you might receive the covenant blessings. If you want to see the vulnerability of grace look at the God-man dying naked for sinners. This grace can be yours.
Now this grace can never leave a man in his sin. Every man who has received grace will be transformed by grace. You can be transformed by grace. You see that in the promise of verse 6, “The Lord your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love Him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.”
An Israelite would know that he had returned to God when the law of God was a desire from the inside rather than an imposition from the outside. This is what Moses referred to as the circumcision of the heart. This is what Jesus referred to as being born again.
You can know whether or not you’ve received this grace of God. You can know whether or not you’ve been born again. You might find the grace of chapter 30 attractive, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been born again. You might find the song Amazing Grace beautiful, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been born again. You might get choked up at parable of the Prodigal Son, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ve been born again. You can know if you’ve been born again. “I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws,” as God explained. The man who has been born again will be moved to total allegiance to God.
The grace of God is very clear. It can’t get any clearer that renewing a covenant with covenant breakers. It can’t get any clearer than the cross. The grace of God is extravagant. It can’t get any more extravagant than throwing a feast for a sinner.
The question for you is whether you respond to the cross with love for God. Does grace move you to love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength?
Please consider before answering because, “To love at all is to be vulnerable,” as Lewis put it. “Love anything [including God] and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even [God]. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.”
God is clearly interested in the total loyalty that He calls love. You see this commitment in making a new covenant with covenant breakers. You see His commitment in the cross. The eternal question is, “are you interested in the total loyalty of loving Him with all your heart, soul, and strength?” That is how you know you’ve received grace. Amen.