Choose Blessing

Deuteronomy Series M-4 Deuteronomy Series M-5, October 21, 2012 Speaker: Ken Shigematsu Title: Choose Blessing Text: Deuteronomy 11; 13:1-18; 28: 1-68, 30:15-20 BIG IDEA: Not following God’s way leads to death; following God leads to life. INTRODUCTION: Each morning I feed our 6 month old golden retriever puppy Sasha and then I grab the leash from the garage and we head out the door of our backyard to the boulevard beside our house. She's very excited because she knows we’re going to go to the park and sometimes she’ll want to bolt out across the street on her own. I’ll say, “Stop.” And she’ll look back at me and at the street wondering whether to run out onto the street or obey me. There's a similar dynamic with our four-year-old son Joey (he’s not a dog, he’s a human being). Sometimes we’ll open the front door, he'll want to run onto the street and I'll say stop and he’ll look back wondering whether to obey me or us to keep running. In both cases, there’s a part of Sasha and Joey that feels like if they obey me and they don't run out onto the street, there are going to miss out in some way. And so it can in our relationship with God. Many of us feel that if we obey God in certain areas, we’re going to miss out on life in some way. I care for Sasha and Joey, I don't want them to miss out on anything good in their lives. But God cares infinitely more for you and me, than I care for our puppy and our son. God doesn't want us to miss out on anything good in life. And all that he calls us to – whether it feels like it or not at the time – is an expression of his love for us. Moses understands this well. So as he preaches to children of Israel on the banks of the Jordan River as they prepare to enter the Promised Land, he calls them to trust and obey God – so that they will experience fullness of God's blessing and life. In Deuteronomy 11: 26-28 Moses preaches: Deuteronomy 11:26-28 (TNIV): 26 See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse— 27 the blessing if you obey the commands of the Lord your God that I am giving you today; 28 the curse if you disobey the commands of the Lord your God and turn from the way that I command you today by following other gods, which you have not known. Then similarly in Deuteronomy 30 Moses says: 19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life… PRAY: In these passages Moses is exhorting his people to trust and obey God so that they would experience the fullness of God’s blessing and life rather than experience a life that is cursed. In Deuteronomy 27 and 28, Moses specifically names the blessings that would flow if people chose to obey God and curses that would follow if people chose to disobey God. As you read through Deuteronomy, if the pattern where lists of the blessings are given for obedience and lists of curses for disobedience seems strange to you, this pattern would not have seemed strange at all to the ancient children of Israel. Whenever a king in the Ancient Near East would establish a covenant with his people, the king would list a series of blessings and curses, and by the way in the ancient world the list of curses was always considerably longer than the list of blessings – and this is also true in the book of Deuteronomy. Now if you were simply skimming the book of Deuteronomy and you saw the headlines “Blessings for Obedience” and “Curses for Disobedience” you might falsely assume that a person before God is on a kind of neutral plot of land before God; that is, if they obey God they will be blessed – if they disobey God they will be cursed. But it’s not quite that simple. First of all, the headlines in the TNIV (Today’s New International Version) were not in the original Hebrew text. They have been added by a recent editor to help outline the book. While these added headlines are often helpful, these particular headlines blessings and curses can be a little misleading because they can cause a person to believe that experiencing God’s blessings or curses is matter of simple arithmetic – either you do good and you’re blessed or you do evil and you’re cursed. That’s not the case. In Deuteronomy, we have the pattern of grace 1) First, God delivers his people out of slavery in Egypt where they been slaves for 400 years—that’s obviously grace. 2) And second, we see the grace of God in action as he gives his people the law. Yes, God’s law is itself an expression of God’s grace. How so? The law of God—and particularly the Ten Commandments—is an expression of God’s character. And since we were made in the image of God, when we honor God’s law, we honour the way God designed us. In Romans 1 we read that the law of God is written across our heart. It's imprinted on our very nature, and when we honor that law we honor the way we were designed and we flourish. We flourish in our relationship with God and each other. This is why Jesus said to the rich young ruler when he asked ‘What should I do to gain eternal life?’ Jesus said keep the commandments – it wasn’t that the rich young ruler could earn his way to eternal life, but in keeping the commandments he would find a pathway that would enable him to live in synch from the source of life – God. God didn’t give us his law so that he could punish us if we didn’t keep it. He didn’t give us his law so we could somehow earn our way into his favor. No, God gave us his law as an expression of his love for us so that we flourish in our relationship with God and each other. The order is important. God didn’t give his people the Ten Commandments in Egypt where they were slaves and say, “If you keep these laws, or if you keep them ninety percent of the time, then I will be indebted to you – I’ll owe you a favor and I’ll set you free from your slavery in Egypt.” No, God first set his people free from Egypt where they had been slaves – that’s grace. And then on Mount Sinai he gives them the Ten Commandments so they might experience a richer relationship with him and more harmonious relationships with each other. That also is grace. 3) And third, we see the grace of God as he leads his people into the Promised Land, a rich, fertile and abundant land-- a land flowing with "milk and honey.” So God had blessed his people by delivering them from Egypt, giving them the law which reflected their nature, and leading them into the Promised Land. Moses says to them (in Deuteronomy 11, 27, 28 and 30), “Now God already brought you into a place of blessing, and now in trust obey God so you experience the fullness of God’s blessing—on the path to life, joy, and wellness. And so it is with us, when God draws us into a relationship with himself, we are not on a neutral plot of land—where if obey we’re blessed and if we disobey we’re cursed—he’s already blessed us by delivering us from a spiritual place where we had been slaves to sin; he’s given us his law which if honored will enable us to flourish in our relationships with God and each other, and spiritually he's brought us into a promised land where we can thrive. He calls us to trust and obey him not because so that we to earn his blessings, no, he’s already longs to bless us. Rather God calls us to obey so that we can more fully enjoy God’s gifts to us as we live in ways that are consistent with the way He designed us. ​Some time ago we had some friends over for dinner and one of them brought our son Joe a remote control truck, a gift (bring it as a prop). But there were instructions that went with the gift that said things like “put the battery in the truck,” and other instructions like “don’t submerge the truck or the remote control in water.” The instructions were not included so that Joe could somehow “earn” the truck if he obeyed all the instructions. No, the truck was a gift, and the instructions were there to show him how to most fully enjoy the gift. And so it is with God and his law – God’s grace comes first. We saw that when he delivered his people out of Egypt, as he led people into the Promised Land, but then God gives his people the law so that they can most fully enjoy the gift of relationship with him and with one another most fully. This isn’t merely true in theory; it’s true in our life experience. Some time ago I was the Boston area having lunch with Dr.Joe Viola who teaches at Harvard Medical School. He said, “When you live in a way that is consistent with the Christian faith, (and he is a committed Christian), you don’t abuse your body through drugs or abusing alcohol, you’ll be happier and you’ll have healthier relationships, and you’ll tend to be healthier, and even if you get sick (as people do) you’ll tend to have more support and a sense of meaning even in your suffering.” Now obviously there are exceptions—life is not a simple mathematical equation--we know that people who do seem to abuse their bodies and seem to do okay, and others who have lead a life of real integrity who suffer from illnesses-- but generally speaking, what Dr. Viola was saying was that if you live in a way that is consistent with the Christian faith that is with your design, you are going to be happier and tend to flourish. Some of have heard me talk about the village of Roseto, Pennsylvania, a close-knit community of Italian immigrants who stop to chat in Italian on the street, take time to visit one another, and even cook for one another in their backyards. Research on this community demonstrates that people have a greater sense of happiness and overall well- being, as in Roseto, because of the strong sense of community here. Similarly, when we trust and obey, we tend to experience more of the fullness of life. It’s out of his love for us God says, “Trust and obey me and choose life.” And the opposite is also true when God through Moses us warns “disobey me; turn away from me – and your life will be cursed.” In Moses’ time, God’s people were sorely tempted to chase the idols of their day—and their idols were not that different from ours—material wealth, money, and sex and pleasure. Chasing agricultural wealth and the silver and gold that would come from that was certainly a temptation for people in Moses’ day. And in their day the “god” of fertility and agricultural prosperity was Baal. Baal was considered lord of the rain, lord of fertility, and lord of the crops. In Deuteronomy 11:16, God’s people are warned that if they succumb to the temptation to pay homage to Baal and the other gods, who seemed to control agricultural success, their prayers would have no affect – that they would find themselves coming up empty. And as we see in verses 16, 17, and 18 and although the gods of Baal had the reputation of being able to send rain and cause the crops to grow – those gods were nonetheless powerless to deliver. And so it is when we chase down the idol of money. When we serve it, when we put too we become selfishly ambitious in our careers will find ourselves empty. I was talking to another medical doctor who practices here in Vancouver. He’s very respected in his field, not a Christian, but a spiritual person, and he was telling me that there are so many people here in the city he sees who are financially very well off, corporative executives and the like, who are struggling with depression and struggling with the sense of meaningless in life. They have all the money they could ever need, and all the toys that money can buy, and yet there is emptiness there. Robert Bellah, the highly esteemed sociologist at UC Berkeley, has said – what many of us have observed – our material possession has not brought us happiness and meaning. Another idol then and now, of course, was sex and pursuit of pleasure as an end in itself; and in Deuteronomy 27 and 28 Moses lists the curses for people who are engaged in sexual promiscuity. And the symptoms he describes in Chapter 28: 28, as some commentators note, very closely describes syphilis. We know that when people in our time turn to sex outside of God’s will or pleasure as a means to fill the void in their own heart, they ultimately come up empty. A popular belief among doctors and social scientists and others has been that many teens begin drug use and sexual activity to deal with depression. However, a study published in the Journal of Preventive Medicine reverses those beliefs. Health policy researcher Denise Dion-Hallfors comments: "Findings from the study show depression came after substance use and sexual activity, not the other way around." The data was gathered from a survey of 13,491 adolescents. A large group of these teens, about 25 percent, were called "abstainers." They had never had sex, smoked, drank alcohol, or taken drugs. Only 4 percent of these teens experienced depression. The study also reported that girls among the 75 percent who had taken drugs and experimented with sex were 2–3 times more likely to experience depression than abstaining girls. Boys who engaged in binge drinking were 4.5 times more likely to experience depression than boys in the abstaining group. Boys smoking marijuana were more than 3 times more likely to be depressed than those who abstained. God doesn't say don't chase idols or god-substitutes because he wants to wreck our life, he tells us not to chase the idols because he knows that they'll never deliver, he says serve me because he knows that he's the only one that can satisfy the deepest longings of our heart. He says trust and obey me, not because he's a tyrant, but because he knows that only we experience true blessing and find out the path to life. One of the wisest Christ followers of his generation, E. Stanley Jones in his book The Unshakable Kingdom and the Unchanging Person , says, and I paraphrasing: “The law of God is written within the structure of our being. We are built to obey the laws of the Kingdom. If we obey those laws written within us we are fulfilled; if we go against those laws we are frustrated and, if we persist we are broken… God doesn’t have to punish you if you break his laws written in you. …You don’t have to punish the eye for having sand in it, nor the hand for putting it fire, nor the soul for having sin in it. Sin and its punishment are one and the same thing.” A modern woman wrote to a newspaper: “They say to have an affair with another woman’s husband is heaven. I can tell you it is 10% heaven and 90% hell.” In the movie Moonstruck when Lonnie (Nicholas Cage) says to Loretta (Cher) before they consummate their affair: We are here to ruin ourselves, and to break our hearts. Dorothy Sayers says, “We never really break the law of God, we just break our self over it.” A boy was seen crying disconsolately. Someone asked, “What’s the matter.” He replied: “I’ve been playing hooky all day, and I just found out this is Saturday.” When we go against the way of God, we play hooky against our own best interests. We play hooky against ourselves. E. Stanley Jones says, “The kingdom of God is our homeland. If our body could express, it would say: ‘Please, oh please be Christian. I work well that way. If you try to work me some other way I work my own ruin.’ Every cell of your body dances with glee when you enter the Kingdom. You don’t have to manufacture ways to be happy; you just are happy when you obey the Kingdom. You don’t try to have a good time - you just have it.” This week while I was out Keats Island, I heard the story of a teenager who attended a Christian camp as someone who was not a believer. He was reading the Bible and the words just jumped out at him and he sensed God came into him. He couldn't stop smiling all week. He tried to stop smiling because it wasn’t cool to smile so much as teenager, but he couldn't help but smile. He didn't know anything about the Bible, but something deep inside him knew… and his soul was dancing with glee. Robert Murray Mccheyne said God doesn’t so much want your holiness so much as he wants your happiness, but the only way you will be happy is by being holy, through obedience, by honoring the way God made you… When we choose the narrow path of which Jesus spoke, it may be hard in some ways—there may be time of suffering—but, as was true of Jesus, there is resurrection, joy, and eternal life now and forever on this path. CS Lewis said, Every time we make a choice we are slowly turning either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To choose to trust and obey God is to become the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. So God says to through Moses in Deuteronomy 30: 19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you: life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life… Prayer: All of us here in some way have wandered from the path of God…we’ve all been comprised. And as a result we are all under, to one degree or another, the curse. But here is some great news: 13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us, for it is written: “Cursed is everyone who is hung on a pole.”[a] 14 He redeemed us in order that the blessing given to Abraham might come to the Gentiles through Christ Jesus, so that by faith we might receive the promise of the Spirit” (Galatians 3:13-14). In this passage we read that Christ became the curse for us in order to fulfill the blessings promised to Abraham. He took on the curse for our disobeying God’s law, so that we could experience spiritual blessings—a life with God that fills us full, and relationships with others that flourish. Forgiveness. Choose life. 1