On the Threshold of Abundance
Deuteronomy 10:12–11:32 – Deuteronomy: Then You Shall Live
Epiphany (Observed) – January 5, 2020 (am)
The call came in to the 911 dispatch center.
Caller: ‘I’d like to order a large pizza.’
Dispatcher: ‘Did you know that you have just called 911 to order a pizza?
Caller: Yes, I’d like a large cheese and pepperoni pizza please.’
Dispatcher: This is the wrong number to call for a pizza!’
Caller: You don’t understand, I want to order a large pizza.
Dispatcher: Okay, I get you now. Do you need medical?
Caller: No, but I think I need extra pepperoni!
Dispatcher: Gotcha! Units are on their way.
Dispatcher to responding units: Caller has requested pizza with extra pepperoni. Suggest that you approach
with lights and sirens off.
If you are like me, you smiled a bit at what at first glance appears to be a prank. But by the end of the exchange you began to understand that the stakes here might be real. When did your thinking begin to change? The answer is that when the light began to go on for the dispatcher, that’s when the fog begins to clear yes? Here’s what happened: A young teenage girl is in the house where an inebriated estranged step-dad is beating her mother and she wants to alert the police, but does not want the guy to bolt! And in this case…… Mission accomplished!
A reporter later asked the dispatcher how he knew what was going on? Was there some kind of code at work here? His response was remarkable. He said that ‘No, there was no code and no there was no specific training designed for that situation.’ But….. He had been trained to listen, to really listen, to listen for important pauses, to listen acutely to tone of voice, to listen to not just the words, but the empty spaces, the emotional intensity, the background noise. I’m not sure what the specific tell-tale clue was, but I am very glad indeed that I am three digits away from help in an emergency, and that the person who picks up the call will earnestly and acutely, and with a trained ear, listen!
So it is for our passage for today, which I will begin to read in a moment. Moses gives a charge to a people who are poised on the threshold of abundance. It is a charge that he is determined that they hear. This people have a job to do, and danger lurks at every moment. Because of the length of the section, I am going to break it up into thirds, and will begin by reading 10:12-10:22.
I. Observations from 10:12-10-22:
[10:12-13]
The charge to this people is unmistakably clear. In the preceding verse [vs 11] God tells Moses, “Arise, go on your journey at the head of the people, so that they may go in and possess the land, which I swore to their fathers to give them.” In fact this command to possess the promised land is repeated 7 times in our passage, and it also brackets the section. Chapter 12:vs 1 says, ‘These are the statutes and rules that you shall be careful to do in the land that the Lord, the God of your fathers has given you to possess all the days that you live on the earth. “
This possession of the land is the banner under which they will march. Moses has carefully explained to the people what they need to know. He has painted a picture for them of the holiness of their God, his single mindedness of purpose, his rescue, his provision, his plans for them, his majesty and his power. He has also painted a picture of who they, this mixed multitude of a nation are, a stubborn, corrupt, rebellious, short sighted, rude and fickle people, liars all! And yet these are the people of God, chosen, protected, His heritage, brought out of bondage by the power of his outstretched arm.
And though their indictment here is well earned, and will prove to be prophetic, and though Moses knows that this people will reject their God, he will not fail to lead them to the very door step of this new and blessed land. His first words in 10:12 are these, “and now Israel, what does the Lord require of you……
There are five verbs that describe their duty to their God.
They are to fear the Lord
They are to walk in all his ways.
They are to love Him
They are to serve the Lord their God with all their heart and strength and soul
They are to keep the commandments
It is a tall order yes? Moses succinctly sums up the totality of the commandments of the Lord with the charge in vs 16, to ‘circumcise therefore the foreskin of your hearts and be no longer stubborn.’ We will see this word picture again in chapter 30:6 where it is the Lord who will circumcise their hearts, and bring them into the land. As uncircumcised lips are lips that cannot speak grace and truth, and uncircumcised eyes and ears cannot see or hear, so it is that an uncircumcised heart cannot love, or fear or seek or walk in the ways of God. Deuteronomy 30:6 says this, “and the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your offspring, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul that you may live.” One day this people will have new circumcised hearts and it will not be because this people will somehow bootstrap themselves into, but because God himself will do it.
We will circle back to these verses as we conclude this morning. As Deuteronomy is a long sermon, much of the following 20 or so chapters tell the people what it will look like for them to fear, to walk, to love, to serve and to keep!
[10: 14-15] Moses describes God with two sets of attributes here, and each set contains three pieces. First Moses describes God as owning heaven and the heaven of heavens. Second, he owns the earth with all that is in it. The third is very different. It begins, ‘yet’ and tells us that this God who in his vastness owns it all, as far as we can see and reach and even imagine…… has somehow set his heart in love upon their fathers and their children, they above all peoples…… Make a mental note here. Moses describes three things that God loves in this passage today, and this is the first. His is a highly personal love for the fathers of this nation and their offspring. Keep your ears open to the other things that God loves.
[10:16-19] Moses then moves on to another set of three attributes of this Lord God. First, He is God of gods and Lord of Lords. Second, he is the great and mighty and awesome God. The third attribute seems like an incongruity…… He is not partial and He takes no bribe. Do you wonder a little at the ‘which of these things is not like the other’ apparent anomaly here? Let me see if I can give a contemporary example. Last week, Pastor Ray suggested that if we wanted to learn to hit like Willie McCovey, we would watch video of his swing and we would watch and watch again. If I were to familiarize you with Willie McCovey by reminding you that he played for the San Francisco giants, in the shadow of Willie Mays, that he was a feared left handed three time home run champion, played in six all star games, hall of famer on the first ballot and an MVP. And perhaps the most dominant pitcher in the history of the game, Bob Gibson called Willie McCovey the scariest hitter he ever faced…… and that he was born and raised in Mobile Alabama to Frank and Esther McCovey, the seventh of ten children, that he took his first job at age 12 and quit high school so that he could work full time, and that whenever the minor league he was on played in Shreveport La, he had to sit on the bench because of local ordinances prohibiting the mixing of Africans-Americans and Caucasians. [strange to think that this was in my lifetime!]
…… Which of these things seems like it does not belong? Of course it is the seeming incongruous detail of about his personal life. And yet, which of these snippets of information tells you the most about the true nature of the man. [okay Ray, you brought it up after all!]
So it is with this detail about the nature of this God that they are learning to serve and seek and love. He is a God of integrity and justice…… And this sets up the next two verses perfectly. “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner. Love the sojourner therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.” Did you catch it? This is the second of three things that God loves! Notice also that what God loves…… we are to love as well. And it is this God that is to be our praise, and by his name and no other are we to swear.
II. Observations from [11: 1-15] read the passage:
Moses pauses here to speak to those who have seen the mighty works that their God has done. Keep in mind that every single one of the adults rescued from the land of Egypt have died in the wilderness, all except three…… Moses, Joshua and Caleb. Those who remember the provision of God at the Red Sea would have presumably been children, and Moses is determined that this nation never ever forget these things. He also reminds them that the power and holiness of God cut both ways and he tells them of Dathan and Abiram, when the earth swallowed them and their households whole! This God of miraculous provision is a God to be feared and respected as well.
Beginning in vs 8, the focus shifts to ‘the land’, a land described as flowing with milk and honey. It is the land that God has sworn to their fathers to give to them. It is a land in which they may live long, and importantly it is a land not like Egypt! It will stretch their imagination. Beginning in vs 10 this land is compared with Egypt, the only fruitful land they have ever known. Egypt with its unique Nile delta, with its predictable floods, with ample water has been for this rebellious people the standard against which their God is measured. And in their eyes…… he has often been found wanting!
Egypt had been a land of complex patterns of irrigation “watered with their feet”, meaning I suppose that they had to carry water for their rows of vegetables in buckets, or perhaps via foot powered water wheel. [Now, my ears perked up at this because though I am not a gardener, not really, I do have some understanding of how irrigation works, and some of the things that can go wrong with it. We have a pretty big garden at our eccentric house, and we catch the rain water off the roof of our house in large agricultural tanks. One is 1000 gallons and the other is 1500 gallons. We have a complex maze of hoses and underground poly butylene tubing that connect the tanks to various parts of the garden. I have told my wife that if the water does not flow it is because it is utterly confused about which way to go. The reality is that where the water flows the garden flourishes. Where it does not, the earth dries up and there is no fruit of the soil. I know when the ends break off of hoses, when hoses get run over by the lawn mower. I know when the frost freezes and breaks the $12.00 three-way splitter [again] because I forgot to disconnect the system in time. I know what happens when too much debris from the roof clogs the tanks, and I know very well that a couple of times a year I will have to climb into a tank [a very tight fit] and shovel out the leaves, roof gravel and sticks that foul up the whole system]
But God has told Moses, the promised land will not be such a place. It will be a land of hills and valleys, that drinks in the rain from heaven. It is land that the Lord their God cares for. The next verse is amazing to me [vs 12 b] The eyes of the Lord are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.…… And in case you did not catch it, this is the third thing that God loves, the land that He has sworn to give to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. [And if I may digress just a bit, remember Caleb from the story of the 12 spies? Caleb, this most improbable gentile Kennezite, just one of the mixed multitude that left Egypt was spared by God from death in the wilderness, and we rightly understand that it was because of his steel-eyed courage. Another way of expressing the same thing is that Caleb simply loved what God loved! God’s love of the land of promise reminds me of the true test of a gardener by the way. If you invite a real gardener to your house to admire your tomatoes or your carrot tops, they will study your produce with interest, but what they really want to do is to stick their hand down into your soil, right up to the wrist. They will assess the friability of the earth and the reason is because they know that a good gardener is really growing not produce…… but soil!
In vs 13-15, God expands his promise to the care of the land. If this people will love, serve and obey their God He will send the rain, the early rain and the later rain that they may gather in their grain, their wine and their oil. He will give grass in their fields for their livestock, and they will eat and be full.
III. Observations from [11:16-32]
This final section takes a darker turn. It begins with the words ‘take care.’ So here they are, poised to enter the promised land with the limitless resources and certain endorsement of the ruler of the universe. What could go wrong? The answer of course is ‘plenty’! Danger lies on the doorstep of abundance, and Moses spells it out. Abundance it turns out can be deceptive and it can cause a people to turn aside and serve other gods. How so?
Ezekiel 29: 3 is the prophecy of Ezekiel against Egypt, and in language that presses the boundary between the temporal and the eschatological, Pharaoh is described as if he were a crocodile wallowing in the great river saying…… “My Nile is my own; I made it for myself.” One of the certain dangers of abundance is to somehow presume that it was our own cleverness that pulled our bacon out of the fire, so to speak! It will prove to be seductive to the children of Israel because it plays to their pride and their own self-righteousness. Another danger of standing on the threshold of abundance is that it is a heady thing to have a sense of your own power and supposed might. It can manifest itself in many ways of course, from a sense of false modesty, to presuming because of wealth and power to know the answers to the mysteries of life, to something as chilling as what we read in Jeremiah 44:15-16. “Then all the men who knew that their wives had made offerings to other gods, and all the women who stood by, a great assembly, all the people who lived in Pathros in the land of Egypt, answered Jeremiah, ‘as for the word that you have spoken to us in the name of the Lord, we will not listen to you…….”
Tolkein put it like this, “It is a dangerous thing Frodo, going out your door. You step onto the road and there’s no telling where you might be swept off to.”
How ought the people “take care”? The answer for them lies in the next verses which are an echo of Moses charge in chapter six. They are to store up and protect these words. They are to speak of them with their children. They are to talk of them in the familiar settings of life. They are to see these commandments, and hear these commandments, and teach them to their young. In so doing, they will be holding fast to their God, serving Him, loving Him, walking in His ways. This is the path of life, the path where blessing flows in rivers wherever their feet shall tread. Any other path will be a sure path to destruction. He is painting a picture of the choices that are before them. And in the final paragraph he presents the choices, blessing or curse
To make this watershed moment crystal clear Moses commands the people to create an indelible picture. When they cross the Jordan to enter the land, they are to march between two mountains. On Mt. Gerizim blessings will be place and recited. On neighboring Mt. Ebal the alternative curses will be placed and recited, with this especially ominous warning, that they are in danger of going after “other gods that they have not known.” The inference here is first of all that men will worship gods that they do not know, as strange as that might seem. The Second inference is that their God can be known. Not to suggest that we can know all there is to know about God, but that he has revealed to us much about his character and about how to have fellowship with Him.
Are you curious as I was to read that there are no less than six geographical markers for this specific event? [vs 30] We are told that this place is beyond the Jordan, it is west of the road, it is toward the going down of the sun, it is in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oak of Moreh? [1] We read in Genesis that God meets Abraham at least twice in this spot. Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Elizabeth, and Jacob are all buried there. If Abraham had a home on this planet, it was here. For this nation, it is as if God is reminding them that they are sojourners still, refugees with a history and a home waiting for them. It is a gracious and altogether and fitting reminder.
IV. Conclusion:
So the people are poised to cross the threshold into a land of abundance. ‘ Ilea Iacta est.’ The die had been cast for them 40 years ago when they crossed the Red Sea. But before they lunge forward precipitously, Moses would have them count the cost, and make a choice. And we don’t like choices, do we? When we have to decide something, we are acutely aware that we are closing off options. That fear can be paralyzing. I have referenced Robert Frost’s poem, ‘The Road not Taken’, the author’s ache is not to choose the path less taken, but rather the ache is in the knowledge that the path not taken will likely go unexplored.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
Friends, brothers and sisters this morning, we, all of us are standing at the threshold of abundance, and danger lurks. Set aside your fear and choose life. You may not have all day! And even as we surrender to the faithful promises of a faithful God who tells us clearly what He loves, we know in our bones that even that surrender will require a miracle of God. I want to wrap up this morning with a couple of questions from the text.
1. Can we cultivate the soil of our heart in the same way that we can cultivate soil in our garden?
2. How can we begin to love what God loves?
3. Can we truly fear the Lord, and walk in His ways, and love this just and personal God, and serve Him, and keep His commandments, or is this a hopeless task, a bridge too far, for the likes of us?
I want to praise the Lord this morning that questions have answers! The answer to the first question is ‘Yes, believer, we can!’ We can do it because the Holy Spirit has been mobilized on our behalf. We are being reconstructed, reformed, transformed into the image of one who truly circumcises our hearts.
9 For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, 10 and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority. 11 In him also you were circumcised with a circumcision made without hands, by putting off the body of the flesh, by the circumcision of Christ, 12 having been buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the powerful working of God, who raised him from the dead. 13 And you, who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, 14 by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands. This he set aside, nailing it to the cross. [Col 2:11-14]
The answer to the second question is we can indeed learn to love what God loves. I have read a kind of Cliff’s notes on Calvin’s institutes by Matthew Meyer Boulton and he gives us John Calvin’s answer to that question:
1. “And so, if disciples are supposed to ‘set all their wishes’ before God in prayer, they properly do so in the hope that over time, and indeed through the frequent and regular ‘use and experience’ of prayer itself, their hearts may be refashioned. Christian prayer involves an ongoing reformation of desire. Living in and with God, little by little, we learn what to want……” [p 173] The takeaway is that prayer is a sanctifying and a formational practice. It changes us, and leads us to pray ever more rightly.
So, though this will seem simplistic to some of us, I would recommend that one way to learn to love what God loves would be to come and join us on Wednesday evenings as we pray, haltingly but with growing faith that what God loves will become the desire of our hearts.……. And if that is not practical or possible, know that there are many other opportunities to pray with your brothers and sisters here on a regular, ongoing basis.
The answer to the third question is a resounding yes! And the reason that our ‘yes’ is confident is because it has already happened! A new ‘Israel’ has fulfilled the charge of Moses in 10:12-13. One named Jesus has come from the tribe of Judah who not only modeled this perfectly, but embodied it in its perfect manifestation. And it is He whom the Father loves above all: [ read John 5:20, John 17:23,28, Luke 9:35, 3:22 today] And in this lies the true abundance spelled out in Jeremiah 31:
31 “Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, 32 not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the Lord. 33 For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. 34 And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”
Folks, we really and truly are on the threshold of abundance. The bible tells me so! O church arise! Shall we set aside our fear, and take a cue from Caleb and learn to love the things that God loves. You know that courage especially becomes us, and though our march together will not look like a victory march in the eyes of the world around us, it is a triumph as certain as the power of the outstretched arm of our Savior. Can you believe it this morning?
Amen.
1. References regarding the location of ‘the oaks of Mamre”: genesis 12:16, 14:13, 18:1, 23:17, 25:10, 35:12 50:13