Heavenly Father, indeed, we desire to adore the Lord Jesus Christ as we enter a season in which the world has largely forgotten the purpose and the meaning and the origin of Christmas help us to be your people truly and clearly in this world. As we consider your word this morning, help us to truly and clearly consider its meaning so that we might apply it to our hearts and lives. We ask in Jesus' name, amen. This morning, I'm going to speak on Deuteronomy 17, and it is not an easy chapter to speak on.
I'm not getting a response, Stephen, and the screen is blank. On the side, there is an on switch. I see the on switch. It is in need of being pushed to the on position.
It's interesting to think about the law because the Christian finds himself or herself in the age of grace. One might then ask why an age or a dispensation or a period of time in which the law governed the earthly children of God. That is a difficult question to answer, but has many facets to it. The seven dispensations that we would subscribe to in this church and which you can find in your Bible, the word dispensation appears in Ephesians 2 as the word dispensation, and it can be translated times, periods of time.
And in that lovely passage, we are reminded that all of these periods of time find their ultimate fulfillment and resolution by God in Christ. All of these things point to Christ. All of these things have pointed to Christ. And that is a wonderful thought in and of itself when we think about God as being the God of history and that God has always been the God of history as we look through the history that we can find in our Bibles.
It is instructive and comforting. And yet, and yet, it is fair to say that not all of Christ Christ and them and not all Christians would subscribe to a dispensational system of theology. However, it is my conviction that it is strongly explanatory and that it is presented to you in your Bible. You have Adam and Eve in a condition of innocence in the garden, a condition of innocence.
Wouldn't that be a lovely place to be to be in a condition where you have not experienced sin and you commune with God personally every day. One can hardly imagine a more wonderful place to be. And yet, man forfeited that. Why?
That's a good question. Mankind was then driven from the garden and lived under the guidance of his own conscience, which is an interesting situation to be in, isn't it? Now you have knowledge of sin and the guidance that guides you away from sin is partly your knowledge of the horror of it. But it ended in catastrophe.
It ended in the judgment of God in the flood, the deluge, eight people survived. We then have the mankind desiring to move ahead and we have the promise to Abraham that the promised one would come and that his people would be blessed. And three major world religions would trace themselves back to Abraham. And then, of course, they ended up in Egypt and under slavery and under domination.
And in leaving Egypt, they were given the law in Sinai. We, on the other hand, live in the Age of Grace. We know what it means to be forgiven. We know the standards of God.
And so we should be all the more grateful to know the forgiveness of our sins, having seen and having had for us defined in the Bible the horror of sin and the nature of sin. And finally, when the Lord Jesus comes back, he will set up his kingdom and he will rule with a rod of iron. When we look at the Old Testament and so much of it being under that law within the age of the law, being man under the law, not in innocence, not under conscience, but under the law, there are many things in it that might even shock us. There are things that would make complete sense to us.
But there it is. It is your Bible. Get to know it. Try to get to understand it.
One of the interesting and important aspects of the reaction of the people, the earthly, people of God, the earthly children of God, to the law being given to them was their reaction at the base of Mount Sinai in Exodus 24. They said, all these things we will do is that so. All these things we will do so quick to say that we will be obedient. I would suggest that if they had any idea of what they were getting into, if they had any idea of the purity of God, the holiness of God, and the standards that he would apply to his children on earth as a testimony to the nations, they would have cast themselves on the grace of God.
They would have said, we will not be able to be completely observant to all of these things. We cast ourselves upon your grace, but they didn't. They said, we accept the terms of the covenant. All these things we will do, quite a statement, quite a claim.
And so we come in our Bibles within the books of Moses, the Jewish Torah, we come to Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is a Greek word, meaning second law. And one might ask, since you have the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, followed by many laws, followed by a period of wandering, you then have a restatement of the laws, a so-called second law, in the book of Deuteronomy as the fifth and final book in the Torah. Why a second law?
Well, you have a new generation of people, an entire generation passed away in the wilderness. You have a new possession to be able to move in to the land that God was giving them, which would then imply a new lifestyle under the law of God in the Promised Land. In addition, it's most interesting if you say, you know, God loves you and someone says to you, well, where in the Bible did God say, first, that he loved his people? Deuteronomy 4.
God in reviewing their redemption from Egypt explains to them, I did that because I loved you. What an important and powerful revelation. This is the first time that the earthly children of God ever hear those words. God loved you and loves you.
And so we have the book of Deuteronomy. There are some parallels between chapters like Deuteronomy 17 and say the 10 commandments. You will remember that the centrality of the worship of God is how the 10 commandments begin in Exodus 20. And in like manner, you will see that in Deuteronomy 17, the centrality of worship in the context of a sacrifice is where it starts.
It's the first verse. And then it moves outward. If you imagine a series of concentric circles, the concerns move outward just as they do in Exodus 20. And it will right just manner.
We should honor God. We should honor our parents. We should honor time, the Sabbath. We should honor possessions, other peoples.
We should not even covet other people's possessions. We need a godly society that will then be our testimony as the people of God on earth. The final chapters of 34 chapters, 34, is a description of Moses' death. But chapters 30 to 33 have Moses' parting words which have broad application.
They remind us of things like, you know, the Word of God is not very far from you. It says in your mouth and in your heart, do not treat the Word of God as something that is distant and foreign. It has been given to you. It also says that Moses also says multiple times in those closing chapters 31, don't be afraid.
Don't be afraid. Be courageous. Don't be dismayed. Those are comforting words to the children of God entering in to a new land.
And Moses also tells them in the chapter before it describes his death and his burial in Mount Nebo by God himself. That God is your hiding place. How interesting. That is then going beyond the idea of a group of people.
Moses is evidently instructing them, as you can also read in Psalm 91, that God can be your personal hiding place. What a concept. What a wonderful concept. Deuteronomy is also important because you have even today the expression of the Shema in Jewish services every Saturday.
You have effectively a statement of faith morning and evening in Jewish worship services. And I'll be able to go back to this slide. And the word Shema means to hear. And you can see there in Deuteronomy 6, 4, very first word.
Here, here, Israel. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. doctrinal foundations like you shall love the Lord your God. doctrinal foundations like serve him with all your heart and soul.
Take these words of mind to heart and to soul. And you shall teach them to your sons. And if you do, you people will be blessed. They will cover their eyes when they say the opening statement.
And then it says, you can go to Jewish websites and find out about the Shema. Glory to your name and to your kingdom. They say it in an undertone or in a whisper. And that is not a verse from the Bible.
But it is part of their reverential treatment of their statement of faith. And so the book of Deuteronomy is very important. The Lord Jesus quoted it three times during his temptation. And you can find about 56 citations and clear illusions to Deuteronomy in your New Testament.
Chapter 17, where we are, is considered to be part of the civil law section of the book. Now that in itself is very interesting because when you are dealing with the earthly children of God, you might ask, what do you mean by civil law? It seems quite religious to me. But the melding together of civil law with, you might say, spiritual law, religious law, the laws of God, it becomes indistinguishable.
And that is not surprising. After all, the intent is that these people would be the testimony of what it is like to have a society based on God himself in purity and therefore in testimony. So it is analogous to saying you are a believer and you trust in Christ. Do you separate your life into the things that are church related or spiritually related and the things that are not?
I have done that. You can take it from me. It doesn't pay. For the Christian, no such mentality.
The life of the Christian and what God is interested in is every single detail of your life. You can pray about anything. I remember hearing people pray in prayer meetings sometimes years ago and thinking to myself an evil thought. That's an awfully trivial thing to bring up in a prayer meeting, isn't it?
There's no such thing. All of life for the child of God is within the view of God. And God can handle the smallest detail of your life if you let him, if you will bring him into it. And so we have the bringing in of the principles of holiness and purity into the earthly children of God.
And in fact, one might say that it is in a frightening way. One of the things that I got out of this study was to be reminded about the purity and holiness of God. And some of the things that I have to share with you are not easy to share with you. What are some of the key words then that you can find in this passage?
You can find the word abominable, detestable, loathsome. That there are things that to the God of the universe who is pure and holy to a degree that you cannot imagine, there are things which are detestable, loathsome, and abominable. To say that they're unacceptable to God is an understatement. There is an aspect of this in which where you have in our Judeo-Christian concept of a personal God, it is not merely that some things are rejected.
You might say categorically rejected. We also see that there is an aspect of our personal God in which the explanation is that it is disgusting. It has to be purged. It has to be expunged from these people.
There are things which we cannot and must not engage in. We can learn these principles from the Old Testament. They were dealt with in horrible ways, horrible. But dealt with they were, and it speaks of the holiness of God and his desire for his people to be free of that which is loathsome, loathsome to God.
And so some people are expunged. They are purged. Some people are not happy with seeing this happen and will challenge the authority of God. They are presumptuous people.
They are also to be dealt with. And finally in this section in this chapter, you will read about the king. One might think that a king is above the rest and of course to a degree and in a way that is very true. But what I get out of Deuteronomy 17 is that the principles of purity and holiness apply to him maybe more than anybody else.
And the way that God makes the point in Deuteronomy 17 is very instructive as we will see. I heard my wife talking about somebody recently and she said that that person does not want to listen to any mainstream media whatsoever anymore. And I'm kind of going, yeah, I know where you're coming from. A lot of what we are exposed to is reprehensible to the soul of the Christian.
And yet what you see around you is this like contradiction of sorts where there is much that is reprehensible and at the same time and in the same breath condemning everything that we believe in. There is a tremendous amount of moral examination going on and condemnation of things all over the place. And yet it is devoid of truth. It is upending the truth.
It is based on lies and counterfeits and dark and sinful thinking. It's disturbing. And we're exposed to this kind of thing every day. I'm 66 years old as of a couple of weeks ago and I interact with people from foreign countries quite frequently.
And some of them say, you know, when I got here I thought that this would be more of a Christian country. And I said, well, let me tell you, when I was a boy non-believing parents would quite routinely send to their children to Sunday school. The idea of parents sending their children to Sunday school is largely gone from Canadian society. There is very little left in Canada that is Christian.
And most of what I see on a day-to-day basis is absolutely anti-God, anti-Lord Jesus Christ and anti-Christian. The amount of condemnation and examination that goes on seems to presume something. It seems to presume that the people engaging in these kinds of condemnations have perfect moral clarity. And that they have the moral fortitude to act on the basis of what they see.
And it's interesting that even the earthly children of God were challenged in this way. They were given the law in great detail. And what we find in Deuteronomy 17 is that even the earthly children of God who said all these things we will do, found of themselves sorely challenged with respect to seeing clearly in the realm of righteousness, holiness, and what we might call morality. And in fact, not only that, would have found themselves deeply challenged by God, by the Torah, to act on the moral failures within their own people.
We might imagine ourselves as believers to be primarily, I hope, it's not just an imagination, God-centered, that our primary concern is our relationship to God, if that is in its proper perspective and place, as Exodus 20, prioritize these things, the rest of the concentric circles find their correct importance. My blood relatives are important to me, but they're not as important as my relationship to God. My close friends are important to me. My relationships with my co-workers and people that I've only met once or twice, all of these things would be of interest to us and to concern us, but realistically we tend to have more concerns about our relationships with those who are nearer to us.
And yet, as I have just said, these things really only fall into place properly if we are in the vertical functioning properly. If we are functioning properly in the vertical in our relationship with God, these concentric circles take their proper place. And so we have in Deuteronomy 17 various levels of examination. We have in the first verse, as we'll see, an offering, an offering that is to speak of redemption, and the individual who's bringing that offering needs to be very, very sure that it is free from blemish.
We then see witnesses who are, you might say, examining their neighbors. Oh, that's interesting. To what extent should we be on the lookout for the deficiencies and failures of our neighbors? And then if you're going to be one of those people who bear witness against your neighbor, you better be prepared for some things.
The priests will get involved and examine those witnesses. And then there will be the presumptuous people who say, I don't like the verdict. Oh, is that so? And then you have the king, and who's going to examine the king?
Is anybody going to point out what's wrong with the king? It could be a bad idea. There's not a lot of power over your life. What does the king need to do?
He needs to examine himself in the vertical according to the word of God that's been provided. And so, society, the godly society, the children of God on earth, need to have understandings in realms like love and mercy and holiness. Because holiness relates to judging sin, mercy relates to forgiving sin, and love relates to loving others and loving God and God loving his children. And then we try to be a reflection of God in a godly society.
Verse 1 in the NASB and in the King James says, you shall not sacrifice your, sorry, you shall not sacrifice to the Lord your God in Oxford sheep, which has a blemish or any defect, bad thing, literally in Hebrew. For that is a detestable thing to the Lord your God, or in the King James, thou shall not sacrifice unto the Lord thy God any bullock or sheep, wherein is blemish, or any evil flavoredness. That is an abomination unto the Lord thy God. It was possible for an individual Jew to bring an offering to God, a sacrificial offering.
And of course, that animal needed to be without blemish. That animal was a picture of the ultimate redeemer that would be coming. It was not appropriate at a simple level to offer God second best. Well, I have a flock.
I'm going to give God something. That guy there is looking sick. Maybe I'll give him anyway, because I think he's going to die anyway. So let's give that to God.
That is a wrong way of thinking about God in your life in terms of what you would offer to God. But it is also a failure to understand the meaning of the sacrifice as a picture of the Lord Jesus Christ, who was as it says in 1 Peter as of a lamb without blemish and without spot. We then come to the remainder here in the subsequent sort of examinations. If there is found in your midst a man or a woman who's doing evil by violating his covenant, a person that's gone to worship other gods, the sun, the moon, or as it says in some versions the heavenly hosts, which I have commanded you not to do which the surrounding nations do, you shall investigate.
And if it's true, then bring that person out to the gates and stone them to death. On the testimony of two or three witnesses, minimum two, that person who has worshiped other gods will not be able to do that. The first words of God's will not be tolerated in the society under the law, given to the earthly children of God. It will be a capital offense.
Notice in verse seven, in terms of this aspect of moral clarity, because you find that people often sort of say, I like a scales of balanced concept of salvation, my good deeds outweigh my bad deeds. Somebody was trying to sell me this last week in my office, a Muslim young lady. This is her whole thing. I'm not going to go from other Muslims.
I'm pretty sure that this will outweigh this and I'll think I'll be okay. In fact, the Quran doesn't give you any such assurance, but that's their thought. I'm going to subject myself to the rules and if I'm on the balance of things doing okay in the rules, I should be okay. Well, what about the moral fortitude to pick up the first stone?
Are you so sure? Do you have that kind of moral clarity? Do you have that kind of moral fortitude that within the community of the earthly children of God, under the law, the law, you would be ready to pick up the first stone? I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking about John chapter eight. It gives you pause, doesn't it? It certainly does. That community needs to say, I cast myself on your grace.
We need God's moral clarity. We need God's forgiveness. We need God's grace in order to live and in order to define ourselves as the children of God. And so we find as we move on through Deuteronomy 17 that the lack of moral clarity is inevitable.
And so you read in the New American Standard, in King James's blood against blood, homicide, one kind of homicide or another, between one kind of lawsuit or another, between one kind of assault or stroke or another. Go to the place where the priest will arbitrate. Isn't that so human? There are about 616 rules in the Torah.
And you can imagine that, well, let's see, there was a fight. And he bled more than him. But then he's more at fault. But he bled.
And then trying to pit law against law. Do we have that kind of moral clarity? No, not always. We don't.
And so the earthly children of God were morally challenged. And the cases would then revert to the Levitical priests. And they will instruct you. Accordance to the law, as it says in verse 11.
And you cannot deviate from that application of the law. And then there's the, you know, the perfect contentious people that say, I don't like. It's not completely clear as to who we are the contentious people, the presumptuous people. But it's so human.
I'm going to go through this process. Maybe I have something in mind about the people involved. I'm going to get them. I'm going to use God to get them.
Oh, yeah? Wait a minute. You didn't, then you didn't get the outcome that you wanted. Now you protest.
That's very human as well. To say, all these things we will do, except when we fail to do it, then we want forgiveness. Then we fail to execute it and we have trouble in our society. And then we don't know what to do.
This kind of insolence, this kind of contentiousness and presumptuous is very human. It is characteristic of we ourselves. Such people are dealt with summarily. And now we come to my favorite aspect of this chapter.
The aspect of the king. And the view is to the future. And it's almost as though Deuteronomy 17 is describing King Solomon, who acquired so many horses and so many stables and so many riches and so much gold. And Deuteronomy 17 says, watch out for that guy.
When that guy arrives, be very careful about that kind of king because that's not the kinds of things that I want a king to do or to be to you. He shall be from amongst your countrymen. You may not put a foreigner over yourselves. But watch him.
It's almost a prophecy. Does he acquire a lot of wealth? I didn't save you from Egypt so that you could collect horses. So what is a remedy in this case, which I like to think, is the remedy for us too, because we need a vertical relationship.
No matter whether we have high station in life or low station in life, high station in the assembly or no apparent station in the assembly, I often think that the people with low profile in the assembly, they must be the prayer warriors. They're accomplishing probably more than I am. They may only say three words on Sunday, but there are people of prayer who are actually accomplishing something. And so you have a king and he should get for himself.
Not actually get for himself, as you can see here at the bottom. He shall write for himself a copy. I love this image. I love this image of a man of such station who is treated like somebody in what we used to call the Senopool or, you know, the job of writing things out, do it yourself.
You may be the king, but what you need to do is to take this Torah and write it out. That's going to take you some time. And you there, Mr. King, you're going to sit there and you're going to have the Word of God and you're going to make one.
Who is the one for that you're making this one? You're copying it. Who's it for? For you.
It is for you. It's not for anybody else. It's for you. What a lovely image of the necessity for the individual to say word by word.
How does this apply to me? Why? Because we don't want him to be haughty as it says there in verse 20. If you copy out the law, you will have fear of the Lord.
If you copy out the law and ask yourself how it applies to you, maybe your heart won't turn away. Because if you become proud and your heart turns away, then you will be a very bad king. Sometimes I hope that when you are looking at the Word of God and you're not asking, and I can tell you being someone who's in this pulpit from time to time, is that for my next sermon? Stop asking that question.
Is it for me? That's the most important question. How does this verse, this word, this paragraph apply to me? Don't worry about how it applies to other people.
Sometimes you get a thrill of joy from a portrayal of the Redeemer and you say, I want to follow him. I want to follow him with all my heart. As I think about this text that's before me, as it were copying it out, get it in here, get it in here, how does it apply to me? And to the extent that I'm able to do that and apply it to myself, isn't it remarkable how the rest of the circles take care of themselves?
If we get to know the Lord Jesus, we become more like the Lord Jesus. And as we become more like the Lord Jesus, our relationships in the horizontal while we walk this earth have a way of taking care of themselves. There may be opposition. Jesus explained to us that if they hate you, it's because they hated me first.
So you will see much in the society that speaks of nothing but hatred of God. That is a big challenge to try to change that. But within our own circles that God has given us, the people that God introduces us into our lives, we should not view these things as random. We should view these things as having a place in our lives by the design of God.
And if we are ready, because we are in a good, vertical relationship with God, God can use us. And like a pebble in a pond, when it's thrown into the pond, the influence of Christ hopefully can spread. And so I trust these few thoughts this morning as we kind of rushed through Deuteronomy 17, we'll be strengthening to your hearts and instructive to your minds. We need the grace of God in order to see these things realized in our lives.
We should not be like the people at the bottom of Mount Sinai with a purely fleshly drive to say, all these things we will do. We will do them by the grace of God. You will live your lives by the grace of God. That is the only way that you can please God is to be a redeemed person living your life by the grace of God.
Shall we pray? Father in Heaven, we are struck this morning that you are a holy God and that you promised the Redeemer from long ago. But now we look back at Calvary and we know that he has come and he has redeemed us and that you have made us your children. Help us Lord in our daily lives, in our relationships nearby and perhaps not so nearby, help us to honor the Lord Jesus Christ.
We pray in His name. Amen.