Listen, O Israel! Transcript

Chapter 1: Power of the Ten Commandments

The 10 Commandments. Every few months, six months, every year, maybe every couple of years, the 10 Commandments make their way into the news. Somebody, somewhere, wants to post the 10 Commandments somewhere public. There's this idea. I think that if we post them publicly for people to see, then somehow through simply reading them up on a wall if they pay attention to them at all, or somehow being in the presence of the thing that the 10 Commandments are trying to make us do and try to turn us into will happen. The problem is we know that Scripture doesn't work this way. You can have a Bible up on a shelf, you can take that Bible from the shelf and even open it, you can even read that Bible, but unless you try to live it out unless you intentionally try to have it make sense and say God, what do you want me to do today? Unless you're intentional about it, it will only do something. If I posted a recipe for a chocolate souffle on my kitchen counter and left it there, I would magically know how to make it just by having it on the counter. I've made one. It didn't go well. It wasn't so bad. I was raising chickens, had a ton of eggs, and decided to try a chocolate souffle. It collapsed. It didn't work. I think I have yet to try again. I need to do that sometime. But it wasn't enough to have the recipe in front of me. It wasn't enough to try that one time to make it. I didn't become an expert in making that particular recipe just because I had written it on a card and tried it out once. 

Reading the Scripture and living out what God is trying to do through these Ten Commandments takes intentionality, practice, and time. We only get it right sometimes. Rarely do we get it right most of the time. And yet God is patient with us. There's that line in today's passage where it says he will visit the iniquities of the parents of the children up to four generations. We don't like hearing that, and I get it. Why would God punish children for what their parents have done? It makes us uncomfortable. It should. 

But the very next line is he will be patient and merciful to the thousandth generation of those who love Him. So, we have both in our past. We have people in our past, in our previous generations, who both rejected God and proclaimed Him. And here we are in the middle, stuck in the in-between, dealing with what our ancestors have done and left undone, but trusting in God's mercy to carry through from the things they have done in His name. And so we have a God who is merciful and patient to the thousandth generation. 

But we will feel the effects of what has happened before us. We still feel the effects in the church today of the decisions made one or two generations ago. We still feel the effects in our country of decisions and ways of acting that were counter to God's will that were made three to four generations ago. We still experience these things as a society, impacting us. And yet, we turn to God's mercy to the thousandth generation because that's all we have to rely on. That's all that we can cling to. We can't change the path. We can make amends, transform, and change ourselves and how we live out the past, but the only thing we can do is cling to the mercy that God gives and move forward in praising God's name. 

But if we go back to these ten commandments in the beginning, Moses has something compelling that we might miss if we didn't follow the story from last week's passage to this one because we jumped far. Did we not? We thought a one-chapter jump between Moses being born and Moses talking to the burning God at the burning bush was a big jump. We jumped from God talking to Moses in the burning bush all the way forward through the freedom of the Israelites, from Pharaoh, through the crossing of the Red Sea, through the wandering of the desert, through the giving of the first ten commandments, the first time, which the people didn't quite get right. Then we reach the point where God's ready to send the people into the promised land, and they say go and conquer the people, and this land will be yours. And they're afraid. They're not quite ready to trust in God. And because of that, the people who had received the Ten Commandments, who had been freed from Israel, who were about to enter the Promised Land, were forced to wander the wilderness for 40 years so that all of them, everyone who was at that mountain, everyone who had experienced God's transformation but responded in fear, had died. Moses was left with one or two other people, but that generation had moved on. 

And so the Scripture tells us this, and Moses immediately says, at the beginning of this passage, that remember, it is God who gave you yourselves, not your ancestors, his commands and what he expects of you. He gave it to you. So, how do we reconcile these two things? That Scripture tells us that everybody alive at the time that the Ten Commandments and the Law were given had died, and they wandered in the wilderness, as that happened. To Moses saying God gave this to you, I believe as a Christian, I mean, there's a lot of different ways of interpreting this, but, as the way I do from a Christian perspective is that this is the power and presence of the Holy Spirit, that God is speaking these things to us now, even as we live, even as we seek to live out who God wants us to be in our lives and in how we treat people and how we grow and how we move out into the world, and especially in how we treat those who do not yet know Him, that God's Spirit is speaking to each and every one of us even now. 

This isn't something that God had put to stone tablets and put to paper so long ago, and now we're just hearing it for second hand, third hand, fourth hand, tenth hand, from past down to us, that it is even now that God's Spirit is speaking to you and he is placing this in your hearts. His words define not only who God is and what God has done but the freedom that comes from that. And it's odd, I'm sure, to hear talking about the Ten Commandments and referring to them as freedoms because in our culture, in our society, when we talk about freedom, it's the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, without anybody telling us otherwise. And here we have God's commandments, rules, and law, telling us what we cannot do. But God is setting this up. God is setting Himself up against where the Israelites came from. He says remember, I am the God who brought you out of slavery in Egypt. I am the God who rescued you and brought you forth, met you at the mountain, and brought you to the wilderness and through the wilderness, to the other side. And I am the God that will be with you as you move into this land, this blessing and promise. So God has defined Himself in terms of what he has done and the oppression and the evil that was being done to them in Egypt, where they had no freedoms. They had laws. They had decrees of what they could and could not do. We talked last week about how Pharaoh had tried to kill every male baby and have every male child born killed. And this is what God brings His people out of. But he sets these conditions on what they should do and how they should live in this new land, and we read today what he lays out. Worship only God. 

Chapter 2: Remembering God, Building Relationships

There are a lot of things that compete for our attention compete for our worship. There are many ways that we forget who God is and what God has done. And it's so, so easy if we're not intentional about remembering if we're not intentional about remembering what God has done, not only in this distant past, but in the church's past and our past, and what God is doing now. We forget who God said he is, and our lives go astray. Don't make graven images. Don't find ways to worship something of creation that won't last and place it in a primary position above God. Honor the Sabbath. Remember. 

They came from a place, and the Scripture reminds us they came from where Pharaoh used forced labor. He was using forced labor to control the population and their destiny so they wouldn't revolt. And he's reminding them that you have been freed to rest. You do not have to work seven days a week, from sun up to sun down. I am giving you Sabbath, not only you but all those who work for you. Not only them but the resident aliens that live in your midst. 

God is telling us that it doesn't rest entirely on our work and efforts, to the point that everything will fall apart if we stop. God tells us that it's not all about the working, the doing, or the resting. There is something built into this. There is something so profound to say that there is intentionally built into creation, built into the rescue of the Israelites from slavery, that God has ordained rest and has placed it in this group of ten laws, ten commandments, ten ways of living in this world that leads to freedom and life. Each one of these, we can look and say, well, this is how you used to have to live when you were in Egypt. This is how you can choose to live now; if you do so, it brings blessing, and if you don't, it doesn't. 

These first four are all about how we relate to God, worship, and grow. And then, it transitions into how we relate to one another. Do not lie, do not steal, do not cheat, do not cover your neighbor's possessions, do not cover your neighbor's wife, do not cover your neighbor's donkey. I get that because I don't want to own a donkey. Some of them are easy, but these are how we relate. It's not about what we want. It's not always about our desires. It's about something other than what we want to cling to and claim for ourselves. It's an invitation to live in relationship with others. 

These things are summarized in the sixth chapter that we read, the second Deuteronomy passage, and then proclaimed by Jesus in the passage in Mark: Love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, your mind, your soul and your strength, and love your neighbor as yourself. These are the two great commandments. This is how you live out God's call. This is how you live out God's commands. This is how you live out of the freedom from sin and slavery and death and God's power. You live out of the freedom from sin and slavery and death, and you live into life. It's those guide rails that I've talked about before that; if we don't have guide rails, we don't know where God wants us to go. But he's placed these guide rails, so we stay within the path. So stay between these places. Find the way to live your life. Find the way to live what God wants you to do within the guidelines of loving God and loving neighbor. 

But I started today by saying this takes time, work, and intentionality. Having the laws on a wall, having the Bible on your shelf, even having the Bible open in your kitchen, even if you read it every day, if you're not trying to live it out, it won't have an effect. We see this when Moses commands the people to tell one another the stories. Share the laws. What share them with your children? Talk about them when you are out and about in the world and at home alone. Affix them into your mind and in your heart. And then the last thing, once you've done all of those things that make a difference, put them up as a signpost in your homes, put them on your doorpost, and there are a lot of Jews today that do place the Ten Commandments in a scroll on the outside of their homes, on necklaces, on headpieces. But you can't just do that without the relationship building and the sharpening of iron against the iron of talking about these things, sharing them with your children, and growing from doing that. 

So this is why I would love for you to be in a small group. This is why I would love for all of you to be a part of something where you are talking about the Scripture, reading them together, and growing together. Talk about current events. Goodness nose, things are pretty bad right now. We pray for Israel and Palestine. Right now, we pray for peace. We have no idea where that's going to go and how that's going to wind up, and so we pray. 

Chapter 3: Living Out Our Faith Through Scripture

But when we gather and read the Scripture, gather to grow together, and talk about current events, we should always be asking, how does God want us to live in this? How does the Bible shape how I interpret this? What does it mean for me and the world, and how do I grow? We do this together to check one another's biases, check one another's understandings, and grow together. We live out our faith by wrestling with the Scripture. We live out our faith simply not by posting it or reading it on Sunday morning but by struggling with it and growing together. And we do so because we have been freed from all of the things that would keep us from God and all the ways that would distract us and all the powers of this world that would seek death and destruction, and we've been invited to use that freedom to live out the calling of God. 

The question for each of us is if we will do it. Do we want to grow more in love with God and grow more in love with those around us? Do we want to follow Christ more closely? And I wholeheartedly pray that the answer is yes because that's ultimately what we're here to do, as Jesus summarized in today's passage. Do you want to do it, or are you content? Only you can answer that question as you leave this place after our worship is concluded, and there's coffee out there. There's a new flavor of coffee, so you should ensure you get some or make more if you run out, or you can talk about it around the tables. What am I looking for? What does God want from me? How am I living out not only the Ten Commandments but that commandment to talk about the Scripture, to wrestle with it both in the home and outside of it, passing it on to the next generation? What am I doing, and what can I do more? How can I live out that freedom?