“5 See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. 6 Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.” 7 What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to Him? 8 And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today? ”
I want you to remember a significant community of which you’ve been a part. Maybe it was a high school basketball team that went to state. For whatever reason there was a camaraderie on that team, and, for you, it was simply a privilege to be a part of it. Maybe it was your group of friends in college. It was a unique time in all of your lives, and you simply can’t begin to comprehend the impact those friends have had upon you. Maybe it was a team at the office that clicked in such a way as to make going to work a joy.
We all want to be part of something remarkable and that goes for church as well. The difference when it comes to church is that church is remarkable by its very nature; we rightly strive to make a basketball team remarkable; we rightly recognize the church has always been remarkable.
How can you improve upon that which Christ loves? “From heaven he came and sought her to be his holy bride; with his own blood he bought her and for her life he died.” No one can improve upon the object of Jesus’ affection. Any attempt to make church better than Christ made it misses the point: the very fact that the church exists is remarkable. God’s people have always been something of a miracle.
Don’t miss that fact. Don’t long for a church that is compelling in the eyes of this pitiful world. That will never happen because Christ’s church is remarkable like Christ who, “made himself nothing and took on the nature of a servant.” “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain. Like one from whom people hide their faces he was despised, and we held him in low esteem.” People in the world might find the church compelling but the world as a whole never will.
Don’t be surprised when people hold the church In low esteem. Don’t be surprised if, at times, you see church that way. Learn to see us as Christ sees us; “from heaven he came and sought us to be his holy bride; with his own blood he bought us and for our life he died.”
Jesus died so that the church might live. You can’t add to that. You can only seek to do that justice. God’s people have always been a remarkable creation and we are called to humbly see ourselves as such for the sake of the world. That is the claim of this sermon: God’s people have always been a remarkable creation and we are called to humbly see ourselves as such for the sake of the world.
We will see this in three points from Moses’ words to God’s people. First: the remarkable wisdom available to the people of God. Second: the remarkable audience of the people of God. Third: the remarkable moral code of the people of God. First, in verses 5-6, we see the remarkable wisdom available to the people of God. Second, in verse 7, we see the remarkable audience of the people of God. Third, in verse 8, we see the remarkable moral code of the people of God.
First: the remarkable wisdom available to the people of God. As Israel stood at the edge of the Promised Land, Moses prepared them to settle in the midst of the nations. They would be in the world, but they must not be of the world. That is a challenge for us as it was for them.
It is a challenge, in part, because the Japanese proverb is true, “The nail that sticks out gets hammered down.” Israel was to stick out. God’s people today are to stick out. That means others will try to hammer us down to fit in. We must not. We must not for the sake of others. We are the salt of the earth. We give this world the flavor it needs. We are the light of the world. We hold out the hope that this sad world needs.
We were made to be remarkable that way. We were made to walk with God and be different. Carl Henry put it this way, “The big turn came when I was twenty, and received Jesus Christ as personal Savior and Lord of my life. Into the darkness of my young life he put bright stars that still shine and sparkle. After that encounter I walked the world with God as my Friend.” Israel was to walk through the world that way. We as a church, all together, are to walk through the world that way.
We do so by obeying the commandments. You are not to stick out just to be yourself. You are to stick out by obeying the commandments. Look at verse 5, ‘See, I have taught you decrees and laws as the Lord my God commanded me, so that you may follow them in the land you are entering to take possession of it. Observe them carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”’
Those last words could rightly be translated as, “wow, this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”’ The Moabites were to say that. The Philistines were to say that. Even the Egyptians were to say that. They were to come to the point of recognizing that they had enslaved a people with remarkable wisdom and understanding that could only be given by God.
Now that is the way the world is to respond to the church; “goodness, this is a wise and understanding people.” When people stuck in the world don’t respond that way it is a sad state of affairs. When a man says, ‘I prefer drunkenness to having a peace that passes all understanding,’ it is a sad state of affairs. When a culture says, ‘promiscuity is more natural than monogamy,’ it is a sad state of affairs. When a woman’s spending habits say, ‘I prefer greed to contentment,’ it is a sad state of affairs.
Moses’ attitude regarding the response of the world was hopeful. He hoped that people would hear God’s word and say, ‘this is the wisest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Many have and many do but sadly some don’t.
I hope you have heard God’s word and said, ‘this is the wisest thing I’ve ever heard.’ I hope that when you open the Scriptures, you say with the Psalmist, “Open my eyes that I may see wonderful things in Your law.” I hope that after hearing God’s word preached you don’t focus on the man who preached but rather say with David, “The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart… They are more precious than gold, than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb.”
There is no need to say that to be “churchy.” The only reason to say that is because you recognize that you have heard from God and no wisdom could be greater.
Moses saw the commands of God’s as wise, he didn’t’ see them as repressive. The man through whom God first spoke these commandments thought they were liberating and wise. If you grew up outside of the covenant, you can probably see that more clearly than those who grew up inside the covenant. Perhaps the best thing that could happen to some of us is to somehow hear God’s word again for the very time. Then we would learn to say that any people who keep the word must be “a wise and understanding people.”
Sadly the loudest voices in our culture aren’t impressed by Scripture. This is tragic because so much of the good that this culture enjoys comes from God’s word. So many of the blessings we enjoy in this nation—freedoms, prosperity, aspects of modern medicine, proper social welfare, and so many others—are the fruit of the wisdom of God’s word. Os Guinness gets it right. He says, “the Christian faith is the single strongest contributor to the rise of the modern world, yet the church has fallen captive to the modern world it helped to create.”
Generations of Christian influence have led to the good that you enjoy every day “wow, what a wise and understanding people”. And now our culture has accepted the blessings and rejected the wisdom. God warned Israel about this foolishness. We will study it in a couple months; “When the Lord your God brings you into the land he swore to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you—a land with large, flourishing cities you did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things you did not provide, wells you did not dig, and vineyards and olive groves you did not plant—then when you eat and are satisfied, be careful that you do not forget the Lord, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.” You can’t understand when you live without understanding that dynamic.
So, what can you do about it? If you care about our culture, which does have much beauty in it and of course is filled with people made in the image of God, what can you do about their rejection of wisdom? There are all sorts of thoughts on the matter, but any answer must include verse 6, ‘Observe them [meaning the commands] carefully, for this will show your wisdom and understanding to the nations, who will hear about all these decrees and say, “Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.”’ One of the best things you can offer the world around you is your obedience to the word of God.
Don’t have a small view of what we are doing right now. We are hearing God’s word to put God’s word into action. That is how God has historically changed the world. He has done it through His people and that means us.
You have access to God’s remarkable wisdom, and you would be wise to avail yourself of it. We also have a remarkable audience who should astound the world. That is our second point: the remarkable audience of the people of God.
We moderns take the fact that God will listen to us for granted. At our worst, we seem to think that God exists for our sake. The ancients were not so proud. They acted as if their gods were more important than humanity.
The problem was that they viewed their gods as unwilling to communicate with humanity. They rightly thought that the gods must far more important than they could comprehend, but they wrongly thought that must mean that the gods were unwilling to communicate regularly. Praise the Father of Jesus that they were wrong; that is verse 7, “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to Him?”
The fact that our culture is sick of hearing what God expects and just assumes that God will listen when they pray is, in a strange way, a sign of the success of the Bible. Israel’s neighbors would look at our culture in disbelief. They would say, ‘you know what God expects and you don’t care?’ ‘You know to whom you can pray, and you aren’t praying? What is wrong with you people?’
Listen to the following prayer. We studied it when we studied Jesus’ words about prayer, “do not heap up empty phrases as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard for their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”
Don’t just listen to this sad prayer of the nations out of historical curiosity. Listen as if these words were uttered by a soul made in the image of God and that you cared about this person. He prayed, “May the wrath of the heart of my god be pacified… The sin which I have committed I know not.” So, he has a sense that God is angry, but he doesn’t know what he has done to make the god angry. He doesn’t know what is sin and what is acceptable. His god has never told him. He prays, “I sought for help, but no one takes my hand. I wept, but no one came to my side.”
If you have a child, imagine your child praying that prayer. Your little girl doesn’t know to whom she is praying, and she doesn’t know what this god expects. She is without hope. Now read verse 7, “What other nation is so great as to have their gods near them the way the Lord our God is near us whenever we pray to Him?”
God’s willingness to communicate is a profound grace. Anyone who takes God seriously and takes pleasing Him seriously can see that. God didn’t give His commandments to people who were happy in their innocence. The commandments didn’t make them slaves. They were already dead in their sins and on some level their consciences knew it just like today on some level people’s consciences know the truth. The commandments were liberating.
We could all learn from those ancients. They would take a speaking and listening God very seriously. Take the fact that God has spoken seriously. You can read His communication to humanity in your own language. That is remarkable. You have regular and habitual access to the preaching of God’s word. That is remarkable. We so easily take all of this for granted that we start comparing ourselves with one another in terms of Bible knowledge and piety rather than being amazed that we know God at all.
The remarkable thing about the church is that we can, in all honesty and hopefully humility, say that we know God. David Wells is right, “The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is not inadequate technique, insufficient organization, or antiquated music, and those who want to squander the church’s resources bandaging these scratches will do nothing to stanch the flow of blood that is spilling from its true wounds. The fundamental problem in the evangelical world today is that God rests too inconsequentially upon the church. His truth is too distant, His grace is too ordinary, His judgment is too benign, His gospel is too easy, and His Christ is too common.”
We can’t make the miracle of God’s friendship with man any more remarkable than it is, but we must seek to do it justice.
We have a God who has spoken to us. We have a God who listens to us. We see it most clearly in the incarnation. “The word became flesh and dwelt among us.” He is Immanuel, God with us. You can’t get nearer to us than our God has gotten.
If God’s nearness doesn’t change you in the least, then you are not hearing from Him and you certainly aren’t really speaking to Him. You are ignoring what millions of people want—to hear from God and speak with God. Be sensible lest those millions rise up against you on the last day.
We must be sensible about the remarkable privileges that we have. We must see these privileges as such rather than as liabilities in this secular age. That is especially true in our final point: the remarkable moral code of the people of God.
The world considers the church’s moral code a liability. We are consistently told that for the church to have a voice in the modern world, we must conform to the ethical code of the world. Certain standards are simply outdated and must change. That is not how God sees it. God sees any attempt to change this moral code as profoundly foolish. Verse 8, “And what other nation is so great as to have such righteous decrees and laws as this body of laws I am setting before you today?”
God doesn’t consider the morality set forth in Scripture to be a liability. He considers it an invitation to greatness. The greatness of God’s people comes, in part, from the perfection of the morality which God has taught us. We don’t always keep it as we ought, but we have it. The poor world doesn’t even have that.
Moses made clear that God’s commands were righteous; consider what that means. The commands of God’s word are right. They outline the way life ought to be lived. Any man who reads God’s word with an open mind will say, ‘that is the way things out to go.’ You should love your neighbor as yourself. You should be content in what you have. You should consider yourself as having dignity since you are made in the image of God. You should deal with God when it comes to your guilty conscience and not drown it in entertainment or alcohol. What is so repressive about that?
Read through the Sermon on the Mount. Read through the apostles’ virtue lists. What would be so horrible with a world that ran according to that code?
Think of what societies would look like if they took Moses’ words about generosity to the poor and the weak seriously. If the Law of Moses were followed, Israel would have been a beacon to the world then and now.
The morality of the Bible has never been a liability. It is simply the morality for which we were all created and by which we all by judged.
Any church that distracts from that moral code rather than embracing that moral code is separating itself from that greatness. The idea that any church will do much good in this world by rejecting the morality laid out in Scripture is nonsensical.
The morality of Scripture is the morality of God Himself. You are to do good to your enemies because your Father makes the sun to shine on the righteous and the unrighteous. You are to do good to the needy because your Father has done good to you who are needy. You are to be holy because God is holy. You are to be patient because God is patient. The fruit of the Spirit isn’t simply a list of virtues; it is a description of what God exhibits, “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.” The life of Jesus is the clearest picture of this moral code in action, and who has problems with the life of Jesus?
What is rather remarkable about this matter is how many people who profess respect for Jesus of Nazareth show no respect towards the moral code which he gladly kept. They respect him because he cared for those in need; that is what the moral code teaches. They respect him because he let his ‘yes’ be yes and his ‘no’ be no; that is what the moral code teaches. They respect him because he offered forgiveness; that is what the moral code teaches. They respect him because he lived with integrity; that is what the moral code teaches. They respect him for keeping the moral code they disrespect.
Don’t be surprised when people dismiss or even revile the morality of God. The vast majority of these people have almost no idea of what they speak. They are simply parroting what they’ve heard in the culture, and they haven’t heard from God. They don’t know the greatness which they mock.
This is a profound opportunity for this church and for every church. We have remarkable wisdom available to us in these commands and this world clearly needs them. We have remarkable nearness to the only God who speaks and listens, and this geographical area is filled with people made in His image whose greatest need is to be near God as God came near them in Jesus. We have a remarkable moral code given to us to keep not so that others will think that we are better than them, but so that others will see a different way of life is possible.
This morning we will baptize Tayvia into this way of life. This morning Jacob and Cheyenne professed their faith in affirmation this way of life. Don’t imagine that this way of life is something merely cultural ‘I just happened to grow up this way.’ It is something supernatural. It is a miracle. It is far more remarkable than any of us will ever recognize.
You know that because the Son of God died to make this life possible. Think the highest thought you can of church. You won’t think higher of it than Jesus did; “from heaven he came and sought us to be his holy bride; with his own blood he bought us and for our life he died.”
This church really is that remarkable. You can’t make it any more remarkable, but you must seek to do it justice. Amen.