1477 - “Remembering on Purpose and for a Purpose” Deuteronomy 6:20-25

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1477. Today we're back in the book of Deuteronomy. I took you there yesterday for a very specific purpose. The book of Deuteronomy is the second law. Literally, that's what it means. But it's not the second giving of the law. It is Moses rehearsing the law and all of the great history of redemption and how God brought the children of Israel out of Egyptian bondage and slavery into the wilderness of Sinai, and then to the gateway to Canaan, which was Kadesh Barnea. As you know, the people rebelled there, and they were destined then to die in the wilderness. Everyone that came out of Egypt died in the wilderness except Joshua and Caleb. That's right, even Aaron, Miriam, and Moses, the man of God. You see, they failed to go into the land. And because of that God said, Because you would not trust me, even after all I'd done for you, after bringing you across the Red Sea, and letting you walk on the floor of that sea on dry ground, and then drowning the entire Egyptian army, and then feeding you manna, water from the rock, and giving you the great moral law of God that has been the foundation of great civilizations since fourteen hundred and forty six years before Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Because you fail to trust me, then I'll let you die in the wilderness. And so Moses was giving his swan song. That's what Deuteronomy is. It's his last words before he climbed up on Mount Nebo, looked over the land that he would never enter, and then he died, and God buried him. And so Moses is giving the last things that he would ever say to the people of God. And they were things that were close to him, things that were in his heart. I have stood beside a lot of dying beds over the last five decades, and I can tell you, when people are ready to die, they do not mince words, they don't deal with trivia. They say those things to those that they love and are closer to than anyone, those that are with them, they say the things that mean the most to them. And so Moses said, I want you to pass on the great story of redemption to others. And that starts with your own family, with your spouse, with your children, with your grandchildren, with your brothers and sisters, but especially to your children. And Moses said that I want you to repeat them. Verse 7 says, I want you to repeat them again and again. Why? Because repetition is the mother of learning. You see, every time we hear something, see it, we say it, and we experience it in some way. That makes the pathway in our mind about that, that track that we run on every time we hear something, it makes it to be more engraved in our minds. And Moses said, You need to do this while you're walking by the way, when you're lying down at night, when you get up in the morning. You need to share this while you're on the way. And he said, if you do this, then God's going to bless you. And then he comes to the end of chapter six when he's told them about how God wanted to bless them and how God wanted them to pass on what he had taught them. In verse 20 he says, In the future your children are going to ask you, what is the meaning of these laws, decrees, and regulations that Hashem, Adonai, Yahweh, our God has commanded us to obey. And verse twenty one says, He told them, then you must tell them we were Pharaoh's slaves in Egypt. But the Lord, Hashem, that is Adonai, Yahweh, that's the personal covenant name of God. But the Lord brought us out of Egypt with a strong hand. The Lord did miraculous signs and wonders before our eyes, dealing terrifying blows against Egypt and Pharaoh and all his people. He brought us out of Egypt so he could give us the land that he had sworn to give to our ancestors. You see, God didn't just randomly bring them out at a perchance time. It was all in the great providence of God. God had told Abraham, Your seed is going to go for over four hundred years into a foreign land, and then I will bring them back out again with a strong and mighty arm, and I will bring them back to the very land that you have walked up and down in, and that I promised I would give you. That's why it's called the promised land. God promised that to Abraham, then his son Isaac, then his grandson Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel. And so he said, I have brought you out to bring you in. God has purpose in everything that he does. God doesn't just randomly do things. He has a will. And it is up to us to search after God's will and search after God with all of our hearts. And he said, If you will search for the Lord with all of your heart, you will find me. And God is not trying to hide his will from us. He wasn't from them. But when they knew God's will, they stubbornly and with a stiff neck decided to do their own thing, and they died in the wilderness. And the scripture says that God brought them out so that he could bring them into the land of their ancestors. This is what verse 23 says. And the Lord our God commanded us to obey all these decrees and to fear him so he could continue to bless us and preserve our lives as he has done to this day. For we will be counted as righteous when we obey all the commands the Lord our God has given us. And what is that command that we love the Lord our God with the totality of our being, our heart, our soul, our mind, our strength? No, that's not a good work. That is just to love the God who has given you everything that you have. And to trust him, this is the will of God that you believe on him whom he has sent. You see, it's the will of God that we trust in. Hebrews chapter eleven, and Hebrews is the most Jewish of all the New Testament books. Hebrews chapter eleven says in verse six that without faith it is impossible to please God. You see, this is the way we please God is to trust in Him whom He sent, and to trust in His Word, trust in the living Word, trust in the written Word. And this is what the closing verses of chapter six is talking about. He said, I want you to remember all that I have done for you. And God in His great mercy gave glorified object lessons to the nation of Israel that were weekly, that were monthly, that sometimes happened every seven years, every fifty years, and then there were annual things that happened every year. These were days of festivals and feast and fast days that God said, I want you to teach your children these, and I'm going to give you these on a regular basis so that every year that you are in existence, every year at a specific time at a special time, I want you to remember these things at the same time every year so that your children will do them so often that it'll become a part of who they are. And I don't want you to just do them to be doing them. I want you to do them so that you can remember who I am and how I relate to you and what I've done for you because every one of these are a reminder to you of some aspect of my great love for you and my mercy and my goodness and my holiness and my righteousness, all of these great attributes and characteristics of God. So you go to Leviticus chapter 23 that God gave them at Mount Sinai, and you open up that chapter and you see that God says, I want to first of all give you something to remember me by every week. He said, You know, I did this from the very beginning. I created the heaven and the earth. I am the creator and the sustainer of all of life. And I want you to understand that's the first thing I want you to remember about me, that I am the creator. God is so in to his people remembering that. Why? Because if he made us, then we are accountable to him. He owns us. This is why he commands all the earth to worship him. Whether you know him in a personal way or not, you are still accountable to know him and to worship him. The Bible says that he gives in the heart of every man, according to Romans chapter 1, verses 18 and following, the Bible says that inside of a man, intuitively, internally, subjectively, God puts the knowledge of who he is within every person. And as soon as they have the mind and the capacity to reason and to think, they know deep in their heart there is a God. You say, Well, why doesn't everyone respond to him? Even people that realize there is a God, in the faintest way, they can reject the light that they have, and if they do, God's not going to give them any more light. But if they walk in the light and respond to the light that they have, no matter how faint that light is, there is a knowledge in every person that says there is someone greater than you. There is a designer that designed everything, the rhyme and rhythm of the seasons of the day that put the heavens in place. You say, Well, how do you know that? Because God says so. And God's word is true. As a matter of fact, the scripture says, Let God be true and every man a liar, because you see, all men are liars. Your children are liars, mine are, and without the help of God we'll lie to ourselves and everyone else, and we'll even lie about God and lie to God, even though he knows it all. And the Bible says in that same book of Romans, chapter one, and verses eighteen and following, that when they knew God, when they knew who he was, they knew about him, they knew that there was someone greater than themselves, but instead of running to him, instead of bowing before him, they suppressed that knowledge. They sat on that knowledge, they tried to hide that knowledge deep in their hearts. They didn't want to think about God because the very knowledge of God meant that they were not an end in themselves and that they were subject to one that is greater than they are. And none of us like that. In our own flesh, we want to be our own boss, we want to do our own thing. That's why there's such stubbornness and rebellion in every heart. So God said, I want to remind you that I am the creator. And I have set the days. One, two, three, four, five, six, and I told you what I created on every day. I made everything that there is. On the seventh day, I set that day aside for you to remember who I am. And for you to do as I did. I want you to work six days. That doesn't mean five days, four days. That means you work and are active for six days. That's the healthiest way to live. But on the seventh day, on Shabbat, what we call Saturday, I want you to take it easy. I want you to rest. I want you to remember on that day, not just rest to be resting, but I want you to rest to remember. See, God uses the word zakar over and over and over and over again and cognate terms, that is, those that are like that, that are in the same family. Because God wants us to never forget, so he reminds us over and over again to remember, to remember, to remember. And he gives us all of these special days and occasions to remember various aspects of who he is and what he's done for us. And Shabbat is about God being creator. And the more that we understand about God as creation, the more we will want to set aside a day to just remember him as creator. And God said, I want everybody to do it. I want my people to do it, especially the Jews. But before Mount Sinai, the Sabbath was sacred. And God said, I want you as my people, especially those of you who know me, those of you who are called by my name, I want you to remember this day. And it had nothing to do with whether they were saved or not. It had to do with just following God and obeying what he said and living by faith and trust that God knows better than we do. So people say to me all the time, why is the Sabbath so special? Well, it's because God's so special, because He made us. And He said, I want you to remember this, so I think it'd be good for us to remember that, don't you? He gave us a day to do it. And when we get to heaven, I want to remind you the first thing we're going to praise God for in Revelation 4, which is the best I can remember, precedes Revelation chapter 5 when we sing worthy is the Lamb. Before we do that, we're going to say worthy is the Creator. You made us. We wouldn't be here without you. And we want to acknowledge that first of all. And then we know that we strayed from all that you gave to us and the blessings you gave us. And if it were not have been for the Lord Jesus, had it not been for him, we wouldn't even be standing before you. We'd be cast into outer darkness and eternal hell. But because of your great mercy and grace and hesed that you've given us down through the centuries and given us in our own personal lives, if it wasn't for your mercy and your grace, we would be cast off forever. And so we say to you, worthy is the Lamb that was slain. Worthy is the one who has given us eternal life, and that's none other than Jesus, the Lamb of God. For on the way, this is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 16:03

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org, then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's Questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.