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In Christ, Mark
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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.
“These are the terms of the covenant the Lord commanded Moses to make with the Israelites in Moab, in addition to the covenant He had made with them at Horeb.
Moses summoned all the Israelites and said to them:”
“Your eyes have seen all that the Lord did in Egypt to Pharaoh, to all his officials and to all his land. With your own eyes you saw those great trials, those miraculous signs and great wonders. But to this day the Lord has not given you a mind that understands or eyes that see or ears that hear. During the forty years that I led you through the desert, your clothes did not wear out, nor did the sandals on your feet. You ate no bread and drank no wine or other fermented drink. I did this so that you might know that I am the Lord your God.”
"When you reached this place, Sihon, king of Heshbon, and Og, king of Bashan, came out to fight against us, but we defeated them. We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites, the Gadites, and the half-tribe of Manasseh.”
“Carefully follow the terms of this covenant, so that you may prosper in everything you do. All of you are standing today in the presence of the Lord your God—your leaders and chief men, your elders and officials, and all the other men of Israel, together with your children and your wives, and the aliens living in your camps who chop your wood and carry your water. You are standing here in order to enter into a covenant with the Lord your God, a covenant the Lord is making with you this day and sealing with an oath, to confirm you this day as His people, that He may be your God as He promised you and as He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I am making this covenant, with its oath, not only with you who are standing here with us today in the presence of the Lord our God but also with those who are not here today.”
“You yourselves know how we lived in Egypt and how we passed through the countries on the way here. You saw among them their detestable images and idols of wood and stone, of silver and gold. Make sure there is no man or woman, clan or tribe among you today whose heart turns away from the Lord our God to go and worship the gods of those nations; make sure there is no root among you that produces such bitter poison.”
"When such a person hears the words of this oath, he invokes a blessing on himself and therefore thinks, ‘I will be safe, even though I persist in going my own way.’ This will bring disaster on the watered land as well as the dry. The Lord will never be willing to forgive him; His wrath and zeal will burn against that man. All the curses written in this book will fall upon him, and the Lord will blot out his name from under Heaven. The Lord will single him out from all the tribes of Israel for disaster, according to all the curses of the covenant written in this Book of the Law.”
“Your children who follow you in later generations and foreigners who come from distant lands will see the calamities that have fallen on the land and the diseases with which the Lord has afflicted it. The whole land will be a burning waste of salt and sulfur—nothing planted, nothing sprouting, no vegetation growing on it. It will be like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in fierce anger. All the nations will ask: ‘Why has the Lord done this to this land? Why this fierce, burning anger?’"
“And the answer will be: ‘It is because this people abandoned the covenant of the Lord, the God of their fathers, the covenant He made with them when He brought them out of Egypt. They went off and worshiped other gods and bowed down to them, gods they did not know, gods He had not given them. Therefore the Lord's anger burned against this land, so that he brought on it all the curses written in this book. In furious anger and in great wrath, the Lord uprooted them from their land and thrust them into another land, as it is now.’"
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may follow all the words of this law.”
Deuteronomy 29
This ends our reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.
Covenant promises.
We have seen them throughout the Old Testament to this point.
God had made agreements with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob…all forefathers of the Israelites who now were listening to their current leader, Moses. In Deuteronomy, chapter 29, we find God again affirming through Moses that the people of Israel were His people and He was their God.
To that end, we read Moses reminding the Israelites of the experiences of their ancestors while held captive in Egypt and what God had done to Pharoah and his people before delivering Israel from oppression into freedom. The people were also asked to remember how they had been cared for throughout their own forty-year desert exodus to include how their “clothes and sandals” had “failed to wear out”. Indeed, the Lord had cared for His people and would continue to do so as they finally were about to enter Canaan.
And yet, we see in our scripture passage where God was concerned as He continues to warn the Israelites just as He has done in prior chapters of Deuteronomy. God knew that the hearts of the Israelites were vulnerable to temptation for after all they were sinners and given this, God persisted in cautioning them not to worship false gods or idols, to refuse to go the way their desires led them instead of the way that He wanted them to go.
To underscore the certainty that He would bring wrath on anyone who disobediently broke His commands, we find God promising destruction, calamities, and diseases similar to what He sent on “Sodom and Gomorrah, Admah and Zeboiim”. Ultimately, the choice to either uphold or violate the covenant with God was up to the people. Their behavior would reveal whether or not they were faithful and loyal to the Lord who expected them to fully surrender their will for His.
And so it is with us.
As Christians, we have a new covenant with our God through belief in Jesus Christ. God’s promise, His covenant, is one grounded in the promise of eternal life to all who place their trust in His Son for salvation. This is why the New Testament is centered on three Christ-centered things:
1. Christ’s birth and subsequent life, the ministry portion of which beginning when He was approximately thirty years old and carrying on for three to three and a half years after. We find this ministry captured within the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John…the first four books of the New Testament.
2. Christ’s crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension, a period where we find Jesus issuing the Great Commission, calling all of His believers to make disciples of all nations, baptizing in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teaching all to obey what he commanded (Matthew 28:18-20). In other words, Jesus called all those who would trust in Him to carry on the Gospel work He began, to spread the good news about Him and the salvation He brings.
3. Christ’s return. In regard to the obedience God requires of His people, nothing has changed. All Christians still hold the obligation to live as Jesus did and this means being steeped in obedience to the Father’s Word and will.
The bottom line is that our Lord hates sin as much today as He did in the days of the Bible. After all, it was sin that led Him to sacrificially offer up His only Son Jesus - the perfect, unblemished Lamb – to take away the sin of the world (John 1:29) by paying the penalty for our iniquities and purchasing our pardon. Instead of all of us being nailed to a cross, God sent Jesus to be nailed instead.
Friends, do we think about this enough as we walk through our lives every day, faced with our own choices and decisions to make?
Do we envision Jesus bruised, broken, bleeding, and dying while hanging from nailed hands and feet when we are faced with a decision whether to sin or not sin?
My brothers and sisters, we simply can never afford for Jesus to feel as if He died for us in vain. He gave up everything so we might be able to live to the fullest, now and forever. So in order to properly fulfill our end of the new covenant promise, we need to lay ourselves down for Him as He did for us for it’s the only possible way that we can hope to live fully in Him and model His life.
To that end, I pray we will pledge to live out these words from one of my favorite Christian hymns as a proclamation of covenant surrender for Jesus:
All to Jesus I surrender
All to Him I freely give;
I will ever love and trust Him,
In his presence daily live.
I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
All to Jesus I surrender,
Humbly at His feet I bow,
Worldly pleasures all forsaken,
Take me Jesus, take me now.
I surrender all, I surrender all;
All to thee, my blessed Savior,
I surrender all.
Amen.
In Christ,
Mark
PS: Feel free to leave a comment and please share this with anyone you feel might be blessed by it. Send any prayer requests to TheChristianWalkPrayers@gmail.com.
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