The OBPC Podcast: Love the Lord You God

Introduction

Israel is about to change its life significantly. For forty years the people of God have done everything as one. They have been sojourners in the wilderness. Now they are about to enter the land and the rest they have been looking for. There are going to be new challenges. They are going to have to deal with other nations living among themselves. They are not going to be as cohesive as they now are. The temptations to forsake the Lord are going to be stronger. So, Moses reviews with them all that God has done for them and what he has commanded and taught them.

As the people were getting ready to cross the Jordan, the Lord graciously reminded them of the covenant that he had made with their fathers at Sinai (1:5-6). He tells them that the covenant he entered with their fathers was for them also, and for their children. At the heart of this covenant is the command to love and obey the covenant God. 6 times throughout Deuteronomy the Lord exhorts his people to love him.

I. The Universality of the Command to Love the Lord.

A. This is not a commandment given to a small ethnic group waiting to cross a muddy river.

B. This commandment is for every man, woman, and child that has ever lived on this earth and will ever live.

Matthew 22:35-40 – And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ³⁶'Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?' ³⁷ And he said to him, 'You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. ⁴⁰ On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.'"

1. Our Lord Jesus Christ calls this the first and great commandment.

2. Everything else hangs or flows from it.

"Moses' second address starts with 5:1, a summons to 'all Israel' to listen, not to the advice or reflections of a sage, but to the recitation of God's standards." Victor Hamilton in Handbook on the Pentateuch, pp. 403-4

II. What the Commandment Is, 1.

A. The commandment is not specifically one of the ten.

B. It is the substance of all that Yahweh had commanded.

C. We see that this is case in the two appositive terms in the plural: statutes and rules.

D. So, the word commandment refers to the whole Torah.

III. Reasons for Teaching the Commandment of the Lord.

A. Three reasons given by Moses, 1-2:

1. That you may fear the Lord;

2. That you may do them;

3. That your days may be long.

a. Side note – old age is a sign of blessing from the Lord and we must treat it that way.

b. We live in a day when old age is seeing as a nuisance and older folks should be put away out of sight.

B. Along with the reasons for teaching, Moses gives reasons for learning (hearing) the commandment of the Lord, 3.

1. That it may go well with you.

2. That you may multiply greatly – doesn't sound like the 2.5 average family size in Thurston County (King = 2.09 and Pierce = 2.6).

C. Alongside with the reasons for learning, Moses gives the manner in which the commandment of the Lord must be followed, 2-3.

1. All the days of your life.

2. All the statutes.

3. All the people within your sphere of influence (sons and sons' sons).

4. Carefully and completely done.

IV. A Word about the Prosperity in Verse 3.

A. The prosperity mentioned here is a corporate prosperity.

B. It is not a promise of individual, temporal prosperity in return for loving God.

C. When people who are in covenant union with one another love the Lord, these promises will come to fruition.

D. We can see this truth in practice when there is a great number of Christians loving the Lord in a nation, that nation generally prospers.

"Religion and righteousness advance and secure the prosperity of any people." Matthew Henry

Ps. 33:12 – Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD, the people whom he has chosen as his heritage!

V. The Basis for the Law of God.

A. Yahweh is the absolute God, 4.

1. This is the most recognizable Jewish prayer – the Shema from the first word.

2. What does the phrase The LORD our God, the LORD is one mean?

a. There aren't many gods who comprise Yahweh

b. He is a single God, not a pantheon.

c. The idea here is that there is only one God and his name is Yahweh, so don't worship something else that is not God.

1) The hang up here is usually the word one.

2) Ehad is often used of unit made of several parts.

3) It does not require numerical oneness.

Ex. 26:6, 11 – ⁶ And you shall make fifty clasps of gold, and couple the curtains one to the other with the clasps, so that the tabernacle may be a single whole…. ¹¹ "You shall make fifty clasps of bronze, and put the clasps into the loops, and couple the tent together that it may be a single whole.

d. The true God is Yahweh the God of Israel; don't look for him somewhere else.

e. Thus, what Moses is getting at is that Yahweh is not a God among others, or one who can be brought into harmony with other gods; rather, he is the only God.

f. Yahweh is the covenant name of the Trinity and may rightly be used for each person in the Trinity.

1) The Holy Spirit – Acts 28 Paul says the Spirit said something and Isaiah 6 says Yahweh said that.

2) The Son – Every knee will bow to him and Isaiah says every knee will only bow to Yahweh (45).

B. He requires love from his people.

1. Why does God require his people to love him?

a. Because it is the best thing they can do for themselves.

b. Because he loves them first, 7:7-9, 10:15.

1 Jn. 4:19 – We love because he first loved us.

Rom. 5:8 – but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

1 Jn. 3:1 – See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him.

2. This command is repeated 6 times in the book of Dt.

3. God has always been after the heart; he was never satisfied with mere outward rituals.

1) There is unity between Old and New Testaments in regard to loving God.

2) The intensity, however, increases exponentially because in the NT God's redemption is displayed "in a much grander and glorious form in the gift of His only begotten Son for our redemption, than in the redemption of Israel out of bondage to Egypt." Kiel and Delitzsch

"Loving the Lord with all the heart and soul and strength is placed at the head, as the spiritual principle from which the observance of the commandments was to flow…. It was in love that the fear of the Lord…, hearkening to His commandments…, and the observance of the whole law…, were to be manifested; but love itself was to be shown by walking in all the way of the Lord…." Kiel and Delitzsch

4. How do we show that we love the Lord? By doing what he says he wants us to do, 6:25.

VI. The Love for God Defined, 5.

A. This love is gracious.

1. God commands us to do something that left to ourselves we can't do.

2. But God himself provides to us the grace to obey him

Deuteronomy 30:6 – And the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, that you may live.

B. This love is complete.

1. Jesus quoted this verse and three of the evangelists recorded it for us.

2. Each one recorded it a little different than the other

3. Putting all three together we have, "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

4. In other words, we are to love our God with our entire being.

a. Every effort is to be directed to loving God.

b. Every skill, every talent, every gift is to be used for loving God.

c. Every cell in our bodies is to be involved in loving God.

5. Implication

a. If we are to love the Lord with all our being, then every other person or thing we love must be a display of our love for God.

b. That is why we are to teach our children every moment of everyday.

C. This love is intelligent.

1. Society defines love as purposefully refusing to acknowledge that there is anything wrong with anybody.

2. So, society teaches that love is devoid of any intelligence.

3. The Scriptures, however, tell us that we are to love our God with our minds.

a. Our love for our God is an informed love.

1) Importance of education.

2) We need a Christian philosophy of education, not a philosophy of Christian education.

b. Our love for our God is based on what he has revealed to us.

c. This also implies we cannot love him without loving his Word, 6:6, 8-9

"To love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, we must know him, and therefore love him as those that see good cause to love him." Matthew Henry in Matthew Henry's Commentary, vol. 1, p. 751.

"Love for God, if genuine, inevitably entails obedience to the word of God. One cannot love Him with all his heart but be lukewarm toward His word. Thus, Moses follows the injunction to love God with the injunction to put His word 'upon your heart.'" Victor Hamilton in Handbook on the Pentateuch, p. 408

D. This love is active.

1. Not just a feeling or emotion.

2. True love for the Lord is always evidenced by what we do.

1 John 4:20-21 – ²⁰ If anyone says, "I love God," and hates his brother, he is a liar; for he who does not love his brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen. ²¹ And this commandment we have from him: whoever loves God must also love his brother."

3. The second great commandment is an evidence of the presence of the first.

4. In the context, the first activity of this love is to teach our children to love God.

VII. Live Your Love for Your God.

A. Only God is God – God is God, and I am not!

1. Simple thought, hard practice.

2. Every time we sin, we say, "I am God, and God is not."

"God deserves to be honored, worshiped, trusted, feared, and loved as God. Our responsibility and privilege is to glorify Him – to enhance His reputation in the minds of rational creatures, to live our lives and order our days so that all who encounter us will have a higher regard for God than they might have had they never encountered us!" Douglas Bookman in Introduction to Biblical Counseling, p. 161.

3. We cannot willingly have idols in our lives.

B. When we live out our love for our God, all the relationships that we are in will be affected.

1. Christians will love one another.

2. Conflicts will be solved biblically

"Every time you encounter a conflict, you will inevitably show what you really think of God. If you want to show that you love him 'with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind' (Matt. 22:37), then ask him to help you trust, obey, imitate, and acknowledge him, especially when it is difficult to do so. This behavior honors God and shows others how worthy he is of your devotion and praise." Ken Sande in The Peacemaker, p. 33.

3. Husbands will love their wives with the same type of love that Christ loves the church – to do anything else is to not love God.

4. Wives will honor and respect their husbands in the Lord – anything else is a claim of deity.

5. Parents will not provoke their children to wrath; rather they will raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

6. Children will honor and obey their parents in the Lord – not to do that is to not believe in God.

7. Older men will be "sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience" – Titus 2:1

8. Older women will "be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things." They will "admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands." – Titus 2:3-4

9. Young men will "be sober-minded," that is "self-controlled" – Titus 2:6

10. Single people will serve the Lord whole-heartedly, without any encumbrances – 1 Cor. 7

C. When we live out our love for our God, all decisions and thought processes will be affected by it.

1. How we choose to use, or not use, the gifts that God gave us will be affected by it.

a. When we love the Lord with all our hearts, we will be consumed in his service and will not hide our light under a bushel or bury our talent.

b. We will seek opportunities to serve in his church and in the world in whatever way we can.

c. To decide not to use what God has given us for his glory is to put ourselves in the place of God.

2. What we choose for our children's education will be affected by it – Dt. 6:6-8.

"Reformed evangelicals must therefore exhort the members of their churches to bring up their children in homes characterized by a gracious love for Christ and to provide a biblical education for these children." Douglas Wilson in Mother Kirk, p. 45

a. Any type of education that would be contrary to a biblical education would also be in opposition to loving God.

b. Notice the sense of urgency given in verses 7 and 8.

3. Decisions in the area of self-control will also be affected by our love for our God.

a. Decisions regarding eating.

b. Decisions regarding exercising.

c. Decisions regarding harmful habits.

4. How we choose to spend the money God has given us will also be affected.

a. Generosity with our resources becomes the norm for those who love the Lord.

b. Throughout the Old Testament God's people were commanded to give of the first fruits to the Lord.

c. The best was to be the Lords.

Conclusion

Love for God is the result of the ultimate transformation in our hearts. We love him because he first loved us and while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Why love God? Because as one who was redeemed by Christ, you cannot do otherwise.

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