In the sermon titled 'A People Held by a Covenant and an Oath of Revealed Things For an Unexpected Purpose,' Scott Brown explores the profound themes within Deuteronomy 29. He explains the covenant and oath that Moses calls the Israelites to uphold, emphasizing the continuity of God's promises from Abraham to the present day. This covenant is a call to unity among Israel, where all people, regardless of status, are urged to renew their commitment to God and His laws. Brown highlights the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience, underscoring the seriousness of the covenant. He also touches on the omniscience of God, differentiating between 'secret things' known only to God and 'revealed things' meant for humanity. These revelations, according to Brown, are tools for guiding a godly life, meant to be passed down through generations. The sermon draws parallels to the principles of sola scriptura, urging the congregation to rely solely on scripture for faith and practice. Additionally, historical references, such as the covenant in John Calvin's Geneva, are used to illustrate the application of these principles in community settings. Ultimately, the sermon points to Jesus Christ as the fulfillment of the law, highlighting the insufficiency of human efforts and the necessity of Christ's sacrifice for salvation.

Please follow along with me as I read verses 1-29 in chapter 29 of Deuteronomy. These are the words of the covenant, which the Lord commanded Moses to make with the children of Israel in the land of Moab, besides the covenant which he made with them in Horeb. Now Moses called all Israel and said to them, You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants, and to all his land, the great trials which your eyes have seen, the signs of those great wonders. Yet the Lord has not given you a heart to perceive and eyes to see and ears to hear to this very day. And I have led you forty years in the wilderness.

Your clothes have not worn out on you, and your sandals have not worn out on your feet. You have not eaten bread, nor have you drunk wine or similar drink that you may know that I am the Lord your God. And when you came to this place, Sion, king of Hegemon and Og, king of Bashan, came out against you to battle, and we conquered them. We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Rubanites, to the Gadites, and to half the tribe of Nessa. Therefore, keep the words of this covenant and do them, that you may prosper in all that you do.

All of you stand today before the Lord your God, your leaders and your tribes, and your elders, and your officers, all the men of Israel, your little ones and your wives, also the stranger who is in your camp, from the one who cuts your wood to the one who draws your water that you may enter into covenant with the Lord your God and into his oath which the Lord your God makes with you today that he may establish you today as a people for himself, and that he may be God to you, just as he has spoken to you, and just as he has sworn to your fathers, to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. I make this covenant and this oath not with you alone but with him who stands here with us today before the Lord our God as well as with him who is not here with us today. For you know that we dwelt in the land of Egypt and that we came through the nations which you passed by, and you saw their abominations and their idols which were among them, wood and stone and silver and gold, so that there may not be among you man or woman or family or tribe, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God, to give and serve the other gods of these nations, that there may not be among you, root bearing bitterness or wormwood.

And so that it may not happen that he hears the words of this curse and he blesses himself in his heart saying, I shall have peace even though I follow the dictates of my heart as though the drunkard could be included with the sober. The Lord would not spare him, for then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy would burn against that man, and every curse that is written in this book would settle on him, and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven, and the Lord would separate him from all the tribes of Israel for adversity according to the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law, so that the coming generation of your children would rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from A far land would say when they see the plagues of that land and the sickness which the Lord has laid on it. The whole land is brimstone, salt and burning, and is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does the grass grow there. Like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Adma and Zaboin, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and his wrath.

All nations would say, Why has the Lord done so in this land? What does the heat of his great anger mean? Then people would say, because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God of their fathers, which He made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt, for they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods that they did not know and that he did not give them. The anger of the Lord was aroused against them, against this land, to bring on it every curse that is written in this book. And the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger, in wrath, and in great indignation, and cast them into another land as it is this day.

The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank you for your Word that we have it. And Lord, I pray now that you'd empower Scott as he comes to preach, that you would teach us through him, that we would be doers of your Word and not hearers only. In the name of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Amen.

Well, you have before you what is the longest sermon title I hope you ever see for me. But there it is. You also have the longest outline, perhaps, that you've seen, not only to be exceeded by Jason Dome's two-page outlines, which are absolutely uncalled for. But this one here could have been two pages, if I had allowed it and been as undisciplined as my brother. And this message also is composed from the longest manuscript I've ever had in a situation like this.

So I'm worried. But what I want to do this morning is to pick up where we left off last week. We walked through the entire passage and left a number of applications on the table that I really felt needed to be made regarding the scene that is before us. And then also to go a little bit deeper into the very last verse of the passage. It's a very rich and deep passage.

It's very pivotal. It's pivotal because it's the beginning of the last speech of Moses before he dies. He's gathered the children of Israel together in the last month of his life, and he is delivering his final speech to the children of Israel. So it's a very dramatic moment, and you can see the drama of it as you look at verse 10. Look at it here.

He says, all of you stand today before the Lord your God, your leaders and your tribes and your elders and your officers, all the men of Israel, your little ones and your wives and the stranger in your camp and the one who cuts wood and the one who draws water, why, that you may enter into the covenant of the Lord your God. So it's a gathering just in many ways like ours. All of us are gathered together of every station in life and every stage of life as it was, right here in this text. And so here we find a scene among ourselves, right here today, very much like this scene, except then there were three million people. But for us, we are, again, the gathered people of God coming together to seek the Lord, to understand His ways, and to find ourselves under his authority and caring for the things of the glory of God alone.

To come and recalibrate on a Sabbath day, to sort of renew the covenant, to come off a week of smoke and fire and sinfulness and failure and difficulty and brought to us to sanctify us, and then to come and collect it all up in this day, the Sabbath day, to try to see it all according to His glory, according to His Word, to be convicted of our sins and then led on into the next week that God has so kindly given to us, that we would live and move and have our being again in another week in a way that would please Him to shine His lights in the world. So That's kind of the scene. Now Moses has spent the previous chapter, in chapter 28, showing the blessings in 14 verses, and then the curses in 54 verses that show the fate of those who would reject the covenant of God. And now in chapter 29, we find the Lord using all of these elements that Moses has built into his second sermon to bring it all together with a very urgent call to enter in to covenant in the same way that the Lord Jesus said, come to me all you who are weary, in the same way that he said, let the spirit and the bride say come.

Moses is saying the same thing here. He's saying come, come, come, enter into covenant as one people with your God. So it's a very dramatic moment that has been set up here. And you have before you the outline that we walked through last week and then now with some additional things. But I would like to just continue to try to set this scene up here.

The first words in Chapter 29 reveal the theme. These are the words of the covenant. And so this here is an introduction and it casts a vision for everything that's going to happen in the remaining verses of the chapter. The two of the most important words In chapter 29 are the words covenant and oath. Those are the two words that upon which everything hangs in this chapter.

And so Moses is appealing to the children of Israel to enter into a covenant and to an oath. And the covenant is clearly defined as the laws of God. And Moses is calling the people, all of them together from every stage in life, every age stage in life, to come and gather together and to be governed by one thing, the law of God. And so he is issuing, he is calling the people to renew their covenant with God. Now what is a covenant?

We've talked about this before, but just to repeat, the word, the re means to divide, to cut. It's like to make a treaty, to make a compact, to come and make an agreement, a binding agreement between two parties. One party is God, God Almighty, the sovereign of all the universe who controls everything, and mankind, sinful mankind, shortfalling in every way. This binding together of one perfect with one so imperfect so that perfection can cleanse the imperfections of man. There's this coming together of God and man that is directed by the law of God in order to bring human beings to Jesus Christ.

That's the purpose of this whole covenant here. And then there is an oath. An oath is simply a promise that binds two parties together. So there is a covenant, a deal, and an oath, a promise to enter into it. And when we were together last week, I was very struck by what our brother Jorge had said when we had finished and were discussing this about the seriousness of entering into a covenant and an oath.

And Jorge said that if he would be involved in planting a church, he would have the words, count the cost, written above as people enter in. There's enormous cost either way. Cost, if you reject it, is so terrifyingly debilitating. And yet the cost of embracing it is as sweet as anything you could ever know. And so there is such cost.

Now, today as we gather together here, I hope that we can somehow transport ourselves to this place where all of you stand here before the Lord your God, your leaders and your tribes and your elders and your little ones all together, that we would somehow see that we too are in this tradition of the gathering of God's people together for this one purpose, to renew a covenant before God. And that we would think of it this way. Now, I say that because people in our day have such a wrong view of the gatherings of the people of God, of both the local church and also the universal church. But people today think that this thing called the local church is something that's disconnected from them. It's something that they go to.

It's this other category out there. They may choose this one or that one or whatever it might be. They may treat it like a food court. Well, I like this and I like that and I like that. But there is no sense, there is no sense in the modern church where people have a gripping sense that they are part of the people of God, that they are wedded to them, that they themselves by a covenant and an oath have gathered together for might, for the glory of God, for His purposes in the world.

And so they take the church so lightly because they don't understand the seriousness of a covenant and a people who are making an oath together. And so instead of thinking of a local church gathering like the one that we have here as something in which we are so intimately connected to with the people and with God himself. That he is in us and we are in him. That we are united in Christ and we have entered into a covenant and an oath with God. Instead we look at the local church as another institution.

It's another gathering. It's another thing out there. But that is not the picture that we have here as Moses has gathered the people together. Now, as you are aware, the structure of this passage begins with the call to covenant renewal and then a reminder of God's mercies. Where very much like the first four chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses is reminding the people of how good God has been to them, how he has clothe them and led them and shod them and fed them in the wilderness.

And for 40 years, none of it wore out, which is absolutely amazing to think about. But here in the smallest details of clothing and sandals and daily provisions of food. His kindness is delivered to us. So he starts out there and then there's this call to enter in the covenant, which is really the heart of the text, verses 10-16, where he says, all of you stand today in order, verse 12, that you may enter, that you may enter into the covenant of the Lord your God. And so it's a very beautiful section.

It's a very pivotal section in the text where these things are delivered. And the purposes are given, that he might establish you as a people, and then he connects it with the previous covenants to God's people as well, as He has sworn to your fathers Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So this covenant is connected, it's not disconnected, as all of them have continuity and continue all the way through to the new covenant. One covenant builds on another and God continues to deliver the secret things that he has to his people by degrees through the delivery of these covenants. And then when you come to verse 16, again you're stopped in your tracks as there's a warning to covenant breakers.

And again, the terrors of departing from God, the imagery of eternal damnation, perdition, the foot that shall slip in due time because of rejection of God is all cast forth in here. He says, spare him, in verse 20, that the anger of the Lord and his jealousy will burn against that man, that God would blot his name out from under heaven. This is all the language of hell and damnation and the final separation of the sheep and the goats and then the complete destruction of the work of the devil in the world. And as God in his mercies finally, he finally wipes out what has done us such harm in this world. And speaks of the plagues and the sickness and the brimstone and the salt and the burning.

So it's a very terrifying picture that he gives in order to warn any who might not enter in, who might, when the Lord says come, that they would say no not me. That's not for me. I'm not ready. There's something greater that I need to experience. There's a pleasure I want.

There's something, I want to do something before I turn to... No, he says, no, no, absolutely. There is burning and brimstone and he will throw you. He will wipe you out and he will cast you into everlasting darkness. That's sort of the imagery that's here now.

But it's actually something that's fulfilled in history. It's a vision in which there will be a real judgment that is like unto the great judgment. And God does this many times, how He judges His people in a particular way, but it's representative of something far, far greater. He does that with us. He gives us a pain that's small to warn us to turn away from what will become so devastating to us.

He gives us the communion service to expose our sins while they're smaller, before they completely overtake us. He gives us a brother who comes and says, I see this sin in your life, and there's a sting in it, but it saves from everlasting perdition. This is how God works. He, by degrees, progressively reveals his anger and his wrath, but he still holds out his wrath out there to terrify us so that we would turn away from our sins. So here we have this scene of the covenant.

Now, I want to just step back for a minute and try to see the sweep of the importance of this in Scripture, that God gathers His people together as one people for a purpose. In Genesis 17, verse 7, when Abraham was 99 years old, God commands the circumcision of the adult males, I mean not the adult males, the 8 day old males, And he says, I will establish my covenant between me and you and your descendants after you in their generations. For an everlasting covenant to be God to you and to your descendants after you. In Exodus, when God is calling Moses to lead the children of Israel out of bondage, in Exodus chapter 6 verse 7, he says, I will take you as my people, and I will be your God. And then you shall know that I am the Lord your God who brings you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians And then in Leviticus chapter 26 he says I will set my tabernacle among you my soul shall not afford you I will walk among you and be your God and you shall be my people." In Jeremiah the prophet he says in 31-33, but this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days.

I will put my law in their minds and write it on their hearts and I will be their God and they shall be my people." Here we have this continual reminder of the language of God, a holy and perfect God and man being brought together in covenant and by an oath. In Jeremiah chapter 32 verses 38 and 39, you find the same thing. They shall be my people. I will be their God. And I will give them one heart and one way that they may be with me forever for the good of them and the children after them.

In Ezekiel 37, 27 the same thing happens. He says, My tabernacle shall be with them. Indeed, I will be their God and they shall be My people. In Zechariah we find the same phraseology, I will bring them back, they shall be my people, I will be their God in truth and in righteousness. And when we go to the New Testament, we find this same kind of language where Paul says to the Corinthian church, he says, and what agreement has the temple of God with idols?

For you are the temple of the living God. As God has said, I will dwell in them and walk among them. And I will be their God and they will be my people. And you find the same principle in the very last, the last book of the Bible, at the very end of it, in Revelation, where we read that John saw a new heaven and a new earth, because the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no more sea. And then I, John, saw the holy city, New Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride, adorned for her husband.

This covenant, this oath, is figurative of this great marriage of Christ and His Church, the bringing together of His people, the New Jerusalem, and then bringing a bride to her husband. So all of this talk of covenant has meaning from Genesis to Revelation and it explains the heart of God for His people that they would gather together as one man and they would enter into a covenant and an oath for a purpose. So that's what's happening here. How do we apply something so great and something so comprehensively demonstrated in Scripture. And we ought to be applying it here in this church that God has made us a part of.

And my prayer for our time this morning is that somehow God, by His Spirit, would show us how better we ought to be a people who enter into a covenant and an oath, and how we might be more faithful to it, and how we might understand it far more deeply. There are times in history where men have attempted to apply this in very dramatic ways. One such time was in John Calvin's Geneva when he was there in that city. They advocated that the people, that all the people, the 10, 000 people there in Geneva would adopt a confession of 21 points and then enter and then take an oath in order to promote it. And this is very much like what Moses is doing with the children of Israel.

He's casting a vision for the principles of his law and then calling his people to enter into it. Calvin was there and they gathered this whole city together to take this covenant. After this message, I'll pass out a copy of the covenant and I'll be reading some parts of it to you this morning just to help us understand how even we might apply these things in our own times. And There was strong opposition in the city for taking the Covenant because the Covenant was based on the great doctrines of the Christian faith. But at the same time, thousands of people gathered in City Hall and at the church, St.

Pierre's Church in Geneva, and they took the covenant. At the same time though, many of them took the covenant, but their lives were not consistent with it at all. And so They passed a measure to banish all who would not take the oath and embrace the confession. How's that? That sounds pretty radical.

Imagine, imagine anyone attempting anything like that today. That we would banish you from the city unless you took the covenant and the oath according to the Word of God." Well, that's exactly what Moses is doing with three million people. It's appropriate to call the whole society to obey the covenant of God. It's appropriate to do that. We don't think that's appropriate today because we don't understand Scripture.

We don't understand what has happened in times past. And we also don't understand that there are many forefathers of ours who freely would do such a thing while we wouldn't dare anything like it. And so they took, They raised their hands and they took an oath to obey it. Now, it was important that this happened. At that time, Geneva was a corrupt city.

It was full of brothels and gamings and taverns and all kinds of things that were corrupting the people. And the pastors, the company of pastors, were coming against these things. And so this confession that was required had 21 points. And the very first point of it was really a reminder of the principle of the source that all Christian understanding and behavior should be governed solely by the Word of God. And so this very first paragraph of the Confession speaks of the principle of sola scriptura.

So here I'm just gonna read you some of the clauses in the Confession and summarize some of them. Clause number one, the Word of God. We affirm that we desire to follow Scripture alone as a rule of faith and religion without mixing it with any other thing which might be devised by the opinion of man apart from the Word of God and without wishing to accept for our spiritual government any other doctrine than what is conveyed to us by the same Word without addition, diminution, according to the command of our Lord. So the first principle in the confession is the most important. And it's also, it might be the most despised in evangelicalism, that you would actually be limited by the Word of God.

I pray that our church, all of us together, would in covenant and oath, determine before God and before one another, and before our brothers and sisters in this community, that we would embrace Scripture alone for all of life and godliness and all practices of church life. God knows how far we short we fall from these things. How imperfect this very church is. How dimly we execute the things of God because of our own seeing through a glass darkly, how our sins, our backgrounds, our culture has so entrapped us that it's hard for us to do that. But still, that our hearts would be such, that we would determine before God and man to establish this principle of sola scriptura, that scripture would be our only guide.

Would you consider being that kind of person in this community and wherever you go speaking to unbelievers and believers alike in the community, you would uphold this principle that we affirm to follow Scripture alone as our rule of faith and practice, and not add anything to it. I understand the difficulty in that. I understand my own lack of ability to apply so completely with this thing, but still we ought to be like those people that Moses spoke of. Oh, that they had such a heart in them that they might fear me and always keep all my commandments that it might be well with them and with their children forever. It's the heart that desires it.

Yes, yes, we will fall short, but that's not the end of the story. And then the second element of the confession, one, only God. The confession reads, following them, the lines lay down in the Holy Scriptures. We acknowledge there is only one God. Therefore, we think in an abomination to put our confidence or hope in any created thing, to worship anything else than Him.

In other words, to set aside everything that would diminish our love for God, that His love would be our greatest in all the world. All the different things that call for our attentions, all the things that we've learned to love in the world, that we would be willing to set them all aside for Him. We grow up in this world, we create so many affections for things that really are not of God. This happens to us as creatures in this world. But God's calling is to continue to move away from our idolatrous practices, the imagery that we want to have to attach to ourselves to make ourselves look good to prop up our own self-image by all kinds Of things other than God and God alone so this second point of the confession was really a call to Heed heed this this great commandment and then thirdly the law of God alike for all There is only one There is one only Lord and Master who has dominion over our consciences.

And because His will is the only principle of all justice, we confess all our life ought to be ruled in accordance with the commandments of His holy law. To have no other rule of good and just living, nor invent other good works to supplement it than those which are there contained." so this is a call to serve the law of God. We live in an antinomian culture today. Most of us grew up in a world that had a very bad and dark view of the Old Testament itself. I myself was one of those.

Many years ago, I'm guessing it was 25 or 30 years ago, I was quoting a popular minister in my church in California. And I quoted him as saying, The Old Testament is about rules, and the New Testament is about relationships. I quoted that. There was a young man of 18 years old sitting in that congregation. I heard him preach a message 20, probably seven years later here in this town, and he repeated that very phrase that I gave so many years ago.

There's so much to repent of, of our turning, of our not understanding the law of God and how important it is. None of us have been able to understand everything at any time. Thankfully, God is so merciful to His children. Thankfully, His grace is sufficient for all these things. Turning from the law of God, he turns to the natural man and the fourth clause.

We acknowledge man by nature to be blind, darkened in understanding and full of corruption and perversity of heart so that of himself he has no power to be able to comprehend the true knowledge of God. Imagine, this is a covenant being entered into by all the people of the city, okay? Gathering a very disparate group of people together to take a covenant like this would be a challenge. Well, many of them didn't want to come. Many of them didn't come.

The fifth section, man by himself is lost. Since man is naturally deprived and destitute in himself of all the light of God and of all righteousness, we acknowledge that by Himself He can only expect the wrath and malediction of God. The sixth salvation in Jesus. We confess it is Jesus Christ who is given to us by the Father in order that we should recover of which we ourselves are deficient. And then righteousness in Jesus the seventh, That in Him is our intercession.

And that in Him alone is our righteousness and our guiltlessness and our remission of sins by the shedding of His blood. And we're cleansed from all of our stains by it. Regeneration. In Jesus, we recognize that by His Spirit, we are regenerated into new spiritual nature, and that our evil desires of our flesh are mortified by grace. Number nine, that remission of sins is necessary for the faithful.

And then it continues on and on, identifying really what is comprised of sound Christian doctrine. And the whole city was brought together to make this covenant and this oath. And my prayer is that we hear in our church would be a people like that, that we would be a people hearing the same thing that the people that were listening to Moses in his third speech in the last month of his life, that we would be like that and ready to hear and ready to obey and then call the whole community together in obedience to God Almighty and that personally in our relationships at least this is what we would be doing. We understand the derision, the rejection, and the difficulty of doing that, But yet this is the kind of covenant that God is calling His people to do here, here in this passage of Scripture. Just to take it another step further, to try to apply it even more deeply and maybe more personally.

In our own church, we have a church covenant. Many of you who are members, all of you who are members have taken this covenant. You have embraced it by taking an oath and we say in our in our membership covenant having been led as we believe by the Spirit of God to repent and believe and receive the Lord Jesus as our Savior and profess our allegiance to Him having been baptized in the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit We do now in the presence of God Angels and this assembly most solemnly and joyfully enter into covenant with one another as one body in Christ. We were doing the same thing when we became members of this church in many ways that Moses was calling for his people to do as they entered into a covenant by an oath. Our church covenant continues that we would pray for the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace, that we would seek the salvation of our kindred and strangers, that we would be faithful witnesses of the Gospel in this community.

We made a covenant to do that. Have we taken that lightly at all? That we've sloughed it off because of our own personal desire for peace and relationships of felicity have shrunk back from declaring that God is King and Jesus Christ is Lord and you'll be thrown into hell for all eternity unless you turn from your sins. Have we neglected that we entered into a covenant to proclaim the Gospel in this community. And if we are not, we are breaking the covenant that we made with God and with one another.

We say in our covenant that we'll strive for the advancement of the Church in knowledge and holiness and comfort, and to promote its prosperity, to sustain its worship and its ordinances and its disciplines and its doctrines, and to submit to its leaders as they're faithful to Christ, that we would contribute regularly to the support of the ministry, that we would not forsake the assembling of ourselves, that we would maintain family devotions and private devotions and bring our children up in the training and the admonition of the Lord. We made a covenant to do that. Are you doing that? Are you breaking the covenant that you made with God and man? It's an important question to ask.

We say, and we make this covenant that we'll watch over one another in brotherly love, we'll remember one another in prayer, in sickness and in distress, and that we'll walk circumspectly in the world. We've said that we'll abstain from gluttony and drunkenness and illicit drugs and materials and entertainments which would jeopardize our own or someone else's faith. We've said that we would refrain from speaking evil of one another. We've said that we would submit to biblically defined and regulated church discipline for the purpose of reconciliation with God and man. And we've said that if we move from this place, if it's possible to unite with the Church that upholds the essential doctrine of this Church.

That's the covenant that we've all entered into. So I just want us to understand that we have to somehow apply these things that we see here in Deuteronomy. The way that we apply them in our own church is to bring one another into a covenant that weds us to sound doctrine and right behavior and to one another before God. So that's what we have done as a church. If anyone is here and wants to become a member, that's what you're doing.

If anyone is a member and has forgotten their covenant, then let's use this time today to remember it and to refresh ourselves, to repent of anything that we've fallen short of, you know, in that covenant. This covenant is not something fanciful, it's something just derived from the general patterns, historical patterns of the Church of Jesus Christ, you know, for hundreds of years. They're just, they come out of the pages of Scripture. They're not inventions of man. They're not anything new.

They're not something hip or contrived. They just come out of the revelation of God. So that makes it legitimate. So here in this call to enter into a covenant, Moses gives the terrifying results of rejecting it. And then he says something in verse 29 that sounds strange.

It almost sounds like it's out of context, but it's not out of context at all. It actually brings together So much of what he's been saying. He's just pronounced that there would be judgment in history of those who would fall away. He predicts that they will fall away. And he says that there will be specific things happening in the land.

And he says, your land is going to look like Sodom and Gomorrah. It's not going to bear fruit. That's going to happen to your land. And it does. It happens.

It happens in history. And so Moses is leaving the people here in verse 28 with this impending doom, his prophecy that they would turn away from the Lord. And then he, very much like the Apostle Paul does in his letters, he makes a statement and then he answers the thing that's in top of your mind. Well, when is this going to happen? How is this going to happen?

Oh Lord, could you give us some more detail on this? You've just said it's coming. Can you just tell us when it's coming? Could we have a little bit more clarity on the prophecy? We want to know.

We want to know what you're saying. I don't know if any of you have ever wondered about prophecy. If you thought, what does that mean? Well, that's normal. This is the way God has designed prophecy.

It's not meant for you to understand everything in prophecy, just like this one. So Moses, in answering that question, he says, the secret things belong to the Lord our God. Yeah, there are things that are secret. There is impending judgment, but there is some secrecy here. But those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do the words of this law.

Now I'd like to spend the rest of our time just on this last verse and then finally, finally conclude. You can see the outline of this, the way that I plan to work through this one verse in dealing with various propositions in it. So there are two things that are just before we sort of dissect this. I think there are two things that are placed before us. There are two things that affect us.

They're the secret things. The fulfillments of prophecy, the things that are beyond our knowledge and understanding. And then the second things are the things that are revealed. So they're the secret and they are the revealed. So get that very clear in your mind.

He saw two categories of knowledge that we all are subject to as creatures This is very much very much like the Lord Jesus when he said it's not for you to know times and seasons That that the secret things belong to God. When there was a crippled man and it was asked why, why is he crippled? Jesus' response was that it was for the glory of God, but you must repent. That's why. There are secret things.

Secret things belong to the Lord, our God. So there are things that belong to us, and there are things that belong to God. Your life is going to be a nervous wreck if you don't understand that. If you do not understand this verse, you will not have peace and happiness in this world. You can't reconcile yourself to the things that you do not understand that have happened to you, or that you think might happen, or that happened to somebody else.

This is a very, very important principle here. There are some things that are not for you. There are some questions you have that will never be answered in this life. And many of the questions are not even appropriate to ask because they're the secret things of the Lord. If you would have peace in your soul, you have to understand the difference between these two things.

I know it's true that In this room there might be thousands of questions that really beg for the secret things of God. Many of those questions perhaps you should just drop them because you cannot know. Now first thing I want to just say is that God knows everything. God knows everything. And this is His omniscience.

And The secret things belong to the Lord. This is his omniscience that's being declared here. You know, in Psalm 139, it's probably one of the best places to turn to see how this works. Oh Lord, you have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up.

You understand my thought from afar. You comprehend my path and my lying down. You are acquainted with all my ways. For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, you know it altogether. You have hedged me behind and before, and laid your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me. It is high. I cannot attain it. Your eyes saw my substance being unformed and in your book they were all written, the days fashioned for me when there was yet none of O." Well, this is a declaration of the omniscience of God. You know, the big three O's in the Bible, omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence.

Well, this is one of the big O's that you need to understand to make your way in this world. God sees all things. Who is known, the mind of the Lord, that he should instruct him, that his ways are without number, that his footsteps are not known. David declares, How great are thy works and thy thoughts are very deep. Psalm 147 says his understanding is infinite.

You know, one of my favorite verses is found in the book of Ecclesiastes chapter 3, verse 11. It's very precious to me because it figures into a longing that I had in my own heart and then finally was fulfilled in God's own time to be married to this girl here named Deborah. The verse reads, he has made everything beautiful in its time. He has put eternity in their hearts except no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end. You recognize that song, In His Time, In His Time, He Makes All Things Beautiful in His Time.

It's a beautiful song. When I finally had become engaged to Deborah, We went back together to my home church and showed up at a small Bible study where my pastor was. We walked in the door, and my pastor broke out in song and sang the song in His time. I did not know if I would ever be married. But God knew.

And my pastor also knew that same thing. And of course, he wanted me to marry this girl. But some of you who are, You wonder, will I ever marry? Will a man ever love me? Is it possible?

You might not even be able to conceive of it. But the truth is, is that God makes all things beautiful in His time. These are the secret things of the Lord. You don't know them now. You can't know them now.

They're secret and they will be revealed in His time. So this is the doctrine of God's omniscience. It's so incredibly helpful and practical in every arena of life. Oh, the depth of the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable are His judgments.

His ways are past finding out. For who has known the mind of the Lord? That's the point that he's making right here. God knows everything. Now there's a question that has arisen in recent years by certain quote-unquote theologians presenting a new doctrine called open theism, which says that God doesn't really know what will happen to you.

This is a damnable heresy at work in the church. Greg Boyd and others have embraced this doctrine of open theism, which completely rejects the omniscience of God, trying to nuance in some supposedly scholarly way, which has no scholarship at all. It's just a sidestep in order to make God more manageable. God's not manageable. He knows everything.

And He makes all things beautiful in His own time. And then there are things that we are not supposed to know. Proverbs 25, verse 2 and 3 says, It's the glory of God to conceal a matter. It's the glory of God to conceal a matter. This is what He does.

This is His business. If you say, Oh Lord, Show me! You're just declaring the glory of God. It's His glory to conceal it from you, that you might be a faithful creature, dependent upon Him. Not wise in your own eyes, not carving out your own way and being the master of your own fate, but to know that there's something greater than that and something far better.

The disciple said, Lord, is this the time that you will restore the kingdom to Israel? And he says, it is not for you to know times and epics which the Father has fixed by His own authority. It's God who has fixed these things by His own authority. And then there are things that God knows that we absolutely should not know. That's a whole nother category That you know, why why why did Satan fall from heaven why Why this why that there are just There are just things in God's eternal plan in the heavens that out of the limitless nature of His knowledge He's established and He doesn't want us to know those things.

We see an example perhaps of this in Luke chapter 9 where Jesus said to his disciples, He said this, Let these words sink down into your ears. Jesus says saying this, The Son of Man is about to be betrayed into the hands of men. And then it says, but they did not understand. And it was hidden from them, so that they did not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask Him about this saying.

And then they got down to more practical matters and they started arguing about who was the greatest. So, but it was hidden from them. It was de-pro- there was something that God didn't want them to know. So, He threw it out there, blinded their eyes and frustrated them, and then they got on to more practical matters. And that's what we often do.

And then there is also a whole other category of this issue and that is that we have limitations in our knowing that there are things that we cannot see by the limitations of our humanity. That in many matters, like the Apostle Paul said in 1 Corinthians 4 verse 6, that we see through a glass darkly. And he said in 1 Corinthians 13, 12, that we only see in part. We don't see everything by virtue of our intellect, our spiritual understanding, the revelation of God, so many things that are upon us. It might even just be the constraints of our culture and the way that our culture has fevered our brains so that we just can't even think right, which helps us understand how much we need Jesus Christ.

So there are the secret things that belong to the Lord our God. That's the first category. And then there is the revelation of God that belongs to us. The revelation of God that belongs to us. Now this is ours.

There is an enormous compendium of things revealed. It is such a help. It's such a blessing. If anyone wants to know the will of God for their lives, Here is where it is found. God has been so kind to His people to give them a way.

And it's here. And again, if you don't understand this verse as well, your life will be very, very difficult and challenged. So there are things that belong to us. God desires His people to be unobservant people. God desires His people to study themselves, to show themselves approved.

God desires that his people would seek wisdom, that they would get it, they would get understanding, they would just go grab it, to take command and go and get it, rather than passively just think, oh, I think it'll just fall upon me somehow as I dance through life. That's not how God has His people configured. He desires His people to be a focused and observant people, not on the secret things, but on the things that He has revealed. And that He's delivered to us everything pertaining to life and godliness, as 2 Peter chapter 1 verse 3 says, that everything we need to know is revealed. And so our lives are composed of the searching of the scriptures to find out what is pleasing to the Lord, so that we'd be so saturated in it and helped by it, that our conversation, our thinking would be all wrapped in it.

What a blessing it is when you find someone who's like that. Isn't it so good? When I see it, I wish, I so wish I had more of it. That I would be so saturated with the Word of God that it would be like Charles Spurgeon said, your blood is biblene. Prick him there and outflows the scriptures.

That's the kind of person God desires to bring into the world. And so here we have this, these things belong, they belong to us, they're for us. This gives us a roadmap through life. There shouldn't be a person in this room who should say, I wonder what God wants me to do. At least you should be acquiring wisdom with all of your heart.

And then, this also says that the revelation belongs to our children. And to our children forever. So, in these five words is jam-packed so many commands that we've already run across in Deuteronomy. This principle is everywhere in Scripture. And here in five words, Moses has squashed it together.

And it stands in perfect continuity with all the things that have been said. This is a dense summary statement of things that He's been saying all throughout Scripture, and particularly the book of Deuteronomy, that Revelation has a purpose. The things that are ours are meant to be delivered to our children. This is a child raising verse. This is a family life verse right here.

This is guidance for parents and for children, that parents and children would come together and agree that this is what their lives should be like. To saturate themselves together as husband and wife and children all together in the things that are revealed. The things that are revealed should be the center of all family life. Some of you are single and you're in a household. Don't think that you have to have a husband or a wife in order to apply this.

Everyone lives in a house, I hope. If not, please come to us. We'll try to find you one. But if you don't, If you're living in some kind of community, you have a household. Maybe your spouse has perished and you're biased.

You still have a household. And so this is meant to be applied, that these revealed things should be yours, and they should be part of this ongoing multi-generational plan of God. They are revealed in order that the wise man would build his house upon the rock, the rock of obedience to the Word, so that all the children in that house would somehow know. As I even see my own children in this room, I'm struck with how short I have fallen in this in my own house, how much more I wished I had poured it out. I did attempt to pour it out, but I think it could have been better, sweeter, more, and more comprehensive.

And that is, if I have a regret, I wish I had done more in this realm. God did help me to have energy for it though. He did give me clarity that this was something I must do. And so I did it to the measure that God gave me strength to do it, and I hope my children will forgive me for any lack of zeal there that might have been part of our family. The wise man builds his house upon the rock of obedience.

Their rock is not like our rock. We have such a good rock. There's nothing like a good sound rock. As one who loves rock, I know that is true. And then we come now to the final purpose of the covenant.

The purpose is revealed in the last ten words of this chapter, that we may do all the words of this law. This summarizes the final purpose of the covenant. And here is the golden truth for us. And here is where I pray we don't miss this. The covenant of God has always been kept by perfect law keeping.

This verse shows this. It shows the glory of the gospel. It shows the mercy of God It shows so many things here, but we have to we have to answer the question is perfect obedience to the law Mandatory for salvation in other words. Do you have to keep every law to be saved? Let's just say this morning you were a little testy or you had some unbelief in your heart.

Is it required of you to be a Christian to keep the whole law? Even this morning, yes. The answer is you must keep every point of the law, or God will throw you into eternal damnation. That's what the Scriptures teach. You must keep every word of the law.

That is so plain in Deuteronomy. Oh, that they have such a heart in them, they might fear Me and keep all My commandments, all of them, capital A-L-L. They all are required. And you cannot be a Christian unless the laws are kept perfectly and completely. Every Israelite, no matter how godly he might have been, had to offer sacrifice for sin.

I mean, think of the continuum of humanity offering sacrifices for sin. You had the worst guy and the best guy in your mind. God looks into the heart. But the best and the worst walk in to make sacrifices, and they all had to make sacrifices. The very existence of the sacrificial system assumes that there was a need for perfect obedience to the law, because they had to keep it.

That's why James says, for whoever keeps the whole law that fails in one point has become accountable for it all. James uses the word accountable. It's the word guilt, is guilty. If you break even one point of the law, you're guilty of breaking all of the law. That is why Paul said to the Galatians in Galatians 3 verse 10, For as many as are the works of the law are under a curse, for it is written, Cursed is everyone who does not abide by all that is written in the book of the law to perform them.

Paul in Galatians says that you must keep the whole law, and if you don't, you are a curse, you are a cast off. You will be thrown into eternal Perdition. Your foot will slip in due time. This is why Moses is constantly insisting, be careful to do all the words that are written in the Book of Law. If you fail, if you fail to obey, then all of the punishments, all of the curses will fall upon you.

And the problem, of course, with that is that there is no one, there is none righteous, no not one. And there is no one who has ever kept the law. That is the problem of mankind. Who can say I have made my heart pure? Who can say I am clean from my sins, says Solomon.

He says it again in Ecclesiastes, surely there is not a righteous man on earth and does good and never sins. That's the truth. While God has demanded perfect obedience for salvation, There is not a single human being who has been able to keep it, because perfect obedience is necessary to escape the curse. But, but, but, there is one who did keep the law, and that is the Lord Jesus Christ. He kept every law, he kept it, and offered his death as a substitute for all the curses of the law that we have deserved.

And that is the final purpose of the covenant. To drive you to Jesus Christ, to show you that you are hopeless without Him, to show you that all of your law keeping is as rubbish. It means nothing to save you. While it's required to obey and important, it cannot save. So the purpose of the law and the covenant and the oath is one purpose To declare the glory of the gospel that Christ paid the penalty for our sins, so that when there were so many laws broken, and there were so many sins committed, that there is a sacrifice for our sins.

And our only hope here in this entire proposition that we ought to be a people of a covenant and an oath is that The lawgiver is also the lawkeeper. And he is so kind to take children so sinful as we, that with one hand He would give us the law that would threaten our eternal damnation, and in His right hand are the fellowship of His sufferings, and the right-handed fellowship, saying, Come, enter into my rest. And so here we have a people held by a covenant and an oath of revealed things for an unexpected purpose that all would fall down and worship Jesus Christ and His great sacrifice. Would you pray with me? Oh Lord, we are amazed at the depth and breadth of your word and how good you are.

And we pray now that you would continue to grasp wisdom as a covenant people taking an oath in faithfulness in this world. Bind us together, O Lord, in these things. Amen.