In the sermon 'A Time of Covenant Renewal' by Scott Brown, the focus is on the covenant that God commanded Moses to establish with the Israelites in the land of Moab. This covenant renewal is detailed in Deuteronomy 29, where Moses delivers his final speech to the Israelites, urging them to remember and adhere to God's covenant to prosper. The sermon highlights the significance of God's past mercies and the miracles experienced by the Israelites, such as their survival in the wilderness. Brown emphasizes that entering into a covenant with God requires a whole-hearted commitment and warns against the consequences of breaking the covenant, which include divine curses and judgment. The sermon also stresses the importance of teaching God's revealed will to future generations to ensure a lasting covenant relationship. The overarching message is a call to remember God's goodness and to live a simple, obedient life in accordance with His revealed will, as this leads to blessings and fulfillment of His promises.

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 and 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 40 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 Heshbon, and Og, king of Bashan, came out against us to battle, and we conquered them. We took their land and gave it as an inheritance to the Reubenites and to the Gadites and to half of the tribe of Manasseh.

Therefore, keep the word 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 go and serve the gods of these nations, and that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood.

And so it may not happen when he hears the word of this curse that 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 all the curses of the covenant that are written in this book of the law, so that the coming generations of your children who 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.

It is not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there, like the overthrown of Sodom and Gomorrah, Admon, and Naboam, which the Lord overthrew in his anger and his wrath. All nations would say, Why has the Lord done so to this land? What does the heat of this 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 had not given to them.

Then the anger of the Lord was aroused 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 to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law. Heavenly Father, We pray now for Scott as he comes to teach your word that our minds would be open, that we would understand your blessings and your curses, and that we would not just go from here today having heard that we may be doers of your word, that we may abide in you forever, Lord. In Christ's holy name, amen.

Welcome to Deuteronomy chapter 29, in which Moses delivers his last speech in the last month of his life before the children of Israel to help prepare them to come and enter into the promised land. Imagine knowing that you had an opportunity to speak last and then die. We don't know what Moses knew exactly, but this will be his last major speech before he dies, before the children of Israel. And yet God gives him the perfect words, whether he was aware of his impending death or not. So it's a very dramatic moment for a man who has poured his life out among the children of Israel for the glory of God.

And so just to help us see where we are in this great set of speeches that Moses gives. Remember the first speech that Moses gives is found in chapters 1 through 4. And the theme of that chapter is, I carry you. It's historical in nature. And then the second speech begins in chapter 5 and goes all the way to the end of chapter 28, which we've just completed.

And this speech is didactic rather than historical as the first speech was. And it's composed of expositions of the law of God. And then the third speech begins here in chapter 29, and it's a promise of life and death. It's a rolling up of many of the elements of the messages that God has given Moses up to this point. And then finally, at the very end, Moses changes leadership, passing the baton onto Joshua.

So that's the book of Deuteronomy in a nutshell. So the people of Israel have just been given instructions for a great demonstration of the goodness of God and the sinfulness of sin and the destructiveness of it. And by instructing the children of Israel, when they go into the land, to stand between two mountains, Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, and declare both the blessings of God and the curses of God against those who disobey Him. So all of these instructions have now been given that the event won't happen until sometime in the future. But Moses is preparing them to remember back to the things he said and to understand the way that the world is structured, that those who disobey God will be destroyed.

But those who love God and who are called according to his purpose to obey him with all of their hearts And he will bless them. So that's that's what's been happening in this whole Whole section now, let's drill down a little bit I want to give you a vision of this chapter before we launch into it because I want you to see how it's structured. It's structured very beautifully and in a helpful way to help us you know understand where Moses is going. Verse 1 is a preface and a call to renew the covenant. That's verse 1.

And then from verses 2 through 9 are a reminder of God's mercies. And then in verse 10 through 16, and this is sort of the heart of the text, it is a call to enter into the covenant, to see it, to know it, to believe it, to enter into the covenant, and then in verses 17 to 28 there is a warning against covenant breakers. And then finally the answer to the whole matter is found in the very last verse of the chapter. And Moses gives the bottom line of the bottom line of the bottom line to us to help us understand what all this is all about. So this is a call to renew and enter into a covenant with God.

So let's look at the first verse. The first verse in chapter 29 reveals the whole theme of the chapter. And it's an introduction to this transaction, this covenantal relationship between God and man. God makes a promise and man responds in humility or obedience Or he responds by following his own heart like a drunken man. And so in this preface there's a call to renewal.

He says, these are the words of the covenant. I love that first phrase. These are the words. And so here we find a preface to the entire chapter. Now, these first words here presuppose previous covenants.

And there had been covenants that had been given by God. There is the covenant to Adam, the covenant with Noah, the Mosaic covenant. Here is the covenant in Moab. There is the Davidic Covenant and the New Covenant. The scriptures are a unified whole that speak of a covenant making God and His people, who cut a deal.

Covenant means to cut. And it has to do with entering into an arrangement where parties know who they are, man knows who he is, and of course he acknowledges God for who he is. That's what a covenant is all about. So covenants connect God and man, and broken covenants make a tragic, tragic disconnect between God and man, so that the mercies and the feedings and the helps of God, the outpourings of grace and water and feedings of bread are lost to man. So the breaking of the covenant is of enormous significance to a man or a woman because it so deprives him of every good thing that ever was conceived of because only in heaven are found the good things in this world.

So covenants connect God with man. And then there's this note about this is kind of a different covenant. And my view of what the difference was is it wasn't really, it wasn't different in content at all. It was a different time in a different place for people who were ready to enter the promised land. The last coming of Mount Sinai was delivered and connected with as the children of Israel were launching out into a 40-year journey in the wilderness.

Now here, it's a different time in a different place. An entire generation has passed away. Many of those people are not there. Only a few are there. And so it's new in this sense.

The covenant in Sinai and the covenant in Moab have the same content, yet it's a different time and it's a different place that they're in. It says right at the beginning, these are the words. These are the words. Now camp on that for a second. Just let that sink in.

We don't want to pass by these first four words in this chapter because they're so important to us. And it indicates that it's God who fixes the rules of the universe and He delivers those rules to us in words. He gives us words to cling to, to guide us, to carry us on in our lives. And so, in verse 1, there's this call to the words of the covenant. That's why as we engage in our life together in this church, we try, as best we know how, to focus on the words that are in the text.

Because we know that that's where the blessing is. We know that they're perfect, we know that they're pure, we know that they're a tree of life, we know that they are all of what we need. But here Moses is calling their attention to the words of the covenant. So, brethren and sister, let me just say this. Be very careful to know the words distinctly of that covenant that God has given.

He has given us words for a reason. And then there's a reminder of God's mercies for the rest of this first section going all the way up to verse 9. And verse 2 says, now Moses called all Israel and said to them, now this is marking this next speech that he's giving. And this part is so compelling to me, and I've loved reading it and listening to it on audio many times. But this is the voice of a father speaking to his children about the tender mercies that he's delivered to them.

This is a father assuring, reminding, helping a people to see that God carries his people, that God is good to his people. And you read this, you have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt to Pharaoh and to all of his servants, and to all his land, the great trials which your eyes have seen, the signs and those great wonders." Now, Moses is saying, you saw it with your own eyes. You saw how good I was to you. And I would just hope that we could pause right now and just meditate on that same proposition for our own lives. Haven't you seen, haven't you seen the goodness of the Lord?

Haven't you seen how He's fed you and clothed you and led you and been kind to you and poured out His mercy to you? This is what Moses is doing. He's like a kind father who's assuring his people of his own goodness, of their own connection to him, and how beneficial it is. He says that their own senses showed them of the greatness of God. And here we are too.

We have various senses that God's given us. The hearing, the seeing, the tasting, the feeling. He's given us so many ways out of which we can discern the goodness of the Lord. And he's speaking of these great gifts of God. And then he says something in verse 4, though, that strikes fear to the heart.

He says, Yet the Lord has not given you a heart to perceive, and eyes to see and hear to this very day. And so Even though many of these people were there physically, and they saw it with their physical eyes, they didn't see it with their spiritual eyes. They saw the signs and the wonders, but they were blind to the goodness of God that stood behind all of it. They just, they didn't see. And this just shows us again how dependent we are upon God.

That even the simplest spiritual understanding, It cannot be ours unless God opens our eyes. Two people can stand and see the same thing, and one praises God, and the other one just says, huh. And that's what he's talking about here. So there were people among the visible church, among the gathered people, whose eyes, though they did see the pillar of cloud, They did see the water parted, yet they didn't really see, because God hadn't opened their eyes to see it. And this just helps us to understand how frail we are before God, that the smallest insights that we ever might have are dependent upon God.

This is this is very much like when the Lord Jesus spoke with Nicodemus In order to see the kingdom of God, you cannot see it or know it unless God changes your heart. Nicodemus had to have his eyes open, just like all of us do. And we see this principle all over scripture. And Paul said to the Corinthians that the natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him, and he cannot understand because they are spiritually appraised. Your heart can't burn within you unless God gives you a burning heart toward him.

And This idea that the heart is under God's sovereign control runs all throughout Scripture. You know, that the King's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as Proverbs 21, verse 1 says. It's like rivers of water and he turns it wherever he wishes all of our hearts are like that He turns it Wherever he wishes who would not want to be close to Almighty God If situ if conditions are that way and they are that way We saw God hardening Pharaoh's heart. We saw, even in Deuteronomy, this book in chapter 2, verse 30, that King Sihon refused to let the people pass because why? Do you remember?

Because God made his heart stubborn. It was God that did it. And so there's this whole principle of this covenant with God requires something that man can't supply. The power of God to open up the eyes, to open up the ears to hear, and to discern that God is who He says He is. And yet at the same time the responsibility and the accountability for sin is upon those whose eyes are shut and whose hearts are stony.

At the same time there's accountability for this and I I would just urge us to pray for ourselves, cry out to God, and to cry out for those among us and around us in our community who remain with stony hearts that we would pray for illumination, that we would cry out to God, that He would open up hearts. You know, when George Whitefield preached, he would say two things. He would say, repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. Be saved from this perverse generation. And then often he would launch out into appeals to God in the midst of his preaching.

And he would say, Oh God, open their eyes. Oh God, soften their hearts. God, would you come down upon them and help them. Help them, oh God. That's my prayer today, that he would help us, that he would help any one of us here who is found with a hard heart or eyes that are shut or ears that are stopped up, that, oh God, that you would come upon this place and not let any of us go from here without opening our hearts.

And God is in control of these things. We are dependent upon Him. And that's what Moses is saying here. And then Moses goes back to the kindness of the Lord in verse 5, as you'll see. He says, 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've not eaten bread, nor have you drunk wine or similar drink that you may know that I am the Lord your God. Notice, he led, he clothed, he shod, and he fed them. Those are the things that Moses is saying that God did for them. You know, He led them.

He led His flock like a shepherd, as He does all of His people who are truly His. He even leads those who do not love Him and know Him to a place where they would finally recognize that God is God. But He is a good shepherd and that He leads His people. They don't get lost in the wilderness And God leads his people. This is an exposition of the goodness of God, just like we found in chapters 1 through 4.

He says that he clothed them And that none of their clothing wore out. Imagine that. You know, it's funny. I was shooting final sections of our film up in Wisconsin. And I read that I wore the same clothes four days in a row, because I had to be on camera in the same clothes.

Well, imagine 40 years in the same clothes. It's amazing. But God provided adequate clothes that did not wear out for 40 years. There's something wonderful about the provision of clothing. God did this for the shameful couple in the garden, and He's been clothing His people ever since with good clothes.

One of the happy occasions in our home over the last two weeks, has been my wife Deborah making my daughter Blair's wedding dress. And Deborah with loving hands, you know, hovering over every detail, considering every possible situation and angle for the clothing of her daughter on her wedding day. I'm telling you, I have so gloried in these moments that Deborah has had, but she's providing a certain kind of clothing for a certain moment in my daughter's life. That is exactly what God does with us. He provides the clothing that we need for the situations that are ahead of us.

He is sufficient, He is able, and he's faithful to do that. Think of how he's done that. Think of how he has taken you from one place to another. And he's prepared you in his own way, in ways that you never could have in your own. But God here, he's provided clothing.

And in the same way that my wife provides clothing for her daughter here, so God provided clothing with loving hands for his people. Think about how God has clothed you. It says that he shod, he shod them. He gave them shoes that did not wear out. Now, think about it.

Now, does this mean Moses was still wearing the same shoes? Well, at least we know they didn't wear out. But some of these people were wearing the same shoes when they were walking through Egypt and seeing the abominations there and going through the Red Sea, they still had those same shoes on. It must have been an amazing thing to consider. It's inconceivable to me that a woman like Miriam would wear the same shoes, which she probably did.

Blessed are you among women, Miriam, who would wear the same shoes for 40 years. He fed them by manna as your Heavenly Father feeds you. He takes the smallest details into consideration, the clothing, the sandals, the daily food, these are the things that God has done. These were signs and wonders, they were miracles. How about you?

Do you think your clothing and your shoes that God has provided for you, the food that you have every day? Is it a miracle from heaven or is it just, huh? Well, God here is reminding His people of His goodness, that every detail is given for this one thing. The words are right here in the text. That you may know that I am the Lord your God.

We who are so beautifully clothed today, we who have sound shoes on today, we who have been fed, we who have been led need to recognize a miracle has taken place of God. God has cast forth his miracle working power upon all of us by all of these things. Even the simplest detail is a gift of God. And then in verses 7 and 8 he calls him to remember the protections of the covenant. He says, when you came into this place, Sihon, king of Heshbon, you know, who God just controlled his heart, and Og, king of Bation.

How many of you young people here today remember Og, king of Bation? Because we talked a lot about him way back. Anybody remember Og? Remember Og? Og, who is so big, you would need a long bed pickup truck to put him down for the night.

He was something like nine feet, the bed was nine feet wide or something like that. I can't remember the exact dimensions. But this big, big bad dude, God destroyed. The protections in the wilderness are being exposed here and then how God took land and gave it to the children of Israel. But the key word here is remember.

Remember. Remember the blessings. Remember how God has taken care of you. And then he says in verse 9, therefore. And now we get sort of the end of this exposition of the kindness of God.

He says, therefore, keep the words of this covenant and do them that you may prosper in all you do." The word covenant is a prominent word in this chapter. It appears, I think, seven times, several times. And to keep the words of the covenant so that you may prosper in all you do. Notice he says, therefore keep the words. In verse 9, notice in verse 1 he says, these are the words.

It's like a bookend, structurally in the text. Reading the text carefully is helpful to see the logic of God as he explains how he wants us to see these things. And then also that this also follows that pattern that we've seen so many times in Deuteronomy. The command, promise. Command, promise.

Command, promise. Command, promise. Either for good or for evil. All the way through the book. It's incredibly redundant.

And it's redundant for a purpose, that God would drive it into our heads that the commandment And the promise is this, so that you may prosper. So that you may prosper. He gives us the meaning of it right there. Okay, so we've seen the preface, we've seen the reminder of God's mercies. Now there's the call to enter into the covenant, verses 10 through 16.

And so Moses says, and 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 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." Now, this is a very beautiful and pivotal section in the chapter, and in view of our sinfulness, it's shocking, it's astonishing that God would allow sinful men and women like us to enter in to a covenant with Him There the mismatch is great Between us and God and yet God God connects Himself with man. And it's remarkable. It's miraculously blessed. And so there's this covenant that he brings up and we've talked about the covenants.

And there's a call to enter in to the covenant and the oath. There are two things, the covenant and the oath. These are two critical engagements. And it's really a call to enter in with your whole heart, not half-heartedly, but to self-consciously enter into a time of rededication to the Lord. That's what this chapter is about, by the way.

So we're here now at the heart of the message that's here. Now, as I've been considering this over this last week, I've just thought so much about us as a people. Here we are, God has brought us together from a lot of different places. We have a lot of different backgrounds. But in the same way that God has brought the children of Israel together as one body in order to do the will of God.

He has done that with us as well. And I've just been thinking about our life in this community, what we do in this community, how we invest in it, how we speak to those who are in this community, and the centrality of the gospel, that the gospel must be on our lips, and obedient people who preach the true gospel for the blessing of this community and of the nations. That's why we're here. We're here for that purpose. And our prayer for more than many, many months.

I think that our most urgent prayer as elders in the last three years is that God would unstop our mouths, that we would not live and move and have our being in this community without preaching the gospel every day. Being an obedient people on the one hand, and then obediently speaking, the greatness of the kingdom of heaven. But here, all standing before the Lord today to enter into a covenant and into an oath. The Lord Jesus said, I am the door, enter in. Come, come, all ye who are weary, have ye a little out.

Come, enter in, enter in. In the last words of the book of Revelation, the spirit and the bride say, come, come. That's the appeal here. Come and enter into a covenant with Almighty God. And what we find here is God has no respect for persons in their station, in their age, in their gender, in their occupation of life.

He's calling everyone from the littlest child to the oldest, to every possible occupation. The highest and the lowest all have exactly the same calling, to come and enter into covenant with God. So there are declarations of commitment that are being called for here. This whole idea of entering into a covenant is so important for us. It's a principle that our culture has kind of gone blind on.

And I don't know why. Let me just give you a couple of illustrations of what it means to enter into a covenant. Many of you have heard of the Scottish Covenanters. You heard of the Scottish Covenanters? The Covenanters entered into a covenant with God in order to do particular things that were needful in their culture.

And a couple years ago I went to the Covenanter graves in in Edinburgh and stood there at the at the graves of the martyrs. Those who enter into covenant with God often lose their lives. And we need to understand that there are enormous implications of entering into a covenant with God, because you lose everything. Your will is not your own, your life is not your own, your possessions are not your own anymore. They belong to God and God alone.

That's what it means to enter into a covenant with God. All earthly things are completely redefined and redeployed for one single purpose. All of your mental capacities, everyone in your family, your house, your automobile, whatever God's given you, whatever you have, is not even yours anymore. And that's what it means to enter into a covenant with God. This is why this was such a serious and pivotal moment.

And so in the center of this passage of Scripture is this call to enter into the covenant. It means that if you make a covenant with God, you break your covenant with the world. You break your deal with the world. The deal with the world is if you serve that prostitute, that whore of the world, she will make you feel good, but she doesn't, and you must break the covenant with her. The deal doesn't work, but the deal must be broken in order to break the bondage.

So there's a deal to be made and a deal to be broken whenever there's a covenant. The covenant of the world will always fail you because the maker of that covenant came to kill and steal and destroy. That's His deal. But that's not God's deal. God's deal is that you might have life and have it more abundantly.

God's deal is that you drink of the waters of life. God's deal is you eat of the bread of life. That's God's deal. So in this whole matter of covenant making and breaking, we have to understand that there are two different parties standing at the end of the covenants. One is a God who is all wise and perfectly merciful and yet full of vengeance and judgment against those who hate Him.

And then there is the devil on the other end of the other covenant. And he says that he does this to establish you, to set you apart, to make a holy people for himself. He speaks of the reach of this covenant in verses 14 and 15. I will make this covenant and this oath not with you alone, but with Him who stands here today before the Lord your God, as well as with Him who is not with us today. Who is that?

Who are those people? I'll tell you who I think it is. I think it's those who have not yet been born, it's the coming generations. It's those who are perhaps in other parts of the world in redemptive history that God begins, He pours His Spirit out on the earth, and He calls men and women from every tongue and tribe and nation from one generation to the next. Just like Peter said in his sermon in the book of Acts, chapter 2 verse 39, this promise is for you and your children and all who are far off.

So it's speaking of the broad work of God in election all throughout the earth. And then we come to a warning after this call to enter in to the covenant. There's a warning to covenant breakers. And this stretches from verse 17 all the way to 28. And Moses speaks of the idols in Egypt that they walked by, and he plays that scene in front of their eyes to remind them of idolatry, to help them remember what idolatry looks like.

Of course, they've seen it a number of times in their own midst. But they pass by the idols and the abominations. And then he says in verse 18, that there may not be among you, man or woman, family or tribe, whose heart turns away from the Lord our God, and to go and serve the gods of these nations, that there may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood. Now here Moses is saying that among this gathered church, among the people of God, are people whose hearts are in rebellion. They know who they are.

They think they're hidden. They think that they're undetected. They're part of all of the blessings and all of the movements of the people of God. But there are those whose hearts are turned away. You can't know for sure whose hearts are turned toward and whose hearts are turned away from God.

But He's acknowledging this reality among the people of God. They're part of the family. They know they're not serving the Lord. And they say, I'm at peace. I'm at peace.

Everything's fine with me. That's what they say to themselves over and again. And he's saying that this is the nature of the visible church, the true church, that there are those whose hearts are turned away, but he's saying here that they poison the rest. They are root bearing bitterness and wormwood. It matters, it matters where we stand here in the congregation, because our hearts inclination will either make us bitterness and wormwood, or sweetness and light.

He's talking about the way that we affect one another. If one member of the body is sick, then the whole body gets sick. That's the basic idea that he's saying. Hebrews talks about many being defiled by this bitterness. And it all comes down to the fact that there are those who do not serve the Lord with joy.

It's a burden to them, they're going through the motions, but their hearts are far from Him. And then he speaks in verse 19. I'm just going to call it the inebriation of disobedience. He says, and so it may not happen that when he hears the words of this curse, that 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. Now here's a scene right before our eyes of a person who's actually under the curse because the heart is turned away and he's blessing himself for it.

He is so inebriated, he is so out of touch with reality that he doesn't understand what's happening to him. He says, I'm okay, I'm not worried, I'm above all this. I can do whatever I want to do. It doesn't affect me. Have you ever heard people who say that?

It doesn't affect me. And this person is fooling himself. He's pridefully standing in his autonomy. His head is uplifted, claiming everything is just beautiful in its own way. I thought of this week on the 70th birthday of John Lennon.

He would have had his 70th birthday this last week. He lived in an imaginary world and he wrote a song about it called Imagine. It's very interesting. I was talking to our interns about this this week And I asked them if they had ever, if that word meant anything to them and none of them even knew it. And I thought, how blessed it is to be culturally illiterate on that matter, on reprobates like that.

But his song, Imagine, tells it all. You know, I hope someday you'll join us and the world will live as one. Now that's an imaginary world. That's the world that was cooked up by hundreds of cannabis and LSD experiences. That did not come from reality.

It came from somewhere else. And so people, they just blessed themselves. Yes, yes, everything will be beautiful in its own way. And yes, yes, imagine this world. It doesn't exist.

And that's what Moses is saying. You say, you say you have peace but there really is no peace. And it was interesting on the way back from Wisconsin yesterday I sat on a plane, on a plane with a woman. And she was about my age. Her father, she was coming for the funeral of her father.

It was a very heartbreaking situation. And after hearing her story, she loved her father, and they had a very good relationship. And I asked her to consider that she had an opportunity at this moment in her life where she could consider seriously the moment that her father experienced when he died and faced God. And I asked her to consider that. And I asked her how she would be at that moment.

And she said, God will compliment me for such a good job that I've done. He's proud of me. And I've been a good person. My children are doing okay. And I told her that if she had broken one commandment, she had broken them all.

And that God would not save. God is not proud of unrepentant sin. And so she just continued, I have never in my life had somebody so aggressively try to convince me of how good they were. And she said, you know, you've probably never heard anybody say this before, that they're good. I said, no, everybody always says they're good.

Everybody thinks they're going to get in heaven because they are good. She thought she was the only person who would actually have the chutzpah to claim to be good. I said, no, no, no. Everyone thinks they're good. But God says no.

And so I spoke of her, spoke of these things. But here, this is the person in this verse, they're saying, they're saying, I shall have peace, I shall have peace even though I follow the dictates of my heart. But she's like a drunkard, as if you could include the drunkard with the sober. It's the person totally disconnected from the reality of sin and righteousness and judgment and mercy. So Moses shows the seriousness of this.

In verse 20, the Lord will not spare him, For then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy would burn against him, and every curse that is written in this book would settle on him, and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven." Now, he's talking about people that are in the covenant community. In verse 21, and the Lord would separate him from all the tribes of Israel for adversity according to all the curses of the covenant which were in this law. And so, to think that our ways are better than God's ways is a grand deception, and that's what he is speaking of here. And then he prophesied the destruction of the land in verse 22 to 28. He says, so that the coming generation of your children who rise up after you and the foreigner who comes from afar would say, when they see the plagues of that land and the sicknesses which the Lord has laid on it.

The whole land is brimstone, salt and burning. It is not sown nor does it bear nor does any grass grow there. And so he continues on to speak about how God judges the land, the very land of Israel. And it's a judgment upon Israel that will be fulfilled in history. And it will happen, the land will lose its natural fertility and people will recognize it and they'll see that there's been a harsh judgment against that land.

And the purpose of it is spoken of in verse 22, so that the coming generations of your children will know. God's going to parts the land to show the coming generations. That's why He's doing it. We see this fulfilled in Daniel chapter 9. Daniel 9, Daniel is praying, he's confessing the sins of Israel, and he says, As it is written in the law of Moses, all this disaster has come upon us.

Yet we have not made our prayer before the Lord our God, that we might turn from our iniquities and understand your truth. Therefore the Lord has kept the disaster in mind and brought it upon us for the Lord our God is righteous in all the works which he does, though we have not obeyed his voice." Daniel in Daniel 9.13 ties the destruction in 586 BC directly to this law, this covenant that Moses is speaking of right here. So it is fulfilled in history. And there are other places where this is spoken of. The image of Sodom and Gomorrah is brought up here, if you notice that.

The whole land is brimstone, salt and burning. It is not sewn. The Lord Jesus also speaks of Sodom and Gomorrah in Matthew 10, verse 15. Again, all this talk of judgment and parched ground in Sodom and Gomorrah, all this is a picture of the Gospel. All this is a warning about hell.

And the Lord Jesus says that. He says, verily, verily, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah in the day of judgment than for your city. So the judgments go on and they're finally typically fulfilled in hell itself. All of these things have to do with the judgment of hell. Now, what does all this mean?

It means that in order, that to enter into a covenant with the Lord means that it will cost you everything. And that as you enter into the covenant you can only enter if he opens up your eyes and your heart in order to enter in. And this is really a call to make peace with God, to settle the covenant. He is coming to kill, he's coming to wet his glittering sword You must break the covenant with the world unless it happened upon you that's the appeal that he's making and He will unravel all of your excuses and all the times you've said that you were at peace, you'll know that you were completely deluded and inebriated. There will be that day when you'll know it, when you'll face Almighty God and you will know and you won't say anymore I was a good enough person wasn't I Lord know every knee shall bow and every tongue shall confess that Jesus is Lord and then finally after this warning to covenant breakers, there's the revelation of God that belongs to our children.

29 sums everything up. He takes the whole message and jams it into just a few words in the last verse. Everything He's been trying to say now will be brought together. The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law." And in those final words you see what he's driving at in this whole chapter. Now, there are a number of things that I'd like to just bring out of this last verse.

First of all, there's the revealed will of God, and then there's the secret will of God. These two things are always operational, and only one of them is for us in this passage. Now, there's the idea that we can't know everything we want to know. There are some aspects of God's will that are secret. We won't know God's plans.

There's no limit to His knowledge. He knows what will happen, but we don't. It's kind of what Psalm 139 says, O Lord, thou hast searched me and known me. You know when I sit down and when I rise up. You understand my thought from afar.

You scrutinize my path and my lying down. You're intimately acquainted with all my ways. Even before there's a word on my tongue, Behold, O Lord, you know it. You hem me in from behind and before." This is the knowledge of God. He knows things that we don't know.

And then the second part is that everything we need to know is revealed. Everything we need to know is revealed. We don't need to know the secret things of God unless He somehow revealed them, but We shouldn't spend our lives searching out the secret things of God. But we should spend our lives searching out the things that are revealed. That's the idea.

It's a simple life. God has given His people a simple life. A simple way of going through life to search out the revealed will of God, so that we can know how to think and how to feel about things and what to do in certain situations. That's what he's talking about, that we should be searching the revealed will of God. This is our life together, to search it out.

And then he says that it all has a purpose. That everything is revealed for us and our children forever. This is a child raising verse, okay? That these things that are revealed are for you and for your children forever. So that part of our life together in this world until God takes us off of it, that we take the things that are revealed and we deliver them to our children.

It's an enormous responsibility. This is a good moment to just do an evaluation of all the households here. We're going to take an evaluation of the households. I want you to evaluate how you're doing on this matter. Are you filling your household with the Word of God?

Are your children reading Scripture? Are you reading it and explaining it to them? Is it part of your daily diet? When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down and when you rise up, is this part of your life? Moses brings it all down to a focus on the revealed will of God doing it and then taking your children and teaching it to them forever, so that it goes on forever and ever.

You're teaching your children to teach their children who will teach their children and their children and their children forever. That's the vision that God has given us as His people. It's what the Lord Jesus said when He said, Seek first the kingdom of God, and all these things shall be added unto you." That really sums up what Moses is saying. He comes and he calls for covenant renewal. He reminds of the mercies of God.

He speaks of the details of entering in to the covenant with your whole heart. And then he warns of the terrible dangers of not entering in. And then finally, he shows us how to live, to seek the revealed will of God. It's a simple life, it's a simple and a beautiful life that God has given. And I pray that God would give us great success as we seek first His kingdom and his righteousness.

And we know that it will be true that all these things shall be added unto us. Let's pray. Lord, we thank you for giving us these words to show us, to help us, to see your goodness and also who we are as your people entering into covenant to glorify you for many generations. Amen. Thanks for watching!