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Now let us turn to serious matters and begin our meditation by reading from the book of Deuteronomy and chapter uh four. Deuteronomy chapter four and we begin, uh, with verse five. Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me, that you should do so in the midst of the land whither you go in to possess it. Keep therefore and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the people. You shall hear all these statutes and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. For what great nation is there that hath a God so near to them as the Lord our God is, whensoever we call upon him? And what great nation is there that has statutes and judgments so righteous as all this law which I set before you this day? Only take heed to thyself and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes saw, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life. But make them known unto thy children, and to thy children's children. The day that thou stoodest before the Lord thy God in Horeb, when the Lord said unto me, Assemble me the people, and I will make them hear my words, that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live upon the earth, and that they may teach their children. And you came near and stood under the mountain. The mountain burned with fire unto the heart of heaven, with darkness, cloud, and thick darkness. The Lord spake unto you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the voice of words, but you saw no form, only you heard a voice. God give us understanding of his word. Welcome to all of you who are here for the first time this morning. You find us encamped with Moses and the Israelites on the plains of Moab. And as Moses rises to address the people once more, and I come as his apprentice interpreter, you will sense that the situation is intensely dramatic. Forty years before, the nation had come to Kadesh Barnea, which was intended as the launching pad from which they might invade the land that God had promised their fathers to give them. People had sent out spies to reconnoiter the land, and they, and though they all had to agree that the land was good, the majority of the spies brought back an evil report. They said the place was full of cities fortified, and giants were among them. It was simply nonsense to attempt any invasion of that land. They rebelled against Moses and made themselves a captain to return to Egypt, thus flinging back in the face of God the very redemption he had offered them from Egypt, and refusing to believe the gospel that God would bring them into this land flowing with milk and honey. God's verdict on them and on their behavior was that they were, after all, sheer unbelievers. They had not believed the gospel. They had, in fact, despised God. And God gave them what they demanded. They refused to go into the land. All right, said God, you don't have to. In fact, you won't. You must now turn with the nation that lives as nomads in the wilderness until this present generation has died out, and the next generation and those following will go into the land. Now the moment has come. And Israel are assembled. This time there's a barrier there that wasn't there before. This time they were east of Jordan, and to get into the land they had to cross that river when it was in flood. But God had appointed a successor to Moses. Joshua, filled with God's spirit and maintained by God, would lead the people in. And now what shall Moses say to them? Yes, it was flowing with milk and honey in God's goodness, but there were dangers. And the dangers not merely from giants and fortified cities. God, in the course of their wanderings east of Jordan, had largely delivered them from fear of giants by actual experience of them. But across the Jordan and in Canaan, there would be far more sinister. You see, the world they were now entering was a very different world from what they had known in the wilderness. In the wilderness, they were largely a self-contained nation. Very rarely did they have to meet any other nation. Occasions when they did and came to disasters more bigger or less, were very few. They could live with God's presence in the tabernacle, and with Moses their guide, and with the Levites teaching the word. And now they were going into the land. It was a very different world. Though God would give them victory over the giants and over many a fortified city, the nations would not all be driven out at once, as God had informed them. He would leave them. And now they must mix. And as the tribes separated into individual tribes and lived- lived in their different places, there would be an insidious danger. First of all, the newer generations, and then the third would begin to forget the magnificent, unique, historic experience that the nation had had when they stood before the mountain of Horeb, and God revealed himself to them and came down in his mercy and stood upon Mount Sinai until Mount Sinai shook. The fire of God's glory billowed up into the very heavens, and they heard the voice of the Lord God actually speaking to them. God had said that he did it so that they might never forget that experience. It was foundational to all that should follow. But two or three generations later, danger was it should have faded, and the people would be prosperous, and they would meet people of other faiths, idolaters, people of a very different moralities, positive immoralities. And they would be tempted to regard Moses' law as merely words in a book, rules in regulations that didn't really need, in our modern world nowadays, to be taken too seriously. And they would meet the prettily decorated young ladies of Moab and such like places, who introduced them to their worship, and there was no denying it was more colorful than the worship of the Lord in the tabernacle. And they weren't so strict on morality, not in Moab they weren't. And the tendency to compromise with modern sexual liberality and with idolatrous worship would grow in intensity, and the farmers would watch how some of these Gentile farmers went about it, and when they saw a Gentile farmer with a very good crop and said, how did you manage that, sir? And sir replied, oh, well, what you do is before you sow the seeds, you offer a bit of incense to Moloch. Oh yes. Does it work? Yes, it works. You try it. And influenced by the cash. It is like businessman would compromise with heathen moralities and sacrifices. Israel's testimony to God would be compromised all the way along the line. And as we recall it, we must surely observe that in our now modern generation, it's a very different world from what some of us were seventy years ago. When, sir, you preached the gospel in your youth in the nineteen thirties or forties here in Ulster, you preached to people at large who had been taught the law of God in day school, if not in church, who believed that there was a God, that Jesus was the Son of God, and accepted the historical facts that Jesus died on the cross. They didn't understand how they could personally find forgiveness and eternal life. They still had it in their heads that you earn salvation by works, and you were delighted to preach to them from the word of God because they accepted it before you even started to preach. It's a different world now, my dear brethren. Different even here in Ulster, it's very different in England and in West Europe, where you face generations that have no idea of what is in the Bible. Some of them have never heard the gospel. They've been taught atheistic materialism in school, and that science has proved there is no God. You can't suppose they know the Bible. You can't even suppose they believe in God, let alone Christ. And the constant pressure over radio and television to say that we must give up our stance and and preaching that Jesus is the only way to God, and recognize the fact that all religions are leading to the same point, and that evangelism is, um, politically incorrect. What should we do? As we move into this new age, so to speak, we too need Moses and the Christian apostles to tell us not to be ashamed of the gospel of Christ, not to abandon the claim of Christ to be utterly unique. No man comes to the Father, but by me. To be unashamed of the Christian standards of morality. Dare to preach them to our families and insist on them. You shall understand, therefore, please, will you not, the address that now Moses delivers to his nation as they stand poised to enter the Promised Land. And he appeals to them to observe what the point of their redemption has been, the utterly unique quality of it. Verse thirty two of that same chapter four of Deuteronomy. For ask now of the days that are past, which were before thee, since the day that God created man upon the earth, and from the one end of heaven unto the other, whether there has been any such thing as this great thing is, or has been heard like it. Did ever people hear the voice of God speaking out of the midst of the fire as thou hast heard and lived? Or has God assayed to go and take to him a nation from the midst of another nation? By trials, by signs, and by wonders, and by war, and by a mighty hand, and by a stretched out arm, and by great terrors, according to all that the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your eyes. And what was the purpose of it? And why was Israel so blessed with redemption? Here comes the purpose, verse thirty five: Unto thee it was showed that thou mightest know that the Lord, he is God. There is none else beside him. Look at verse thirty nine that repeats it. Know therefore this day and lay it to thine heart that the Lord, he is God in heaven above and upon the earth beneath. There is none else. The utter uniqueness of God, never to be confused with idols. The utter uniqueness of God's self-revelation to this nation of Israel, and the new, the unique calling of Israel, to be one nation, not just a few individuals, to be a nation amongst all the other nations who for centuries were to stand on this planet as a witness to the one true God. This was what now was at stake in their behavior. We Christians listen and prick up our ears. Because, you see, our Christian faith is bound up with these historical things. Our Christian faith is not a philosophy. Given tenpenny penny worth of sense, you can invent a philosophy. There are plenty on the, on the, on, on offer. You could, uh, invent another one if you had the mind to. Christianity is not a philosophy that someone thought up. Christianity is the full flowering of a great historical movement in history. And God called out Abraham and then called out his successors, Israel, to be a nation to whom God revealed himself and through whom the Christ would one day come. So Matthew tells us that our gospel is about the Lord Jesus, who was the son of David, the son of Abraham. And Paul reminds us that the gospel is about Jesus Christ, who was born according to the flesh after the seed of Abr- uh, of David. Why is that important? Because no mere man can decide where he's going to be born and by whom he shall be born. That Jesus Christ was born of the seed of David is in itself an indication of God's authority behind the Christian gospel, announced in the Old Testament, fulfilled in the New. And not only his birth and the place of his birth, but the purpose for which he came. That he should die a sacrifice for the sins of the world. Christianity then is rooted in history, and the uniqueness of God's real self-revelation to Israel is part of our Christian testimony. Listen to Paul, he's writing his great exposition of the Christian gospel in his epistle to the Romans. It is in four major parts, and the third part of it, as you well know, is a discussion of the part Israel has played in God's self-manifestation to the world. He describes them thus, who are Israelites, whose is the adoption. God appointed them, as Deuteronomy says, as his sons. And the glory, it is in Israel's tabernacle, the God of the whole universe deigned to present himself in the Shekinah glory that overshadowed that tabernacle. And the covenants. For the covenants that God historically made with Israel, the old covenant and the promise of the new, and the giving of the law, and the service of God, so utterly different from the pagan service. No image of any God inside that temple. Of whom, whose are the fathers of the promises, and of whom is Christ as concerning the flesh, who is over all, God blessed forever. We thank God for Israel and their testimony to the uniqueness of God, the distinction between Jehovah and all other idols. It is true that Israel compromised it from time to time, but God in his mercy brought them back, and the triumph was this. Now, by the time our blessed Lord Jesus came to Jerusalem and entered the temple courts, there was no idol to be seen from one end to the other of the temple, and no cultic prostitutes, as had been the habit of some of the idolatrous kings of Judea. And why was that important? Why, if God is going to send his son into the world and proclaim to the world that Jesus is the son of God, God thought it wise, first of all, to establish what is meant by the term God. Jesus Christ had been born in pagan Greece, with all their stories of gods galore who had relations with goddesses and sometimes with human women, and their offspring were called children of God. If Jesus Christ had been born in Greece and people said he was the son of God, what would you thought that meant? God saw to it. When he sent his son into this world as the son of God, first God took the trouble with Israel to establish and secure that Israel was now totally faithful to the doctrine of the one true God. Israel, therefore, were now to stand by that revelation. And as they are about to enter the land, Moses appeals to them not to be ashamed. You see, he says, keep these statutes, therefore, and do them, for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of the peoples, which will hear all these statutes and say, surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people. Don't be ashamed of your wisdom. When I first joined Queen's University of Happy Memories, there were two Christian bodies of students in the university that sought to witness for Christ. One of them was called the Student Christian Movement, and the other the Christian Union. The Student Christian Movement in its early days had set out with good and great intentions. By the time I reached Queens, they'd lost their grip on the doctrines of the gospel and of the deity of Christ and of his resurrection and of his virgin. And the last president of the student Christian movement was an atheist. It folded up, did that movement. There came to the university a sociologist, and he was an atheist. And if you please, he chose to write a PhD thesis on the student Christian movement and the Christian Union in Queen's University Belfast. His aim was to discover why the one institution had folded up and the other institution, um, continued vigorously. He was not biased, he was an atheist himself, didn't believe anything of it, but he pointed out to the world that why the one institution had folded up was because they has lost grip of their beliefs. They had nothing to believe anymore. And you can't, uh, continue if you've lost your faith in the very foundations of your beliefs. The world won't respect you for it. They won't necessarily agree that you are wise, but the world has no respect people that claim to have a religious faith and are prepared to compromise it, compromise it, compromise it all the way along the line. The Christianity that denies the virgin birth of Christ, his atoning death, his resurrection, and his second coming might as well fold up as far as the world is concerned. All my good brothers and sisters, and you younger folks who must face the new world, the new age, so to speak, in which you are entering, certainly here in the West, all give heed to the historic facts, both of Israel's faith and of ours, and determined by God's grace not to be ashamed of them. For only consider, says Moses, what great nation is there that has a God so nigh on? Ah, listen to a Christian at prayer, a real believer, I mean. You'll find that he or she is not just mouthing formal words. They're talking to God as if they knew him, and they do know him. Oh, listen to the evidence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts as they cry, Abba Father, and rejoice in their closeness to God and God to them. It doesn't mean that God says yes to all their requests, whether he says yes or no. And even when he says no, and it tests a Christian's courage, heart, and faith, and yet the Spirit of God triumphs in them. He that spared not his own son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Oh, what a marvelous fact of experience it is to have the living spirit of God. God has not given us a spirit of slavery again to fear, but the spirit of sonship whereby we cry, Abba Father. So near, so very near to God. Nearer we could not be, for in the person of his son, we are as near as he. I write to you, little children, says John to his youngest converts, because you know the Father. Dad, we say. Isn't it marvelous? Says Paul to the Galatians, says he, God sent forth his son, born of a woman, born under the law, that he might redeem those that are under the law. And thank God for that redemption, but he's done more. Because you are sons, and God has given you the status of sons and daughters in the very family of God. God has sent forth the spirit of his son into your heart, whereby we cry, Abba Father. What great nation is there that has a God like it? Oh, the wonderful forgiveness of God. At one stage, my good colleagues, I think it was in the chemistry department of Queen's, said, would I mind if they sent me a PhD doctoral research student? She came from Thailand. She was a Buddhist, and she was wanting to get hold of a Christian on two legs that could tell her what Christians really believed, you see. So I said yes, and one day she came, a formidable but charming lady, of course, uh, and told me that she had come to find out what Christians believed, you see. She wasn't going to get converted, she warned me before we started, you see. No. So as I progressed to talk to her about, uh, uh, uh, Christianity and the doctrine of salvation and forgiveness, I said how marvelous it is, you see, because Christ has died as our savior, we can have forgiveness of sins, and not only have it, but know it. Don't have to wait until the end of life to know whether we are forgiven or not. We can know it right now. I said, my good, uh, lady, suppose you were a mother and you had a child, and your child, um, did something wrong, and then she came to you and said, I'm sorry, mum. And you said in, you would say in your heart, would you? I, I, I, well, I'm going to forgive her, but I can't let her know. Let's keep her in suspense whether I'm going to forgive her or not. I said, you wouldn't do that, would you? And she said to me, what are you talking about? I couldn't forgive my child. There is no such thing as forgiveness. Then she treated me to the Buddhist, of her particular Buddhist doctrine of, uh, reincarnation, that everybody has to bear the responsibility for their own sins and the suffering that must come upon them. No one can relieve them of it. They must suffer, and if they haven't suffered enough by the time they reach the end of life, they must be reincarnated and go through the whole process again and do the suffering again, and also the si- the suffering for any other sins they would happen to do in this second incarnation, you see, and never be sure that they suffered enough. And if you ask what sins, therefore, of a previous incarnation are they suffering for, they couldn't tell you. And if you say, how many reincarnations have you been through already? I couldn't tell you that either. And how many reincarnations will you have to go through before you are eventually free from suffering? And they can't tell you that either. Oh, my dear friend, I'm not being rude, I hope. I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ. The mercies of God, our Creator, through Jesus Christ, our Lord, that can say, whosoever believeth on him shall receive forgiveness of sins and an inheritance among them that are sanctified. Don't be ashamed of your wisdom. You say, well, we Christians are taught we haven't got any wisdom. Oh yes, you have. Oh yes, you have. Don't be so humble as all that. You haven't got any inherent wisdom, maybe, but listen to this. Christ is made unto us wisdom from God. What appears to be a foolish message, the message of Christ crucified, is in fact the wisdom of God and the power of God, and does what philosophy cannot do. Philosophy can teach you to argue logically, but it cannot get at your heart. The trouble of man's relation with God, his relationship with God, doesn't lie simply in his intellectual deficits. It lies in his heart, a rebel's heart that fears God and doesn't want to submit to him, thinks God is against him. How can you solve it? Uh, God has a way of reaching a man or a woman's heart and show them what God is really like. Therefore, God came to us, oh, how near in the person of Jesus Christ, so near that they took God incarnate and smote him across the face and put a crown of thorns on his head and plunged their spears into his side, and God took it. To show men and women what God is really like, and how God is not in that sense against them. But while we were enemies, we could be reconciled to God through the death of his son. And do let us be ashamed of our wisdom, nor compromise it. I say this, forgive my crude expression, but when it comes to salvation and forgiveness through the death of Christ, Christ is the only one among all the world's religions that's on the market. If you want forgiveness with God and know it, there's no one else to go to. And don't be afraid of your statutes, says Moses. Don't be ashamed of them. Why should they be ashamed? They were among the old, uh, Canaanites that from time to time would get their little babies and put them on the outstretched arms of their idols, Moloch in particular, and light the fires underneath until the arms of the idol were hot and their babies sizzled. You don't need to be ashamed of God's statutes, says Moses, based as all of them are on this basic s- uh, uh, principle of human life, that man is made in the image of God, and God himself forbids any murder. If God sent his judgments on the Canaanite society, or what, amongst other things, they did to their babies, what do you suppose God will think of the Western world in this last thirty to forty years? Where in the States alone, forty million unborn fetuses, alive and human, were murdered. You needn't be ashamed of the statutes. Biomedical ethics now is a, a very big topic in many universities in the world. What is it right or not right to do in medicine? On what basis shall we decide it? What is the value of a human life? When I was a boy, Queen Victoria was dead, had recently died. And most houses in Britain had cats to keep the mice down. If a cat had too many kittens and you didn't want any more, you tried to give them away, but most people had too many kittens anyway. So you selected the best one, and father got the bin, the ra- ra- you know, the trash bin, filled it with water, and drowned the kittens. Would you have been happy if you had been born and father had done the same with you? You say, don't be silly. No, I'm not being silly. In ancient Greece, when parents had children that they didn't want, they didn't kill them themselves. They put them in a little pot and set it out on the mountains, knowing, of course, that the wild beast would devour it, but somehow thinking that they were ex- excused from any guilt. They didn't themselves murder the child. What is the value of human life? If you are an atheist and an evolutionist combined, you will think perhaps like Professor Singer thinks, of Yale University. He says it's about time we got rid of this notion that man is made in the image of God. Man is not special. There ain't any God anyway. We've just evolved, and human beings are just one little twig compared with another twig, which is the other animals on the evolutionary tree, and must be so evaluated. So a human baby, says he, is no basically more valuable than a pig. Mark you, Professor Pig, uh, uh, Singer thinks pigs are very valuable. They are to be treated decently. But a human being is no more valuable than a pig, and if a child being born has some defect, then it should be allowable that within twenty day days, twenty eight days of birth, it should be killed. Don't be ashamed, says Moses to Israel, of God's statutes, based as they are on the fear of God, and the value that God assigns to human life. Ah, but not only does Moses exhort them not to forget the words and statutes of God. Not only does he exhort them to listen again to him talking about the nearness of God and the wonder of God, and the wonder and glory of his statutes, but he senses another danger. He himself stood with Israel, indeed brought out Israel as a nation to the foot of Mount Horeb, that they might come and meet God personally. And they heard the living God speak. And they who remembered it would never forget that the words that Moses gave them were not just rules written in a book. They were the voice of the living God. That is still true. So often, when it comes to rigorous study of scripture, particularly in academic circles, it is easy to slip into studying the Bible as though it merely a book of physics. Well, physics is a marvelous topic, of course. But if we treat the Bible merely as another book of physics, we shall miss the biggest thing it's about. To study rigorously is good, but to say we study rigorously at our desks, but in our devotion we, uh, uh, study on our knees, that's also good advice. But I have found, what many have found, that when we study the Bible rigorously, we better do it, metaphorically speaking, study it rigorously on our knees. Because it's God's word, mediated by his inspired apostles and prophets. It's God's word nonetheless, such that if God opened the heaven and spoke, he would speak these words. Believe it? It's not just rules, my dear brothers and sisters. Mark you, you must be careful to distinguish between God's revealed word and all sorts of rules and regulations that grow up in Christian centers that are not justified by the word of God at all. That's a very different thing. What is God's word? The question is how we shall hear it. And now Moses says an extraordinary thing. Says he to the second and third generation, remember how you stood at Horeb. You say he's forgotten who he's talking to. It was the first generation that stood at Horeb. These, the grandchildren, never sto- stood at Horeb, did they? Yes, you did, says Moses. You're part of the nation, isn't you? Aren't you? And you therefore experience what the nation must experience. It's part of your being Israelites. And we say like the spe- uh, Negro spiritual, when we think of the way that God has spoken to us in our Lord Jesus Christ, that we might learn to reverence God and read his word with true reverence and obey him gladly. Were you there when they crucified my Lord? You were, weren't you? And if we would be true to our historic faith, from time to time guided and helped by God's spirit, we must recur to Calvary. At Mount Horeb, the glory of God was shown such as to impress Israel that they might reverence him forever, and the fire of his holiness billowed out into space to the topmost galaxy. But oh, but oh, how near and how loudly God spoke when our blessed Lord died at Calvary. Mids rending rocks and darkening skies, my Savior bowed his head and died. There on the cross he died for me. Oh, Calvary, God's Calvary. God help us to stand there again and again until the wonder of God's speaking penetrates our deepest minds and hearts, that we might learn to fear him all our days and not be ashamed of his gospel. For his name's sake, shall we pray. Pray. And so, Father, we have read and tried to think about thy word, and thus to love thee with all our minds. Help us to value thy holy word and to know it in experience as God's inspired self-revelation, but that we may love thee and reverence thee. We pray now thy help as Christian people, that we might stand ever and again in heart and spirit at the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, and hear thee there speak thy magnificent words, that we might there learn to fear thee all the days of our life, and to witness for thee manfully until the Lord shall come, through Jesus Christ our Lord.