40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 165 (Deuteronomy 9:1-10:22)

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

God makes sure that Israel understands why He destroyed certain nations and why He gave them the promised land. Is the Old Testament about works while the New Testament is about grace? What does God mean that people are stubborn and stiff-necked? Is there anything more stubborn than sinners? Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network Chad's Academy Course HWSS Conference Donate

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out the whole family of podcasts living over there. there's one for every day in fact there's one that is every day christian history almanac that's every day five minutes of church history for you that's a good one to check out there's other ones that are weekly there's ones that are seasonal you know ones where it's like 12 episodes a year and they just drop them and then you binge them like a netflix show if this is the only show you

listen to on that network and you like this show but we're only 40 minutes every week and you got more than 40 minutes a week to listen to podcasts go over there and check out some of the other ones and find something else. Also, if you haven't signed up for Chad's Academy course yet and you're listening to this podcast, that doesn't make any sense at all because obviously you're interested in the Old Testament. You're interested in what me and Chad have to say

about the Old Testament. Well, Chad is teaching a legit course on Christ in the Old Testament. How many sessions is it, Chad? It's six in all. I mean, you can sign up anytime so far since it was dropped uh we've had two that released but yeah you can jump in anytime and start with with the first lecture yeah yeah so go over to the academy over at 1517.org and sign up

it's free it's this free class that you can take with chad so check that out also guys few tickets left for here we still stand the big one the greatest conference in the history of conferences out there in san diego california me and chad will both be there along with a ton of other people We're going to talk about the common faith. So it doesn't matter. You don't need to be, are you not Lutheran? Doesn't matter. Are you Lutheran?

Great. Whatever you are, come on out. We're talking about the Apostles' Creed. We're going to have talks that are sort of launching off from things that we all believe, the very core of the faith as articulated in the Apostles' Creed, the very oldest of the creeds. So, yeah, it's going to be a great time. Tons of food, fellowship, hanging out. we're gonna be doing a live podcast as well as giving some talks so we'd love to hang out with

you go to here we still stand.org and you can register there and here's the thing because you are a podcast listener you can enter the code p as in podcast net as in network 19 that's p net 19 enter that in the promo box and you get 25 bucks off your ticket so even a better deal so go over there and do that that will not be around that long that long and by that won't be around i mean the tickets they won't be around for too much longer so uh so we'd love to hang out with you chad where are we at in uh in deuteronomy here we're jumping into chapter nine today a lot of good stuff nine and ten are kind of a unit so we'll uh we'll uh treat those together we might even finish both of them today we'll see but there's there's there's some great stuff in this

chapter. I know we were talking a little bit about it before we started recording. So if you've never read Deuteronomy chapter nine, then just take out your Bible and read through it because there's some real, I mean, it's serious stuff, but it's also kind of hilarious stuff when we're talking about the righteousness of Israel. So anyway, we'll get to that in just a second. But chapter nine, I think we wrapped up eight pretty much last time. So we'll take nine and 10 this time the chapter starts out these first uh three verses with sort of an intro and some stuff we've talked about before starts out with this uh typical deuteronomy kind of word here here oh israel uh there's a lot of a lot of calls for israel to hear in deuteronomy so listen up

open your ears here oh israel here's what uh here's what you're doing you're you're getting ready to cross the jordan today well soon anyway in order to dispossess nations greater and mightier than you, and all these cities that are fortified to heaven, and there's these giants who are there, they're great and tall, these sons, sons of the Anakim, and there's like this, I guess there's this proverb going around, who can stand before the sons of Anak? Well, actually, it's going to be Israel that stands before them, but it's not because Israel is such a powerful nation, or Israel has this superior military force, or they're just really good at guerrilla warfare, or anything like that, it has absolutely nothing to do whatsoever with Israel's skills in battle

or size of their armies. Instead, verse 3 says, know therefore today that it is the Lord your God who is crossing over before you as a consuming fire. And when God is a consuming fire going in front of you, then look out because that means that no enemy is going to be able to stand before you. And that's basically what it says. He will destroy them and he will subdue them before you so that you may drive them out and destroy them quickly. So I love the way those two things are put together. So basically, Deuteronomy is saying God is going to destroy them so that you can destroy them. God is going to drive them out so that you can drive them out. In other words, God is going to do all the work and everything that it seems like you're doing, you're actually

not doing it really. It's because it's God who's doing that work in and through you. And the only victory that is yours is the victory that God himself has provided for you. So all of that is actually a very good introduction to what follows, because this kind of sets up an impossibility in the form of the giants. And then a declaration that the only way these giants are going to be conquer it is not because of Israel's military prowess or Israel's greatness or anything having to do whatsoever with Israel. It's only because of God, and He alone is going to give them the victory. That's such a great introduction to what follows, because what we're about to hear about is the reason that the Israelites are able to go in and to possess the land, and why all this is

basically falling into their lap and why the land is going to be open and free for the taking before them after God does his work. So I'm just going to read this. I'm going to read these one, two, three, three verses, and then we'll dissect this a little bit and talk about everything that's going on here. So this is Deuteronomy 9, 4 through 6. do not say in your heart when the lord your god has driven them out before you because of my righteousness the lord has brought me in to possess this land but it is because of the wickedness of these nations that the lord is dispossessing them before you it is not for your righteousness or for the uprightness of your heart that you are going to possess their land but it's because of the

wickedness of these nations that the Lord your God is driving them out before you in order to confirm the oath which the Lord swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. No, then, it is not because of your righteousness that the Lord your God is giving you this good land to possess, for you are a stiff-necked people. I don't know, Dan. I mean, I feel like he's not being quite clear there, like he's sort of beating around the bush. What do you think? yeah yeah it definitely seems like he's uh maybe you should say it one more time just to really drive it i'm not quite to get the message i mean it's is it or is it not because of the righteousness of israel it's not not quite clear to me well there's one way to read this you'd be

like now you're pretty righteous but it's not because of that that i did this that's not what he's saying here which is why he ends the way that he does end i think uh so he's saying look these people are really really wicked you're really really stubborn the difference between the two of you is that i made a promise to one of you and i didn't to the other that's really what's going on here it's it's that i boxed myself in a corner with my word because i made a promise to you and that's why all this stuff is going to be given to you this is why you're going to possess the land you're going to possess the lion because i said so uh even though you are a stubborn people but one thing i want really clear as you possess this land is that you

have no confusion going on about how righteous you are yeah that's exactly what's going on here This is one of those Old Testament sections, which is just about as in-your-face as I can possibly imagine. Actually, this coincides really well with something. I was watching this video a couple days ago. It just caught my eye. I was on YouTube, and it was a discussion between Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson. What caught my eye was not so much their names as the topic. it was something like what's the difference between judaism and christianity and uh i was

very disappointed with all the answers that were given but i can't remember if it was jordan if it was ben one of them said basically people have the impression that that uh the old testament is is about how we earn god's favor by our good works and the new testament is all about that we receive god's favor by faith and i thought well that's first of all that is just a that's a ridiculous contrast because it's not true to the old testament whatsoever and then my mind actually jumped to deuteronomy chapter 9 because this this disproves clearly that the old testament is not about getting into god's good graces because of some observance of the law or good behavior because this this makes it very clear very graphic that it's not because of righteousness

it's not because of keeping the law it's not because of any kind of superior righteousness that israel has or any particular israelite but instead it's all about the grace and mercy of god so we i mean we we hear this i hear this caricature all the time the old testament is all about the law the new testament is all about grace the old testament is focused upon uh making sure that you God's covenant by keeping his laws, and the New Testament is about believing and by faith receiving the righteousness of Christ. So there's this bifurcation that's set up, which is completely contrary to the message of the scriptures. Because from beginning to end, and this is Paul's argument at Romans, right? From beginning to end, it's by faith that we receive the righteousness

that God gives to us. It's not by being better or being not quite as bad or by keeping God's law or anything whatsoever to do with our righteousness. It's all because of his mercy and his grace toward us, which is received by faith. The idea sometimes is that, and you'll hear people say this, even Jews will say this, that Judaism is an acts-based religion. So, sometimes they don't use the word works, but it's an acts-based, like a carrying out what has been told to you-based religion. And that Christianity is, you know, a grace-based religion. So, they're different. I think this comes primarily from a failure to distinguish, and I think I've watched that video that you're talking about, there's a failure to distinguish what is a central principle for us,

which is the difference between law and gospel, which is not to distinguish between the Old and New Testament. Law and gospel doesn't divide between Malachi and Matthew. This is not the distinction we're talking about. When we say the distinction between law and gospel, we're not talking about the distinction between Old and New Testament, because there is law and there is gospel in both loads of it in both uh and so i mean in a lot of ways some of the harshest law in the entire scriptures is in the gospels i mean jesus is a ferocious teacher of the law i mean he takes the law and does things with it that that nobody likes you know um he's the guy that goes in and says yeah all these things that you think you're doing you're not doing because

I'm judging on the thinking and feeling level. The distinction that we're talking about is that is this distinction right here. A text like this makes it obvious that there is a distinction between law and gospel in the Old Testament. It may be a better way that makes, if you're reading the Old Testament, you're like, well, where's the gospel in there? Another way to say law and gospel is even to say the distinction between command and promise. And if you think there's no promise in the old testament you're you're just not reading it at all i mean there's promises everywhere yeah yeah i mean that's the consistent theme right that's what we've already heard it multiple times just in deuteronomy itself and we we heard it many times before

deuteronomy that that the reason that that israel is god's people is because he chose them he swore an oath to their forefathers. He made a promise to them. So the commitment is entirely on God's part. He has bound himself by oath, by his word, by promise to the nation of Israel. And this is all based upon his promise to Abraham, which is nothing more than an outgrowth of the promise that he originally gave way back in Genesis, in Genesis chapter 3. So from the beginning, when God deals with us according to promise. He's dealing with us according to grace and goodness and what eventually we come to call the gospel. In short, God is the one who's doing all of the work, all of the faithfulness, all of the oath-keeping, and Israel or the church or individual believers

are on the receiving end of His grace and mercy. Yeah, I mean, and you can make anything that was supposed to be a religion of a distinction between law and gospel or command and promise and just make it a religion of acts a religion of works i mean it's not as though we don't see this within christianity there are forms of christianity that are entirely works-based even that distinction doesn't really hold up because i look around and i say well you might say that judaism is an acts-based religion which i would say well the way that You're practicing it is, but I don't think it is any more than I look around and see certain streams of Christianity that are obviously works based, not even trying to hide that they're works based, you know. And I'm saying, well, that's also just a misinterpretation of of what our what our scriptures say.

well there's that is the natural religious tendency that we have embedded within each of us is to is to proceed toward god based upon our righteousness or our work so an axe-based religion is the most natural kind of religion imaginable it's what drives us right i mean that's that's basically the way that we operate in the world is by doing certain good things in order to receive good things and avoiding certain bad things in order to avoid other bad things. So we basically take our, we translate our day-to-day experience in relationships and in work and in all aspects of our lives, we translate that vertically and assume that that's got to be the way that it is with God as well. And that's why Christianity is completely different, is backwards from the

natural religious tendencies within us, because it says that, first of all, there's no way that you can earn any any good graces with god and secondly everything that is in you everything that you've done is completely tainted by unrighteousness and so you have no standing before god and so if anything is going to be done to save you it's got to be one directional it's got to be coming from god downward to you and not from you upwards upwards to god yeah and if this this text does anything it tells you that god's one of god's main concerns is that he knows that We will think that this is a works-based proposition, right? So he wants to make it real clear that this is the great temptation

that we would think that, well, we did something. Well, we have a little bit of righteousness, and that's why this happened. This is why God is giving us these things. This is why God's favor is on us, because we're at least a little bit better than someone else, and we're a little more righteous. And that is the great temptation, and this is why God makes statements like this. Do not think for a moment that it's because of your righteousness.

It's not. It's because of the promise I made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. That's why this is happening. Yeah, that's exactly the point that I was about to make, is that we operate according to what I call comparative righteousness. Because it doesn't matter how bad you think you are, you can always find somebody else that is supposedly worse. So that's kind of what is being warned against here by the Israelites. So don't think to yourselves, the reason all of this good stuff is happening to us is because we're not as bad as these people that we've gone on to dispossess.

Because as he goes on to say in the section after I stopped reading, no, I mean, you have been rebelling against God from the very first day that I knew you, Moses says. So it's not as if you have this moral resume, which has all this goodness that God is going to take into account, and on the basis of that, give you this land. No, you have a whole track record that's full of just rebellion after rebellion after rebellion. So if God wanted to, on the basis of your supposed righteousness, he could destroy you because you have no righteousness. It's all unrighteousness. So he basically is destroying what Luther calls the monster of one's own righteousness through three different things here in this particular section of Deuteronomy 9.

First of all, he says that it's not because of your righteousness, but because of the wickedness of these people that they are going to be driven out. So in other words, it has nothing to do with you. You're just the instrument that God is using, period. it. And then secondly, he's doing it because, not because of your righteousness again, but because of the oath that he swore to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. So he's doing everything that he's doing here for you, not because of you, but because of his promise, because of his oath, because of his own goodness and grace, because of his righteousness, in other words. And then thirdly, we have the fact that God is doing this not because of the righteousness of the Israelites

it's proven by listing all of the ways in which they have not been been righteous and that's really what beginning with verse seven that's what the rest of the chapter is about yeah well he's he's going to describe exactly what he means by stubborn yeah exactly yeah and i think stubborn i think it's great that stubborn is the word that's used here uh because what what what is implied in that is that they have so many reasons to have complete faith and what does it mean to be a sinner well a sin is everything that does not proceed from faith and so they are faithless people who have so many reasons to have faith but they're stubborn there's they are this is what he's alluding to in the stubbornness like how many things do you have to witness and how how many

things do i have to do like you're you are so stubborn in your unbelief and your and in your uh in your sin it's absolutely mind-boggling that you could be the stubborn and the only thing more stubborn than you is me like my grace is so stubborn that like and my word i'm so stubborn with keeping my promises like it's a good thing that i am the only thing more stubborn than you yeah yeah that's a great way to put it yeah so i mean that's that is how it uh that's how the rest of the chapter proceeds as you say by a delineation of the various ways in which their stubbornness or literally their stiff nakedness is is revealed and it begins quite appropriately with verse 8 at mount horeb i mean that's not the first time that israel rebelled against god the

First time, well, they were veiled already while they were in Egypt by complaining and murmuring about how horrible Moses had made their life since he showed up. But even after they left Egypt, they were complaining on the way. So you have Massah and Meribah, which is happening in Exodus 17, I believe. So that precedes Horeb. But he starts out with what happens at Horeb or at Sinai because that is, that's like the worst. I mean, of the incidents of idolatry and rebellion in the Old Testament, which are referred to, we kind of become the classic examples of Israel's rebellion. You have two that come up over and over. One is the golden calf incident at Sinai.

And the other is Israel rebelling at the borderline of the Promised Land right before they were forced into 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. So those two incidents, not entering the Promised Land and the golden calf incident, those become the classic examples throughout the Old Testament of Israel's rebellion. And the reason that the calf, which is talked about in verses 8 and following, the reason the golden calf incident is such a huge example of Israel's rebellion is because if there's any place, any time that Israel should have feared and loved and trusted God, God, it should have been when they were standing there at the foot of Mount Sinai. I mean, they had just seen this amazing theophany take place. They had actually heard the voice of God speaking the Ten Commandments. They had just been delivered from Egypt, crossed the Red Sea, saw God drown all of Pharaoh's army in the Red Sea. So all of this, this did not happen 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years before i mean this had just happened like within three months all of this had gone down and yet

it's at the very foot of mount sinai that they decide that they're going to build a golden calf and and worship before it it's it's the equivalent that incident of rebellion and infidelity on the part of israel is it would be the equivalent of a man marrying a woman and like the second day of their honeymoon he goes out to get him something to eat and comes back and finds her in bed with another man i mean this is israel's honeymoon if you will with god with the divine husband and yet even on that honeymoon they they prove that they will engage in in spiritual adultery with with a golden calf and that's the reason this comes up over and over yeah imagine that scenario and then you you know you get back and she says well don't worry i'm calling him you

yeah that's that's exactly what was happening too right yes aaron says tomorrow we will have a feast to yahweh and he says that in reference to the golden calf yeah yeah so you get you get back you get back to the room it's like she's using your name but uh it ain't you yeah so if you ever wonder exactly how bad the golden calf incident was we kind of keep that image in mind yeah it's It's not good. Not good. That drives it home. What we have in the rest of the chapter is really it's Moses taking the history of Israel up to this point,

beginning with their departure from Egypt and summarizing all of the bad stuff that they've done as a demonstration, as you said earlier, Dan, as a demonstration of how they have been stubborn. so it begins here with the story of the golden calf and how moses comes down from the mountain and he throws the two tablets of stone down and then he has he grinds up the golden calf makes them drink and puts it in water and makes them drink the water and god is so angry that he's ready to just completely annihilate israel and start over with moses and make of him a new nation we've talked about this multiple times so i don't think there's any reason we need to to expand on all of those details. But the reason that Moses is expanding and reminding the

Israelites is so that they might have evidence put right in front of them of how they have not been righteous. And so it's not because of any righteousness or morality or kind of an ethical standard that they have upheld that all of these good things are about to happen to them. In fact, In verse 7 and in verse 24, we have the same kind of language used. Verse 7 says, remember to not forget how you provoked the Lord your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day that you left the land of Egypt until you arrived at this place, you have been rebellious against the Lord. And then verse 24, you have been rebellious against the Lord from the day I knew you. this is this is moses's uh very explicit way of saying listen there wasn't a single day

from the beginning in which you've been righteous in which you haven't been rebelling in one way or another so it's it's a it's it's there's a lot of law here but this is this is what israel needs at this point because this is this is the way that moses is making sure that they realize in the end, it's not going to be because of their righteousness, but it's entirely because of God's promise, God's oath, which is, I mean, this is the same work that preachers do today, right? They might not stand up in the pulpit and recount all of a congregation's rebellious acts or all of an individual's rebellious acts, but in one way or another, that's what the preaching of the law does. It points out that, hey, you can't compare yourself to others. You can't say I'm better than

other people, or I'm not quite as bad as somebody else, because the preaching of the law is to strip away any claims to righteousness that we have. It's to destroy that monster of our self-righteousness in order that we can stand before God and have Him clothe us instead of boasting of any kind of righteous clothing that we ourselves have created. Can you imagine if a pastor got up there and said, okay, I'm going to go over the last 40 years of this congregation, and he just starts going down a list of all the ways they've been awful? That would be some ferocious law. yeah that would be some ferocious law and that's i mean that's i think we do that to ourselves a lot of times at least when we're being honest if uh you know we we get to thinking back over over the course of our life and all the stupid stuff we've done and all the bad mistakes that

we've made and all the things that we didn't actually do but we really wanted to do that if we had done them would have been even worse than just thinking or desiring them. So in rehearsing our own life story, we kind of do to ourselves, we preach the law to ourselves, we kind of do what Moses was doing here. And I think that's a healthy way to use the law. So rather than thinking to yourself, how many ways have I actually kept God's law? Think to yourself, how many ways have I broken God's law, because that's what the law is all about, right? It's an accusatory command. It's accusing us to reveal all the ways in which we have been rebellious in order that it might kill any claims to righteousness that we have, and then bring us to the point of hearing that good news

that we stand before God on the basis of the righteousness of Christ instead. All right, well, I think that's, we've basically covered chapter 9. Now, chapter 10 is a continuation of this uh the same section of of moses's sermon so god says to moses after he's broken the 10 the tablets of stone he says cut out two more tablets of stone like the former ones and then come up to me on the mountain and he also wants him to make the ark not uh the ark as in the boat but the ark of the uh ark of wood into which the tablets are going to be placed so he tells him to Make this ark and cut two more tablets of stone, and I will write on them the ten words as before, and then you shall put them into the ark of the covenant, which, of course, is what ended up inside the Holy of Holies.

So that's the way that the chapter starts out, a description of these commands and Moses carrying out the carving of the stone and God putting the Ten Commandments on there and then putting the tablets of stone inside the Ark of the Covenant. And we have this kind of six through nine. I know some of you actually follow along in your Bibles with a podcast. It's probably in parentheses in your Bible.

It's kind of like an interlude there where he's bringing people up to speed as to the travels of the Israelites and who was supposed to carry the Ark of the Covenant and the duties of Levi. in in that regard then it picks up with verse 10 it says moses speaking says i stayed on the mountain 40 days and 40 nights like the first time and the lord listened to me and the lord did not destroy you and instead he said arise go on your journey ahead of the people and take them

to the promised land so this is all of this from the beginning of 9 all the way through chapter 10 verse 11 is a summation of the history that we've covered so far and then it picks up with 12 saying as sort of a uh uh a concluding a conclusion to this now israel so on the basis of everything that has said to you now is what does the lord require from you and then he answers his question He says to fear God, to walk in his ways, to love him, and to serve him with all your heart, with all your soul. This is kind of, this is first commandment kind of stuff. So fear God and walk in his ways and love him and serve him. All of that is just an expansion upon what the first commandment is all about.

and then he goes on to say in doing all that and to keep the lord's commands and his statutes which i'm commanding you today for your good in other words the focus is upon having god as your only god believing in him trusting in him fearing him loving him and serving him because if the first commandment is is is not being kept then all the rest of the commandments are going to be broken as well so that's why he begins with the focus on the first commandment and then proceeds to talk about keeping the rest of the commandments and and the statutes and ultimately it's for your good as he says at the end of verse 13 so pick it up with 14 he says behold to the lord your god belong the heaven and the highest heavens the earth and all that is in them yet on your fathers did the

lord set his affection to love them and he chose their descendants after them even you above all peoples as it is this day circumcise therefore your heart and stiffen your neck no more i this isn't the first time we've had this language of of the circumcision of the heart and it's a good place to point out that okay this kind of goes with what we were talking about earlier that sometimes we'll hear that the old testament is all about the externals the the the outward aspects of life and whereas the new testament is more focused upon the heart and the inward spiritual life well this this particular section of deuteronomy destroys that that notion because his focus is not on he doesn't say make sure that you have an outward physical circumcision

He says, circumcise your heart, which is what ultimately God was desiring the outward circumcision to be a manifestation of. So he wasn't just interested in the physical circumcision, but he was also interested in the heart of the Israelites. So it wasn't like you had to wait for the New Testament to have this focus upon the heart. You've already got it in Deuteronomy. And I think this is the basis for what you were referring to earlier, Dan, with Jesus preaching, like in the Sermon on the Mount, about the necessity of knowing what's going on in your heart and in your mind, because that's where sin starts. So it wasn't as if Jesus was the first one to preach. The preach of the law is not just an external, but it's also an internal command that's directed to our feelings and desires and intentions. It seems that this circumcise your heart thing, too, is sort of this acknowledgement that the external circumcision doesn't really do much. Like, okay, you've all been circumcised, but you all have very stiff necks.

And so what you need is this sort of inward circumcision. And what we find is that we can't circumcise our heart. I mean, we can circumcise, you can circumcise your flesh. But circumcising the heart is a little bit trickier thing. And what we have stated in the New Testament is that baptism is where the circumcision of the heart takes place. And so here you have this sort of even this command to do something that you can't do, but that God is going to find a way to do. Yeah, Ezekiel picks up this language later on, too.

he uses a a little bit different image he talks about taking out the heart of stone right replacing with a with a heart of flesh and but the action is undertaken by god himself right to tell a person to change their heart is uh is to ask him to do the impossible i mean there's yeah we could we could maybe try and we could attempt to improve ourselves and to do things that are going to have maybe an inward impact on us. But ultimately, to change our heart is an impossibility. Because that's like asking us to change our very nature, the heart with which we're born.

So any kind of change of heart is ultimately going to be a divine act. It's not going to be a human accomplishment. So God is the only one who can take out the heart of stone and replace it with the heart of flesh. He's the only one who can take that inward scalpel of baptism and use that to circumcise our hearts and to cleanse them, to make them into the kind of hearts that he desires them to be. And really, I mean, I think ultimately what he's talking about

with like this heart change that takes place, whether it's taking out the stony heart, replacing it with a heart of flesh, or circumcising the heart, really what he's talking about here is a divine act of changing us by stripping away the identity with which we're born, which is polluted by sin, and giving us the identity of Christ. So it's ultimately us receiving the heart of Christ. It's not like He gives us now a fresh heart, and we really need to take care of it and keep it healthy,

because that's going to be the means by which we stay right with God. No, He takes out a heart of stone and gives us the heart of Christ. He circumcises our heart so that our heart might be the heart of Christ. In other words, inwardly and outwardly, everything that we are is now subsumed into who Christ is, so it's on the basis of who He is and what He's done that we have our security and that we have our righteousness before God, and not because of some new moral heart that we've been cultivating. Yeah, and I like the language of stiffening your neck, which is sort of a way that the Old Testament talks about being stubborn. And the picture it paints is that God wants you to look in a certain direction.

Here, look at all the things I've done. Look at all the promises I've made. Look at the direction I want you to go, and the stiff neck will not turn and look at it. the stiffened neck says no no my neck is I'm pointed in this direction and God is asking you to turn your head and look at all the things that he has promised and all the things

he has done and the good things he has for you and you will not do it and so he says this you need this sort of circumcision of the heart so that you'll be able to gaze upon his goodness and his promises you'll be able to look in a different direction

yeah that's a that's a great point and it fits with the context here uh not only is he wanting them to not have a stick next so they can look at what he's done for them but also then to turn in another direction as well and look upon the alien and the orphan and the widow which is what he begins to talk about in the verses that follow this that wrap up chapter 10 yeah i mean so that this is a hundred i'm totally on i'm all in on the i don't want to hear about any good works or second table of the law that doesn't have the neighbor in view like i i don't want to hear about any of this what he does is when he talks about the commands and then circumcising your heart not stiffening your neck

one of the things he turns your head towards is not ways that you can be righteous before him so then he'll be all happy with you but what he does he actually turns you toward your neighbor which which he says you know uh to execute justice for the fatherless and the widow and to care for the sojourner and give them food and clothing and this sort of stuff um so this means that the law i mean paul does this in in romans where he says look uh everything is boils down to love your neighbor because love does no harm to your neighbor and so love is the fulfilling of the law that's how it is. And so one of the things, certainly, that God is trying to turn your head toward is your neighbor. Yeah, look toward, as some of the prayers of the church put it,

look in faith toward God and in love toward your neighbor. That's the two-directional focus that a loose neck will look, right? Stiff neck is all about looking at ourselves, and a neck that God has made unstiff, that he's loosened, is going to look upward in faith toward god and then sideways toward the neighbor in love and that is ultimately what god desires for us because that's ultimately what is best not only for us but for our families and our in our society is faith toward him and love toward the neighbor yeah it seems as if the stiff neck only looks down at your own belly button that's it that's it yeah and that's it man that's all the time we got so that's it all right that's deuteronomy 9 and 10 we did it guys uh if you

would like to support the work going on over here uh support the academy support all the things that we do you can do that by going over to the donate page uh on any of the sites and you can become a contributor and thank you so much to those of you who do that you make all this stuff possible chad i will see you next week see you then I'll see you next time.