Deuteronomy 6 "That It May Go Well" Scott Hoezee

Last year if you visited the exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls, you may have discovered, as I did, that as fascinating as the actual scrolls were, many of the other artifacts on display were equally intriguing. Among those items were two things that tie in directly with Deuteronomy 6. As some of you already know, verses 4-9 of tonight's passage are known in Jewish circles as the Shema. It is perhaps the single best-known and most-often memorized set of verses in the Hebrew Scriptures. To this day in Orthodox Jewish homes the Shema is said at the beginning and end of every day. For Jewish children this is the equivalent of praying "Now I lay me down to sleep" each night at bedtime.

The word Shema comes from the Hebrew word for "to listen" or "to hear", which is the very first word in Deuteronomy 6:4. Shema, Yisrael, Yahweh Elohenu, Yahweh echad. "Hear, O Israel, Yahweh your God, Yahweh is one." Precisely because these verses became so vital in the formation of Jewish piety, the subsequent words about the laws of God were also seized upon and applied very literally. And so at the recent Dead Sea Scrolls exhibit you could see phylacteries and mezuzahs. A phylactery is a small leather box on a strap that gets wrapped around a persons wrist or forehead. Inside the little box are some very small scraps of paper containing the first Hebrew letter of various commandments of God.

A mezuzah is also a small, oblong little box, usually with a Hebrew letter carved onto the outside and also containing some pieces of paper. The mezuzah was affixed to the doorframe of a house and to the doorframes within a house. Recently when I went along on a field trip with my daughter's class from school, we visited a Jewish temple here in Grand Rapids, and our guide made sure to point out that every single doorframe within the temple had a mezuzah. Upon entering and exiting such rooms, Jewish children and adults are told to touch the mezuzah as one of many constant reminders of the need to live for God.

It's an open question whether or not Moses' words here were meant to be taken quite that literally. Some have suggested that all of this was symbolic. The laws of God needed to be on our hands in the sense of guiding our actions day to day. The commands of God needed to be on our foreheads in the sense of directing our thoughts. The law of God needed to be on the doorposts of houses in the sense of calling the shots for parents and children such that each household would know it was part of a larger covenental community.

This evening we need not get overly distracted trying to parse the literal versus the symbolic application of Deuteronomy 6. Instead I would rather have us take a look at this chapter's overall presentation on the place of God's commandments in life in order to begin to figure out the function of divine rules in also our lives as New Testament Christians.

But first let's note some features of the Book of Deuternomy. The English title for this book comes from the Greek version of the Old Testament known as the Septuagint. "Deuteronomy" comes from the Greek deuteros nomos, meaning "the second law." That is a reference to the fact that in this book Moses will repeat the law of God for a second time. The old generation of Israelites had by now died off and so the new generation is at long last getting ready to take possession of the Promised Land.

But before they do, and before Moses himself dies, Moses holds one giant review session. Hence the Greek, and now English title, of "The Second Law" or "Deuteronomy." But the original Hebrew title may be better. In Hebrew this book's title is Elle hadebarim, "These Are the Words." That title was lifted directly from the first four words of the book in chapter 1:1. It's a better title than Deuteronomy in the sense that this book is not just about laws but about many other words, too. In fact, as I hope we will see tonight, the only way to understand the law correctly is to see it in the context of the larger story as told by Moses in and through the many other words he also speaks here in Deuteronomy.

Still, we will begin with the law since it is so prominently on display in chapter 6. We need to remember that in the previous chapter Moses had just re-presented the Ten Commandments. These famous laws were first given at Mount Sinai some forty years earlier shortly after the exodus from Egypt. You can read that first account in Exodus 20. The Ten Commanments in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 are nearly identical, though as we have noted on other occasions, there are a couple of very intriguing differences between the two. But the point for now is that you can't read Deuteronomy 6 without realizing that the Ten Commandments are still hanging thick in the air as this chapter opens.

So as chapter 6 reflects back on all that, please notice two salient features to these verses. First, notice that just about every time Moses refers to God's commands, it is done in the context of fostering wellness in life. If the people do as God says, things will go well with them in the Promised Land. Sometimes we read that as a veiled threat. We always want to insert some follow-up words to the effect, "Obey these rules so that it will go well for you because otherwise you're going to get smacked!" Of course, the Book of Deuteronomy does hold out the prospect of curse rather than blessing. But even so it should be possible for us to read God's talk about things going well without clouding it up with the opposite of wellness. Instead we should see here a sincere desire on God's part to see life go well for his people. God wants his people to be well and he is certain that the recipe for such shalom is contained within his laws.

We've noted together before that the word "law" can be used a couple of different ways. Sometimes a law reflects the way someone decides things should be. So the sign that tells you to drive 55 MPH on a certain stretch of highway is the law, but it's rather arbitrary. Maybe it used to be 45 MPH and maybe someday a Department of Transportation committee will decide to move it up to 65 MPH. Similarly, if you own a patch of forest, it's up to you whether or not to grant access to hunters. You can post either a "No Trespassing/No Hunting" sign along your fenceline or a sign that says, "Hunters Allowed with Permission." It's up to you, and either way it is, as it were, the law for your property. Speed limit and trespassing signs are "law" in the sense of how we decide things should be.

But there is another kind of law that you can detect when someone speaks of "the law of gravity" or "the second law of thermodynamics." This sense of law does not suggest how things could or should be in a given situation but how things very simply are in all situations. You may disobey the law of gravity if you want--you could even decide you don't believe that particular law. But that attitude won't help you if you lose your balance at the top of a step ladder or drop a hammer while it's overtop of your left foot.

Too often we make the mistake of thinking that God's laws are like speed limit signs--they are just arbitrary hoops God has decided people should jump through. But as the people of God, we need to know that God's laws are like gravity--God gave us these guidelines and rules as a kind of owner's manual for life on earth. These rules describe the way things simply are. All in all, you will be far better off in life if you respect the law of gravity--when dealing with hammers, ladders, staircases, and the edges of cliffs, it's a really good idea to know that gravity is not a law that depends on circumstances to take effect. So also with God's law for the Israelites: God wanted his people to be safe, healthy, and well. But God knew that for shalom to come, it would come best and easiest and the most quickly when people followed the owner's guide for life in the Promised Land.

So that is the first thing to note from this chapter: God's laws were not meant to spoil fun, crimp personal freedom, or just make people perform like circus animals in some artificial set of tricks. God's law aimed at shalom, at being well, at living life to the fullest degree of joy and goodness that God always intends for us.

The second item to note, though, is the place where law comes in. And here is a point that may be as vital as it could prove to be controversial, but notice in Deuteronomy 6 that law always comes after grace. This entire chapter is shot through with imagery designed to remind the people that their entire life as a community was the result of God's prior grace. God makes repeatedly clear that these were the laws they had to follow and teach to their children after God settled them in the Promised Land. Keeping the law would not be their entrance ticket to Canaan but how they lived after Canaan had been given to them.

Verses 10-12 go to great lengths to make clear to the people that soon they would eat grapes from vines they did not plant. They would drink water from wells they did not dig. They would live in cities they did not build. All of life, in other words, would be a gift from God. It would not be the result of their hard work, a reward for the spiritual merit points they racked up, or anything else that depended first of all on the people's efforts.

Grace precedes the law such that the law will make sense only when grace is kept in mind. So long as the people remembered and did not forget all that God had done for them, the law would stay in its proper place. That's why in verses 20-25 when the son asks his father what the deal is with all of these stipulations and laws of God, the father begins not by talking about the law but first by talking about the grace of the exodus. You need to do a whole lot of holy recollecting of God's prior grace before you can then explain the whys and wherefores of God's law.

The final verse of this chapter says, "And if we are careful to obey all this law . . . that will be our righteousness." At some point years ago, in the margin of my Bible I scribbled the word "works" next to verse 25. I suspect that when I wrote that in there, what I meant was that the Israelites were clearly aiming at a works-righteousness. They had to earn their righteous status before God's face. But if that is what I thought back then, I now think I was wrong. This entire chapter tells us that the righteousness of the people was granted to them ahead of time. So what does verse 25 mean? I now think that it means that keeping God's law was the only sensible, logical, but also appropriate thing to do given the righteous gifts they had received by grace.

Think of it this way: most people get married because they are in love. The love doesn't come into being only after the minister pronounces the couple husband and wife--the love was there first and led to the nuptial commitment. But once that commitment is made as a result of the prior love, there are certain rules a husband and wife must follow. An obvious one is not to cheat on your spouse in adulterous ways. But other rules are there, too: you will consult your spouse on everything that involves both people in the marriage. You will agree together on how to raise the children, on whether or not to move to another state or take a new job. You will be kind and considerate, forgiving and gracious to each other when arguments happen.

All of that behavior is the natural outflow of the marriage commitment. Keeping the rules does not create the marriage and it surely does not create the love that led to the marriage, but the rules will keep the marriage strong. It would be absurd if a husband said to his new bride on the wedding night, "Honey, now that we're secure in having actually gotten married, I'd like to negotiate with you a bit on how many times a year it would be OK for me to see other women." That makes no sense at all! You don't get married just to keep a bunch of rules but once you are married, the rules become a natural part of your identity as a spouse.

So when verse 25 says that obeying God's rules "will be our righteousness," I read that the same way I would understand a husband and wife saying that keeping faithful to their nuptial vows "will be our marriage." God's laws don't create the righteousness but they are part of what it means to be righteous. But what follows on that is that you have to be in love, you have to be married, you have to be in a righteous relationship with God in the first place for the rules to occupy the proper place in your life (not to mention for the rules to be important to you to begin with). I could tell an unmarried adult that sex before marriage is wrong but I can't tell him not to commit adultery and neither can I tell him that he needs to be kind, considerate, faithful, and forgiving toward a spouse he doesn't have.

It is just here where we sometimes experience some moral confusion. Earlier I said that God's laws are like the law of gravity and not a speed limit law: they describe the way things are and not just how we think they should be. True enough, and insofar as we believe that, we also believe that God's blueprint for life is the best for all people whether or not they happen to be Christian. What we forget, however, is that without a prior experience of God's grace, without being in a relationship of righteousness to God in the first place, merely giving people God's laws and insisting they follow them will seem, to some people anyway, about as odd as insisting that a single person lead a faithful married life.

In this country we sometimes get very exercised over whether or not the Ten Commandments are posted in courtrooms or classrooms. It's frustrating to us as Christians when people tear those things down because we believe, deep in our hearts, that really and truly those laws reflect a recipe for shalom. But we must never forget that without God's prior grace, other people aren't going to share that view, and so we shouldn't be blown away or shocked by this. Above all, though, we in the Church need to remember that we, like God in the Pentateuch, need to proffer grace before we try to enforce laws. We need to demonstrate that our own righteousness is a fruit of grace because that is the only way we have a chance of helping others understand why we value God's law.

Israel was a very different society than our own. It was a covenental, theocratic community formed by and ruled over by God in a way no nation since has ever been. But even in Israel it is instructive to remember that the first place God wanted his law to be on display was on people's hands, heads, and doorways. God wants us to live out the wellness of shalom that we have received by grace through Jesus and he wants to have that grace and graciousness shining in the deeds we perform with our hands, in the thoughts and decisions we make with our minds, in the words we speak with our mouths, and through the very shape of the homes we form as parents and children, husbands and wives. We need to be living examples of the grace of God because when we are, that is when we are in the best position to tell those who have not yet come to faith in Jesus about the joy of grace and of the further joy that then comes when we then lead lives bursting with the wellness of shalom.

What we should want above all is not to have people come up to us to ask, "Tell me about the rules that govern your living." What we want is for people to see the shape of our lives so that they will be led to ask, "Tell me about the joy and the hope that is so obviously inside you!" Because that is the question that then lets us explode about the wonders of God's grace. The life of shalom, righteousness, and wellness flows from there. Thanks be to God! Amen.