The Only Future Is God

 November 2022

Deuteronomy 4:9-31,30:1-14

         It goes without saying that when people experience a great milestone in their life they expect that on that day that people will speak in glowing terms about the future which lays ahead of them. I mean, no one wants to hear a high school graduation speech that tells their audience that if they have chosen to go to college they will incur hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt probably amassed on a loan which will take years to pay off. Not only that, most likely the degree which they have worked so hard to obtain will no longer interest them when they enter the workplace so they should expect to spend more time and more money trying to figure out just what it is that they really want to do with their life. Even though it may be true, it really can’t be said on graduation day because everyone knows that this is a day of optimism and hope; there will be plenty of time for reality to be dealt with later on.

         We all just seem to understand that there are those times when we all need a little more optimism and a little less reality. I mean, yes, when the pastor who married Jennifer and me told us that we would be lucky to be happy thirty percent of the time, that may have been his reality but it wasn’t exactly what I wanted to consume my thoughts on our wedding day. Yes, it seems that everyone seems to understand this need for optimism at the outset of a new venture.  Moses, on the other hand, sure seems to be one of those people who seems to like to rub the noses of the people of Israel in the cold hard reality that awaits them and their descendants as they now get ready to live in the land God had promised to them. They were probably looking for at least a little bit of optimism, after all, they had just spent close to forty years wandering around in circles in the wilderness. It wasn’t that they couldn’t find the exit ramp out of there it rather they had to remain in the wild places until the last of the original generation which had come out of Egypt had at last died. You see, even though they had experienced the hovering over of their God which kept death from ravishing their families and even though  once they had been set free from slavery they had seen their God make a way for them to walk through the Red Sea on dry land, no less, and even though they had watched this same God feed them day by day with the bread from heaven and made water pour from a rock, they still did not believe that this God was able to defeat the giants which lived in the land which had been promised to them. So God told them that since they had no faith in his faithfulness to keep his promises he would just wait them out, allowing them to die in the desert and try anew with the next generation.

         At last then this next generation stands at the threshold of the promised land ready to enter it and watch God bring about the victory which will secure this home for them. Before they can proceed though, they will need to be addressed by Moses because he will not be joining them on the far side of the Jordan. Moses was to die there in the wilderness because when the people had run out of water, God told Moses to speak to a rock because by doing so water would pour forth from the rock. God wanted to demonstrate to his people the power of his word spoken through his chosen one. Instead, Moses was in terror as he stood before the angry mob who thought God had brought them out to the desert to kill them, and in his fear he did not speak to the rock but instead struck the rock with his staff, drawing attention to himself and away from God. The teaching moment God desired was lost and because of this God forbid Moses from entering into the Promised Land.

         So in Deuteronomy we have what can be best described as the final words of Moses as he sends the people of Israel on their way under the care of Joshua. Here in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy we hear Moses address his people but as I have already pointed out, Moses does so without a lot of optimism and with a heavy dose of reality. At least Moses says, “if” you act corruptly and not , “when” you act corruptly, but still his warning sounds pretty severe. If and when they act corruptly towards God and begin to make carved images, their time in the promised land will not last long. God himself would scatter his people until they would be few in number among the nations in which they would find themselves. There they would serve the gods which were nothing more than the works of human hands, gods which could neither speak to them nor hear them when they cried out in their suffering. So, this entering into this land which God had promised to them was a double-edged sword. It could either be a place of immense blessing if they were diligent in their relationship with God or it could be a short stay if they began worshipping statues and out of this corrupted state they began to do evil against one another.  This corrupted state would come on them as Moses states, when “they have grown old  in the land”, when they have become comfortable and lower their guard, when they began to take for granted what God had given to them, when the grace of God became expected instead of being for them a joyful surprise, this is when they would once again look back, back to the old ways instead of being seized by the new way of life God was speaking into being.

         What God is speaking into being is a new world where the curse which has come upon the earth is defeated, replaced at last by the very blessing of God. This is the future that God promised would come through Abraham and his descendants. This must be always remembered as these descendants of Abraham, the people of Israel, at last come to live in the land which God promised to Abraham. Here in this place was to be a sampling of the blessing of God, a blessing which is a life with God, a life where the very goodness and glory of God was present in a real and powerful way. This is what these people of Israel could not forget, that they had been rescued from slavery in order to be the people on whom the blessing of God rested. To be these people thus meant that they had to be people who were seized by this vision of this majestic and marvelous future God was holding out before them so that they were no longer captured by the false hopes and promises of the past. This future had as its foundation a life which is shielded from death through the overshadowing God, a God under whose wings we were created to live. Just as God called Abraham to have as an anchor for his life this certainty that the God who had called him, was the very God who could bring life out of death, the God who can call into existence those things which do not exist, so too this is what God was calling the descendants of Abraham to do. They were to no longer put any stock in what their flesh, their power, their strength or their wisdom could do because none of these were of any use in the face of death; only God, the hovering Spirit, only he could be for them their salvation when all seemed lost. This is why God knew that time and time again he had to bring his people to the place where all was lost, where all of their striving, all of their lusting after power and prestige, all of their attempts at greatness and glory, when all of it would come to nothing, then there God would be there for them, willing to take their nothing and create something of it.

         You see, the past is a world where the people created their own gods; the future is where the one true God creates something out of the nothingness of us. This is why God is a jealous God because we are his creation, we are a living image of the God who has given us a hope beyond death. God knows that if we continue to be enamored with the past and the ways of the past then when the past passes away we will pass away with it. Only when we realize that this world, this world held under the curse of death, only as we know the utter futility of attempting to find hope and peace apart from God, will we at last be ready for a life with God. Moses tells the people of Israel when they walk away from God and they find themselves in a tight spot, a place where they are afflicted, with no way out of their trouble, this is when, at last, they will return to God. They would turn to their God because as the prophet Isaiah speaks of God in the sixty-third chapter, in all of the affliction that the people of God experiences, God is afflicted too. God is there in the troubles of his people, waiting for them to come to the end of themselves so that they at last might find their future with God. You see, the God who is our future, the God who is our only hope, is a merciful God. God does not wait for his people to turn back to him in order for him to at last turn toward them; no, our God is always with his people, waiting patiently for them to seize a hold of him knowing that he alone is the only future that any of us have. Moses tells his people that the God who loves them, is a God who is never going to leave them, a God who is never going to harm them, a God who is never going to forget the promises that he made with Abraham upon which the certainty of our future rests.

         The way Moses tells his people that they can find this God, who is always present with them, is that they were to search for him with “all of their heart and all of their soul”. These words, heart and soul, describe the love which God expects from his people. The heart is the place where we hold what we treasure. The soul is the sum total of our life. So, to search for God with our heart and soul is to come to a place in our life where God is what we treasure most, the God with whom we are willing to offer up our life in service of this glorious future that he is bringing into existence.  To love God with all of our heart and soul can only come forth from us when we, by our own efforts, have come to nothing, when we know that we face a certain death a part from God, when at last we are convinced that we are able to do nothing to save ourselves. Only as we begin at this point can we then come to realize that God is to be treasured above everything else because he alone is able to bring our life out of the certainty of death. The love we have for God comes from the faith we have in what God alone is able to do. It is only as we know God as our future that we at last can love God here in the present.

         This warning that Moses is giving Israel here in the fourth chapter of Deuteronomy where he pleas for the people of Israel to return back to the God who is their only future is not only found here at the beginning of Moses’ address to the people before they cross the Jordan but is also found again at the end of this work in the thirtieth chapter. So, it is easy to see that this book of Deuteronomy begins and ends with a call to return to God. When the people of Israel forsake God and turn and are once again enamored by the old ways of life, life under the curse, chasing after gods which are nothing but figments of their imaginations, God will chase them out of the land which he has promised to them so that his people might live among the nations. In other words, God is telling them that if they want to live like all of the rest of the nations then they will have to do so in the nations because the promised land is only for those who desire to live out God’s glorious future here in the present. When we get to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy, there is no expectation that the people of Israel will be faithful to the ways of God because Moses begins this chapter speaking about the people of Israel scattered to the four corners of the world, living there among the nations. It is from there, in places which they might believe are far from God they nonetheless can remember the future God holds out for them to experience and if they return with all their heart and soul then they will still be able to enter into a future of blessing. God promises his people that he will come and gather them from all the places that they have been scattered even if they are in the most remote regions of the highest heavens, even there God will search for them and find them and bring them to himself. So, this imagery of God gathering his people under his glory is an image of his shielding presence, his placing his life between his people and whatever might come against them. This has to be understood in order to make sense of what God means when he says that he is going to circumcise the hearts of his people and the offspring of his people. Through gathering his people under his hovering Spirit and giving them a life that is able to endure beyond death, God will at last abolish the foolishness of his people’s belief that by their own strength, by their own power or wisdom could they ever be able to find a deep and abiding security that their soul craves. God through his mercy and his love will cut away the persistent false hope that somehow apart from God, through our own wherewithal that we can ever be at peace in this world. This circumcision will be of the heart, the cutting away of what we treasure because we have found a greater treasure there under the glory of God.

         Again and again God holds out to his people the hope of a future with him if they would but turn to him with all of their heart and soul. This is the depth of the love that God expects his people will have for him when they no longer rely upon their own abilities and instead find their hope in the God who opens himself up, and welcomes his people back into his arms out of his great mercy for them. This commandment of God that they are to love him with all of their heart and all of their soul, this Moses tells his people is not a hard commandment neither is it out of their reach. This commandment to love God with all of their heart and soul is not a commandment which resides in heaven  as if they have to wonder, “Who is going to go up to heaven and bring this commandment down to us? And Moses continues, this commandment is not somewhere beyond the chaos of the sea as if someone needed to go across the waters in order to bring it back for the people of God to obey it. No, the word, the call of God to love him, was right there with them, it was on their lips because everyday they were to begin their day with the prayer that this new day they lived under the authority of one God and it is this God that they were to love with all of their heart, and all of their soul and all of their strength  So they knew that what God expected was that his people would love him and now that they knew that this God in his mercy was willing to gather to himself anyone who would turn to him in order to find their future in him, in this great act of finding their security under the glory of God, their hearts would be filled with love for God.

         So, in this harsh dose of reality, Moses does tell his people that, yes, this grand experiment God is working out with them is all going to go south sooner or later. Eventually, they will grow old, and turn to the old ways, the ways that are passing away and because they will cling to these ways they too will pass away as well. When they become enchanted by the past instead of being seized by the wonder of the future God is holding out for them to claim as their own, then God will have no choice but to scatter them out into the nations because they will have become no more than just another nation. Yet all is not lost because there in their hopeless state, God would be waiting for them to turn to him, to once again find their future in him, to discover their security in his arms as he gathered them close.

         It should come as no surprise for us as people who follow Jesus, that Paul in searching the scriptures for what it means to place our faith in Jesus, that he would turn to the thirtieth chapter of Deuteronomy. In the tenth chapter of Romans, Paul writes that the righteousness based on faith says, ‘Do not say who will ascend into heaven?(that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss? (That is, to bring Christ up from the dead) But what does it say? The “word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart”; because if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.” Jesus through his death on the cross has defeated death; he has been raised from the dead and he has ascended as Lord over all and in him we confess that we have found our secure future so that our hearts abound at last with love for God, a love that consumes our hearts, and our souls. I pray that today you turn to Jesus and be welcomed in to the glorious future God has for you!Amen.