Hear and Listen

Thank you for reading this sermon from Christ Fellowship. I hope and pray that this sermon will be a blessing of grace and truth to you. With that said, let me encourage you not to use this sermon as a replacement for your local church. Christ Jesus did not establish his Church simply for us to consume content. Instead, He calls us to be part of a real, covenant family.

If you’re visiting this morning, we are on a journey through the Old Testament looking for connections to the life and mission of Jesus Christ. This morning, we will take a look at the fifth book of the Bible – the book of Deuteronomy, which is mostly a series of speeches or sermons by Moses.

This book is quoted often in the New Testament. It’s the third most quoted book behind Psalms and Isaiah. We are going to focus our attention on three passages, starting in Deuteronomy 6:

4 “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one.

5 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

This is called the “Shema”, which is the Hebrew word for “hear”. It’s the most important prayer in the Jewish tradition because every other religion at that time was polytheistic – they believed in many gods.

But this prayer clearly teaches the uniqueness of the Hebrew God. Yahweh is the only God and Yahweh is the only Yahweh.

One of the reasons the other nations hated the Hebrews is because of this exclusivity. When the surrounding culture accepts the existence of many gods, this belief in one God sounds arrogant.

And the same thing is true in post-modern American culture. One of the most common objections to Christianity I hear is what happens to people who don’t accept Jesus as the one true Lord and Savior? The answer is hell and that sounds exclusivist and arrogant.

And yet, there are 2.4 billion professing Christians in the world. The second largest religion is Islam, and it teaches that we are all going to hell. The third largest is Hinduism, and it teaches that we are all in for a very bad reincarnation. And unfortunately, these faiths are all mutually exclusive. One of them is right and the others are wrong, or they are all wrong.

But it can’t be wrong for the One true God, if He exists, to declare Himself to be the One true God. Can it? Wouldn’t He have that right? And wouldn’t we be obligated to listen?

Notice, the Shema also calls for complete devotion to God – not thoughts only or emotions only or actions only… complete and total devotion.

In Matthew 22, Jesus declared this to be the most important commandment in the Bible. And so, I can’t preach one sermon in Deuteronomy and skip it!

But there’s also an important connection to Jesus we need to see. When Jesus quotes the Shema in Matt 22, He uses the Greek word “Kurios” for “Lord”. But at the end of the same chapter, Jesus asks the religious leaders a question. How can David refer to the Messiah as “Lord” if he is also his son? And Jesus uses the same word – “Kurios”.

No one was able to answer the question, because the only logical conclusion is that the Messiah would have to be both a human descendent of David AND somehow God!

No one understood it at the time, but Jesus was calling Himself “Lord” – which means Jesus is either God or He was committing blasphemy.

All of this may sound a little technical and hard to follow for us, but I’m convinced this would have been one of the conversations between Jesus and his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Jesus was identifying Himself with the God of the Shema.

Now let’s look at a second passage. Buried among the various rules and regulations and seemingly out of the blue we find this in chapter 18:

15 “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen.

When Peter preaches the Gospel at Solomon’s portico in Acts 3, he quotes this verse and declares Jesus to be that prophet. Right after he says this, he and John were arrested by the temple officials.

In Acts 7, Stephen preaches the Gospel and quotes this verse. Once again, he links it to Jesus, accuses the religious leaders of murdering Him, and immediately they pick up rocks and stone Stephen to death. Stephen became the first martyr, but countless more have died over the past 2000 years because wickedness often responds to truth with violence.

In fact, that is the role of a prophet if you trace it through Scripture. Many prophets were hunted, beaten, exiled, or killed for speaking the truth to their cultural context. Prophecy in the Bible is not fortune telling. Prophecy is a warning, a call to repentance, speaking truth instead of silently ignoring moral and cultural problems.

But there is a standard for prophecy, in both the Old and New Testaments.

Deuteronomy 18 continues:

20 But the prophet who presumes to speak a word in my name that I have not commanded him to speak, or who speaks in the name of other gods, that same prophet shall die.

This is serious business, obviously. We should be very careful of trying to speak for God or to speak where God has not spoken. I think we need some “modern day prophets” to check their sources before they go around saying “God told me”.

In 1 Thessalonians, Paul commands the church to test all prophecies. Test them against what? The Word of God!

And Jesus, of course, is the ultimate Prophet. He not only delivers God’s Word to us, He is Himself God’s Word! All prophecy points to Him.

Now, let’s look at one last passage and then we’ll try to tie it all together. This one is found in Deuteronomy 21:

22 “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree,

23 his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God.

We should probably start with the observation that capital punishment was permitted, even commanded by God for certain crimes. These executions were not by hanging. Instead, it was usually done by public stoning, which involved the entire community. They didn’t watch. They participated.

These verses are referring to the practice of then hanging the dead body, after the stoning, to signify the judgment and curse of God.

This was a gut-wrenching scene, but it was limited to a few hours. It served as a temporary, public warning to the people that God is holy and incredibly serious about sin.

As a sidenote, I’ve had this sermon text planned for months, not expecting it to coincide with an investigation involving a young man from my hometown found hanging from a tree on the campus of the college I attended.

I can’t imagine what Trey Reed’s family is going through, and given our history, regardless of the results of the investigation, I completely understand the trauma response that it triggered for many. It’s a shameful part of our past, that wicked men, many of them professing Christians, once terrorized entire communities in this way.

And it’s making all of us uncomfortable that I’m even talking about it. Why? Because any public display of death is incredibly difficult for us to process. It would be strange and inhumane if we were somehow comfortable talking about it.

Last week in Numbers, God sent snakes to bite people, and then they had to look at a symbol of their curse to be saved. In the same way, these hanging bodies in Deuteronomy 21 were a symbol of the curse caused by sin.

The harsh reality is that no one looking at this death, this symbol of curse, had a right to declare themselves righteous and innocent. It was justice and yet no one is righteous. Who among us could cast the first stone?

It is in the midst of this tension that we need to find Jesus. Paul writes in Galatians 3:

13 Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree.”

There’s the Gospel in short form. A symbol of curses and death became a symbol of hope for the Christian, because Jesus took our place. Where I should be, He was.

None of us has kept the greatest commandment. None of us has loved the Lord with all our heart, soul, and strength. Jesus is the only One who has.

He came speaking Truth and his own people rejected Him in the most violent way possible. But He took the curse willingly to save murderers, adulterers, and rebels… not just religious people who sometimes make a few mistakes.

This is the great prophecy that transforms lives, families, and entire communities.

This is the message that heals towns and states and countries with long, violent histories.

This is the Gospel that motivates a widow to publicly forgive a man that killed her husband 11 days earlier.

Jesus is the only One who has ever loved the Lord with all His heart, soul, and strength. He is the only Prophet who spoke God’s Word and fully lived it out. And He is the One who became a curse for us—hanging on the tree so that sinners like us might be forgiven and set free.

The Shema calls us to total devotion, but only Christ has given it. Moses warns us about false prophets, but only Christ has spoken pure truth. The law confronts us with the horror of sin’s curse, but only Christ has carried it away. He did it by becoming like us, for us.

In 2010, 33 workers were trapped in a mine over 2,000 feet underground in the country of Chile. Engineers drilled a rescue shaft, but someone had to be lowered into the darkness, risking his own life to reach them.

That’s a picture of the Incarnation: Jesus entered our cursed world and went down into death so that we might be lifted out. He didn’t stay at a safe distance—He descended to the place from which we could never escape on our own.

But the illustration falls short, because He wasn’t rescuing innocent people. He was rescuing rebellious sinners. He was dying in the place of sinners, bearing the wrath of God for our sin.

And do you know what our world and our country and coworkers and our families need right now more than anything else? We don’t need better information… better technology… better healthcare… better policies… we need spiritual revival. We need the Gospel. Nothing else is going to reverse the curse of sin and death.

Put your faith in the One true God and follow Him. You’ll find grace for yourself, grace for your enemies, and a grace that will lead you home.