Month: February 2021

106. Blessed above All

Deuteronomy 7:14 Thou shalt be blessed above all people: there shall not be male or female barren among you, or among your cattle.

The conditional promises continue as a result of keeping the commandments. Here God promises that we shall be blessed above all people. In the ancient world (and to a lesser degree in the modern world) children were considered blessings, and barrenness, or childlessness, was considered a curse. It was likewise considered a curse if your livestock did not produce offspring.

But we may also take the promise spiritually: we believers are indeed blessed above all people. As a group, the Church, is blessed with individuals who have eternal life, the greatest blessing there is. Eternal life is life that continues on forever and even gets much better after temporal death. This blessing for believers is truly a blessing above all the people who do not believe, who will not live with God forever. And they do not have God in their life during this life on earth.

What a vast difference exists between believers and unbelievers! A tremendous gulf has been fixed between the two groups. One group is blessed far above the other group of people. We don’t see such a great difference between those who have been blessed with eternal life and those who haven’t been. But when we see what the rich man saw when he died and went to hell  in the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus, then we would wish that somebody would have told us about that eternal death and eternal life. But someone has told us: it is written in Moses and the Prophets, the Word of God, for all to hear and see. You are truly blessed above all people if you see it now. You will never be barren and alone.

105. Love, Bless, Multiply

Deuteronomy 7:13 And he will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee: he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine, and the flocks of thy sheep, in the land which he sware unto thy fathers to give thee.

God continues listing the blessed consequences for obeying, keeping, and doing the Ten Commandments. These are wonderful conditional promises for the people of God who believe in Jesus Christ. NT believers take these promises as spiritual, rather than material, blessings. God gives us spiritual blessings, but he couches the promises in material, physical, and earthly terms so that we can see and understand what is happening to us in the spiritual world in the heart. Jesus, who earns the promises for us and gifts them to us for free, satisfies the condition for us. By faith, we claim what God promises to give.

First, the Lord will love you. In this context, loving means gifting material wealth and physical blessings. The Lord will show His love with material and spiritual gifts. Every good gift is from above. Every good thing we enjoy comes from God the Father who loves us and loves to give us good things.

Second, He will bless you. In this context, the Lord is promising material blessings, which are tangible tokens of God’s love. But also, blessings come in many intangible ways from the Father, who sees and cares. There is no greater blessing or token of love than the peace that passes understanding and the joy of the Lord as our strength.

Third, He will multiply you. Once again in this context, He is first of all referring to having many children, grandchildren and workers around us. Additionally, there is the intangible blessing of seeing your faith, fruit of the Spirit, godly character, and loving personality being multiplied among your family and friends.

Fourth, He will bless the fruit of the womb, the fields, the crops, the harvest of grapes and olive oil, and the increase of cattle and sheep. All of these material blessings are common ways of measuring wealth and prosperity. We can see it. Now we may transfer such material abundance to the spiritual kingdom in which God showers us with more expansive and expensive spiritual blessings than we could ever imagine. 

All of this is “in the land.” God gives us the land, the kingdom of God; He places it in our hearts to personally dwell there and rule and bless from there. “Seek first His Kingdom…” and all these blessings will follow. Believe the Gospel and enter into the kingdom of promise, blessing, and an abundance of good things. Do so daily.

104. Keep Covenant and Mercy

Deuteronomy 7:12 Wherefore it shall come to pass, if ye hearken to these judgments, and keep, and do them, that the Lord thy God shall keep unto thee the covenant and the mercy which he sware unto thy fathers.

This verse repeats the conditional promise of the Mosaic Covenant made at Mt. Sinai, repeated and reaffirmed by Moses in Deuteronomy, “the second law.” If you listen and keep and do God’s rules, then the Lord will keep the covenant promises and make real the steadfast and faithful love which He swore on oath to your fathers. The “fathers” in this case were Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The Lord had promised to them in a covenant oath that He would do what He says He is going to do. And this covenant promise holds true for all the descendants of Abraham and Israel. The covenant applies spiritually to all the people of the world who have the faith of Abraham, The promise of the Abrahamic Covenant turns out to be Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man. We believers are the children of Abraham, the children of the promise, the spiritual and true descendants of Abraham. For we believe in Jesus Christ.

The problem for us is that we cannot and we do not listen to and obey God’s commandments, we do not keep and believe God’s Laws, and we do not do and live by God’s rules. The condition is lost for us, but the promise is still true for us because Jesus kept the condition in our place before God. Because God is satisfied with Him, God will most assuredly do His part of this Mosaic Covenant: God will keep the covenant and the mercy. The covenant includes the Kingdom of God, the Savior of the World, and Blessings to our lives. The “mercy” is an English translation of Hebrew “chesed,” which most fully can be translated as “faithful and steadfast love to do what He said in His covenant promises.”

God keeps His Word and Promise. Therefore, it seems like a good idea to know the Word of God and keep it in the heart. What does He promise to us? What are the blessings He will give to us? We read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest the Word so that His covenant and mercy lives in us, and comes out of us.

103. Faithful and Merciful

Deuteronomy 7:9 Know therefore that the Lord thy God, he is God, the faithful God, which keepeth covenant and mercy with them that love him and keep his commandments to a thousand generations.

Who is your God? The Lord is God. The Lord is the faithful God. The Lord is faithful to keep covenant promises and show mercy. The Lord will keep covenant and mercy with all those who keep their part of the covenant, who love God and keep the commandments. He will keep covenant and mercy with the faithful ones for a thousand generations. That is a long time, from at least 20,000 years to 40,000 years, longer that the earth is likely to be around. 

It is a way of stating with assurance that the Lord is a faithful God and He will do what He says. He will keep His promises laid out in His covenant. His mercy will be deep and long lasting, enduring forever. God is good; all the time. The mercy of God will never run out. His faithful love is so deep it covers us completely.

Of course, our part of the covenant is to love the Lord and to keep the commandments. In this we have failed, and we know it; so the Lord is not obligated to keep his part of the covenant and be merciful. But our faithful God provided a way for us to faithfully keep our part of the covenant stipulations: He sent His Son to live a righteous life that perfectly keeps the Law of God. He pays the penalty of our sin and disobedience, and God, the faithful God, grants us exoneration for sin and a righteous life. Therefore, in Christ we have kept the covenant, and so the faithful God is obligated to keep His part of the covenant promise and show lovingkindness forever.

Because of Christ we can be absolutely certain that the Lord our God and Father will keep for us every promise He ever made to us. When believed and taken to heart, the promises of God are designed to give us confident hope today and change our lives forever. “Learn to trust Me and love Me, and your life will get better and better forever.” So our faithful God promises.

102. Holy and Special People

Deuteronomy 7:6 For thou art a holy people unto the Lord thy God: the Lord thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.

The Lord chose the descendants of Abraham, the children of Israel, to be a holy people unto the Lord and a special people unto Himself. This is a promise: the people of God will be holy and special. This is what Moses tells the people from the mouth of God when they are on the plains of Moab poised to enter the Promised Land and possess it.

The Jews were indeed a peculiar people in contrast to the others peoples of earth, for their dietary rules and hygienic taboos and worship rituals and Sabbath keeping were different from others and set them apart.

The NT people of God who are believers in Jesus Christ are the people of God, as the OT Jewish believers flowed into and became the NT believers in Christ; the disciples of Christ are the “Israel of God.” The entire Church, made up of Jewish and Gentile believers, are in the NT declared to be peculiar, holy, and special. All those who believe in Christ are accounted holy, righteous, pure and innocent by faith. This justification is sudden. Those believers are gradually made more holy in lifestyle to match up to their accounted status. Sanctification is gradual.

This is the promise: we are holy and becoming more holy; we are special and becoming increasingly more special, if possible. This promise must be taken by faith, since we don’t see it and cannot point it out. God sees us as holy and special, although the church and our holiness is invisible to us. We need to believe the promise and see ourselves as God sees us: I am holy to the Lord and I am special to Him. I believe what God sees, not what I see. This promises changes how I look at myself and how I live and act to come into conformity with who I already am.

101. The Lord Delivers your Enemies

Deuteronomy 7:2 And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them.

The Lord will deliver our enemies before us, and He will deliver us from our enemies. He will deliver the people from the seven nations greater and stronger than they. God promises to deliver us from evil. The nations living in the Land are pagan, idolatrous, adulterous worshipers of evil demonic gods. This kind of evil must be rooted out of the land. If they are not driven out of the land they will remain to become a temptation and a snare for the faithful believers in the Lord. And if those faithful believers become ensnared in the evil, idolatrous ways of the sinful world religions around them even they too will be driven out of the land. And this actually happened under the Assyrians and Babylonians centuries later.

In our day the “Land” is the Kingdom of God that has come into our hearts and minds. But in our hearts and minds there are still sinful, evil, worldly, idolatrous, and adulterous thoughts and strongholds. God gave us the kingdom; we shall possess it; and we must still drive out worldly religion and philosophy. When we are willing God is there to do it for us and deliver from worldly temptations. And so we pray and believe every day: “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”

We have the promise, along with the command, that we will smite and utterly destroy the seven heathen kingdoms that remain in our minds where the kingdom of God dwells. We may even call these the “seven deadly sins” that must be dealt with or they will rot our insides and diminish the Kingdom of God within. These seven are: anger, lust, laziness, greed, envy, gluttony and pride. Be aware of these “Canaanites” in your life and the dangers they pose. Let the Kingdom of God flourish and wield its influence and authority over the soul.

100. Possess the Good Land

Deuteronomy 6:18 And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the Lord: that it may be well with thee, and that thou mayest go in and possess the good land which the Lord sware unto thy fathers.

Once again God gives a conditional promise that it will be well with you if you do that which is good and right. The Lord repeats the covenantal promise that if one party (you) keeps the stipulations (commandments) then the other party (God) will definitely keep His part; and therefore, it will be well with you. The principle is always true: keep the Ten Commandments and you will have a good life; break the Commandments and things will go badly for you. Here the condition is put in terms of “doing what is good and right.” It should be a no-brainer that life will go well for you if you do.

All humans by conscience know the principle is true, but we still make excuses and rationalizations, which come from the devil, the world, and our own sinful flesh: “one time, it’s not going to hurt anybody,”  “no one will know,” “it can’t be so bad, if it feels good,” “what can it hurt?” etc. But, according to God’s Word, each disobedient thought, word, or deed has a bad consequence. We don’t get away with it. We also want to be noticed and we want credit when we do something good, but God rewards “hidden” service, the good things we do and think that no one ever sees.

The further promise is this: if you keep the Law you may go in and possess the good land. Jesus kept the Law for you; you now own His righteous life. The good land is the kingdom of God that lives and rules in the hearts of believers in Christ. Possessing it is believing God and trusting Him for giving the kingdom and its blessings, giving victory over spiritual enemies, and working all things together for good. God grants grace for forgiveness, justification, and salvation, but we must believe it to possess it. Faith makes it our own; we “have” eternal life. However, “I cannot by my own reason or strength believe in Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to Him, but the Holy Spirit has called me by the Gospel.” And God keeps us in the true faith that possesses the good land, the kingdom in the heart

99. Words in your Heart

Deuteronomy 6:6 And these words, which I command thee this day, shall be in thine heart.

This remarkable promise doesn’t sound like a promise at first, but God does promise that God’s words, His Commandments, will be in our hearts. This was meant to be true right away, for when God gave the Ten Commandments, and especially when He gave the Great Commandment (Thou shalt love the Lord thy God), He expected the people to memorize it and take it to heart immediately, repeat it often, teach it to the children, talk about it all the time, bind it on your hand and forehead and on your door. We are not commanded to put these words in our hearts; we are promised that these words will be in our hearts.

The Pharisees took these words seriously, and literally, for they made phylacteries with the words of Deuteronomy 6:5 written on papyrus to wear as frontlets and wristbands. They took the words “shall be” as a strict command, thinking that as Law it was something they should do, but more importantly it is something God does, for it is a Gospel promise: “these words will be in your heart.”

The complete fulfillment of this promise didn’t really come about until after Jesus ascended to heaven and then poured out the Holy Spirit. Jesus had promised that He would send the Holy Spirit into the hearts of believers, and the Spirit would bring His Words to remembrance and we would actually keep them. The Holy Spirit is the “words in the heart,” which will be rivers of living water flowing out of the belly of believers. The Spirit in us will be the “phylactery” reminding us to believe and do the Great Commandment.

We need reminders of this truth that the Holy Spirit is living in the heart, for we can go a long time through daily living forgetting that God, really God, the living and eternal God, Creator Almighty, All-loving King, is living in my heart. If we stop long enough to think about it we would be blown away. The very love of God, and more, the God who loves, is dwelling so intimately with me so as to be in the center of my body and soul. When the Spirit reminds me, my natural response is to love the Lord with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. The promise reaches its purpose every day.

98. Be well and increase

Deuteronomy 6:3 Hear therefore, O Israel, and observe to do it; that it may be well with thee, and that ye may increase mightily, as the Lord God of thy fathers hath promised thee, in the land that floweth with milk and honey.

Another conditional promise that it will be well with you has the additional promise that you will increase mightily in the land. The condition, as usual, is hearing and doing the Commandments. The general principle is always the same: keeping God’s Moral Law will make a good life for you. Living well is a direct result of obedience to the Commandments. We can’t measure the cause and effect and see it as you could in a scientific study, for we don’t see the inward obedience and inward living well. But we can believe God’s Word, and it becomes a motivation to believe and obey.

You will increase mightily in the land of promise that flows with milk and honey. For us, the land flowing with milk and honey is the spiritual kingdom of God within the hearts of all believers. One Day we will see the spiritual kingdom become an eternal physical kingdom in which our resurrected bodies will live under the glory of a gracious God; we will see and feel the love of God as a tangible force always.

The promise of increasing spiritually in the kingdom effects spiritual growth while here on earth. We can expect to grow up in every way into Him who is the head. The more we hear, believe, love and obey the Word of God the more we will grow and increase in the spirit. Being strong in faith, powerful in spirit, and full of God’s love is truly living well. This “increase” is available to all of us when we spend more time with God, meditate on His Word often, pray without ceasing, listen to the Gospel regularly, remember our Baptism and partake of Holy Communion. Most people are deceived into believing that “going to church” does nothing for them, but God’s Promise challenges that lie. The Gospel does do something: it increases the kingdom life in us.

97. Walk in the Ways

Deuteronomy 5:33 Ye shall walk in all the ways which the Lord your God hath commanded you,that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.

The refrain is getting familiar now: if you keep the Commandments it will be well with you and you will live long in the land. This is the classic promise of the Mosaic Covenant, with blessings or curses following as consequences of obedience or disobedience to the Law of God. The condition becomes unconditional in the NT because Jesus Christ has keep our part of the covenant for us. By faith in Christ we are accounted righteous, that is, we have kept the Commandments; therefore, we will enjoy the blessings.

Life is long and good and rich and full. This kind of life Jesus demonstrated in His public ministry, earned for us by His innocent death, and sealed unto us by His bodily resurrection from the dead. We now by faith will live and live well, live long and happy. We possess this abundant life, full, rich, and eternal, for it is God’s life, which He shares with us. We possess it by simple, yet profound, faith in Jesus. We possess the land, that is, the kingdom of God. God’s life lives in us and His kingdom rules in us. And one day, the promise says, we won’t need faith, for we will see the kingdom and feel the life and the love.

When Moses says, “Ye shall walk in all the ways,” this can be taken as either a command as in, “Thou shalt…” or a promise as in “You will….” Or it can be both a command and a promise. Consider it as a promise (in fact, take all Ten Commandments as promises) and ask, “what does this mean?” As a promise it means that believers, who take the Lord as their God, or who believe in Jesus as their Lord and Savior, will walk in the ways God commanded. They will obey. This promise can be taken in two ways: as justification, we are justified, made right with God, by faith, or as sanctification, we are made more and more holy, like God, in our actual daily behavior by the working of the Holy Spirit through the Gospel. One is sudden and is done, the other is gradual and in process. God is making you a better person gradually when you hear the Gospel often. So He promises: you will walk in His ways.

What a promise! The Lord makes you a better person and gives you a better life.