Well, I understand that the last few Sunday nights, we've been studying aspects of the law of God, the Ten Commandments, and things surrounding that particular subject. I'm going to try to take a very complicated issue, and that is the law of God, and try to boil it down and give you a few good basic principles that you can latch onto and use in your own study and understanding of the law of God. The reason I selected the title right out of the text and he added no more is because it's remarkable to be that the law of God, that is, the Ten Commandments and the surrounding ordinances and judgments that go with it, are really quite small. If you were to go down to the County Courthouse and pull out the code for the County of Dallas or go to City Hall and pull out the code for the City of Dallas, it would be a whole lot more to it. It would be thicker and have a lot more laws and rules and regulations in it than the Lord God gave us. And certainly if you would pull down the state code of the state of Texas, it would cover volumes on a shelf. And then if you would pull down the volumes of the federal code, you wouldn't be able to handle it. You see, man-made law is far more complicated, far more restrictive, far more oppressive, far more limiting than anything God ever came up with. God's law is short. It's simple. Jesus said that the yolk was easy and the burden light and he was referring to the Old Testament law code when he said that. Now the story here in Deuteronomy, how the text that we just heard, comes from the book of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy, means second and no-mo or no-moss means law. This is the second giving of the law. You looked at a few weeks ago, the law code has given it Mount Sinai out of the book of Exodus where God met his people there in the thunderous and lightning cloud and all of the fireworks and all of the demonstrative power of Almighty God at Sinai. As he thundered from Sinai giving them the law and literally terrified the people. And as the text said, Moses had to stand between the people and God and be a mediator between man and God, 40 years. 40 years have passed since God's people came out of Egypt and stood and camped at the foot of Mount Sinai. The covenant God made with this people there at Horab now has been in force for 40 years, an entire generation. I'm tempted to ask how many people in this room are age 40 or under or less. Let's see a show of hands. Just go ahead. Yeah, it's almost all. There's a few of us that stretch a little beyond that. Some of us are 40 plus. Yeah. Can you imagine those of you who are 40 years are younger? You were born and the law was given before you were born. You don't remember that experience at Sinai. You weren't there. But 40 years have now passed and God's people have come through the wilderness and they've in fact the book of Deuteronomy recounts all of their experience. The first four chapters is kind of a narrative of where all they went. They went around, they fought this battle and they had this issue and the book of numbers gives the entire story and these first few chapters of Deuteronomy kind of give a summary of it. 40 years have come and gone and now God's people are at the edge of the land of promise, the promise land. They're on the plane of the Jordan River over on the east side of Jordan, in the land of Moab and they're on the planes of Moab and Moses is still their leader but he's the oldest man in the camp. Moses is 120 years old and he's leading a group of people that are predominantly 40 years old and younger. I won't make any comments about how important it is maybe for an old, old man to sometime lead younger people. But be that as it may, that's the scene we have here. And what Moses does to the people as he talks with them there, he says, Moses, I'm reading it out of Deuteronomy chapter one, Moses undertook to explain the law. Moses undertook to it. These people had not been there when the law was given and now he's explaining the law and it's interesting the way he begins to set it forth when he begins to talk to him about keeping the law and the things they should do. Listen to how he summarizes in chapter four and now, O Israel give heed to the statutes and the ordinances which I teach you and do them that you may live and that you may go in and take possession of the land. You shall not add to the word which I command you or take from it, but you may keep the commandments of the Lord your God which I command you. He tells them to keep the commandments, but then notice a few verses later, he said, only take heed, keep your soul diligently. There's the key, there's the key right there. It's not merely that we keep the commandments of God, but it is that we keep our souls. If I were to subtitle this little explanation tonight, I would call it the grace of law. You see the law of God is part of God's grace. He gives us the transcript of his nature. He gives us the precise way in which he wants us to live in order that it might be good for us. Our passage in the call to worship said that the precepts of the Lord are life-giving. God gives us the law not to limit us, not to oppress us, not to keep us from having any fun in life. He gives us the law in order that we might live. You see, the law came after grace. The very first of the law says, I'm the Lord your God who has delivered you and brought you up out of the house of Egypt. God saves us first, miraculously and wonderfully and by grace. He finds us wherever we are, wherever we are, whatever sin and whatever circumstance and whatever condition of life, in whatever mental state and whatever physical condition. He finds us where we are and he rescues us. He saves us from ourselves as well as from our sins. And having already saved us from ourselves and saved us from our sins and redeemed us and loved us and brought us to himself. After he's already done this gracious deed, he then gives us commandments. Now, most people have it backwards. Most people think that God gives commandments and then you keep those commandments and you're okay. Or if you don't keep those commandments, you're in trouble. And in order to be saved, you've got to keep those commandments to some standard or another. You've got to keep 50% of them or 75 or 80 or 90 or some severe people say 99 and 99, 100s. You've got to keep it just something so you've got to keep it perfectly. And then if you keep the commandments perfectly, then you're saved. Then you're accepted with God. Then he receives you unto himself. Then he gives you new life and he regenerates. No, that's backwards. God saves us by mercy and grace. He sets his affection upon us and loves us while we were yet sinners. Christ died for us. Our scripture said in due time, Christ died for the ungodly. Jesus doesn't die for perfect people and perfect law keepers. He dies for sinners and that's what I am and that's what you are. And having saved us by his mercy, he then gives us the law. And the law is not to oppress us and depress us and compress us, but it is instead to enable us to live the kind of life that is rewarding and fulfilling to him. And he summarizes it all in what we see as ten short commandments. Now, I don't have time to knight and I hope that before we're through with this study with Tim and others that are participating in this, you get a chance to look at each one of those commandments because each one of those commandments that God gives promotes something. It promotes something. For example, the commandment to keep the Sabbath. It promotes restoration. We get weary from labor. We get tired. We work six days, shall I labor and do all that I work but on the Sabbath day to rest. There's a place in God's economy for restoring, for lifting up, for bringing back to life, for resurrecting and revivitating the soul, the body, the spirit, all of our life. We need to be picked up and we need, and that's what the Sabbath is for. It's a rest. It's to give us the restoration that we need in our life. So the Sabbath is a good thing. By the way, Jesus Christ is the Sabbath and when we come to him, we get that restoration and that resurrection in a very real spiritual sense. For example, the commandment I shall not kill or I shall do no murder is a commandment that promotes life. There's nothing more sacred and more precious upon planet earth than life, human life, all of life by extension. God is a life giving God. He breathed into the nostrils of the first man, the breath of life, and he became a living soul. And that is to protect life and everything that has to do with life. If we don't have protection of life and promotion of life, then we don't have the kind of existence in this world that God intends us to have. So that commandment is designed. The other command, for example, dachal not steel, dachal not steel protects private property. The right to have and to use those goods and resources that God has given us with a stewardship that enables us to prosper. If we're not able to put work and effort into resources, and to earn, and to keep what we earn, and to prosper with what we earn, and to share with others in generosity and a stewardship, if there's not a protection of private property, if anybody can just take anything they want to, if an individual can steal someone's means of production. If a government can confiscate it through confiscatory tax rates, it destroys the engine of economic prosperity. And I'm here to tell you, if you don't know much about economics, you're going to be learning it in the next few months and years in this country. We're going to learn principles of economics that we have forgotten, biblical, godly principles of private ownership of property, of production, and of economic activity. You see, God is the first economist. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. God's the first producer. The heavens of the earth is the first product, and everything we've had all these centuries and millennia to live on on this earth has come out of God's earth. All of life is extraction from the earth. We mine it, we fish it, we forestry it, we do everything to bring it out, we process it into the goods that we need to live on, and everything, the petroleum, everything you can think of that mankind is needed for his existence since time in memoriam has come out of the earth where God put it in there. You see, and Dasha'll not steal, establishes the principle of ownership and stewardship over the earth that God has created. So each one of these commandments, I've only mentioned a couple of three, each one of these commandments, Dasha'll not bear false witness, gives us the protection that we need for truth and veracity, which is the basis of a justice system. If you don't have truth and veracity, truthfulness, you do not have a justice system, a system that undergirds a feeling of right and wrong, and that which, and God gave us in the commandments these very brief, simple, short little precepts that are so profound in what they actually do for us. The commandments of God are not grievous, they're not burdensome, they're not odious, they are life-giving, and they establish the order of the commandment that I shall not commit adultery. You know what adultery means? The English word adultery just comes from two Latin words, odd and alt, odd, odd, adultery. Odd means two or toward, and alt means an alternative, an alternate, something else, and the commandment against committing adultery is a forbidding of us to go to any alternative, other than what God has established in the created order, when he created man, in order to have man kind the way it should be, male and female, and to go to any other kind of relationship in that union is to go toward the alt, the alternative, and to go to the alternative is to violate the commandment of God, and therefore violate the basic principle of the core of human society. You see, the commandments of God are given, and they're brief, and they're very slight in terms of having to read them and memorize them, but yet they're so full of life-giving, the economic system, the justice system, the social fabric and the familial system. All of these things arise out of these simple commandments that God has given us. Our religious value, thou shalt have no other gods before me, establishes true and authentic religion. What I said is the nation whose God is the Lord, who we as a nation acknowledge the Lord God as our God, or if we move to some way of looking at false notions of God. The nations, I'm quoting the Bible by the way, the nations that forget God are cast into hell, in other words they go into destruction, hell means death, they go into death. This die when they forget the true God. Now it's interesting that when the Lord gave these commandments, he gave them to a people who were to be the custodian of them, but it was not as though they were to begin an end with Israel. The commandments were given beyond that. In fact Moses even says that in the passage that we just read there in chapter 5. The Lord our God made a covenant with us at Hora, not with our fathers did the Lord make this covenant, but with us who are all of us here alive this day. In other words the commandments of the Lord were not just exclusively for that first generation that heard those commandments from the thundering, from Sinai or Hora, but instead they are perpetually binding, therefore us today, those of us who are alive today, the next generation, the under 40 set, the demographic that still has the majority of their lives ahead of them. I'm 60 years old, three-fourths of my life is behind me even if I live to age 80. I'm in the fourth quarter. What are you doing the fourth quarter? You better give it all you've got because that's the end of the game. Those that are 40 and under, you're still in the first half. You've watched enough ball game to know that you can do almost anything in the first half, anything can happen. And then after half time you can make it up in the second half, and that's what God's given us an opportunity to do. He's given us an opportunity to live right, to do right, to please Him, not in order to be saved. We've already been saved by grace. Let me say one more thing and I'm through. I've just got to stop on that time. Jesus Christ was the perfect man. He kept the law of God perfectly. And because He kept the law of God perfectly, He was able to do a couple of things. The law had stipulated that if you disobey the law, you die. If you obey it perfectly, you live. Jesus Christ kept the law perfectly. Therefore He earned for Himself life, eternal life. That's what the resurrection is all about. It's God bestowing upon Jesus that eternal life that He had earned by His perfect obedience to the law. But the law had also stipulated there was a penalty. If you disobey the law, you were to die. But the law had specified in the sacrificial system that one could die for another. There was substitutionary atonement. A goat or a lamb or a turtle could die in place of the person and atone for their sins. And that's who Jesus is. Jesus is that sacrifice. He stands in the place of and in the stead of us. And He takes that death penalty, which was in the law for disobedience. And we've disobeyed. And He takes our death penalty in Himself as our substitute and bears it away. So Jesus brings the blessing of the law that is eternal life and bestows it upon us. Christ has borne the curse of the law that is death in His own body in our place and in our stead. And He's brought the blessing of the law that is eternal life and bestows it upon us in our salvation. You see, God didn't set the law aside and say, oh, forget it. Those commandments are outdated and let's go with the new thing here. Let's call it gospel. Now, it's not what God said at all. Read the book of Galatians. What God said was, I take my law very seriously. It's eternal and everlasting. It's an abiding contract. It's a covenant. I'm sworn by an oath and I'm going to judge all of the world by that law. Now I've dealt in terms of that law, my salvation. I've sent my son, who bore the curse of that law death for his own, for his people. And since he kept it perfectly, he now has the reward, the blessing of that law that is eternal life. Here's what happens when you trust Christ. When you take Christ by faith, when you believe in Him, when you seize upon Him, when you embrace Him, when you come to Him and say, he's what I need, I've got to have Christ. When you do that, you get the benefits of both. You get his penalty bearing and his life giving. He bears your penalty so that you don't have to bear it dead. And he gives you eternal life, never dying life, life beyond the grave, life beyond this particular realm that we know and see by sight. You need to think about it a little bit. How can you pass Him up? How can you walk away from Him? How can you ignore Him? How can you deny Him? How can you not reckon with Christ and have some regard for Him? You've got to do something with Him in your life and your whole eternal destiny and your whole life's quality depends on what you do with Christ, what you do with Christ. Jesus said, I didn't come to destroy the law, I came to fill it up, I came to fulfill the law. And He does, He fills it up by bearing its penalty, He fills it up by bringing its blessing.