Deuteronomy 6; Romans 7
From Deuteronomy chapter six, just want to read the first handful of verses. And I’m looking at Exodus and that didn’t make a lick of sense. So let me turn to Deuteronomy. which will make more sense. Okay. Now this is the commandment of the statutes and the rules that the Lord, your God commanded me to teach you that you may do them in the land to which you were going over to possess and that you may fear the Lord, your God, you and your son and your son’s son by keeping all his statutes and all his commandments, which I commanded you all the days, which I command you all the days of your life and that your days may be long. Hear therefore, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly, as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart. and with all your soul and with all your might. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.
And then Romans chapter 7, which is a great chapter for the Christian. The second part tells us that great fact we know. I know the thing I ought to do, and that is the thing I don’t do. I know the thing that I ought to. not do, and that’s what I do. Yeah, gotta be careful there. But also, the wonderful thing about this passage is it tells us that the law shows us what sin is.
You know how you’re riding down the highway, and there’s one of those bad billboards that shouldn’t be up? And riding along the car, hey, don’t look at that billboard. What does everybody do? They look at the billboard. What you should do is point at something over to the other side. Hey, look, a deer over there. And then they look at that. But what happens when we say, oh, dead body, don’t look. We look or bad picture. Don’t look. We look.
So Paul says in Romans 7, or do you not know, brothers, for I am speaking to those who know the law, that the law is binding on a person as long as he lives. Thus, a married woman is bound by law to her husband while he lives, but if her husband dies, she is released from the law of marriage. Accordingly, she will be called an adulteress if she lives with another man while her husband is alive. But if her husband dies, she is free from that law, and if she marries another man, she is not an adulteress.
Likewise, my brothers, you also have died to the law through the body of Christ, so that you may belong to another, to him who has been raised from the dead, in order that we may bear fruit for God. For while we were living in the flesh, our sinful passions, aroused by the law, were at work in our members to bear fruit for death. But now, We are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve not under the old written code, but the new life of the spirit. What then shall we say, that the law is sin? By no means. Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, you shall not covet.
But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. Apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Did that which is good then bring death to me? By no means. It was sin producing death in me through what is good in order that sin might be shown to be sin and through the commandment might become sinful beyond measure.
For we know that the law is spiritual, but I am of the flesh sold under sin. I do not understand my own actions, for I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now, if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me that is in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing.
Now, if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God and my inner being, but I see in my members another law waging war against the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death. Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh, I serve the law of sin. Amen. This is God’s word.
I want to take a minute or two every time we look at one of these Heidelberg catechisms to remind us, you know, it’s good to read our Bibles and it’s good to read and preach our Bibles in church, so it’s a little odd we’re taking a little side venture into the Heidelberg catechism. We want to remember that our Bible, as we hold it up, is our ultimate rule of faith, what to believe, and practice how to live. but subordinates who are under our Bibles, we can find great help. Uh, and we can find great blessing, uh, in our creeds and in our confessions and in, uh, our subordinate, um, teachings. And so we want to remind ourselves the Heidelberg Catechism, though it’s not a doctrine of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, it is one of the great doctrines of the Reformed Confessions post-Reformation, and it is a faithful expression of what the Bible teaches about God, man, sin, and salvation.
And so we want to always keep that in mind. One of the things we may say when we’re out in polite company and we’re telling folks that we’re believers, we might say, I’m of the Presbyterian faith. I’m of the Reformed faith. If you haven’t learned to read yet, you’re of the Baptist faith, right? That’s a joke. Funny. But we use the word faith sometimes to express a verb, right? I put my faith in or exercise faith in God. But other times we use faith as a noun. It’s the content of what we believe. And so we want to think of that as we enter into a study of one of the confessions of faith. Remember, you’ve heard me say it a number of times, and perhaps some of you have heard Sinclair Ferguson say it on his daily podcast, that catechisms and theology are like Velcro to which Bible preaching and teaching can stick.
If you are at home and you’re organizing your desk You put your pens and pencils in the pencil cup. You put your bills in the bill stack. You put your, um, maybe your letters and correspondence in another stack, but you have what we call buckets or, or places that you put things so that you are organized. Everything put in its place can be found later when it’s needed.
And I think theology or catechisms and confessions can help us. You hear something. and you know right where to put it. That goes with the doctrine of God. That goes with the doctrine of man. That goes with the doctrine of salvation. That goes with sanctification.
Perhaps, for example, when we were reading Romans chapter seven and you heard the struggle, how does he put it? I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. Your brain was thinking, and Velcroing that information to doctrine you’ve learned. Oh, that’s because of the fall of man.
That’s because we have remnant sin in us. That’s because we live in the world and we struggle with the flesh and the devil. So you see how valuable it is to understand the bits and the tidbits of our theology. But we always want to remember scripture is ultimate. These are subordinate. But here’s a application I want to make with you tonight. Creeds and confessions make, when they’re faithful, good commentaries on scripture.
If you want to know, for example, how to study the great commandment in light of Jesus expressing it and adding, what is it, heart, soul, mind, and strength? There’s only three in the Old Testament, but there’s four in the New. For example, you want to learn or you want a commentary on that, Heidelberg Catechism, guess what, makes commentary. Who wrote the Heidelberg?
German reformed folks, smart scholars. Is their commentary legitimate? Of course it is. And so sometimes our theology gives us good commentary on scripture. But just studying the plain Bible, we look at its grammar, we look at its meaning. Scripture helps us interpret scripture. Sometimes the book of Hebrews will explain Cain and Abel. Or why was Abraham willing to sacrifice Isaac? What Hebrews tells us, he was in the act of sacrificing Isaac and he had faith in God that God could raise Isaac, the child of promise from the dead. And so you read Hebrews, it helps you interpret Genesis and on and on we go.
So just a thought or two about these things. just big picture and in general. All right, we want to look tonight at this three ways. I know my misery out of the law of God. It’s kind of the first statement we want to think about. And then we want to look at what Christ teaches about the law of God. Basically love God with everything, love neighbor as yourself. Those are the kind of the summary. And then the third thing is we cannot keep the law of God perfectly because we are prone by nature to hate God, and hate neighbors. So those are the three things.
First, let’s think about our misery and how do we come to know about it?
One way to think about our spiritual condition, our Christian life, is to say, I believe what the Bible says about me, but my experience also confirms it. Isn’t that a wonderful way to think about the Christian life? I believe what the Bible says about me, but my experience confirms it. I think we have a confession of sin maybe one Sunday a year that says something to that effect. I know what the Bible says about me is true, but my experience confirms it. And that’s sort of a Romans 7 attitude. But what about sin? What about misery? How do we define sin? Where does it come from? What does it do to us? We have to think about several things when we want to come to understand our Misery.
Now, for some strange reason, when I think of misery, I think of that Stephen King novel, which I never read, but I can remember watching a movie, probably way back in high school with my family, and there was Kathy Bates, and she stuck a log between the dude’s legs, and she hit his ankles with an ax on either side.
She hobbled him, that’s what she called it, so he couldn’t get up and escape her. That’s misery, right? That’s pretty bad. Or perhaps we might say misery is what the folks in Israel went through when those Palestinians attacked and kidnapped them and some are even still held captive. Or misery may be being trapped in an unhealthy body and wishing you could be untrapped from that unhealthy body. Misery could be all kinds of things. But we need to define misery ultimately. Misery is the effect and the way of sin. And we remember that when God made Adam and Eve, he made them happy and holy. He made them righteous and he made them to live for God and to bear his image.
And what did Satan do when he came in the garden? He attempted and he, well, he succeeded, but he attempted in his temptation of Adam and Eve. to undo the beauty of creation. He knew from his heavenly fall what he could get away with on earth. If only he could seduce Eve and she would then seduce Adam. Of course, we know later Satan tried to do the same thing with Jesus and thwart the redemption of man as well as the redemption of the whole cosmos.
But while Adam and Eve were foolish, Jesus was wise. But we remember Adam’s first sin, eating the forbidden fruit, not accepting, not taking God at his word, but hearing the whispers, the hissing of Satan. And so when Adam and Eve sinned, they lost their righteousness. They lost their ability to do good. And so from their original sin, And from our original sin proceed actual sins.
We like to say sometimes babies are cute and innocent. Well, they’re cute, but they are not innocent. They are born with a sin nature and given time and motor skills, they will say no. Right? Or they will say mine. or they will say, my turn. And so we know very quickly, given time and motor skills, sin will manifest itself. And that’s why children are given to parents, to curb that appetite for sin and to say no and teach them the law as well as the grace of God.
And so if we’re going to think about misery, we need to think about how it came about and what brought it about. Well, Adam and Eve, when they sinned against God, could only do evil. They went out of the garden and we see very quickly the the line of godly and the line of the ungodly flowing right from Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel and all the rest leading right up to the flood. And so sin and its miseries are an effect of the fall.
Sin and its miseries are part of the sinful condition and that will only get better when God comes and And Christ makes all things new. We have little down payments of it now, but in the new heavens and the new earth, there will be no more sin in our lives, but also in our environment.
And so the scripture says, cursed be the one who does not keep the words of the law that are written. And so cursed is the opposite of blessed. Cursed is he who is hanged on a tree. That was Jesus. He was cursed because our sins were laid on him. He who was a law keeper was made a law breaker and he bore the curses of sin.
So how is it we know of this misery? We’ve said a little bit about the misery, but how do we know it? Well, we know it out of the law of God. If it had not been for the law, I would not have known what sin is. We need the law to say this is right or this is wrong. And we have typically in our theology what we call the three uses of the law. There’s the civil use, like speed limits, don’t kill, you know, don’t bring illegal drugs into our country, you know, borders. You name it, we got laws, and those laws are civil.
They are meant to restrain evil. This is the law, and if you break it, what is it we hear a lot lately, burn a flag, get 10 years in prison? And what’s the hope? It will stop flag burning. So we hear the law, we hear its denunciations, its consequences, it curbs evil. But it also protects the righteous from the unrighteous.
You should be able to walk down the street without getting your wallet taken. You should be able to go to Walmart, either of them, without getting carjacked, right? That’s a thing. You should be able to go to, what’s the mall up in Greensboro? Four seasons. You should be able to go to four seasons, right, George? And make it home alive. Wanda should be able to bring your lunch that you forgot and be safe. But she’s not allowed. So the civil law restrains.
There’s another, a second use of the law, which we call the pedagogical or the teaching use of the law. And we say the law is a mirror that reflects to us the righteousness of God, but it also shows us we are unrighteous. And so the law is a teacher, or as Martin Luther said, it is a tutor, or some have even said it is a hammer that drives us to Jesus. We see the reflection of God in the law and we see his righteous demands, his holy expectations, and we say, whoa, I don’t measure up.
I fall short and I need Jesus. So the first use of the law says don’t speed, civil, The second use of the law says you are a speeder and you’re going to hell, right? You’re speeding to hell. How about that? And you need Jesus, one to obey in your place.
The third use of the law, which is the law as we understand it as Christians for our daily life, is what we might call the normative use of the law. We don’t obey the law in the Bible to get salvation. Only Jesus did that. But we do obey the law because it pleases God and we want to do it out of a changed, transformed heart. So we don’t keep the 10 commandments for salvation. Jesus has done that. But we do keep the 10 commandments because we are new creations in Jesus. And that’s the way new creations ought to live.
And so, uh, how do we know that our misery it’s not out of the civil use of the law and it’s not out of the normative use. It’s out of that middle use that second use. It has put a mirror in front of me and I don’t measure up maybe like the, the ride thing, you know, you gotta be 48 inches tall to get on the ride. If you don’t measure up your 42 inches, guess what? you’ve fallen short of the standard. And so that’s how we think of the law of God. So how do we know our misery? We know it out of the law of God.
Well, second thing, how is the law summarized by Jesus? Well, he summarizes it simply, love God, love neighbor. Don’t y’all see that sometimes on a church motto? Love God, love neighbor, not a bad church motto. Worship God, and then go out in the world and love our neighbors. What’s the best way to love our neighbor? Get them to love God by giving them the gospel. Sometimes you’ll hear us pray, Lord, send out the gospel so that more and more men and women, boys and girls, come to faith in Jesus and worship him in this life and in the next. That’s a way better overarching prayer than, Lord, help us to make some really good laws and legislatures so that people will be obedient. They’re not going to be obedient until Jesus changes their heart.
There may be some civil use of the law where they don’t kill their neighbor because they got some remnants of decency in them. They’re not so radically corrupt that they have a conscience where they won’t kill or something like that. But we think of this very basic breakdown, love God, love neighbor. And doesn’t that match the Ten Commandments?
One through four, no other gods, no graven images. don’t take name in vain, remember the Sabbath day, keep it holy, and then commandments five through 10, honor mom and dad, no murder, adultery, theft, lying, and coveting. And so the table of the law is even broken up into loving God, loving neighbor. So how does Jesus summarize?
You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. This is the first and greatest commandment. Why is it the first and greatest commandment? Because the object is God. Now the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself, but it’s sort of a secondary or flows out of the first. We do love neighbor, yes, but we love God first.
And you think about this in our modern day, love is love. Who are we to judge? You know, in the churches, well, we should use the word church loosely because it becomes a group of organized people who do churchy things, but they cease to be a church when they bless sin. They cease to be a church when they call evil good. But people want to put humans first before God.
Oh, I love my neighbors and their nighttime activities more than I love the Holy One of Israel, right? Isn’t that essentially where we are? And so, We have to be careful to put the loving God first and then we love neighbor underneath. So how do we love God?
Well, we acknowledge him to be God against other so-called gods. There are no others. We esteem him and we love him. We rejoice in him as he has been revealed to us. We rejoice in his perfections. We prefer him. We realized that we would suffer apart from Him, but our chief end is to glorify God and enjoy Him. Now, I did not hear y’all’s whole Sunday school lesson this morning, but the blurb I heard when I was walking by was the expulsive power of a greater affection.
Am I right? And what’s the best way to get rid of sin? It’s to love God more. And if you love and esteem God, guess what? You won’t love and esteem. Sin. And so if you are living with sin in your life, you aren’t loving God, right? You are esteeming something that stinks to him. You are in love with something that he would never be in love with.
And so when we love the Lord, our God, we are loving and esteeming and serving and all the rest, the things about him that he has revealed to us. There’s that hymn we sing from time to time, we have not known thee as we ought. And then it leads to we have not served thee as we ought.
That is the logic here. What does it mean to love God with all our heart or soul or mind or strength? Well, our heart is our affections. The seat of man are his affections, his desires, his inclinations. And so we love God with our whole heart. with a perfect heart, as the scripture says. Yesterday, my Saturday tradition, I watch This Old House a little bit in the mornings while I’m kind of balancing my checkbook and a few things. And after a couple episodes of This Old House comes on college game day.
Well, they’re in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. And what’s everybody in Tuscaloosa wearing? They’re wearing crimson, crimson red. And they love the crimson tide, heart, mind, soul, and strength. I mean, and they hate the other team. It happened to be Vanderbilt. Nobody in that background, minus a few, loved Vanderbilt. They loved Alabama.
And we are really good at loving ice cream with full devotion. We are really good at loving our ball team with full devotion. But that’s what God wants. He wants us to wake up every day saying, I’m going to cheer for the team. That’s probably a crass way to put it, but maybe it’s something we recognize.
We’re also to love God with all our soul, or you could say all our will. All our willpower from our new heart should be for God. What about our mind? The reformed system of thought is a love God with mind, then love God with heart. and then love God with hands. We see in our day a mismatch.
If you go to the Pentecostals, they love God with all their hearts, you know, rah, rah, right? You go to a more liberal church. What do they do? They love God with their hands. They’re going to do a soup kitchen. Now you go to a reform church sometimes and they’re all brainy and catechism-y.
That’s a word. We’re to love God in mind, which seeps into the heart, which then leads to opening hands. And so we love God with all our mind. We are rational, logical beings. We’re meant to take information, including God’s revelation of himself, and we’re meant to take that revelation and draw conclusions. There is no other God. He is perfect. And that’s why theology is very rational and very logical. And you begin to rule out all other things when you read the scriptures. And then we’re to love God with all our strength. It was interesting today.
I didn’t say a whole lot about it, but Paul says as a minister, he disciplines himself to run. He disciplines himself to box. He doesn’t beat the air. He doesn’t run extra or around the corner or cut corners or cheats, but he disciplines himself. And so every Christian, especially apostles in those days and now ministers, but every believer should discipline their body in order to serve God. Isn’t that an interesting thought? We talked about the body a couple of weeks ago. Uh, and one of the reasons we want to take care of our bodies is so we can meet the commands of the Lord.
You know, what happens if we don’t take care of our bodies? We don’t feel like going to church. What happens if we don’t take care of our bodies? We don’t feel like having a quiet time. What happens if we don’t take care of our bodies? Our brains begin to shrink. What happens if we don’t take care of our bodies? We sort of get the malaise.
And so we want to love God with all our strength. That does take discipline and self-control. And we do, excuse me, submit our bodies in service to the Lord. So that’s the first and great commandment. But the second is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. Got so excited there, excuse me. Need to wet the whistle. We are to love our neighbor as ourself.
So when Jesus was asked, how do you love your neighbor? He didn’t say, well, you do it these five ways. He tells a story. There was a man going from Jerusalem to Jericho and he fell among robbers. And a priest went by, didn’t help. A Levite went by, didn’t help. But who stopped and bandaged up his wounds, saddled him on his donkey, took him to an inn, paid the week’s stay, said, take care of the guy when I come back.
It was the Samaritan. It was the person, you know, the Samaritans are those who repatriated the Northern tribes’ land when they got hauled off to Assyria in the, what, 722? So the Syrians repatriated the land and the less racially satisfying people you might say to the Jews were the Samaritans. So what is Jesus saying when he answers the question, who is my neighbor? It’s a Samaritan. Who is your neighbor?
It’s the one in need. It’s the people we don’t necessarily love. And so we take the second table of the law. We take this second portion of God’s commandment and we love our neighbor. And here’s the kicker as yourself. Uh, we were talking at home today about something the kids need up at, up at school. And my brain was saying, what can I do without so that they can have? And isn’t that the way we should think? Or we see someone in need and we don’t walk by and say, well, that’s too bad. I’ve earned my money. I’m enjoying my shoes. We would try to meet a material need if we could.
Now you got professional, you know, grifters and all the rest of these days, they call the church nonstop asking, Do you pay hotel bills, light bills, power bills, and whatever? And you got to be careful with that. But does our heart hurt when we see someone in need? Remember the phrase that’s very often used with Jesus, he was moved. to compassion. It hurt in his gut to see the hurt in other people. And I’ve seen that in y’all. When one in the church hurts, we go. But I also hear of y’all in the community, and those are commendable things. But we should always look for opportunities to share the love of God in tangible ways, but especially, of course, in gospel ways, speaking the gospel.
But who is my neighbor? What’s my Christian ethic? Well, the last thing we want to think about is this fact that I cannot keep the law of God perfectly for I am prone by nature to hate God and neighbor. Well, how about that? That’s not very nice, is it?
But remember what we said earlier, we believe what the Bible says about us to be true and our life experience, unless we’re big fat liars, right? Proves it. Every time we read Romans 7, I know the thing I ought to do and I do not do it. I know the thing I ought not to do and that is the very thing I do. That rings a bell with us, doesn’t it? It’s biblically true and your mind’s going back to two hours ago or yesterday or whatever moment in life.
I cannot keep God’s law perfectly for I am prone by nature to hate both God and neighbor. When we stand in front of the mirror of the law, we see nothing like the law. We see an ugly reflection. When we compare ourselves and contrast ourselves to the law, we see nothing. And so we have to think in our brains, if I don’t measure up to the law, then the curses of the law will be applied.
And so curse it is everyone who does not continue in the law that is written and continue to do it. I have not continued in the law. We must say, I am condemned. That’s why every Sunday we confess our sin. That’s why every day, every time it’s necessary, we should think like Martin Luther, the Christian life is a life of ongoing, never ending until we die repentance. I cannot keep the law perfectly.
Think about this for just a moment. This may be a little bit of a brain twister. I think you’ve heard it before. If you’ve been in the Westminster confession studies, Thomas Boston gives something called the fourfold state of man. And so in the garden, the first state of man in the garden, it was possible for Adam to not sin. It was possible in his state of original righteousness to remain in that state of righteousness and not sin. But as we know, it was also possible for him to sin. And then we know that once he was tempted to sin and did so, once he’s cast out of the garden, the second state of man, it is only possible for Adam to sin.
He could do no good. He was, as this says, prone by nature to hate God and neighbor. And that’s why his son Cain killed his brother Abel. That’s why there was lawlessness until God said, I have repented for making man on the earth. And I’m going to destroy the earth and sinful mankind, save Noah, who’s found favor in my eyes.
And so in the garden, Adam could, it was possible to not sin, but it was also possible to sin. We know that he did sin. And once he did sin, he went from a state of innocence to a state of sin and misery. But then what about the state of grace when Jesus comes into our lives? Again, it’s possible to sin and it’s possible to not sin. And isn’t that our daily battle, the spirit and the flesh?
We know what we ought to do. Don’t do it. We know what we ought not do. We’re pretty good at doing it. That’s the third state of man that Thomas Boston lists. We can sin and we cannot sin. And we need God’s help and grace. But what about the fourth state of man when we get into glory? It will not be possible to sin. We sing in the hymn sometimes, be saved to sin no more. And that’s what we are speaking of.
You see theology and Bible and Velcro, it’s all coming together, isn’t it? You see how wonderful our old hymns were. They were thinkers. And they wrote good, robust theological, good stuff. So what are the three things we need to know to live and die in the comfort of being in Christ? Well, the first one is we need to know how great our sin and misery is.
And not great as in, hey, this is the beach. Isn’t it great? Right. But how great it is, how huge it is, how massive it is, how much it has infected your body. We talk about remnant sin from time to time being like the hot coals and the ashes of your wood stove or your fire pit. And if you just rake those top layer of ashes back and reveal those embers and you put a little kindling and a little fuel wood on there, you will have a raging fire. One of the miseries of this life, and I do not know why God designed it this way, but one of the miseries of this life, even though we are redeemed in Jesus, we are not yet fully redeemed, but we still live with remaining corruption in us. And to be a Christian is to struggle every day with temptation.
But what does that do? It leads us to Jesus who is sufficient. And he who suffered under the temptations of Jesus with the recall of scripture and the love and affection he had for God was able to overcome. And so he became the sinless savior who died in our place. But that’s not all, he lives above in heaven interceding for us. And we can call out to him moment by moment every day, oh great high priest, you know my love for this world.
You know my inordinate affections for things that displease you. You know that my heart is tugged this way and it needs to be tugged that way. You know the tight grip I have on my idols. You know what it is like for the evil one to hiss into the ear. And I need your help. And guess what God promises to do? Promises to help.
And so while our sin and misery may be great, we have a greater Savior. And so don’t lose heart in the Christian life. It can happen. It can weigh upon you. But look to Jesus. Let’s do pray. Lord, bless the things we have thought of. May they stick in our minds and in our hearts and in our lives so that we can love you and love neighbor. Do this night a work on our affections. We are in love with base things. As David says, we make it our prayer. We want to put no worthless thing before our eyes, much less our hearts. Help us. We pray in Christ’s name. Amen.