Deuteronomy 30: 1 – 20
You guys know what you want?
30 When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the LORD your God disperses you among the nations, 2 and when you and your children return to the LORD your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today, 3 then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. 4 Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back. 5 He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors. 6 The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live. 7 The LORD your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you. 8 You will again obey the LORD and follow all his commands I am giving you today. 9 Then the LORD your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your ancestors, 10 if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul. 11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. 12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” 14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it. 15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess. 17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. 19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live 20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Unless you fly first class you might want to eat before you get on the airplane. As you know getting some food is to a large degree a benefit of the past.
Knowing this fact I picked up a guest speaker at the airport late one evening and asked him if he was hungry. He had just flown over five hours and told me that he failed to eat before the flight. Knowing it was late I picked out a good restaurant that I knew was opened all night.
When we entered the restaurant the manager at the register told us to pick out any seats we would like. Right after just settling into the booth a waitress came over and placed two glasses of water down and said, ‘You guys know what you want?
The visitor was stunned at her remark. It took him a moment to respond.
He said to her, ‘I’ m sorry. You kind of startled me there. I am from the other side of our country. I am use to having someone come over and chit chat a little while before even presenting a menu before me.’
The waitress responded. ‘Oh that’s nice. So, do you guys know what you want or not?’
I answered for the both of us. I said, ‘How about we start with some coffee and I will explore what my friend is up for eating?’ The waitress nodded and walked away.
I laughed and said to the other guy, ‘Welcome to Philadelphia. No use wasting words we get right to the point.’
Today’s our Holy God Yahweh also gets right to the point. His question for all mankind is simple and doesn’t need time for anyone to think about. He says, “15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction.”
His question is to all of us, ‘You guys know what you want?’
This chapter begins by recognizing that both the blessings and the cursing described in chapter 28 will finally have their effects. Moses was fully aware that God had not at this stage permanently given to His earthly people a heart to know, eyes to see, and ears to hear as he had said. It was he himself who had declared that they were a stiff-necked people (9.6) and needed to be circumcised in heart (10.16). He had certainly experienced enough in the wilderness to know how unreliable they were. He thus reluctantly had to recognize that Yahweh had given these warnings because He knew that they would necessarily be fulfilled. Man’s sinfulness made it finally inevitable. Through these things Israel would have to learn their lessons.
Moses confidence was also in the fact that God would fulfill His promises to the patriarchs. He knew that God would not fail in that. Thus he recognized that just as God had shown mercy when the people had been driven from the land in 1.44, so would He do so again when the people were driven from the land in the future. He had already made that clear in back in chapter 4 and he repeats the same idea now.
The covenant relationship very much underlies this whole section. They would be removed because they broke the covenant. But Yahweh would again turn to them. They were therefore then to turn to Him. Then would they be restored when they submitted to His covenant again as spoken through the prophet Hosea 14:4, ‘I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely: for my anger is turned away from him.’
30 When all these blessings and curses I have set before you come on you and you take them to heart wherever the LORD your God disperses you among the nations,
Moses expected that for a time the people would keep covenant and would experience blessing. The blessing would come on them. But then as time went by he was sadly confident that the faithfulness of many of them would lapse, and then they would begin to experience the cursing, until at length God had had to drive them out of the land.
He wants to let them know that when that happened they were to call to mind, when they were among ‘all the nations’ to which Yahweh their God had driven them, all that God had said through him related to the blessings and the curses.
2 and when you and your children return to the LORD your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I command you today,
In that day they (Israel as a community not each individual person) will return to Yahweh their God, and will obey His voice in accordance with the covenant, and will begin again to obey His commandments with all their heart and soul. They will thrust idolatry from them, and again seek His face. They will set aside all else out of a firm desire to know Him again, and will commit themselves to obey His voice.
He knew that this would happen because of the faithfulness of God and because of His promises to their forefathers. He knew that nothing could finally frustrate God’s final purposes, just as Israel’s faithlessness had not done so. He had simply turned to others, in that case their sons.
3 then the LORD your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you.
When that time came Yahweh their God would have compassion on them. He would reverse their situation. As He had brought them from Egypt, so would He bring them from all the peoples among whom He had scattered them, and restore them to the land which would now welcome them again because they were from their hearts responding to the covenant. Please take note here the stress on the fact that He will know exactly where they are. He is not just a local God. He is God of the whole earth.
4 Even if you have been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the LORD your God will gather you and bring you back.
However far from the land they may be, He will gather the outcasts from where they are. From whatever place they are He will fetch them.
5 He will bring you to the land that belonged to your ancestors, and you will take possession of it. He will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors.
Yahweh will bring them back to the land from which He drove them out, the land which their fathers had possessed, and they will once more possess it. And He will prosper them there. He will ‘do them good’. And He will once more enlarge their numbers. There is implicit in this that they will not be replaced in His favor by another nation, because the promises to Abraham must be fulfilled.
6 The LORD your God will circumcise your hearts and the hearts of your descendants, so that you may love him with all your heart and with all your soul, and live.
This new people would be established because of what God would do, because of His work in men’s hearts. The thought is of a transformed heart which is turned to righteousness, either by the cutting away of sin and disobedience, as the foreskin is cut away in circumcision, or through the shedding of the blood of the covenant as the blood is spilled in circumcision
7 The LORD your God will put all these curses on your enemies who hate and persecute you.
The good result would be that the curses, which would no longer be on them, would be put on their enemies, on those who hated them and persecuted them.
8 You will again obey the LORD and follow all his commands I am giving you today.
The result of their return to God would be that they would obey His voice and do all His commandments as commanded through Moses. Through God’s working the covenant would be triumphant in accomplishing its purpose. A faith that does not result in obedience is no living faith, and we are still equally responsible for fulfilling the principles of what Moses taught except in so far as they are superseded by and fulfilled in Christ Jesus our Lord, or made impossible by the conditions of the times. And we are to do this, not in order to be accepted into His covenant, but because He has brought us into His covenant and we seek to please and obey Him.
9 Then the LORD your God will make you most prosperous in all the work of your hands and in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock and the crops of your land. The LORD will again delight in you and make you prosperous, just as he delighted in your ancestors,
That the remnant of Israel, the ‘few in number’, did return to God is testified to in history and they did eventually prosper and enjoy the covenant blessings, being plenteous in the work of their hands, fruitful in begetting children, and abundant in cattle and agriculture.
10 if you obey the LORD your God and keep his commands and decrees that are written in this Book of the Law and turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.
The promises are all dependent on true response to God. They are fulfilled only for those who obey His voice, and thus keep His commandments and His statutes as written in the book of His Instruction, and if they turn to Him with all their heart and soul.
11 Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach.
Moses stressed that the commandment that he had given, which contained the commandments and statutes and ordinances, was neither hard to discover nor distant from them.
12 It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?”
Yahweh had not put His commandment beyond man’s reach. It was not in heaven that men might say, ‘who will go and get it for us?’
Please take note of Moses’ meaningful way of describing it, ‘who will go -- for us?’ Even now he knew that they did not want to get too close to God. They had wanted him to go into the Mount to receive God’s commandments, and it would be the same if the commandments were in heaven. They would want someone else to go for them. And therein would lie great danger, for that was why they could be manipulated by people who made such claims. But Yahweh’s ways on the contrary were made plain to all.
What was more shown here was that he indicates by these words that they were aware of their own weakness? While they did not want God to make them hear it with His terrible voice, for they had heard it once ‘from heaven’ and that was enough, they did want someone to make them hear it, that they may do it.
So the reality is that they need not fear. Moses had gone into the Mount to receive God’s commandment for them ‘from heaven’ and it was now easily accessible to them, and he was doing his best to make them hear it so they would do it. So they had no excuse.
13 Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?”
There would be no need for a great adventurer who would sail forth to unknown lands to seek to obtain it for them, in order to make them hear it and do it. There was no far off mystery which could bring them wisdom and understanding. God had given it openly there among them.
14 No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.
For the word was as close to them as it could possibly be. It was in their mouth and in their heart that they might do it. It was there in what he had taught them and the word from God that he had brought them. They could teach it to their children, they could speak of it with each other, and they could meditate on it in their hearts. But there was no one who could make them hear it and do it. That was up to their own their final choice.
15 See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. 16 For I command you today to love the LORD your God, to walk in obedience to him, and to keep his commands, decrees and laws; then you will live and increase, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.
The commandment which he had commanded them set before them was ‘life and good, and death and evil’. They could choose either to love Yahweh and walk in His ways and keep His commandments and His statutes and His ordinances, or not. And if they did choose to follow Yahweh then they would live and multiply, and receive blessing from Yahweh their God in the land which they were about to enter and possess. They would receive all the good and the blessings which He had promised. But if they did not only evil and death awaited.
The choice rests with us too. We also must decide whether we will serve Him and wholly follow Him, or whether we will side with those who ignore Him and refuse to listen to what He has to say to them, living for the things of the moment and forgetting eternity.
In Scripture we have a constant reminder to us that there are two sides to God’s workings. On the one hand He carries out His will and none may deny Him, He carries forward His purposes whatever man may do. It is He Who circumcises our hearts. That is His side of things. And on the other He calls on man to choose Whom he will serve. That is our side of things. We must circumcise out hearts, by submitting to Him and allowing Him to circumcise them. The sheep may hear and follow, and that is what they must seek to do, but it is the Shepherd Who draws them.
17 But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, 18 I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.
Yet to all this good that our Holy God wants to do there is a flip side. There was an alternative to life. The alternative of choosing death and evil happens as described in the cursing. For if their hearts turned away and they refused to hear, because they were being drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, then he, Moses, could only denounce them. He could only stress that they would surely perish, that their days would not be long in the land that they were passing over Jordan to enter and possess it, that they would endure all the judgments that he has described.
19 This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live
Back in chapter 19 Moses was familiar with the Lord God’s rule relative to having witnesses, “One witness shall not rise against a man concerning any iniquity or any sin that he commits; by the mouth of two or three witnesses the matter shall be established. Calling on heaven and earth as witnesses was a incorporating more than what it appears. Moses is calling upon all heavenly witnesses along with all earthly witnesses the importance of these truths he has given the people.
20 and that you may love the LORD your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the LORD is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Moses here expands the point about what did choosing life consist of? It consisted of loving Yahweh their God, and obeying His voice, and cleaving to Him, for He was their life and the source of long length of days. It consisted in living faithfully in the land which He had sworn to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and enjoying its promised blessing. Thus they would find fullness of life in God and in His promises.
For us that life consists in even more. It consists in receiving Christ’s life, His eternal life, and enjoying His presence daily; in cleaving to Him, and in obeying His voice, and in living with Him under His kingly power and rule. (Colossians 1.13).
In these words Moses ends his appeal. He has brought them God’s covenant and he has pleaded for their response to accept all that was brought out. He can do no more.
The question that the Israelites and people today have to think about is ‘Do you guys know what you want?’
