Outlined Transcript:
Hi everyone. I wanted to keep going on the series on discipleship and want to unpack what I do with people in the villages. Even at the conference in April, what I'll probably be doing is teaching very fundamental truths of the Word of God—both the law and the gospel.
Beyond Content: Teaching to "Keep"
Last time we talked about how discipleship is teaching people to keep all that Christ commanded, not just to teach what Christ commanded. We're not just teaching the content, though that is important. And truly, it's not just what came out of Jesus's mouth, but it's the totality of the Word of God. It's the whole counsel, the full counsel of the Word of God because we know that it is the Spirit of Christ who inspired the sacred writings. It is the Spirit of Christ who carried along the prophets and the writers of old who inscribed the God-breathed Word.
And so it's not just the Gospels we're talking about. It's the totality of all that Jesus taught through His Spirit in the text. Because we know that God spoke in many ways and many places and many times through prophets who are carried along by the Spirit of Christ. But today He speaks to us through His Son. So anytime the Word of God is open, Jesus is speaking. So faith comes through hearing, and hearing by the Word of Christ.
To Guard and Protect
And so, teaching people not just the content but to do something with it, and that is to keep, to guard, to protect. And so, like I said, in some versions it says to teach to "observe" and I don't prefer that English word. I think it gets at the point of the word better than "obey." Obey typically implies something you do and to follow after or to emulate a command.
But there's more to the Bible than just imperatives. The Bible's full of indicatives. In fact, most of the Bible is indicatives. And where there are imperatives, they're always following after redemptive indicatives—truths of what God has said and what God has done: the Word and the works of God.
Our walking worthy of the gospel always comes on the back end of:
Lots of gospel doctrine.
Lots of Christological doctrine.
Lots of theological doctrine about the attributes and the nature of God and the goodness of God.
The works of Christ: His obedience, His death, and His resurrection.
How do we teach people to keep or to guard what God has commanded, what Christ has explicated, what He has illuminated through His teachings and how He has given us the keys to understanding the promises in the Old Testament and the law in the Old Testament? How those make sense only in the person of Christ through His life, His obedience, His death and His resurrection and now His ascension and someday His return in glory.
The Lesson of Judges
I want to kind of flesh out how I do this. Just briefly, the verse in Judges that everybody quotes is that "In those days there was no king in Israel. Everybody did what is right in his own eyes.” That's typically used as the key verse, the hermeneutical key for unlocking the narrative thrust and emphasis of the book of Judges.
But I think there's actually a verse that is more significant. It's more contextually significant than that one only because it makes sense of that one. This verse gives you a clue as to why that happened. It's towards the very beginning of the book of Judges, in Judges 2:10-12:
"And there arose another generation after them... who did not know the Lord or the work that he had done for Israel. And the people of Israel did what was evil in the sight of the Lord and served the Baals and they abandoned the Lord the God of their fathers who had brought them out of Egypt."
"Them" refers to the generation that followed Joshua, that crossed through the Jordan into the Promised Land, who saw and participated in all the conquests of Joshua. Some of them had even known Moses. The children of those who were victorious failed to pass on the faith to their own children.
Of course, the children are guilty for their own disobedience, but their parents are also likewise guilty for not passing on the faith to their kids—not teaching them to keep or to guard all that God had commanded them in the law; all that God had promised in the grace through Moses; and the work of God through Joshua. They failed to teach the children to keep, to guard, to hold on to, and to remember.
The Priority of Deuteronomy: "Remember"
One thing that is interesting in the book of Deuteronomy: in the Hebrew mind, the Torah is the "holy place," but the book of Deuteronomy is like the "Holy of Holies." It is the most sacred book of all of the Tanakh.
If you look at the book of Deuteronomy, the most often given commands are synonymous:
You shall remember.
You shall take care and not forget what God has spoken.
That is the burden of the Holy Spirit for the people of God. At this point in the Torah, you don't need another word. What has been given to you in the promises and in the law—the law of Moses, the promises through Abraham—this is enough. You don't need new words. For that generation, it was sufficient just to remember; to remind each other of what God has done.
Our Job as Disciples
That really is a picture of discipleship: teaching people to remember, to take heed lest they forget what God has done and think that all the blessings God has given them were done by their own hand, and fall away from trusting in the living God.
As Hebrews 3 talks about, we must encourage one another every day, as long as it is still called "today," lest we, or our brother, or ourselves fall into the deceitfulness of sin. We must remind each other with the words of God—what God has spoken and what God has done—lest we be like those who did evil and abandoned the Lord who redeemed us out of slavery to sin.
We must take care to teach the rising generation to heed, to keep, to guard, to protect, and to defend the truth that God has passed on to us. It is our job to teach the next generation to tereo—to hold on to, to hold fast to the Word of God.