Deuteronomy 9:1-7
“Undeserved”
February 25, 2018 – Second Sunday in Lent
In an episode of the television version of “Lethal Weapon,” a young police officer received high fives and admiration from the local surfing community. They were thanking him for saving fellow surfers from a shark attack by punching a shark in the nose. The problem was that he knew he didn’t really deserve it. As he later admits to a fellow officer, it was actually a dolphin who approached the group in the water, not a shark. He feels like a hero fraud because in reality he only fended off a less-than-vicious dolphin attack. In his mind he knew he didn’t deserve all that praise.
In our text for today, Moses calls the people of Israel to see themselves in that same sort of honest, less-than-deserving light. Contrary to what they might someday come to think, God was not bringing them into Canaan and defeating all the nations there because Israel deserved it, because they were somehow better than those other people. No, Moses tells them, you don’t deserve it at all.
Here in Deuteronomy, Moses is recounting for a new generation in Israel their history, a history of what God had done for them. The title “Deuteronomy” comes from the Greek translation of the Old Testament and means “second law.” Moses repeats the story we’ve already read in Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers and in chapters 4 and 5 of Deuteronomy, he carefully repeats the Ten Commandments and expounds on them. Throughout, the book, Moses recalls episodes from their exodus from Israel and the giving of the Law and the people’s various rebellions in the wilderness.
All that repetition made it hard for me to choose what to preach this Sunday. Much of it seemed to just go back over ground we’ve already covered. I started out to preach a text that focused on the law, but realized Mike Fargo had already given you a fine sermon on the law from Exodus. I switched to a text about Moses not being able to enter Canaan, but then I found that story told more fully at the end of Deuteronomy, so I saved it for next week after we’ve finished the book.
So I finally settled here at the top of page 287 in Beginnings, the first few verses of Deuteronomy 9. It captures a theme which I believe is the point of the whole book and also speaks to us during the season of Lent. God’s people are not blessed because they are somehow better than others. They, and we, don’t deserve His blessing at all.
As it we read in chapter 1 of Deuteronomy, they are all camped on the plains of Moab across the Jordan River from Jericho. This is the end of forty years in the wilderness. They have arrived on the brink of where these people have been headed since they were children. As we read in Numbers, the first generation chickened out. They failed to trust God in the face of powerful enemies. In the first few verses here, Moses reminds the next generation of just how big and powerful those enemies were, the descendants of giants.
Now there on the east side of the Jordan, all the adults who left Egypt and chickened out have died, except for Moses, Joshua and Caleb. Their children have grown up over forty years and it is time for them to cross the river and receive the Promised Land. But before they do, God is using Moses to help them understand that they are not really any better than their parents. They are not really any better than the people whose land they are going to conquer. They don’t really deserve what God is about to give them.
It’s a reminder we all need. It’s a reminder that the ashes and the somber purple and the sad songs of Lent are designed to give us. All our blessings, from the gift of life itself, to any success or prosperity we might enjoy, to our salvation in Jesus Christ, all of it is a gift of grace. God does not give us these things because we deserve them but because He is gracious, because He loves us.
One commentator I read said that love is really the theme of the book of Deuteronomy. It’s not law or land or liturgy. It’s love, God’s love for a people who don’t deserve a bit of it, but whom God saves and protects and blesses anyway. It’s a picture of us and our salvation in Christ.
Moses repeated all that history for a younger generation for the same reason we repeat Lent every year. He wanted them to remember their rebellion against God, their sins, their stubbornness. We want to remember our own sins, our own stubborn desire to follow our own way instead of God’s way.
We and Israel need these reminders. We too easily forget the facts. Human beings are always ready to believe in our own deserving. Some of you who volunteer for our Egan Warming site have noted how grateful many of our guests are on those cold nights. But as an activation goes on for a few days, some guests express less gratitude and more a sense of entitlement. Why isn’t the food better? Why isn’t the tap water in the bathroom warmer? Why can’t I have my backpack with me? Why don’t you have ESPN on the television? We get annoyed that these addicts and drifters feel like they deserve what we give them.
Then you and I go home to our warm houses and full refrigerators and big screen TVs and grouse that the cost of heat is rising or that our spouse forgot to buy milk or that Netflix is down that evening. We’ve worked hard and we deserve a little comfort and convenience, or so we imagine.
On a larger scale, we may even imagine with the Israelites that we are better than the people whose land we took. We get upset with those who will do anything to come to this country to find work and food and a place to live. We forget that some of our ancestors and predecessors in America took this place from people who already lived here and shut them up in reservations, packed their children off to residential schools, killed them with disease unintentionally and killed them with guns intentionally when they didn’t cooperate. Yet you and I imagine that we somehow deserve our own place here, while others don’t.
In the second paragraph of our text, verses 4 and 5, Moses told Israel that God was letting them drive out the Canaanites because the Canaanites were wicked, not because Israel was good. We don’t even have that excuse. As I find it important to repeat now and then, America is not Israel. We don’t have the sort of place in God’s plan that Abraham’s descendants did. We’re not the race who will give birth to the Messiah. We’re not the cradle of salvation for the whole world. We’re not the builders of God’s Temple or the keepers of His Word. We’re just a nation of folks who inherited a pretty good place in the world from folks who took it away from someone else. That’s not really anything to be proud about, any more than Israel was supposed to be proud about their place in Canaan.
So we are here in the season of Lent to remember what the children of Israel needed to remember there on the plains of Moab. We don’t deserve what we have been given. And, first of all, we must remember that it was given to us. We need to keep recalling what Paul told the church at Corinth in I Corinthians 4:7, “What do you have that you did not receive? And if you did receive it, why do you boast as though you did not?”
As much as it may look like it’s about law, Deuteronomy the “second law” is about grace, about God’s gifts being given to underserving, rebellious, sinful, stubborn people. And they is us. Lent may look like law, like legalism. Don’t eat that chocolate. Make sure you do your Bible reading. Serve at Egan. But it’s all about helping our stubborn, sinful souls remember that what we have is all a gift, the gracious blessing of a loving God.
That’s part of why Moses frames it the way he does in our text, “Today you are about to cross the Jordan to take over land belonging to nations much greater and more powerful than you. They live in cities with walls that reach to the sky! The people are strong and tall—descendants of… giants.” He wants them to know then and remember later that when it happens, when they march in and make the walls of Jericho fall and win battle after battle, that the odds were stacked against them. They held a losing hand. Their forces were way too small to win the day. It was only because God helped them, only because God gave them those victories, that they ended up with a good place to live.
As many of you know, I’m not much of a sports fan. I haven’t been watching the Olympics. But I’m still moved when I come across stories about athletes who credit their success to God and put Him above their sport. Evidently the U.S.A. women’s hockey team scored a major upset, winning the gold over Canada who had won it for the last four Olympics. Just before the game Gigi Marvin who scored for the team said, “I know my worth is not found in what I can achieve in this game. Instead, my identity and value is only found in Christ, my Redeemer and Lord.”
We’re remembering Billy Graham today, one of God’s faithful, even great servants. Yet one of the greatest things about Billy Graham was not what he achieved, but what he understood about himself. In interviews and in his autobiography, he was not afraid to talk about his regrets, the points in his career when he could have done better, when he simply failed. One regret that struck me is that the man who won perhaps millions of people to Jesus said more than once that he regretted that he had not studied more. He also said he regretted getting overinvolved in politics. Most of all, he said he regretted being gone from his family as often as he was. He did great things for God but he knew he was not perfect. And he often said what he says in his autobiography, “I cannot take credit for whatever God has chosen to do accomplish through us and our ministry; only God deserves the glory, and we can never thank Him enough for the great things He has done.”[1]
Moses spoke the words in Deuteronomy to teach Israel and to teach you and me what Billy Graham learned. Our worth is not in what we accomplish in this world, whether it’s winning a battle or a game, earning a diploma, making a big sale, filling a bank account, raising a family well or even bringing crowds of people to Jesus. Just like the Israelites, we don’t deserve those successes. They don’t happen because we are such good and worthy people, but because God loves us and gives us what we do not deserve.
Moses tells the people, “you are about to cross the Jordan…” The subtle implication, which we will explore more fully next Sunday, is that he will not. Like most of the other adults of his generation, he too failed God there in the wilderness. Scripture is full of figures like Moses, fallible heroes with feet of clay. We saw another in our Gospel lesson this morning. Peter, Jesus’ star disciple, got rebuked almost before the ink was dry on the “A+” he got on the question about who Jesus was.
Some of you saw a cartoon PowerPoint slide on Ash Wednesday of funny greeting cards someone thought up because it was also Valentine’s Day. One of them said, “Remember you are dust, but awfully loveable dust.” That’s exactly right. This is the season to remember that we are mere dust, no better than those men and women in the Bible who sometimes did good things, but who often forgot God or deliberately rebelled against him. Yet at the very same time they were loved and helped and saved by God.
Our text is only the prelude to Moses pretty much rubbing his people’s noses in their failures, like you rub a dog’s nose in what he did on your carpet. In the very next bit he goes on to talk about the golden calf they worshipped instead of God. Just below the middle of page 288, verse 24, Moses says, “Yes, you have been rebelling against the Lord as long as I have known you.”
The second paragraph of our passage concludes, “you are stubborn people.” That pretty much sums up what Moses was trying to tell them. “Stubborn” might have been a good title for this sermon because that’s what they were. That’s what we are. We get angry with politicians and employers and other people in power who don’t like to admit they are wrong, but we are all like that. I know I hate it. I’d rather do almost anything else than admit I’ve made a mistake, call up someone and apologize, ask for forgiveness. We believe in our own goodness, our own integrity. We’re stubborn about it.
I still like to tell the story of when our oldest daughter was two years old. One day I found her in the living room and detected that distinct aroma which some of you young parents know all too well and you older ones can remember. I looked down at her standing there and asked, “Susan, are you poopy?” If it had been a cartoon, you could have seen the wavy stink lines rising from her diaper. But she stood there with that stench streaming out behind her, looked up at me with innocent eyes and said, “No, Daddy.” That is the nation of Israel whom Moses addressed. That, friends, is you and me and the way we so often present ourselves to God.
Many Jewish people realize all this as well as Christians do. On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, part of the liturgy remembers that word stubborn, “stiff-necked” in more literal translations. One form of it goes like this:
we are not so arrogant and stiffnecked as to say before you, Lord our God and God of all ages, we are perfect people and have not sinned; rather do we confess: we have gone astray, we have sinned, we have transgressed.
We are arrogant, brutal, careless, destructive, egocentric, false, greedy, heartless, insolent, and joyless. Our sins are an alphabet of woe.
That would not be a bad confession for us to use during Lent. Lent is our version of Yom Kippur, a time to remember our failures and just how little we deserve God’s grace and blessing, to remember how stubborn we’ve been even about not admitting our sins.
All this is pretty grim, I know. It feels like an old-fashioned Lutheran Good Friday service Beth and I attended while I was in seminary. The pastor laid into his congregation just like Moses. At the end, Beth and I walked out, looked at each other and said, “Wow, if we didn’t know we were sinners going in, we do now.” That may seem depressing. You may want something more uplifting. But the whole point is that realizing our own sin and stubbornness and repenting of it just makes God’s grace and love that much greater, that much deeper. We’re not even loveable dust, but He loves us anyway. That’s what Paul was driving at in our text from Romans 4. All that law and wrath is so that, as he wrote, “the promise can rest on grace.” The Promised Land rested on grace and so does the promise of salvation in Jesus.
We need to repent in Lent, but repentance is not all gloom and doom. Kallistos Ware quotes St. John Climacus who said, “Repentance is the daughter of hope and the denial of despair.” Ware goes on,
[Repentance] is not despondency but eager expectation; it is not to feel that one has reached an impasse, but to take the way out. It is not self-hatred but the affirmation of my true self as made in God’s image. To repent is to look, not downward at my own shortcomings, but upward at God’s love; not backward with self-reproach, but forward with trustfulness. It is to see, not what I failed to be, but what by the grace of Christ I can yet become.[2]
My hope is that during Lent you and I can remember how undeserved our blessings are, and know that we are not blessed because of our own goodness. I pray that we will confess our sins and remember our failings and repent. By doing that I believe that we can see clearly just how strong our hope is, how trustworthy God’s promises are, because they rest on His goodness, not on our goodness, on His love for us not, on our love for Him, on His grace to us in Jesus Christ, not our meager efforts. Then we can rest too, secure in the blessed assurance that all our blessings are undeserved.
Amen.
Valley Covenant Church
Eugene/Springfield, Oregon
Copyright © 2018 by Stephen S. Bilynskyj
[1] Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham (New York: Harper Paperbacks, 1998), p. 852.
[2] The Inner Kingdom (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000), p. 45.