Five Dimensions of Covenant Faithfulness

Introduction and Overview: What Does God Really Want? (v. 12a with vv. 12-13)

Just by way of quick review: Verses 1–5 gave us the Gospel of the Kingdom. Verses 6–11 described the ministers of that Gospel. And now, in verses 12–22, Moses will summarize the kind of life that the ministers of the Gospel must teach us how to live. So the chapter as a whole moves from the King's covenant, to the King's servants, to the response that the King requires of its citizens. And because verses 12-22 are so densely rich in lessons, I’m thinking that I will divide them up into four sermons. So we are only going to tackle verses 12 and 13 today.

Look at verse 12. There are few questions more important than the one asked here: “And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you?” What does the sovereign God require from the people He has redeemed? What does covenant faithfulness look like in ordinary life?

Many people answer that question very selectively. And it is not just non-Reformed Christians who can become imbalanced here. I know a lot of Reformed Christians who tend to reduce Christianity to correct doctrine - and so long as they have pure doctrine and they are vigorously defending pure doctrine, they feel like they are doing OK. Others go to the opposite extreme and reduce Christianity to private spiritual experience. There are others who are more activist-oriented, and they tend to reduce Christianity to moral behavior, service, and activity. They will criticize you if you are not involved in every service or ministry project that they are involved in - or that God has called them to. They measure your call by their calling. Others try to correct this, but also err by almost exclusively focusing on loving God from the heart. Each may be holding onto something that is biblical, but Moses refuses to pull apart what God has joined together.

He gives five verbs, and every one of these five verbs must be held together in balance. The five verbs in these two verses are fear, walk, love, serve, and keep. Daniel Block's commentary points out that those five verbs include both inward dispositions and outward expressions. He points out how fear and love concern the orientation of the heart; while walking, serving, and keeping express that inward allegiance outwardly in real life situations.¹

Michael Grisanti's commentary adds that those five verbs show how thoroughly God’s claim reaches into every part of a person's life.² And I agree.

But there is also something else that is important to notice about these two verses (that is often missed). Notice where this summons occurs. He says, “And now, Israel…” Moses does not give these five verbs to Israel in Egypt as a ladder by which they might climb into God’s favor. No. God had already redeemed them, borne with them, heard the mediator’s prayer, renewed the covenant, restored the tablets, and commanded them to enter the land. Don't ever think of these five verbs as a way by which we can earn God's favor. They are the living out of a favor we already possess because of our position in Christ. So the words “And now” connect this summons for covenant faithfulness to all of that grace that we have looked at in past sermons - and show what covenant faithfulness should look like throughout our Christian life. Because God has shown mercy, what now should His redeemed people do?

So the theme of these two verses is this: The Lord’s covenant grace calls us to a whole-life faithfulness that reveres Him, follows Him, loves Him, serves Him, and keeps His good commandments. That sentence captures these two verses in a nutshell. Let's look at each of the five verbs.

Fear the Lord Your God (v. 12b)

Moses begins his call with the words, “to fear the LORD your God.” What does He mean by fear? Biblical fear is not the terror of a criminal who only wants to escape punishment. Nor is it a casual respect that leaves us comfortable in our sin. It is the reverent awe produced by seeing God as He truly is.

God is not our peer or our buddy. He is the Creator, Judge, King, and covenant Lord. We stand in awe of Him. He is infinitely holy. He cannot be manipulated, domesticated, bribed, or safely ignored. To fear Him is to live consciously before His face and to assign ultimate weight to His approval.

Gerald Gerbrandt's commentary rightly says that this fear does not paralyze us. I like that thought - it does not paralyze us. Instead, it leads to trust and action because it recognizes both the awesome character of God and the gravity of our relationship to Him.³ Proverbs says the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It turns us away from evil because we would rather displease the entire world than to displease our awesome God.

Our age specializes in the exact opposite - the fear of man. And you might think that you aren't afraid of anyone. But the fear of man can be very subtle. People fear being disliked, unfollowed on social media, criticized, excluded, sued, or passed over in a job promotion. Churches can fear losing members. Ministers can fear controversy because they don't want to alienate certain members of the congregation who are influential. Parents can fear that firm biblical standards will alienate their children. But all of those things are simply subtle manifestations of the fear of man. And the fear of man and the fear of God cannot coexist in your life at the same time. They are opposites. And whenever the fear of man governs us, we begin negotiating with commands that God has not placed up for negotiation.

The fear of God breaks that slavery to the fear of man. Praise God! It breaks slavery to the fear of man. It does not make us harsh; it makes us free. When God’s verdict is the weightiest thing in our minds, the shifting verdicts of men begin to become lighter and less important. So how do we know if we are regulated first and foremost by the fear of God? I've already given you some diagnostic hints, but here are four more diagnostic questions:

1. Do you take God seriously when no other person can see what you are doing? If you do, then the fear of God is stronger than the fear of man. On the other hand, if it doesn't bother you that God knows that you are watching pornography (or doing some other sin) but it would very much bother you if your peers were to find out that you were doing that, then the fear of God is weak to non-existent in your life. And you need to plead with God to put the fear of man to death and replace it with a holy awe of Him.
2. Second, do you allow His warnings to interrupt your plans? If you do, that's a good sign. It's a good sign when you obey God even when it is hugely inconvenient to do so.
3. Third, does His holiness, sovereignty, and power govern how you worship Him? There is too little reverence and fear of God in some kinds of worship services. Too many churches have rejected the ancient doctrine of the Regulative Principle of Worship, which means that we may only worship God in ways that He has explicitly laid out in Scripture. If creativity and man-pleasing is central to worship, it is a sign that there is no fear of God driving that worship.
4. Fourth, is there anything you refuse to surrender to God because you fear its loss more than you fear the Lord?

So those are just some diagnostic questions that will let you know whether you need to ask God to ignite more of a holy fear of Him within you. When you have a Biblical fear of God it will positively transform almost everything that you do. It really will. Some of you have à Brakel's book, The Christian's Reasonable Service. It’s a great book. Here's what he says about this fear:

“Filial fear (in other words, the reverence that a child has to its father - filial fear) is a holy inclination of the heart, generated by God in the hearts of his children, whereby they, out of reverence for God, take careful pains not to displease God, and earnestly endeavor to please Him in all things.”⁴ That's a fantastic definition.

Walk in All His Ways (v. 12c)

The second verb is "walk." Moses says that Israel must “walk in all His ways.” Walking is one of Scripture’s most comprehensive pictures of life. A step may be small, but a succession of small steps establishes a direction - a walk. Our walk is the habitual course of our decisions, speech, work, worship, relationships, and even our use of time.

God does not merely claim isolated religious moments. He claims the whole road that we are walking on - including the times that He commands recreation and relaxation. Nor does He permit Israel to select just a few of His ways. Moses here says “all His ways.” Covenant faithfulness does not just obey when it is convenient while preserving one protected territory for ourselves that we don’t want God to touch.

To walk in His ways also means that His character supplies the pattern. It’s not like He is commanding us to do something that He is unwilling to do. We are imitating Him - just like a child imitates a parent. Later in this passage, God’s impartial justice and His love for the stranger become the model for Israel to imitate. We learn the way that we should walk by seeking to imitate His character.

Now, obviously Jesus is the fullest revelation of that way in human form. He did not merely teach righteousness; He walked it. He loved the Father, kept the law, welcomed the weak, confronted hypocrisy, endured suffering, and went obediently to the cross. To follow Christ is therefore not merely to admire Him but to pick up our cross and follow Him in the road that He walked - to endure (as Gary's sermon outlined last week). In fact, I would encourage any who did not hear Gary's sermon last week to listen to it. Endurance is continuing to walk in His ways rather than just taking a few steps and then giving up.

Ask yourself not only, “What do I believe?” but “Where is my present path taking me?” Is my present path a contradiction to my belief? Repeated compromises eventually become a walk - but it is walking in the wrong direction. Repeated acts of faithfulness also become a walk.

The direction of life is ordinarily established by thousands of apparently small steps. So don't be discouraged by the fact that you have a long ways to go in your journey - that you are not as holy as other people, or that you are not as passionate as other people. None of us have arrived at the final destination. The more important question is whether you are walking in the right direction, and course correcting whenever you realize that you are deviating from God's pathway of righteousness.

Love Him (v. 12d)

The third verb is "love." Israel must “love Him.” This is remarkable covenant language that is completely foreign to Islam, Hinduism Judaism, and other false religions. The Lord does not settle for grudging compliance. No. He calls for the heart.

Now, granted, in Deuteronomy, love is more than passing emotion, but it is certainly not less than affection. Affection is at the heart of Deuteronomy’s definition of love. God's call is to have our affections more and more captured by Him. But love in Deuteronomy could be defined as covenant loyalty, delight, attachment, preference, and devotion expressed in action. Let me repeat that: love in Deuteronomy could be defined as covenant loyalty, delight, attachment, preference, and devotion expressed in action.

Christopher Wright isn't totally reliable in his commentaries, but I love the musical metaphor that he used. He compares the five verbs of verses 12–13 to the distinct notes of a single musical chord.⁵ If you get any one of those five notes wrong, the chord sound off. And he points out that love stands within that harmony: it prevents fear from becoming servile dread and it prevents obedience from becoming mechanical legalism. Without a heart that loves God, it is easy to go to either extreme.

It is possible to do outwardly correct things while inwardly resenting God. And you have probably seen that resentment on the face of a child who obeys, but does so grudgingly. You can tell that the heart is not in it. And you parents need to think about this before you bring your children to be examined by the elders for communion. We are not just interested in knowledge. We want to know- where is their heart at? A child may obey only because he or she fears that punishment will happen if he or she doesn't obey. That's not enough. A church member may serve because reputation is at stake. That's not enough. A theologian may defend truths about a God in whom he takes little delight. We've got a lot of theological warriors on the web who are excellent at defending doctrine, but who lack one or more of the five verbs. And God is not satisfied with that. So in this verb, God is asking, “Do you really love Me?” Or is this note missing from the chord of your life?

Of course, we love because He first loved us. It’s all of grace. The previous chapters have displayed Israel’s stubbornness and God’s covenant mercy. When we see our sin forgiven at infinite cost, obedience ceases to be an attempt to purchase love and becomes the grateful answer to love already given.

This is why Christ must remain central. At the cross we see both the holiness of God that judges sin and the love of God that bears judgment for sinners. The Spirit pours God’s love into our hearts and teaches us to cry out, “Abba, Father.” I love that phrase. The Holman Illustrated Bible Dictionary says, "Some would translate Abba as “Daddy” to convey the close, personal meaning of the word."⁶ So, "Abba Father" is similar to saying, "Daddy, Father." That's astounding - that the Holy Spirit enables us to have that kind of a close relationship with our heavenly Father. That’s the kind of love that the book of Deuteronomy wants us to have for God.

So even though Christianity is not less than law, doctrine, and duty, it is essential to see that at its center stands personal communion with the triune God. So this word "love" is a critical verb by which to evaluate our responses to all that God has done. Are we growing in our love for God, or is our love waning? If it is waning, we need to course-correct quickly or we will eventually get ourselves in trouble. The books of 1 and 2 Kings (which I am going through in my morning devotions) give illustration after illustration of kings who started out with a passionate love for God, but allowed that love to wane until they found themselves on a totally different pathway than God had called them to. At the end of Solomon’s life, he was surprised at how far he had drifted away from the Lord and from the Bible, and he wrote Ecclesiastes to convince us that if we allow our love for God to wane, eventually we will experience everything as vanity and emptiness. Please, keep your love for God aflame.

Serve Him With All Your Heart and Soul (v. 12e)

The fourth verb is "serve." Moses says “to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” The Hebrew word for “serve” can describe worship. But it can also describe the whole-hearted day-to-day service rendered by a subject to his king. Both ideas belong here. The point is that worship cannot be confined to an hour - or in the case of DCC, two hours on Sunday morning. Why? Because the King owns the whole week. That means that every aspect of our week (24-7) should be seen as service to God.

Well, that verb by itself makes us realize that we need more of God's grace because (if we are honest with ourselves), there are moments when we serve other things than God - and God is not in our thoughts. But that conviction of our need of grace grows even stronger when we see the qualifications of how we are called to serve in this verse.

The words “with all your heart and with all your soul” exclude divided allegiance in our service. Moses does not want God to occupy only one shelf in an already crowded life. He does not accept Sabbath devotion joined to weekday autonomy. He claims thought, affection, strength, schedule, vocation, vacation, money, body, household, and future plans. Wow! If that is God's call, then we definitely need God's grace every moment of our lives.

And, by the way, in case this makes you immediately discouraged, you aren’t listening to this sermon with ears attuned to grace. So I will hasten to say that wholehearted service does not mean that believers never experience weakness, distraction, or conflict. We do. All of us do. But it means that we should recognize no lawful rival to God. When we discover divided motives within ourselves, we should not baptize those divided motives or justify them; we should immediately bring them to Christ, repent, and seek fresh grace to serve.

But an encouraging side note to this verb is that the phrase as a whole also gives dignity to ordinary work. A mother changing a child's diapers can be service to God just as much as my preaching from the pulpit is service to God. So can a tradesman keeping his contractual obligations, a magistrate refusing a bribe, a student laboring honestly with his studies, or a church member quietly caring for an elderly saint. And thank you to those of you who minister to the elderly in our communion. The elderly are often neglected and not revered and honored the way Scripture calls us to honor the elderly. Coleen gave Gary and I an excellent book called Dust To Dust: Aging Well In An Anti-aging Society. And some of you do an awesome job in that department. So thank you.

But the thing I wanted to emphasize by that last phrase of the clause is that all of those things can be service to the Lord if we are doing those things as unto Him. The decisive question is not whether the activity looks religious or not, but whether it is offered up to God in faith, according to God’s Word, and for His glory. And that can only happen as we learn to live our lives coram deo - constantly conscious of His presence.

Keep His Commandments for Your Good (v. 13)

The fifth verb is "keep." Moses says, “and to keep the commandments of the LORD and His statutes which I command you today for your good.” Fear, walking, love, and service become concrete in obedience. This obedience fills out the musical chord and gives it richness. We do not get to invent the form our devotion takes. The God we love has spoken and given definition to the outworking of the previous four verbs.

And by the way, the Hebrew verb for “keep” also has the sense of guarding carefully. Why do we need to guard His commandments carefully? Because Satan tries so many clever ways to convince us that we are keeping the previous four verbs by defining them with things other than the Scripture. God’s commands are not disposable suggestions. We must know them. Well, you can't know them unless you are regularly reading the Scripture. We must treasure them. Well, you can't treasure His law if you are not meditating on it and turning it into worship. We must apply the commandments. Well, you can't apply them unless you are consciously evaluating every part of your life against God's Word. And since the verb "keep" also has the idea of "to guard carefully," we must resist every attempt of Satan to steal these five verbs from our lives and from our households. These five verbs are critical to the definition of covenant faithfulness.

But Moses adds a phrase that exposes one of Satan’s oldest lies. He adds the phrase, “for your good.” The serpent told Eve that God’s command withheld good from her - that His commandments were not for her good. Every temptation repeats the exact same accusation. Satan tempts you to think that God’s boundaries are cramped, His timing is unkind, and true freedom lies outside His will. But those are all lies. They are absolute lies.

Moses says the opposite. The commandments come from the God who redeemed Israel from horrible slavery into liberty. His authority is benevolent. His law describes the grain of the moral universe He made, and if we go against that grain, we cannot find true success in His universe. And God wants us to have success. Sin promises freedom but it actually pays it’s wages in slavery, shame, fractured relationships, and death. God’s way of liberty can be costly in a fallen world, but it is always for your good. Keep in mind that there is always a cost to true liberty. But it’s much less of a cost than the cost of rejecting His path of liberty.

Of course - we must carefully distinguish this from earning justification. God’s law cannot justify sinners because we have already broken His law. Christ alone supplies the righteousness by which we stand accepted legally. But Paul insists that the same grace that justifies us also trains us to renounce ungodliness. The same law that once condemned us when we were in the covenant of works, now guides us as children who have been brought into the Father’s household.

Jesus embodied the living out of all five verbs that we have just looked at. He feared His Father, walked in all His ways, loved Him, served Him with an undivided heart, and kept every commandment given in the Scriptures. He did so in our nature and on behalf of His people. At the cross He bore the curse due to our covenant unfaithfulness. In His resurrection He began the new creation, and by His Spirit He writes God’s law upon our hearts.

Conclusion: One Allegiance, Expressed in Five Dimensions

So those are the five verbs that capture what true covenant faithfulness looks like. But let me reiterate that Moses does not present five competing spiritualities from which we may choose. These are five dimensions of one covenant faithfulness. They are one musical chord. And if any one of these five verbs are missing from your life, you are robbing yourself of some aspect of the good that God wants for you.

For example, fear without love becomes cold dread. Love without fear becomes sentimental familiarity. Profession without walking becomes hypocrisy. Activity without wholehearted service becomes empty busyness. And there are a lot of busy Christians out there who are lacking one or more of these five verbs. Claimed devotion without commandment-keeping is self-deception.

Another caveat is that the Gospel does not leave us to assemble this life from our own resources. No. The Father provides everything from beginning to end, and those resources are there for the asking. The Father chose us in Christ, the Son fulfilled the covenant for us, and the Spirit renews us after His image. Grace both precedes and empowers our obedience. So don't get discouraged if you do not measure up fully on all of these five verbs. I would dare to say that none of us can say that we do not still have room to grow.

So hear the question personally: What does the Lord your God require of you? He claims your reverence, your path, your affection, your service, and your obedience. And He claims all of those five dimensions of your life not as a tyrant seeking your ruin, but as the Redeemer whose commands are for your good. Let's go to Him in prayer and thank Him for giving us a recipe for success.