“Remember What the Lord has Done”
Deuteronomy 26:5-10
2/28/07 - Mid Week Lenten Service
In Psalm 103 David writes, “Praise the LORD, O
my soul, and forget not all His benefits, who forgives all your sins
and heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the pit and
crowns you with love and compassion...” In the O.T. text
for this evening, Moses speaks to the Israelites as they are just about
to enter into the promised land, and he reminds them not to forget what
the Lord has done for them, how He has brought them out of a land of
slavery and is bringing them into a land flowing with milk and
honey. He tells them to set aside a tenth of the first fruits of
all they produce once they have entered into the land and to lay it
before the altar of the Lord as they recount the history of God’s
faithfulness to them in just a few short sentences.
Jacob, the forefather, was the inheritor of
God’s promise which He had made to Abraham, that God would be his
God and would bless and multiply his descendants and that through him
and his Seed (Christ) all nations of the earth would be blessed.
Jacob and his sons were sojourners in the land of Canaan, and when a
famine came upon the land they moved to Egypt where Joseph took care of
them. Years later when a Pharaoh arose who knew nothing of
Joseph, the Israelites were enslaved. For 430 years they labored
under their oppressors. Then they cried out to the Lord, and He
heard them and brought them out of Egypt, leading them by His servant
Moses. He brought judgment upon the Egyptians and their gods
through the plagues He sent upon them, finally destroying them through
the waters of the Red Sea, the waters through which the Israelites were
saved. And now here they were about to enter into the land which
God had promised them. Not one of God’s promises had
failed. God had been faithful to keep His Word and His testament
with His people, even though they, on the other hand, had not been
faithful and did not keep His testament.
During the Lenten season, we, like the Israelites,
are encouraged to forget not the Lord’s benefits towards us, and
instead to remember how, like the Israelites, we too have been
delivered from our bondage to sin, death, and hell and have been
brought into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son, the Seed promised
to Abraham, in whom we are blessed and are heirs of eternal life.
Like the Israelites, we too were slaves, slaves to a taskmaster who was
a much greater tyrant than any earthly ruler. This taskmaster was
the Law. Just as the Egyptians drove the Israelites with whips
and threatened them with punishment, so the Law drove us, always
demanding of us what we could not accomplish. The Egyptians
required the Israelites to find their own straw in order to make their
bricks. The Egyptians were not going to provide it for
them. The Law too demands things of us, only these are things we
can’t provide for ourselves - perfect righteousness, holiness,
and obedience to God. And yet the Law will not help us find these
things. It cannot and will not deliver to us what it demands of
us. Under the Law there is only oppression and despair with
God’s judgment looming over us for being transgressors of His
Law.
Not only were we in bondage to this taskmaster, the
Law, but we were under the oppression of the devil. He’s
either constantly accusing us before God, seeking to drive us to
despair and giving us a guilty conscience, or on the other hand
he’s trying to make us think we’ve kept the Law, giving us
a false sense of security, and causing us to turn away from God’s
Word and trust in ourselves. He does anything and everything
within his power to keep us from clinging to our Savior, Jesus Christ,
even using God’s own Law to keep us from hearing the comforting
words of the Gospel.
Besides the Law and the devil, we were in bondage
under our own sinful nature. We could not help but sin.
Even at our best we were at our worst in God’s eyes. Even
now as Christians we can’t stop sinning. We still struggle
against this internal enemy on a daily basis. But we have the
promise that when we confess our sins, God is faithful and just to
forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness. Now as
Christians our works of obedience to God’s Law are acceptable to
God because the sin that still clings to them has been forgiven on
account of Jesus. Our good works are considered good by God, and
that only because they are done through faith in Christ who is our
righteousness, holiness, and redemption.
Jesus has delivered us from these oppressive
tyrants, even though they still try to enslave us all over again on a
daily basis. The Law in and of itself is good, because it is
God’s Law. But God’s Law without God’s
forgiveness in Christ only damns us to hell. Both the devil and
our flesh would misuse God’s Law either to drive us to despair or
to a false sense of security. Either way, we are not driven to
our Savior, Jesus Christ who is our deliverer just as He was
Israel’s deliverer in the O.T.
The Apostle Paul writes, “...our forefathers
were all under the cloud and ...they all passed through the sea.
They were all baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea.
They all ate the same spiritual food and drank the same spiritual
drink; for they drank from the spiritual rock that accompanied them,
and that rock was Christ.” Israel’s baptism into
Moses was a foreshadowing of our baptism into Christ. As Israel
was saved through the waters of the sea, so we are saved through the
waters of Baptism, as the Apostle Peter writes, “Baptism now
saves you.” Israel’s spiritual food and drink of
which they partook in the desert (the manna from heaven and the water
from the rock) was a foreshadowing of the spiritual food and drink of
which we now partake - the true body and blood of Christ given to us to
eat and to drink in His Supper - which refreshes us as we sojourn
through a land thirsting for God’s Word on our way to heaven, our
promised land. And just as Christ accompanied His people in the
O.T., so He accompanies us today who bear His Name.
This evening we are reminded of our deliverance from
bondage to sin, death, and hell. Lent is a season for repentant
reflection. It is a time to remember what the Lord has done for
us in rescuing us from our enemies. It’s a time to
acknowledge that were it not for our Savior, Jesus we would still be in
bondage under God’s Law, the devil, and our own sinful
nature. It is a time not only to remember where we have come
from, but where we are right now for the sake of Christ. Because
of His sacrifice on the cross for our sins and His resurrection from
the dead, we are free, free to be the children of God, free to walk in
His ways without fear, free to call upon Him in every trouble and with
His Name pray, praise, and give thanks. But this present time is
not yet what will be. We look forward to the time when our
freedom will reach its fulfillment in our future redemption, when what
the Lord began in Baptism He will complete, when He puts off of our
sinful nature for good, when He glorifies us, and when He clothes us
with immortality. All this, because our Lord has rescued us lost
and condemned creatures, not with silver or gold, but with His holy,
precious blood and His innocent suffering and death, that we may be His
own, live under Him in His kingdom, and serve Him in everlasting
righteousness, innocence, and blessedness, just as He is risen and
lives and reigns to all eternity. Amen.