Deuteronomy 8:10-18
Remember the Lord Your God!
1. Remember from where your blessings came (12-14,17-18)
2. Remember exactly how undeserved they are (15-16)
3. Remember to thank God for them (10-11)
Thanksgiving Eve
November 22, 2006
When you have eaten and are satisfied, praise the LORD your God for the good land he has given you. Be careful that you do not forget the LORD your God, failing to observe his commands, his laws and his decrees that I am giving you this day. Otherwise, when you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your herds and flocks grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. He led you through the vast and dreadful desert, that thirsty and waterless land, with its venomous snakes and scorpions. He brought you water out of hard rock. He gave you manna to eat in the desert, something your fathers had never known, to humble and to test you so that in the end it might go well with you. You may say to yourself, “My power and the strength of my hands have produced this wealth for me.” But remember the LORD your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today. (NIV)
In 1836 in San Antonio, Texas, a famous battle took place--the Battle of the Alamo. Enormously outmanned, 183 Texans made a stand against the Mexican leader Santa Anna at the fortress called the Alamo. Although the Texans fought hard, fought bravely, all 183 were killed. About 6 weeks later, Sam Houston took his troops into battle against Santa Anna at the Battle of San Jacinto. Their battle cry--Remember the Alamo! The idea was that they would keep in the forefront of their minds what had happened there, and that this would affect their attitude towards the battle--that it would give them added incentive to fight hard. That phrase--Remember the Alamo!--has become a part of our nation's history.
In our reading for today, Moses encourages the people of Israel to remember the Lord their God. On a day like today particularly we remember the Lord our God as we give thanks for our many blessings. Moses tells us to remember the Lord our God by first remembering from where our blessings came and secondly, by remembering exactly how undeserved they are. When we do this--when we Remember the Lord our God!--it will affect our attitude towards life, because we will remember to always be thanking the Lord our God.
1. Remember from where your blessings came
In our reading, the children of Israel are soon to enter the Promised Land, and Moses is giving them advice for the future. He tells them not to forget the Lord their God. As they stood there, overwhelmed by the thought of taking over a land which was currently occupied, yet thinking about this huge land which God had promised to give them--as they stood there thinking about this, it probably seemed that it would be impossible for them to forget God.
After all, God's goodness to them was so evident. He had led them out of Egypt, parted the waters of the Red Sea, and then, as Moses reminds the Israelites in our text, he had led them through "vast and dreadful desert, with its venomous snakes and scorpions." He had given them water--from a rock! He had miraculously provided for them by sending manna to eat.
And God's goodness would continue to be evident in the future--as he caused the walls at Jericho to tumble down.
And yet Moses warns the people not to forget to praise God for all he had given them. He says, "When you eat and are satisfied, when you build fine houses and settle down, and when your flocks and herds grow large and your silver and gold increase and all you have is multiplied, then your heart will become proud and you will forget the Lord, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."
It seems somewhat foolish of Moses to warn them about this. And yet history reveals that Moses was right. The Israelites eventually "forgot" God. It wasn't that they rejected him and spit on his memory. They simply ignored him. Is America doing the same thing today? Is America forgetting God? It is. And again, I don’t know that America is outright rejecting God and spitting on his memory so much as it is simply forgetting God and ignoring him. Oh, there will be a lot of lip service to God tomorrow in the form of table prayers, but the large percentage of people who can’t be bothered to thank God in his house this holiday would indicate that people have for the most part forgotten God,
Why did Israel, why does so much of America forget God? One suggestion that is often and quite easily made is that it’s because people become so accustomed to a particular standard of living that they no longer realized how good they had it. I don’t think that’s as much of a reason as some suggest. It's very possible that the Israelites realized exactly how good they had it. And I believe that Americans have a fairly good understanding of how good they have it. As world travel has increased and as CNN beams other cultures into our homes on a daily basis, I would say that Americans are more aware than ever of how good they have it. You don’t see a lot of Americans escaping across the border to Mexico or Canada or even moving overseas. No, I don’t think that Americans fail to recognize their blessings, but rather I believe that Americans fail to recognize the source of those blessings.
You hear a lot of talk about the American work ethic, and good old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity, and the attitudes of people who worked 14 hours a day in the fields to provide for their family, and you almost start to get the impression that all this prosperity is solely the result of our hard work--especially when you hear talk about "self-made men."
“Ahh,” you say, “I see your point, Pastor. A lot of people have the energy and the drive to do these sorts of things, but they are born into countries and situations in which they don't have the opportunity. We should be thankful for where we are.”
Well, sure–but that’s not really my point. If that’s all we take out of this, it's still too easy for us to take credit. It's too easy for us to feel thankful to God for giving us the opportunities he has given us, while patting ourselves on the back for making the most of them. After all, our family isn’t exactly being fed by manna from heaven, is it?
Maybe that was the Israelites' problem too. Very often--especially after they entered the Promised Land and settled down--God provided for them in such an ordinary way that the Israelites began to feel that they were doing it all, while God was doing nothing. There was no longer a pillar of cloud leading them by day and a pillar of fire leading them by night. They were the ones plotting the military strategies and sending men to war. (Sure, the walls had fallen down once, but who remembered that?) They were the ones tending the fields by the sweat of their brow. They were the ones who were making every effort to raise their children right.
They began to feel entitled to what they got. They felt as though they were glad to have what they had, but they also felt that they had earned it.
It's an enticing thought. After all, we are the ones who went to school for years and years and took on a huge student loan, we are the ones who get (or got) out of bed every morning at 6AM while a lot of other people are still sleeping, and we are the ones who lived wisely and planned shrewdly for our financial future to the point where we feel fairly comfortable about it today.
That's why the Israelites, that's why we need this reminder from Moses. "Remember the Lord your God, for it is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth." Real simply, everything we have is a gift of God, whether God chose to give us that gift by dropping groceries from heaven onto our front porch or whether he chooses to give us the skills to program a computer or teach children or manage a business so we can bring home a paycheck so we can go buy groceries.
And isn't that what we say in the Explanation to the First Article? "I believe that God made me and every creature, and that he gave my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my mind, and all my abilities (God gave me those!)." So it's true that it is usually through the very ordinary, get up and go to work, use of our mind and abilities--it's usually through the use of these things that God gives us our "clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and hone, wife, children, land, cattle, all that we own, and all that we need to keep our body and life."
But that shouldn't make us any less thankful. The fact that rather than miraculously giving us well-adjusted children, physical health, or possessions--the fact that instead of miraculously giving us these things, God simply gives us skills, job, talents, whereby we can earn a living, patience whereby we can raise well-adjusted children, or a health club membership whereby we can stay physically fit shouldn't make us any less thankful for our possessions, our children, or our health. It shouldn't make us forget that our blessings come from God--even the ones that come to us in very ordinary ways.
2. Remember exactly how undeserved they are
But it's easy to think that we somehow deserve these things. Sure, God gives them to us, but he gives them to us because we do what he says, because we're neat guys and gals. It's easy for us to feel a little bit like the Pharisee in the parable. It's easy for us to pray, "I thank you, God, for making me a decent individual. I thank you for the material blessings that come with living the moral life that I lead."
It was easy for the Israelites to feel that they were deserving of certain things because of who they were. It was easy for them to think that they were God's chosen people because of who they were--instead of remembering the truth--that they were God's chosen people simply because they were God's chosen people.
"After all," they could think, "God led us out of Egypt, he brought forth water out of a rock, and he gave us manna in the desert. Surely we must have done something to deserve so amazing--and so many--blessings."
But if the Israelites listened and thought as Moses listed these things God had done for them, they would have been reminded of the circumstances that lay behind each of these things. On their way out of Egypt, the Israelites had complained bitterly that they were going to be killed by Pharaoh's army. Before God gave them water from a rock, the Israelites had been complaining that Moses had brought them up out of Egypt to die of thirst in the desert (Exodus 17:1-7). And before God gave them manna in the desert, the Israelites had been stubbornly complaining--untruthfully, even--that they wished they had stayed in Egypt, where they "sat around pots of meat" and "ate all the food we wanted." And even after they had received the manna, some of them did not obey Moses command to only take enough for one day, instead greedily gathering up extra food (Exodus 16). If there has ever been a people less deserving of the repeated blessings of God, it's hard to imagine!
Unless we own a mirror. Because if we look in that mirror, we will see a nation that has been blessed by God for years and years, and yet has made and continues to make laws which treat God as irrelevant--or worse. There in the mirror, we see ourselves--people who have complained about not being able to find a job, and then, after God has given them the undeserved blessing of a job, complained about the job they had been given. There we see ourselves--people who have complained about not being able to find a good spouse, and then after God gave them the undeserved blessing of a spouse, have--like Adam--complained about the spouse God had given them. There in the mirror we see a nation who has repaid God's kindness with evil and an individual who has repaid God’s grace with rebellion. And yet God continues to bless us.
No, the United States of America is no more deserving of God's blessings than the nation of Israel, and we as individuals no more deserving than the people of Israel.
And we haven't even talked about–and yet it sort of brings us right to–the most undeserved blessing of all.
In verse 18 Moses says, "It is he who gives you the ability to produce wealth, and so confirms his covenant, which he swore to your forefathers, as it is today." Moses reminded the Israelites that when God kept his promises to care for them, that was also a reminder that God was going to keep his promise to care for their biggest need--their need for a Savior.
The Israelites had failed to obey God's commands. They had sinned against him by their grumbling in the wilderness, by their worship of the golden calf. They didn't deserve to live. In fact, they deserved to die. And that's not just my opinion. That was God's judgment.
When God told Adam and Eve that they would surely die if they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he was setting the penalty for sin--death. This is what the Israelites deserved, and it was what we deserve. And that sort of knowledge could put a real damper on Thanksgiving, couldn't it?
Because deep down we know that the person who dies with the most toys still dies. There's a story that when John Rockefeller died, a man asked one of Rockefeller’s aides how much money Rockefeller had left behind. "All of it", the man replied.
And if we stop for a moment and really take that story to heart, we know that unless God gives us a Savior from sin, no others gifts really matter, do they?
Consider the man on death row who gets to choose his last meal. In one sense he might be able to consider himself very blessed to be sitting down in front of a plate of filet mignon and caviar (or perhaps Cheetos and Boone’s Farm)–but how much enjoyment do you think he’s going to really get out of that meal?
Similarly, if God has only given us material blessings, blessings for this life, God is still a great and gracious God. But that doesn't leave me with a lot of peace. In fact, it doesn't even really allow me to enjoy those things–not when I know that death and judgment is drawing ever closer.
So God made a covenant with the Israelites to send them a Savior. During the month of December, during the Advent season, we take a look at this ordinary Savior, this child who was born in a stable born as a man, born under law. We look at the extraordinary things he did, redeeming those who were under the law, buying them back, rescuing them from the power of eternal death, that they--that we--might have the full rights of sons, that we might be God's children.
When we remember this, when we consider the greatest undeserved blessing of forgiveness of sins and an eternity of happiness, now I’m able to enjoy all his other, additional blessings as we await the joys of heaven.
3. Remember to thank God for them
And it makes us all the more thankful. Realizing not only how undeserved all our blessings are from God, but especially how undeserved--and yet how wonderful--the gift of a Savior is, we should not forget to thank God. Our thankfulness brings us here to church this Thanksgiving--still the best way to celebrate Thanksgiving, by the way, still the best way to give thanks--to "praise the Lord our God for the good land"--and the food, and the families, and the abilities--that he has given us. But we come also to thank him for the great gift of Jesus.