There is an old saying to the effect that what you don't know won't hurt you. I beg to differ. If it is true that what you don't know won't hurt you, then why don't we just let babies pop anything and everything into their mouths, just as they want to do? Obviously we know that some things will hurt, and if the child is too young to know, then we have to protect him.
If is true that what you don't know can't hurt you, then ask the folks who only a few months ago set up camp right in the valley which engineers had planned to flood with the opening of a dam upstream. It all looked perfectly innocent, harmless, beautiful, but because they had not taken the time to learn what was going to happen, and because they had trespassed and gone where they should not have gone, they all were drowned. Oh no, what you do not know can hurt you and it can even kill you.
Of course there is also the possibility that I may know what to do but just ignore it, and that can hurt too. I do know that there is a law of gravity; I know enough physics to be able to use the law of gravity to help myself. But if I choose to ignore it, if I choose to disregard the law of gravity, if I just climb and jump off our local Eiffel Tower up here at 4-D, I can get hurt, I can even be killed.
In other words, if I am going to stay alive, there are some things I must know, and if I know them, I have to follow through. I have to act on the basis of what I know. To know and to obey is to live. To be ignorant; or to be disobedient even if I am not ignorant – that is to die. That is to forfeit my chance to live.
Now you and I live in an age that prides itself on freedom. We think it is awfully important to determine our own directions and to make our own choices. We want to do what we want to do. And we are not too excited about folks telling us what we should do or making us do what they want us to do. Something down inside rebels against that. If you tell me I have to do something, that just kicks up in me a very loud, "Oh yeah, we’ll see about that." We defend our freedom from restraints very forcefully. I know of a church which invited a guest preacher, who said, "Do I have to wear a robe?" The host minister said, "Only if you want to." The guest replied, "Then I will; if you had said I have to, I wouldn’t!"
And yet, can you see this: there are some laws, there are some standards, and if we are ignorant of them, or if we just choose to walk away from them, we are going to get hurt. We may even die.
I submit to you this morning that God's way of life, God's law, is like that. What you don't know may indeed hurt you. It may even squeeze the life out of you. And when you know it, if you choose to disregard it, it will surely bring destruction.
At least that's what I hear the editor of Deuteronomy saying in the passage for today. That's what I sense is being taught us in this wonderful exhortation – that our God in His grace has given us instructions about how life is to be led. You can if you like remain ignorant about these instructions, but you run a very great risk if you do. Or you can take a cavalier approach; you can know something about God's expectations but decide that you are above the law. But the risk is great. Life or death issue.
"And now, O Israel, give heed to the statutes and the ordinances which I teach you, and do them; that you may live, and go and take possession of the land. Notice that sequence: give heed, and do, so that you may live." Know, obey, and live.
Well, does it matter how I live? Are there consequences from my moral standards? The rest of the text is given over to a recital of an incident that had happened out in the desert wanderings of the people of Israel. They had come to a place called Peor, and there had stopped for a while. At Peor two things happened, two closely related things: first, quite a few of the people got caught up in idolatry and began to worship the Baal, the idol that was popular in that place. And second, they got caught up in some very unhealthy sexual alliances. Not the first time nor the last time, by the way, that spiritual wanderings and sexual wanderings went together.
And at Peor, according to the original story in the book of Numbers, both idolaters and adulterers were destroyed. The vengeance of ultimate punishment was visited on those who either did not know God's will or who chose to leave it aside. Either way, the result was death.
And so, says the writer of Deuteronomy: know, obey, and live. What you don't know will hurt you. And what you know and do not follow will hurt you too.
Now I have an idea that some folks, when they think of God and His law, God and his standards for life, have an image something like this: God saying, "Well, let's see, let's make some laws today. I think I'll just arbitrarily make some things right and some things wrong. No reason for it – I'll just do it."
"Let me see: spilling blood is awfully messy, so I think I'll tell them not to kill each other. And if I don't order them to keep a Sabbath day, well, I will never get the church budget filled up, because they'll never come to church, so, well, maybe about every seven days I'll order them to come visit me. And let's see, sex – wow, I really did something when I created sex, didn't I, and they're going to enjoy that, so, heh, heh, guess what, I'll tell them they can't have it except under carefully controlled circumstances. Let me see how many ways I can trip them up with my laws."
Is that your image of God and His law? I think that's really what an awesome number of people think: that the laws of God are arbitrary and capricious and that they really don't matter much.
Please look at it this way: God has created a moral law in order to give us life. God has told us what is right and what is wrong in order to keep us from hurting ourselves. It is not that He has just had nothing better to do than to write scores of rules to see if he can trip us up on technicalities. No, our God has told us how to live so that we will live, really live. His love means that He tells us and teaches us how to live so that we will not destroy ourselves. And the formula is really quite simple and quite obvious: Know, Obey, Live. Give heed, do, that you may live.
And so someone may think, well, all they do in Bible study classes is to drone through the kings of Israel and Judah, and who needs that? I can safely be ignorant of that. But we are not learning Biblical history just to accumulate facts and dates; we are doing so because, as someone has said, "Whoever does not know history is doomed to repeat it." And that has meant destruction and war and death. We learn the history contained in the Bible so that we can learn the life-giving lessons it has to teach us.
Someone else says, what you seem to teach in Sunday School is all the religious rules and regulations …don't drink this, don't take that, don't pray this, do pray that. And it seems a bit like the old medieval debates about how many angels may be able to dance on the head of a pin. But I tell you, that is not what we are doing; when we study religious teachings, when we argue about how to pray, when we examine what our God says about how we ought to worship him, the truth is that we are studying about how to stay alive spiritually. The reality is that we are examining what it means to take in the power and the beauty of a relationship to God, how to know personally the very source of life itself. Do you see? Know, obey, and you will live.
Here we are in this very text struggling with Biblical standards about marriage and sexuality. As I mentioned earlier, the text refers to an incident involving God's people spending their sexual energies in a wild and wanton way. Does that matter? Is that of any real consequence? Does God say that sexual expression is to be confined to marriage just because He is some sort of celestial killjoy who plants raging hormones inside us and then enjoys watching us be driven by that? Not at all, not at all. He is trying to protect us from ourselves. He is telling us what we must do to enjoy long and healthy and satisfying lives. And this is something, quite frankly, that many of the AIDS victims and the venereal disease sufferers and the mothers of unwanted babies and the purveyors of abortion because of convenience – this is something that these folks now suffer from. You must know God's will, you must follow God's will, not just because He says it, though that might be good enough. But also because He knows what is best for us, and he wants us to live, truly live.
Oh, hear me this morning. It is not that I have some bee in my bonnet and want to get cross with anyone. The truth is I hurt with those who are in these binds; I do not enjoy seeing people destroy themselves. But then there again is my point. God doesn't enjoy that either. God is not working at making things tough for those who do not know or who do not follow. He is simply warning us what we will do to ourselves if we do not know and obey. Know, obey, and then you will live.
One of my old English professors used to stare down the class and say to us, "When I grade your exams, which counts off more: an ignorant error or a careless mistake?" And then he would quickly and decisively answer his own question: "They both count off the same. They are the same. To be ignorant or to be careless; there is no bottom line difference."
Oh, but hear again the positive side of this; hear again what our God can promise. "Give heed to my laws that I teach you, and do them, that you live and go in and take possession of the land which the Lord give you."
Know and obey so that you will live, and do more than live; so you will thrive. So you will live gloriously. So you will live happily.
Know and obey so that you will live and take possession of what God gives you; know God's truths and then determine to do them so that you can have all that he wants you to have.
Know and obey so that you will have life and have it abundantly as the Lord Jesus says He wants to give.
Know and obey and take possession of the land; know and obey so that you cannot only just get by and pay the bills but you can also climb the hills.
Know and obey so that you can walk with your head up high, and more; you can soar with wings as eagles, you can run and not be faint.
Know and obey and live.
You know the story, don't you, about the fellow whose air conditioner broke down. It was hot and steamy and just about as uncomfortable as Tennessee – that's a euphemism that one person here understands – it was hot and steamy and uncomfortable, and he thought, if I don't get this thing fixed, I'll just about die. And so after tinkering with it every way he could, he called the repairman. The repairman walked in, looked at the unit, and said, "O, I know this kind of machine; there' s a gizmo over here that gets stuck." And so the took out a little hammer, spotted a place on the side of the cabinet, gave a quick little tap, and behold, the air conditioner roared into action, just like that.
Then came the real shocker, as if that were not enough. The repairman presented a bill for 505 dollars. "505 dollars! How can that be; all you did was tap on the cabinet once." "Turn over the bill; I’ve itemized it." And on the back it said: "Service call, ten minutes of time to hit the air conditioner, 5 dollars; for knowing where to hit it, $500."
Well, if you know, that's the most important thing. And then if you know and you do, it all comes alive.
