1. Please pray with me. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing in Your sight, O Lord, our Rock, and our Redeemer. Amen. The message from God’s Word on this Palm Sunday is taken from Deuteronomy 32:36-39, it’s entitled, “Who is Your Rock?” Dear brothers and sisters in Christ.
2. The whole Book of Deuteronomy is a gathering of Moses’ most urgent thoughts as he is about to lay down his leadership and the people are about to enter and take possession of the Promised Land. He recounts the great deeds of the Lord bringing salvation for His people. He teaches the Ten Commandments again (5:1–21). He gives Israel some new and specific instruction about how to live together in this new land. He gives them two creeds to confess (6:4–5; 26:5–9). He gives them a liturgy of curses for disobedience and blessings for obedience to be performed by the entire congregation (27:1–28:6). All of it has the same kind of forward-looking, anxious, and hopeful urgency of parents on the day they send a child off to college. “Check the oil in your car. Call us every week. Don’t go to drunken parties. Don’t forget to go to church. We love you.” Finally, Moses provides a song that he hopes generations to come will sing, a song that speaks of sadly inevitable future waywardness and how the Lord will deal with that. It’s from that song that our sermon text comes.
3. This song from Deuteronomy 32 comprises Moses’ last words apart from the brief blessings pronounced upon the tribes of Israel. He’s done preaching law. Now it’s time to consider what will happen in the future as Israel disobeys that law. How will God respond? This is what we’re going to talk about today in our message from God’s Word.
4. Ok, so you’ve disobeyed the Law of God, and I mean really disobeyed it, and now the nasty consequences are bearing down on you: diminished health, ruptured relationships and upset neighbors, job loss, a damaged reputation, financial debts, earthly goods repossessed, doubt, depression, and anxiety. The list could go on, and there’s little you can do to fix the mess. You can try. You had banked your happiness on all the things that got you into this hot mess in the first place. I doubt it happened all at once. It’s just that you got your eyes off your Rock, the one sure source of security. By the way, Martin Luther, in the Large Catechism, asked this question: “What does it mean to have a god? Or, what is God?” His answer: “A god means that from which we are to expect all good and in which we are to take refuge in all distress” [LC I 1–2].)
5. It’s not that one day you actively decided to set aside your Rock, the One who simply is, and there is none beside him. You began to think of God as one source of good among many—to be sure, the chief source, but, nevertheless, one among many. Ever so slowly, you began to look to other things for your good and security. It probably all started thoughtlessly. Something just presented an innocent opportunity to you. It seemed to make sense. So many other people around you were doing it. You took it, and then took some more, until you were caught, so that here you are today, beginning to see that those so-called “opportunities” are actually enemies out to get you.
6. You do have enemies out to get you, and sometimes your biggest enemy is your own sinful nature. Here’s an illustration of how we can often become our own worst enemy. Finlee Farnham was thirty-one years old, unmarried, living with his parents, and collecting 1960s vintage transistor radios. (I know. It’s weird.) Against his parents’ better judgment, he went out quickly one day to buy a Marvel Model 6 YR-15A, aqua colored radio and in vintage condition. What a find!
7. Out in the car, Finlee set up his GPS. He looked down at his gas gauge. Hmm . . . maybe enough to get there. Anyway, he’d fill up along the way. (Finlee’s a little absentminded.) Well, you know what happened. He was several miles from anywhere and ran out of gas. He got out and took a shortcut through a field to the main highway. A few minutes later, he began to notice the chigger bites. By the time he got home that evening (without the Marvel 6 YR-15A radio), he was in a sour mood. He didn’t want to hear anything from his mom and dad. He went to take a shower and discovered not only the chigger bites but also several tick bites, which developed into Lyme disease. Being sick, he wasn’t able to get back to his car, which then two days later was impounded. He missed several weeks of work and didn’t have the money to get his car out of impound, so it was sold at auction.
8. Do you think his mother told him, “I told you so”? No. She nursed him through months of chronic disease. Meanwhile, his father helped him sell off a couple hundred radios, some for a pretty penny. Now Finlee could buy a new car and get on with some kind of productive life. God’s people regularly make a mess of things. We deserve nothing but God’s contempt and disgust, but he doesn’t give up on us. Our Heavenly Father has, “compassion on his servants, when he sees that their power is gone” (Deut 32:36).
9. Now all of you know the Law of God. Ok, maybe you don’t know it well, at least as it’s written in Holy Scriptures, but then again maybe you do. In any case, it’s written on our hearts, and God has baked it into his creation. So, I’m not going to talk to you a lot about the content of that Law. I’m not going to ask you what you were thinking when you did what you did.
10. The question is, if we know God’s Law, why do we disobey it? Why do we stray from it? And when we do, does God just wipe his hands of us? That’s the burning question our Old Testament Reading from Deuteronomy 32 presents, and it’s one that has preoccupied God’s people from time out of memory. Your experience isn’t unique. You’re not the first one to blow it.
11. But this is a delicate moment. If you’re ashamed of your sin and dig in to prop up your pride, God will let you do that for a while. He’ll say to you, “Where are those gods of yours, the rock in which you took refuge? Did they accept your offerings? Have they answered your prayers? Keep offering to them. Keep praying to them. Let’s see how this works out.” (Hint: he’s being sarcastic.) God doesn’t really want you to do that, but then, sometimes we’re just so stubborn that we have to get into the mess even deeper before we’ll look to the one true Rock for help, the only One who is our true good and security.
12. Yes, we have made a royal mess of it all. But the Lord will vindicate us. He will have compassion on us. He sees that we are powerless against these things—including our own sinful nature—that have caught us. We’re so powerless, it’s as though our hands have been cut off, the blood has drained out of us, and now we’re a quivering heap of sadness. Away with our pride! Our power, our hands, aren’t going to do what we need. It’s gone.
13. Here’s what God our Heavenly Father, your Rock, says to your enemies: “I, even I, am he, and there is no god beside me; I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand” (Deuteronomy 32:39). And how does he do that? By stretching out his own hands. He does his greatest work when he is most powerless, hands pinned to the cross, the blood draining out. God takes vengeance on our enemies by taking the blows that were coming our way. All those enemies were out to get you. They were bearing in on you. You were circled. Suddenly, Jesus your Rock came to you as a decoy, drawing them off. He took on the form of a servant, your servant. He dies. You live. You are forgiven of your sins, you are free. Amen. Now the peace of God that passes all understanding, guard your hearts, and your minds in Christ Jesus, until life everlasting. Amen.
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