Shema, Part 1
Joel Gorveatte · Tidal Church Moncton · February 6, 2022 · Finding Wisdom series
Joel Gorveatte teaches on Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema, showing that wisdom begins with knowing there is one God and loving Him with all our heart, soul and strength, and that this love shapes daily life, family and every choice we make.
More from Joel Gorveatte · The Finding Wisdom series
Topics: Love, Discipleship, Worship
Transcript
[0:00] Man, okay. I'm going to make the question, Pársca y si le question, vois si le question. Here's the question that I want to change up a little bit today. Normally you go, who's ready to study God's Word today? And I hope you are. But I want to make it more general just because, man, it's good to see you. And those of you who are with us online as well, you're not second-class citizens. We're glad that you're with us online as well. But everybody who happens to be here today, hey, let me just ask you, who here is glad to have some church? Wow, wow, wow. Thank you so much for being with us and wherever you are today.
[0:47] I want to begin with this question. What if there was one single passage of Scripture in the Old Testament that is the foundation for all of wisdom itself? And what if that one passage of Scripture that might be the foundation for all of wisdom itself, what if it is also the foundation upon which the rest of Scripture is built? Are you ready? And here's what we're going to look at today. Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4 through 9.
[1:36] So if you have a Bible, you're welcome to open that up now. You can jot it down to look at it later if you'd like because we'll have it on the screen. But where is Deuteronomy? Well, it is in the Old Testament up near the front. And the first five books of the Old Testament are called the Pentateuch. The Pentateuch, obviously Penta for five. And so the Pentateuch of the Old Testament are the first five books, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. And many of you have heard of this in Judaism called the Torah, right? You've heard of the Torah. The Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible are called the Torah in Judaism, which is the foundation for our faith as Christians.
[2:25] And so when you look at this last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy, you find a passage of Scripture and in particular a couple of verses that Jesus himself said are the most important commands in the entire Bible and the foundation for our lives. And so before we read it, I want to ask you, those of you here in the room and those of you who are at home as well, wherever you might be at this moment, if everybody could stand for just a moment out of reverence for this amazing passage of Scripture. For the last 3,300 years, since 1,300 years before Jesus was born, the people of God and Jesus himself have pointed to Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4 through 9.
[3:30] Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates. And so there it is. Now what I want to ask you to do, we're going to go back to the beginning and this time, now that you've got it, let's read it out loud together. Deuteronomy chapter 6, beginning in verse 4. And everybody at home, if you would join us. Here, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.
[4:49] Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates. Thus saith the word of the Lord. You may be seated. Now, many of you already know that this passage of scripture is called the Shema. Shema is a Hebrew word and it's the word for the very first verse or the very first part of that first verse, verse 4, here. The Hebrew word for here is Shema.
[5:41] And so when it says here, O Israel, this is called in the longer name is the Shema Yisrael in Hebrew. Let me hear you say it. Shema Yisrael. Here we go. It is the Shema Yisrael. Oh, your Hebrew is so good today. One more time. I just want to hear you say it. Be sure you put a little bit of a little bit of trill on it. Okay. What is it called? It's called the Shema Yisrael. Beautiful. Now, the beginning of wisdom we find is when you recognize that the Lord our God is one. There is one God. And that the purpose of life itself is when you love that one God with all your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your strength, which leads to the question, how do you do that?
[6:45] And the Shema goes on to answer that question. And it says, the way that you do that in the next verse is by keeping his commandments upon your hearts, to meditate upon his word, to study his word, to love his word, to live by his word, to make it the foundation for everything, to put it upon our hearts, to impress it upon our children, to teach our children the scripture from the very youngest of ages. That's why it's so important to bring our young ones to church and to give them good Bible resources online, like our children's ministry provides and others, and to teach them as they are young and as they're growing up to impress the word of God upon their heart as well.
[7:35] And to talk about it, wherever you go, when you sit at home and when you walk along the road to speak of God and of his word and his promises, when you lie down at night to go to sleep and when you get up in the morning to go about your day, that you would tie it as symbols on your hands and on your forehead. In other words, that everything you put your hand to and everything you put your mind to would be for the sake of God's word and for his glory and him alone. And to write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates and literally to make it the foundation for your home and for everything you do to be for the glory of God that you would love him with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.
[8:26] And so here's how they applied this in their families. As a young child, as soon as they were able to speak, they would begin to be taught to memorize the Shema. In fact, it's fairly safe to imagine that the very first verse of scripture that Jesus probably ever learned was memorizing the Shema. And a child would ask his father or her father, what does it mean to love the Lord your God with all your heart and soul and strength? And the father would say it means that we would rather die. We would give up our very lives before we would betray the Lord our God.
[9:18] And this is what made them different from all the other ancient people. Everyone else in the ancient world would just worship whatever God was most popular. If you picked up and moved to another city, you could just worship their God. If you married into a new family, you might worship their family's favored gods. But the Israelites were different. They would rather die than to forsake or betray the one true God. And so if you were killed for your faith as a martyr, the last words that you would speak upon your lips would be the words of Shema. Yet again, with Jesus as he hung on the cross, we know it's not his final word because his last word scriptures say where it is finished.
[10:11] And I can imagine before that as he hung on the cross, he most likely said these words that he would have memorized as a child. That he one day said was the greatest commandment of all. Shema Yisrael. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. So love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These were the first words from the mouth of a child and the last words you might speak before death, the beginning and the end, the first and the last. John Orberg said something about these words that I'll never forget.
[11:05] He said, Israel believed that this command, this Shema said something wonderful about God. It's said that God wants to be loved. Nobody else believed in a God like that. It's one thing to say God ought to be feared and everybody would have feared God because all the other gods in the ancient world would generally demand something like infant sacrifice. But this God wanted to be loved and it's a vulnerable thing to want to be loved. There's something endearing about somebody who wants to be loved. Now I know I told this story probably within the last couple of years.
[11:52] I remember telling this story to you, but some of you may have not heard it and so I'm not going to tell the whole story. I'll just tell the first part of it here today because there's something I think that applies here. Tracy and I started dating when we were in university. Now we had already known each other five years prior to that. We went to Indiana Wesleyan University. I transferred there when I was in my third year of university and she was in her first year and neither of us had planned it that way. But we met there after having known each other for five years and we had both lived. She was born and raised in Virginia and I had spent all of my teenage years in Virginia from middle school on up through to graduating in high school. And so we had known each other when we were high school students.
[12:46] We had known each other five years before running into each other again on the sidewalk at Indiana Wesleyan University and we were talking and we had chatted a couple of times throughout that semester. And this was the beginning of January and it was cold outside and we stopped and chatted outside of the chapel one time after a worship service. And as we were talking, all of a sudden I asked her out. I said, Tracy, would you like to go to dinner with me tonight? And she looked me in the eye and she said, well, it's about time. No, no, that's not exactly what she said. That was maybe the essence of it, but she didn't exactly say that, but she did say yes.
[13:35] And so we went out to dinner that night and we went out the next night and the night after that and we became really serious really quickly. I mean, it took her no time at all to just fall head over heels for me. But it was mutual. And we got really serious really quickly. And when it came to any other dating relationships that I had ever had, I had always been very, very cautious with the words, I love you. And so I think I had only used it one time ever before in my entire life. And, you know, I didn't just go around saying to girls, I love you. To me, that meant really serious, serious commitment.
[14:23] But I finally decided it's time to communicate to her my level of commitment that I'm all about this. And so we went out one night and you've heard me tell before that I made a mixtape because that's what you did back in the early 90s, right? You made a sign of romance. And so I made a mixtape, mostly made up of Beatles songs, because nothing says I love you like, yeah, yeah, yeah, she loves you. And so I played a song for her from the Beatles. Listen, do you want to know a secret? Let me whisper in your ear. Ooh, ooh, ooh. And then comes the line, what's the secret? I'm in love with you.
[15:15] And so I turned down the Beatles. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I turned down the volume and I looked her in the eye and I took a big breath and I said, Tracy, I have something to tell you. I love you. And then I waited because what follows is one of the most nervous moments of a man's life. Am I right? Because I don't know what she's going to say. Is she going to wait and say, well, that's nice. No, thanks. And apparently it turned out all right, as you can see. But in that moment, that is a moment of vulnerability when you just put yourself out there. And in that moment, what I was saying to her was, Tracy, thou shalt have no other guys before me. That I know you have other relationships and people you love, friends and family and priorities and ambitions.
[16:12] And I know that you love God first and foremost in your life. But after God in your heart, I just want to ask, can I have the exclusive rights to your heart? That you would declare your love for me more than any of the rest. I love you. Will you love me back? And in essence, that is what God is saying in the Shema. It's mind blowing when you realize that it is this great and powerful God who is making himself vulnerable and putting himself out there and saying, I love you. Will you love me back?
[16:57] And folks, this was so different from all of the other gods of the ancient world. Other gods were not like this. The gods of the Mesopotamia were often Greek gods who were mean and vengeful, or maybe like hundreds of years later after Jesus. You have more modern religions like Islam with Allah who is a God who is judgment and punishment. But with the Shema, Israel had a relationship with a God who, yes, was judgment. Yes, was punishment. But over all of that, wanted to forgive because he is a God of love. And so the Shema is God being vulnerable and putting himself out there and saying, I love you.
[17:45] Will you love me back? Are you with me? Are we together on this so far? Okay, let's shift gears here a little bit and talk about how this applied to daily life. How many times a day did they recite Shema? There's a clue. Look at verse seven. We know it was at least twice. How do you know that? Because verse seven says, when you lie down, because the beginning of the day in Judaism is not morning. The beginning of the day is when? At sunset. And so the day begins in the evening when the sun sets and then continues until the next day sunset.
[18:31] And so when you lie down and when you get up, that is at least twice. So every night and every morning, it would take out their talith. And I've taught on this before and we won't go into great detail about what this is and its function. But you would go into your prayer closet, into the shadow of his wings, and they would begin to pray the Shema with the, next slide, with what are called the Teflon. The Teflon are something that developed later, whether or not this is what God actually meant.
[19:21] I'm not sure that it is, but this is how they would apply it is you see the little leather box. There's one here attached to these straps that go all the way to the hand and back. And then another one strapped to the forehead and those little leather boxes in them, it contained a passage of scripture, a verse or on a little scroll. And that would then be placed in the little box. And that was the interpretation of tying them as symbols on your hands and binding them on your foreheads. You'll see that even to this day with an Orthodox Jew like in New York City or if you go to Jerusalem with us next year. And now, I think that what this actually means we're supposed to do, whether or not it's wear a leather box on your head, I think is debatable.
[20:15] I think this is about making sure that the word of God is on your hands. Everything you put your hands to would be for the glory of God and on your mind that everything you set your mind to would be on the glory of God to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and all your strength. And get this, here's how excited they were to do this. In Jesus' day, you had the Bible scripture, right? You had the Old Testament in Jesus' day, but you also had alongside the Old Testament what they called the oral law. It was not Bible, it was not scripture, but it was rabbinical interpretations of how to read and apply the Bible.
[21:01] So various commands of the Old Testament, you wonder, well, how exactly am I supposed to do it? And so the rabbis would debate these things and they were handed down from generation to generation to generation for hundreds of years as the oral law of the rabbis on what to do when it comes to applying the Bible. So it was still oral by memory when Jesus was around, but a couple of hundred years later around the year 200 AD, they wrote this down into what is called the Mishnah. Everybody that was at Jesus' time an oral law, and then was later written down 200 years later, that they had different interpretations of how to recite Shema.
[21:57] And here's what's interesting. Do you know in this huge book that is not scripture, but that they shared alongside scripture from the rabbis that there was one subject that was considered to be the most important subject, the very first chapter, the very first verse. What did they consider the most important subject to cover? And it was this. The very first line of all the books of the Shema in Barakot is, when can I recite the Shema? In other words, when is it actually considered evening? I can't do it too early or too late. I want to make sure I do it right. When is it too early in the morning?
[22:44] In other words, they wanted to know how early can I possibly get up to say my words of love to God and it still count? Like I want to do it right. Now compare that to how we get up in the morning. We get up with something we call a what kind of clock? We call it an alarm clock. Notice we don't call it an opportunity clock. We don't call it a seize the day clock. We don't call it a rise and shine muffin clock. We call it an alarm clock, which I think kind of sums up how we start our days, right? But they wanted to make sure that they started their day right. And so they would take the tallit and they would begin to say Shema.
[23:36] And they asked, when can we start? When is it too early? And so the first rabbi in the Mishnah suggests that when you can distinguish, when the sun is up that you can distinguish blue from white on your tallit, that then it is finally morning and you can recite Shema. And the next rabbi in the Mishnah says, no, because you can tell that even in the moonlight, blue from white. And so the next rabbi says in the Mishnah, when you can tell blue from green, because the sun has come up enough, that's when it's okay to recite Shema. And then another rabbi said, it's when you can distinguish blue from red, blue from red.
[24:25] But nobody listened to him because he was a Montreal Canadian. Okay, that was a joke. That last one. The other two were right. That was a joke. By the way, I always like to bless people. I love everybody here and everybody at home. Don't get me wrong. But I have a special place in my heart for anybody who sits up front because I know that's hard. And so I brought this as a gift for somebody who sits up front. And Mary, yeah, you showed me your shirt this morning. It says, I am a front porch friend, Luke 1520. She came wearing a Bible shirt. So that's your gift today.
[25:12] Shema was so important that when you said it along the road, if a friend passed by, you were not allowed to interrupt the saying of Shema in order to greet your friend. Unless they made an accommodation in the Mishnah, unless it was a Roman soldier who could kill you and then you were okay with interrupting Shema. They said, that's okay. The Shema could be interrupted by death. Because in Better Code chapter three of the Mishnah, again, the oral law, he who's dead relative lives before him is exempt from reciting Shema. Now remember, this is not Bible. The Mishnah is not Bible. It's not Bible. It's what the rabbis said about it. And this is going to be really important.
[26:01] I want you to remember he who's dead relative lies before him is exempt from reciting Shema. Because that's going to be really important next week when we see what Jesus had to say about this. Okay, this is really important. And so as we drive this home, let me just ask one more question. Why is this such a big deal? It's because they believed that the foundation for wisdom and the purpose of life is found in Shema. The answer to every question, what do I do with my life choices, whatever best accomplishes Shema? How do I make my decisions concerning my career and what to do? What best glorifies God and loves him with all your heart, soul, and strength and honors his commands in your life? How should I raise my children?
[27:02] Well, how best can you focus them towards Shema? How should I spend money whatever best accomplishes Shema? Because the Word of God says when you begin to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and put his commands upon your heart, that nothing else should get in the way of that. I wonder how many of you know somebody who's a real smarty pants? I mean, somebody who's like super big brainiac, like, you know, people who got like super high ACT scores and the best education and they know all the stuff and straight A's and education through the roof and big IQ and yet when it comes to handling life, they're just clueless.
[27:49] You know what I'm talking about? People who seem so smart and yet sometimes act so dumb. There was an airplane. This is a joke. There was an airplane. I tell you it's a joke just so you can know when to laugh. Okay, that makes me feel better. There was an airplane with three people on it. There was the pilot, a boy scout, and the world's smartest man, but they only had two parachutes and they started to have engine trouble and the plane starts to go down and they've got to decide what to do. And so the pilot and the boy scout and the world's smartest man are talking. The world's smartest man says, look, I'm so sorry to the two of you, but my brain is so big. The world needs my intelligence to solve all of its problems. I'm sorry.
[28:35] I have to take one of the parachutes and survive for the good of the world. And so he grabs one of the parachutes, jumps out of the airplane and away he goes. And so the brave and heroic pilot looks at the boy and you still have your whole life ahead of you. You take the last parachute and I will go down with the plane. And the boy scout said, relax, captain. We still have two parachutes. The world's smartest man left with my backpack. Some of you didn't get left with my backpack. There you go. Thank you, Mary Lynn.
[29:20] I knew I gave the person the right gift there, right? The right person. That is the kind of world we live in, isn't it? So often people who claim to be so smart, so intelligent to have it all figured out. And then we look and it's like smart people all the time are jumping out of airplanes with backpacks in our world. And meanwhile, they look at us and they say the Bible is foolishness. You shouldn't believe that ancient stuff that we're the source of wisdom. We know what life is about. We know what identity is about. We know what money is about. We know what about dating and relationships and sex are about. We know what all of this is about. And meanwhile, the word of God says, Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
[30:06] The word of God says the truth is found in Shema, that the first priority of life is to know that there is one God and to love him with all of your heart and with all of your soul and with all of your strength and to put his commands upon your heart and he will make your paths straight. And so we have another assignment for you this week, more of a gift, I guess I would say. A couple of weeks we gave you a lock screen that you could put on your phone. Well, we made a new one for this teaching and it is the Shema. And so if you go to our, instead of going to the website, actually type in directly just like this, mw.church slash lock screen. And there you can save it to your phone or your iPad or whatever you want to save it to.
[31:03] And then you can go in and make it your lock screen so that every time you open your phone, and just like I said a couple of weeks ago, if you need help doing that, just ask anybody under the age of 25, and I'm sure they can help you, or you call the church office and we'll get somebody to help you if you want to figure out how to do that on your smartphone. But to have it with us all the time, every day, for the next week, maybe you want to just write it down. It's Deuteronomy chapter six, verse four and well, it's verse four through nine, but verse four and five in particular that we're going to focus on Deuteronomy six, verse four and five. And every night before you go to bed to make these the last words on your lip.
[31:54] Hear, O people, the Lord our God is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And when you wake up in the morning to be reminded that that is the foundation for wisdom and the meaning of life, to know that there is one God and to say it, let it come across your lips first thing in the morning. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. I might even teach you to say it all in Hebrew next week, the whole thing. And when you do that, every morning and every night, you will be joining with the tradition of 3 ,300 years. But next week, next week, we're going to see what Jesus had to say about all this. Because next week, we're going to see when somebody came to Jesus and said, what is the meaning of life? What is the greatest commandment in all of scripture?
[33:01] And Jesus answered what? Jesus said, the answer is Shabbat. And we're going to look at that next week because then, here's what's going to shock you. Next week, we're going to see that then Jesus in that moment did something shocking, something radical, something that some might even have considered in that day heretical. Jesus actually added to the Shabbat. You're not going to want to miss it. Let's stand together.
[33:55] And so father, in this quiet moment, we invite you to speak to us or that we would meditate upon your word. We would keep your commandments upon our heart, that we would impress them upon our children, that we would talk about them everywhere we go, along the road, when we sit down and when we get up, when we lie down and when we arise, or that we would, in everything we put our hand to, in everything we set our minds to, in every choice we make for our household.
[34:56] Lord, may it be focused on first and foremost, loving you because you first loved us. Loving you with all our heart and with all of our soul and with all of our strength. And we know scripture tells us that there is something wrong inside of us, apart from Jesus. That there is something that makes it impossible to love you the way that we ought. That there's sin, rebelliousness, disobedience in us. And because of that, we cannot love you the way that we need to, apart from Jesus. And if you're here today and you recognize that is true in your life, if you're with us online and you recognize that as much as you have tried to love God, it's like there's something holding you back. There's something that's not right, no matter how hard you try to reach out to Him.
[35:58] You seem to fall short. You need to understand that's why Jesus died on the cross to pay the price for our sin because sin is what separates us from Him. And so we cannot do this. We cannot live out Shema without first surrendering to Jesus. And if you need to do that right now, what the Bible says is that we need to confess our sin. Feel the weight of your sin. Confess it to Him. Right now, let Him bring to mind the things in your life that are displeasing to Him. And then say, Lord, I confess.
[36:44] I confess that I've sinned. I confess that I've been disobedient. I confess that I've been selfish. Confess and believe. Believe that Jesus died on the cross to take away that sin, to cancel your debt, to wash you clean, to take the punishment that you deserved. He did it for you. And so right now, say, I believe that Jesus died for me. Confess, receive, believe, and receive. Receive it right now. Receive Him. Invite Him to come in and to wash you clean. Confess it. Believe in Him.
[37:33] Receive His forgiveness and commit. Commit and say, I will follow you now, Lord. Now and for the rest of my life, that you would be glorified in me, that every fiber of my being would sing of my love for you. That all of my choices, that all of my ways, that all of my priorities, that all of my focus would be upon my love for you. With all my heart, with all my soul. With all my strength.