Shema, Part 2

Joel Gorveatte · Tidal Church Moncton · February 13, 2022 · Finding Wisdom series

Joel Gorveatte continues in Deuteronomy 6:4-9, the Shema, and Jesus' teaching in Matthew 22 on the greatest commandment. Loving God with everything is inseparable from loving our neighbours, and even good pursuits can quietly pull us from both.

More from Joel Gorveatte · The Finding Wisdom series

Topics: Love, Relationships, Discipleship

Transcript

[0:01] Amen. Wow, it is so good to see all your beautiful faces. And thank you everybody who joined us online today as we continue and we're soon winding down this series called Finding Wisdom. And as we finish today, I just want to ask you the question, right? Voicil a quesion. Es que are you ready to study God's Word today? Oh, all right, that's all we're going to get. Let's try that again. Are you ready to study God's Word today? The foundation for our lives and that's what we're going to look at today as we started with this question last week.

[0:56] What if there was a single passage of Scripture that is the foundation for all of wisdom itself? And what if that Scripture is also the foundation upon which the entire rest of the Bible is built? And we said if there is any passage of Scripture that matches this description, it would be found in Deuteronomy chapter six. And we saw that Deuteronomy is the last book in the first five books of the Bible, five Penta, the Pentateuch. That's the term for the first five books of the Bible, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. You've heard of the Torah before in Judaism. The first five books of the Bible are called the Torah.

[1:49] And so as we look at this Himself declared to be the foundation for everything. Deuteronomy chapter six, verse four through nine. Can I ask you to stand out of reverence for the reading of this holy, amazing passage of Scripture? Let's read this out loud together in unison, everybody together. It says, Hear, 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.

[2:37] 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 we talked, if you want to go ahead and have a seat, thank you so much. We talked about how this is called the Shema. Everybody say Shema. Shema. And that comes from the word here. The first word of this passage here in Israel is Shema. So when it says Hear, O Israel, in Hebrew you say that Shema Yisrael.

[3:30] Everybody say that together. Here we go. You did a wonderful job last week. Let me hear it again. We say Shema Yisrael. Hear, O Israel. And so last week we gave you kind of a gift that you could use throughout the week, this past week. I put it on my phone and hopefully you put it on yours, many of you at mw.church.lockscreen so that you could say it every morning first thing when you wake up and every night before you go to sleep. Somebody sent us an email about this this week. They said, I just wanted to say what a great idea the lock screen is. It was so impactful. I woke up this morning and grabbed my phone to shut off the alarm and there it was, God's word in my face.

[4:22] What a wake up call. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And thank you for sending in that feedback. And so we said that we were going to look at a little more of this in Hebrew before we continued on. I told you last week and so I'll put this on the screen so that we can all read it together. Are you ready? Shema Yisrael, Adonai, Eloheinu. Okay, this is a challenging language, yes? And when you read this from opposite of the way that we read it, you read it from right to left instead of from left to right. And so when you read this, Shema Yisrael, Adonai, Eloheinu, Adonai, Echad.

[5:09] I've highlighted here in yellow a word that you see three different times. It's here again as well in the first two verses of the Shema. These letters are Yod Hei, Vod Hei. Yod Hei, Vod Hei, which pronounced sounds something like Yahweh. Yahweh. Now, this is just kind of a little language detour for us for just a second, but hopefully you might find it helpful even if it has very little to do with what we're talking about today. Yahweh. So, but interestingly, instead of saying in Hebrew, Shema Yisrael, Yahweh, Eloheinu, Yahweh, Echad.

[6:01] Instead, it's they say Adonai. Do you know why that is? Many of you know this because the most holy name of God, Yahweh, was believed by the ancient Jews to be so holy, too holy to even be uttered from human lips. And so whenever in the Bible it says the most holy name of God, Yahweh, and they saw the letters Yod Hei, Vod Hei, instead they would replace it with the word Lord or in Hebrew Adonai. Adonai. And so that's why even though it says Yahweh, when you say the Shema in Hebrew, you don't say what it actually has written.

[6:47] Instead of Yahweh, you say Adonai. Shema Yisrael, Adonai, Eloheinu, Adonai, Echad. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength. This is believed to be the foundation for everything knowing. First and foremost that there is one God and that the purpose of life is to love the Lord your God with everything that you are. And so when you look at that again in English, if we'll go to the next slide, when you look at that, it leads you to the question, how do you do this?

[7:40] And we said last week that the Shema even provides that answer in the very next verse as you continue into verse 6. It says that we are to keep His commands. It says we are to keep His commands upon our hearts, to impress them upon our children, to teach our young ones, to talk about God's commands, His word when you sit at home and when you walk along the road everywhere you go, when you lie down at night, when you get up in the morning to tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads that literally everything we are to put our hand to and everything we set our mind upon is to be for the glory of God according to His commands and to write them on your door frames of your houses and your gates, the foundation.

[8:32] In other words, it is the foundation for everything. And so as we look at that first part again, why do we need a foundation? We could go ahead and put that again on the screen. Why do we need such a foundation? Why is this so important? Well, we said at the end of the teaching last week that one of the problems in life is that sometimes the smartest people make the biggest mistakes. Have you ever noticed this? Sometimes the smartest people make the biggest mistakes. Now let me show you a little research to prove that to be true because you look like smart people, right?

[9:23] You look pretty smart, smartest people I've seen today at least. And so let's put this little math problem on the screen. A bat and a ball cost a dollar and 10 cents together. How much do they cost together? A dollar and 10 cents, the bat and the ball. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. So if the bat costs a dollar more and together they cost a dollar and 10, how much does the ball cost? I'll let you think about it for just a second. But oh, I heard multiple answers. How many of you think it's 10 cents? It's 10 cents. Yes. How many of you think it's, I don't want to say, I'm afraid. It looks like it's your question.

[10:10] It kind of is because guess what? If you said 10 cents, then you agreed with the smartest students in the world at the top Ivy League schools around the world. And yet it would be wrong. The answer is five cents. How do we know that it's five cents? Well, let's do the math really quickly. A bat and a ball cost a dollar and cents together. But the bat costs a dollar more than the ball. So the ball has to cost five cents for in order for them together to add up to a dollar and 10. Now, why is it, I asked a bunch of people this question this week and every single person got it wrong.

[10:58] Why is it? It's so simple. And yet what happens is, what happens is that we've got a screen that I think shows the, no, back one. There's a slide missing. Okay. My bad. Oh, that's the one I'm looking for. Yes. That in our attempts at logical thinking, we tend to skip necessary steps. What we tend to do is our brain to be expedient tends to go with what seems right and what feels right we assume is right. And so Daniel Keneman from Princeton University did this research study and it quotes him in the New York, in the New Yorker magazine and says that, that, that actually we jump to conclusions and the smarter we are, sometimes the more mistakes we tend to make.

[12:00] Look at this slightly. We're more likely to engage in deliberate deliberation. We're slightly more vulnerable to common mental mistakes. Education also isn't a savior. As Keneman and Shane Frederick first noted many years ago, more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton, and MIT gave the incorrect answer to the bat and ball question. And so the Shema reminds us, no matter how smart you think you are, to be careful about leaning on your own understanding. Proverbs 3, 5, and 6 says, there's trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, but in all of your ways submit to him and he will make your paths straight.

[13:00] And so how do we do that? The ancient rabbis pointed to Shema as the answer to every question in life. You wonder what, what, what should I, what choices should I make in life? The answer is always Shema. They said, what, what should I do with money? How, how should I make career decisions? How should I raise my, my children? What choices should I make?

[13:50] Thank you. Thank you, Rhoda. One, two. Oh yeah, yeah. Man, this is an example of Murphy's law today. Whatever can go wrong will go wrong. So whatever it takes is the answer to the question of parenting to the rabbis, to love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and to put his commandments upon your heart. Let me read to you from John Ortberg about his friend Jimmy. Jimmy and his son Davy were playing in the ocean down in Mexico. His family, wife, daughters, parents, and cousins were on the beach and Jimmy and little Davy were out in the water.

[14:35] All of a sudden this strong riptide swept them both out to sea. And so Jimmy is out there reaching for his son. They're trying to make it back to shore, but they can't make it, they're, they're drowning. And Jimmy said, all of a sudden I saw my life flash before my eyes. I thought my wife is going to have to have a double funeral for her husband and her son as we were being swept out to sea. But that day his cousin was also there. His cousin is an outdoorsman and he understands the the ocean and tides and how it works. And he knew that there was a sandbar nearby and that if you try to fight the current by trying to go back to shore with a riptide you will die.

[15:26] Your natural instinct says swim back to shore. Every fiber of your being says fight against the current. But this cousin knew if they did what seemed right trying to swim back to shore they would die. What they needed to do was swim sideways. And so he went and he stood as close as he could get in the water to Jimmy and to Davy on the sandbar in the water. And then this cousin lifted his hand up and said, you come to me, you come to me. And he saved their lives that day because he stood on the sandbar and said here is the firm foundation. If you try to save yourself you'll die.

[16:11] What you need to do is to come to me. And the word of God is that foundation in our lives to to help us from drowning in the foolishness of this world. And so then all of a sudden one day in the New Testament Jesus shows up and Jesus is about to do something radical and unexpected. Are you ready? So Jesus is going around teaching and he's the greatest rabbi ever. And one day in Matthew 22 verse 36 someone comes up and asks him, teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? And guess what Jesus said the answer is. Jesus said the answer is Shema.

[16:59] Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And all the Jews were like, yes, Jesus, finally we agree with you on something. You got the answer right. But then what Jesus said next was about to blow their minds because Jesus said, oh, no, no, no, I'm not done yet. Jesus said, yes, the answer is the most important commandment in all of scripture is to love the Lord your God with everything. But he says there's more. And Jesus is about to add to the Shema. And he says the second is just like the first. He says to love your neighbor as yourself and the prophets, all the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments.

[17:55] See, what Jesus is doing here is identifying a problem that Jesus says it is possible for us to get all religious and do all the right stuff and claim to love God and follow his commands and yet miss the whole point that that when we love God, it is impossible to do that with everything that we are if it does not also evidence itself in an increase in our love for other people. And can we just admit this is one of the great problems of religion, how often we try to love God while still holding on to our resentment for other people.

[18:48] And Jesus says you can't. That one has to be connected with the other. Later on in the New like this, he said we love others. Why? Because he first loved us. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates a brother or sister is a liar. He says, look, there is a really simple way to know whether you are loving God with all your heart, soul and strength. Like the Shema says. He says, all you have to do to test your relationship with God is by evaluating it through the lens of how you think about the people who upset you the most in the world.

[19:44] As a 1 John 4, 19 goes something like this. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates, fill in the blank. You just fill in the blank with whoever you're upset with the most right now. Maybe it's your next door neighbor. I can't believe they're driving me crazy. I'm so frustrated. I hope that they move and lose all their money on their house sale. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates their neighbor is a liar. How about somebody who stole from you? Whoever claims to love God, yet hates the person who stole from them is a liar.

[20:29] How about somebody who speaks poorly about you? Who's out there ruining your reputation and saying bad things about you? And you're so angry. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates that person is a liar. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates Justin Trudeau. Ooh, now it's starting to get painful, isn't it? Prime Minister of Canada is not everybody's favorite person in Canada. Some people love him, some people not so much. But whoever claims to love God, yet hates him, is a liar.

[21:16] Whoever claims to love God, yet hates the people in the freedom convoy protests, is a liar. Whoever claims to love God, yet hates the people who are out there speaking against the freedom convoy protests, is a liar. Do you see how incredibly probing this is? And you say, but you don't understand. You don't understand what they're doing or what this person has done to me. I'm so frustrated and upset and disappointed.

[22:02] And guess what? Jesus was upset and frustrated and disappointed with people on a regular basis too. And yet, if I cannot genuinely find love and compassion in my heart against for them, then listen, I need to recognize that I'm in a danger zone. That if I don't get that right with God, if I don't confess it, if I don't fall on my knees before Jesus, then my resentment against other people becomes a very real danger to my relationship with God. You see, I'm less concerned these days about how or about what we disagree on in our culture, and I'm more concerned about how we disagree about it. And so one more time, Matthew 22 verse 36, someone comes up to Jesus and asks him, teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the law? And Jesus replied, love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.

[23:12] This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the commands. Now, when you understand this, it begins to become a framework for everything in your life. To evaluate everything you say, everything you do, everything you think, everything you believe has to come into alignment with, is it better helping you love the Lord and love other people? This also becomes a framework by which you understand the rest of scripture. Because when you understand that Jesus said that this is what it's all about, these two things, then you begin to realize that anything you read in the Bible that seems to conflict in some way with these two things, it means that either I'm misunderstanding something, misreading something, or maybe I'm missing some information about the context.

[24:20] Let me give you an example of one passage in the New Testament that sometimes gets really confusing, because people look at it and they're like, man, Jesus is being really mean and harsh to this guy. And so let's see how context help us understand what maybe we're missing about how this fits into the great commandment. For example, so Matthew 8 21, this guy comes to Jesus and says to him, Lord, first, let me go and bury my father. I want to follow you, but my father has died and I need to go and be with my family and bury my father. But Jesus told him, no, follow me and let the dead bury their own dead. Whoa, Jesus, that is not very nice, right?

[25:09] That does not seem very loving, does it? That does not seem to fit into the great commandment to love God and to love others. What Jesus is telling him to do does not seem very loving to his family. Agreed? It's confusing for us. So let's look at the context. Remember last week, we talked about the oral law that was around at the time of Jesus. And so you have the oral law in the time of Jesus, which was not the Bible. It was not the Old Testament scripture, but it was the rabbinical traditions and interpretations that were around in terms of how to apply the Bible. So the Bible says this, and then they had the oral law that says, and the way that you should do that, the rabbi said, is by doing this, this, and this, and don't do that.

[25:56] And they had come up with all these extra things that were in addition to the Bible in the time of Jesus. Then about 200 years later, around 200 A.D., all of that was written down into the Mishnah. And so last week, I showed you one of the verses from the Mishnah, better quote chapter three. Again, this is not scripture. It was what the rabbis said about scripture, how to apply it. And chapter three said, he whose dead relative lies before him is exempt from reciting Shema. And so this guy is quoting from the oral tradition. And here's the problem. The rabbis were saying that when your relative died, you got an excuse from having to carry out your spiritual responsibilities.

[26:52] And so around the time of Jesus, this has grown to the point where the burial tradition would take over a year. They would bury that body in a tomb, like a cave, like you think of with Jesus in the tomb. And a stone would be rolled in front of the tomb to protect it. The body would decompose for over a year in the burial process. And then after about a year, they would come back, they would pick up the bones and put them in a box called an ossuary, a stone box about this big kind of a casket for just the bones. And this process took like over a year. And so this guy is saying to Jesus, Jesus, look, I really want to follow you and be your disciple.

[27:40] But I also have these other cultural expectations that I have to live up to. My community expects things from me. My family expects things from me. And so I need to do some of this other stuff that my community says I need to do. And then when I get around to it, sometime maybe next year, maybe I will come and follow you. And Jesus said, no, that's not what it takes to be a disciple. If you're going to follow me, you have to lay it all down and come and be my disciple today. No delay, no turning back. And I wrestled with that passage, with this poor young man who's lost his father and he's struggling between what his culture expects and what Jesus demands.

[28:32] And I literally, Thursday morning, was laying in bed in the darkness of the early morning. And I was thinking through this passage because I was wrestling with what does it mean? What is Jesus really saying to this young man who's lost his father? And all of a sudden I felt like it came to me clear as day. I grabbed my phone and literally put it in my notes to give to you because I felt like I heard something and I wanted to get it just right. And here's what I think it is that Jesus was saying. In ways we don't realize, pursuits that feel right and good and just and moral can subtly shift our focus away from the priority of loving God and loving others.

[29:36] The guy in this story says, Jesus, I have all these things that my culture expects of me and that I have to do in order to be a good person. And Jesus says, if you're not careful, things that you think are right and good and just and moral in ways you don't realize can begin to subtly shift your focus away from what it's really about, which is loving God and loving others. And nothing should come before that in our lives. If my politics get in the way of my love for God and loving others, then there's something wrong.

[30:24] If my job gets in the way of me loving God and being more loving to others, that's a challenge. If my financial concerns or my priorities or my personal preferences or my entertainment and hobbies and interests, if my thoughts and perspectives on all the things that are going on in the world today make me less loving to God and less loving to the other people around me, even the people I disagree with and people who drive me crazy, then there's a problem. And so with this in mind, we're going to start a new series here in a few weeks called United We Stand, loving people even when we disagree. Because again, frankly, I'm less concerned about all the things that we disagree on and more concerned about how we are disagreeing, even as Christians.

[31:36] And so just in closing today, I want to pose a question. It's a question that we're going to put on the screen so that you can meditate upon it, pray upon it, and listen to what God might have to say to you today. Ask the Lord, is there anything in what I think, do, say, write, or believe that is not loving to God and loving to others? And so what we're going to do is we're just going to give you some quiet time.

[32:26] And I'm just I'm going to go over there. We're going to bring down the lights so that you can spend some quiet time between you and God. Just ask the Lord this question. And whatever he lays on your heart, let's confess it and receive his forgiveness to make the priority of Shema and our lives. As Jesus said, the command above every other command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and strength and nothing get in the way of that and to love your neighbor, love other people as you love yourself, the greatest commandment.

[33:15] Let's spend some time in prayer asking God this question together.