Jesus remembered what Israel forgot.
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 "Listen, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.
5 And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your strength.
6 And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today.
7 Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up.
8 Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. 9 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
The greatest challenge in the Christian life is not gaining new knowledge, it is remembering God's faithfulness. We are prone to forget His goodness, slow to love Him with our whole heart, and often fail to pass that faith on to the next generation.
It amazes me how much knowledge we are expected to gain during our lifetime. Just when we have accumulated enough wisdom and experience to recognize God's faithfulness through both our successes and failures, our opportunity to pass those lessons on to the next generation begins to slip away.
That observation came to me recently while studying the Old Testament. Even in the lives of the heroes of the faith, we see people very much like ourselves. There is surprisingly little spiritual growth over the course of a lifetime. They die, and their children begin the journey again.
Consider Father Abraham. He didn't have a relationship with the one true God when he was called to leave his homeland. Abraham made some serious mistakes along the way as God patiently increased his capacity to trust and obey.
But by the time Abraham had matured in his faith, his life was nearly over. Isaac inherited only a small part of what his father had learned and still had to develop his own faith. Jacob continued the journey, and then the twelve tribes carried it forward.
When Jesus began His ministry, the nation had a strong belief in the one true God, and its knowledge of Scripture had grown considerably. Yet the deeper issue of the heart remained. Wholehearted love, trust, and obedience were still a struggle, just as they had been with Abraham.
Each generation began with a slight advantage over the previous one, but the tension between personal spiritual growth and passing our faith to the next generation runs throughout Scripture.
Moses knew that he was about to die, and Israel was preparing to enter the Promised Land without the leader God had used for the last forty years. Before Joshua took command and before Israel crossed the Jordan River, Moses gathered the people one final time to remind them of the truths they must never forget.
This helps explain why Deuteronomy is such an important book.
As Moses spoke to Israel on the edge of the Promised Land, he renewed the covenant with a new generation, calling them to love the Lord with all their heart, soul, and strength. Moses knew that before Israel could truly obey God's law, they first had to love the God who gave it.
The success of God's people depended on this, both then and in the future. That is why God expected parents to love Him wholeheartedly and pass this truth on to their children. The Jews understood the importance of Deuteronomy and still recite the Shema today, but somewhere along the way the church largely forgot.
I think that is part of the point I am trying to make. We have largely stopped passing on the importance of Deuteronomy to our children, and its significance in Christianity today seems surprisingly small. While researching this study, I found very few sermons on Deuteronomy, and many commentaries and study Bibles skim the surface without emphasizing its central message.
This book carries unusual weight throughout the rest of Scripture. Jesus quoted Deuteronomy more than almost any other Old Testament book, using it to resist Satan's temptations and identifying the Shema as the greatest commandment. Where Israel failed to trust and obey God in the wilderness, Jesus remained perfectly faithful. He not only taught the heart of Deuteronomy; He lived it.
The historical books that follow evaluate Israel's faithfulness by Deuteronomy's standards, and the New Testament reveals that the heart transformation Deuteronomy ultimately requires is provided through Jesus, the Mediator of the new covenant.
The first four chapters review God's faithfulness throughout the wilderness. Chapter five repeats the Ten Commandments, and chapter six reveals the foundation upon which every other command rests:
God's people must love the Lord above everything else.
The Jews call these verses the Shema, named after the Hebrew word for "Hear" or "Listen." For centuries it has been recited morning and evening as a confession that the Lord alone is God and deserves our complete devotion.
All other loves must be secondary. This is a wholehearted commitment that places God above every other affection. Such love does not come naturally, and that is exactly why it must be passed on to the next generation.
That is our hope today. As we journey toward our own Promised Land, we face the same temptation to forget God's goodness. We have Jesus as our example. He lived the life we could never live and became the first and only perfect fulfillment of the Shema.
David expressed the desire of every believer when he wrote:
Psalm 103:1–2 "Let all that I am praise the LORD; with my whole heart, I will praise his holy name. Let all that I am praise the LORD; may I never forget the good things he does for me."
Like Abraham, Israel, and David, we all fall short of loving God with our whole heart, soul, and strength. Jesus alone fulfilled the Shema perfectly.
As we journey toward our own Promised Land, may we remember God's goodness, love Him above everything else, and point the next generation to the One who perfectly lived the Shema for us.
