I invite you to open your Bibles tonight as we turn together first to the New Testament for light upon our text in the Old Testament. The New Testament passage is 1 Thessalonians 4, and we read the verses 13 through 18. 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 13 through 18. You'll find that on page 879 in the New Testament portion of your Bibles. We're going to consider, as our text, Deuteronomy 14 in a moment. Deuteronomy 14, verses 1 and 2. But first, we read the Word of God from 1 Thessalonians 4 at verse 13. Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or to grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. According to the Lord's own word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left till the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will come down from heaven with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. Therefore, encourage each other with these words. And then over to Deuteronomy 14. Deuteronomy chapter 14, page 141 in the Old Testament section of your Bible, our text for this evening, the first two verses. You are the children of the Lord your God. Do not cut yourselves or shave the front of your heads for the dead, for you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be his treasured possession. There ends the reading of God's word. Beloved congregation in our Lord Jesus Christ, we are in our text tonight looking at a portion of the Bible often called the Pentateuch or the Torah or the law of God. In Deuteronomy particularly, we have Moses preaching to Israel as they together stand on the banks of the Jordan River waiting to enter into the promised land. And in Moses' sermon, he takes the Ten Commandments and he opens them up and applies them to the life of Israel as they are about to enter into the land. Now, in our culture today, the word law has a variety of meanings and significations. For example, when we're riding down the highway and we see that sign which says speed limit 70 miles an hour, we experience the law as restriction. And that kind of law has one interest, and that is external action or conformity. Law as restriction is interested merely in outward behavior. If you're stopped by a police officer for breaking that law, he doesn't care at all. If you like the law, he doesn't care if you like him. He's not interested in a relationship between you and him. All he's interested in, given his calling and his task, is that you honor the prescription outwardly, that you honor the prescription of the law. That's one use of the word. Another use of the word is is law as suggestion. And this often happens in our homes, where as our children become adolescents and teenagers, we give them rules for behavior that are designed to be advisory. It's a good thing to come in at this time to get enough sleep in order to get out of bed and go to work the next day. It's a good thing to pick up your clothes and take care of them, or you're going to have to buy new clothes sooner than you'd like. Law as suggestion has as its goal advice. And then thirdly, there's the kind of use of the law that we have in our text, and in fact in most of the Old Testament. Law as sermon. Preached law. Unlike case law, as we understand it in those books that decorate a lawyer's office, unlike case law, God's law is permeated with reasons for doing what he's saying, with motivation, with a description of God's love for his people. The goal of law as sermon is wisdom and maturity within a relationship. So you see, unlike the police officer, God is desperately interested that we love him with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That is the fulfillment of the law. You can't do what God asks if you don't love him, and if you're not in a relationship with him. And so tonight, as we look at part, a very small part of God's law, what we hope to see is how God stoops down, as it were, not merely to begin a relationship, but more especially to continue that relationship once begun. But more than that, as I see on the plaque here behind the pulpit, what we're going to see in this text is a portrait of Jesus Christ, a faint outline of His work and of His reason for coming to live and to suffer, to die and to rise again from the dead. So tonight the Lord summons His people to grieve, to grieve in covenant style. You notice, first of all, the address in our text. You are the children of the Lord your God. In this address, we hear the faint implication that life will one day overcome death. Secondly, notice the activity, the covenantal activity that God prescribes, or rather proscribes, forbids from His people. You shall not shave the front of your heads for the dead, or you shall not cut yourselves. Now here, as Israel followed this precept of the Lord, they were prophesying, they were prophesying that life would overcome death. And finally, in all of verse 2, we have a description of the covenantal antithesis. You are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be His treasured possession. And this antithesis guarantees that life will overcome death. You are the children, our text begins. You are the children of the Lord your God. This is shocking, isn't it? We would expect this kind of truth to come from the lips of Jesus first, or from the lips of John, or from the pen of Paul, who talk about being children of God. And already here, to our surprise, we learn that this is a truth revealed and conveyed already in the Old Testament. This special relationship between God and His children wasn't invented in the New Testament. It wasn't revealed for the first time in the New Testament. It was disclosed already in the Old Testament. The Israelites here are called the children of God. And this wasn't the first time. You may recall back in Exodus 4, when God assigned Moses and appointed him to go to Pharaoh's court, He said, I want you to go to Pharaoh's palace, and I want you to stand in front of him, and I want you to say this, Israel is my son. Let my son go that he may serve me. And so you see, Moses was commissioned to wage a contest in the palace of Pharaoh for the right of divine ownership. Who had the right to the service of this people called Israel? Did God, whose sons they were, or Pharaoh, whose slaves they were? That was the contest Moses was called to wage. For you see, in Egypt, Israel was enslaved. And in the ancient world, in the Bible, to be enslaved was to be unfree or to be dead, to be as good as dead. Israel was a walking dead people under the tyranny of Pharaoh. And her exodus then. Then came the exodus. Her day of liberation. Her birth day, if you will. The day of her beginning. A day of freedom. A day of life under God. This was decisive for Israel's style of life. For you see, God had said in the preamble, the preface to this law, I am the Lord your God who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. In other words, we might translate that and interpret that to say, I am the Lord your God who gave you life. Now, here are my commandments for preserving yourselves in that life, in that freedom, in that style. And Deuteronomy is a sermon then on this covenantal style of life. A sermon that makes very concrete applications to God's people in the Old Testament for their life in Canaan. Teaching them the style, the covenantal style of life, particularly in our text tonight involving grieving customs. Taking care of their dead. Burying their loved ones. Going to the funeral home. Going to the cemetery, to use modern jargon. For here too, God's people were to show and exhibit and witness to the principle of life in the midst of death. And so the Lord begins His instructions by teaching them, you are the children of the Lord, of covenant Jehovah. This address reminded God's people of their origin, of their beginning, of their identity, so that as they stood at the graveside of a loved one, tears streaming down their cheeks, wailing and mourning the loss of someone close, they were to remember the exodus. They were to remember their position as a free, that is, as living children of the living God. Their God was the life giver. they had seen Him in action, they had seen the Exodus, the Red Sea, they had heard the stories from their parents and grandparents about how the Lord brought them out of death into life by means of these miracles. And so their grieving had to be done in covenant style, like father, like children, burying the dead. Brothers and sisters, burying the dead is covenant business. We talk a lot about the covenant. Covenant isn't just for infant baptism. It's not something we celebrate merely when babies are born. Covenant isn't a good word to bring into the sermon when we want to emphasize Christian education. It's much more than that. It's much broader than that. In the Bible, covenant is something that covers all of life. And it determines and directs the style of living, of dying, of grieving for the dead. I say burying the dead is covenant business. And because life is covenant business, so is that part of life we call dying and death. The Apostle Paul, we heard him say this evening in 1 Thessalonians 4, verses 13 and 14, Brothers, we don't want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep or grieve like the rest of men who have no hope. We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in Him. Brothers and sisters, do you see that what the Lord had done for Israel, He has done fully, He has done finally, He has done most powerfully in the Lord Jesus Christ. For it is in His life, it is in His death, it is in His resurrection, that all these events of the Old Testament are gathered together, are fulfilled and completed in Jesus Christ. So imagine, if God could say on the banks of the Jordan River to people Israel as they were waiting to go into the promised land of Canaan, I am the Lord your God and you are my children. How much more comfort? How much more strength? How much more style don't we obtain in this new covenant dispensation by the resurrected, ascended, and ruling Jesus through His Spirit who now reminds us, You are my children. Act like my children. Grieve like my children. Bury your dead as those who belong to me, the Lord, the Lord of life. So you see, in this title, in this address, in our text, we already catch the faint echo, the faint promise that one day life would overcome death. But now let's move, secondly, to the activity that the Lord prohibits from His people. And this activity prophesies that life will overcome death. In Israel's time and among the surrounding culture, there were many different grieving customs. I'm sure we've all heard about sackcloth and ashes. Nobody does that today in our culture where you would wrap yourself with sort of a burlap rag and put ashes on your face perhaps or on your head. We read in the Bible of people who would beat their breasts and wail aloud in the streets in grieving for the dead. people who would sit on the ground and put dirt on their head as a symbol of grieving all of those customs that Israel shared with her neighbors the Philistines the Moabites the Midianites but in addition to these customs there were other habits that these nations performed like cutting themselves for the dead and shaving the hair on their forehead for the dead now what is and that by the way is what the Lord prohibited. He said sackcloth and ashes, that's okay. Dirt on your head, that's fine. You want to wail aloud in the streets, okay. But that's where it stops. No cutting yourself and no shaving the hair on your forehead. Why? Why did the Lord prohibit His people from doing that? Because in the ancient culture, to cut yourself and allow your blood to fall to the earth and be swallowed up and absorbed in the earth was a symbolic confession of faith that you were united to the person who had died. And when you cut your hair, you were thereby making a declaration, a profession of faith with respect to the dead. You remember, don't you, the significance of hair in the Bible? You think of Samson and we know that his hair was a sign of his calling. It was a sign of his strength. But you know, in connection with warfare back then, and even perhaps today, what happens when a soldier gets captured and becomes a prisoner of war? What is one of the first things that happens to him? His hair is shaved. That's not merely a hygienic practice. That's a practice symbolizing humiliation and subjugation. That's a practice that reminds people that the person whose head is shaved is as good as dead because he's in bonds. He's enslaved. And now God comes, the living God, comes to His people and says, When you go into that land, you're going to have funerals just like everybody else. But I want your funeral customs to be covenantal in style. No cutting yourself, no shedding your own blood, no cutting your hair. Because you see, these forms of grief were not in covenant style. These customs expressed that the mourners were dominated by the terror, the awesomeness, the power, the finality of death. And God's people might never make that kind of a profession of faith. Israel's neighbors would cut themselves and shave themselves, acknowledging that death was decisive. Death was irreversible. Death was final. But Israel was the people of life. The children of the Lord. Redeemed from slavery, that is from death. Their grieving customs had to reflect who they were and whose they were. And there's the prophecy, don't you see? The Lord God set a limit to the grieving customs of His people. He set a limit to His children's grief. They may mourn, they may weep, like the rest of the world. They may beat their breasts, cover themselves with sackcloth and ashes. But that was it, because one day life would overcome death. For you see, Easter was coming. Easter was coming. The Lord Jesus Christ was coming who would subjugate and destroy the power of death by means of His own resurrection. And as a people, by grieving in covenant style, Israel was to prophesy, through their actions, prophesy of the coming Christ. We know the gospel in its infant form from Genesis 3, verse 15, where God said to Adam and Eve, among other things, that the seed of the woman would destroy the serpent. And the serpent is the source of death. The serpent has the power of death in his hands at least for a time. And that promise in Genesis 3, verse 15, coupled with Genesis 17, verse 7, where God spoke to Abraham of a seed, a seed in whom all the families of the nations of the earth would be blessed, those promises looked forward to the Lord Jesus Christ, who would take from Satan's hand the power of death. He would rob Satan of his claim, and he would destroy that power in his own death and resurrection. I say grieving. Israel's grieving in covenant style, And our grieving in covenant style is a prophecy. It's a testimony. It's a witness that we bear in the midst of our culture. I've already said that our funerals ought to be covenant business. We must so perform our funerals that they testify to the Christ who has come. Israel had the privilege of testifying to the Christ who was to come. We have the privilege of testifying to the Christ who has come and the Christ who will come again. That means, brothers and sisters, tonight again, the Lord summons you and me as His children to grieve in covenant style, bearing testimony to the victory of Jesus Christ. Do you do that? Before the service, I chatted a few moments with your pastor. Because I'm not familiar with funeral customs here in Southern California. I know how they go in the Midwest. I know what it is that people do when someone dies and they have to call the undertaker and arrangements have to be made and visitation hours are set and so on. I'm sure you're familiar a little bit with that. How is it we share so many customs with those around us in our own culture about burying our dead, but where is it? How do we do it that is in a Christian way? in a way that testifies to the victory of life over death. One of the ways we do it is in the songs we choose. Songs that speak of victory. Songs that speak of hope. Another way we do it is in terms of the committal service in the cemetery, where as we stand alongside the coffin, in which is housed the body of our departed loved one, many times people will recite the Apostles' Creed. They'll recite the Lord's Prayer. They will stand amid their tears and sorrow and they will bear testimony to the fact that Christ has risen and that is our hope as we lower this casket into the ground. Brothers and sisters, I want to draw your attention to what may be a unique privilege in our generation. A unique privilege that our forebears either didn't have or didn't take advantage of. In our culture of openness, in our society where anything and everything gets talked about over the public airwaves, the television and radio, people are more comfortable now than ever before talking about dying and about death. It's our privilege and it's our blessing as Christians to prepare for our dying and for our death. It's our privilege to look ahead, to look ahead to the inevitable time when we will depart this earth and leave behind, by that means, leave behind for our children and our grandchildren, a covenant testimony of what it means to belong, body and soul, in life and in death, to our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. A few years ago, both my father-in-law and my own father passed away within 12 months of one another. I had the privilege of sitting around the kitchen table with my father editing his obituary. He had written it up himself, and he asked me to go over it with him, and we talked together about it, and that's how it appeared in the newspaper after he died. He and my mother had taken the time, as many of you I'm sure have, of looking ahead to that event in terms of preparations, in terms of order of service, in terms of songs sung. Who would preach and such things? Don't be put off by this. Don't think it's macabre or weird or some kind of freaky conversation. As Christians, we have nothing to fear. As Christians, we have everything to sing about at the time of our dying. So now, I want to challenge you in terms of God's Word tonight, that we look upon this matter of grieving, burying our loved ones as covenant business. Fathers, talk about this with your children. Fathers and mothers, discuss this matter so that when you are faced, and your children, rather, are faced with this event in their lives, that they will see your testimony, hear your testimony, in the midst of their tears and in the midst of their mourning. You see, as Christians, we have a lot of opportunities in our culture to speak the word of life to people who are fascinated with death. But if we're going to do that at the cemetery, if we're going to do that at the end of life, then we're going to have to testify throughout our living that we are children of the living God, that we are children not of death but life, and that impacts, for example, the music we listen to. If you listen carefully to music today, popular music, much of it glorifies death. It glorifies the dark side of life. It glorifies the enslaving powers and desires and lusts of life. And I think as Christian young people, we want to be aware that if we're going to live in covenant style before the face of our God, then we can't take pleasure in that kind of testimony. We can't join together in making that kind of declaration that death is prominent in our lives and enslavement is something that we celebrate and desire. No. In our entertainment choices, there's so many features of our life in modern 21st century America that breathe death, dead-end streets, enslavement, whether it be enslavement to purchasing habits, whether it be enslavement to habits of sexual addiction, whether it be enslavement to substance abuse, any form of enslavement. And here's why it doesn't fit the covenant style. Because it marks us as dead. When we sell ourselves or surrender ourselves to any form of enslavement, we're denying our identity as the children of the living God. So if we are to testify consistently to life in the midst of our tears over death, then we must testify to life while we're living. so that it won't be an abrupt difference between the way we've lived and the way we die. Finally, notice with me the covenantal antithesis in verse 2. There's not only an address, not only an activity, but here's the antithesis. For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the Lord has chosen you to be His treasured possession. And I say this antithesis guarantees that life will overcome death. Notice once again how the Lord brings His people's attention back to their status. Earlier you are children, now you are holy, elect, chosen, that is possessed by the Lord. And here this evening, brothers and sisters, we see a biblical application of the doctrine of election. It's a wonderful doctrine. It reminds us that we were not the ones who sought out God, but it was God who, before we were born, before the world was created, had us in mind. The doctrine of election in the Bible reminds us that what God begins, He finishes and completes. The doctrine of election teaches us that we belong. We belong to God. But here's the point tonight. If we belong to the Lord, if we are His possession under His Lordship, He, He will not allow death to be the last word. He's the God of life. And because He owns us, He will not allow us to rot eternally in the grave. For Israel, this meant that Easter was coming. For us, it means that Christ will return someday to gather us and all His children to be with Him. Because, you see, God will not let His Holy One see corruption. Psalm 22. Now, I know that the primary reference there is to the Lord Jesus Christ. That's why in the Psalter hymnal and in our Bible translations, the phrase Holy One is capitalized as a reference to deity. But I want you to see yourself as well in that promise. I want you to see yourself in the Lord Jesus Christ taken up in that electing love. That perfecting work of God Himself. The Lord will not let His Holy One see corruption. He will not abandon us to the grave. Guaranteed. And so now we have something to say to each other at the funeral home. If you're like me, and you take the opportunity to extend your Christian condolences to brothers and sisters who lose loved ones, then I suspect as you're driving on the way to the funeral or the funeral home or perhaps the cemetery, you wonder, what can I say? What can I say? Here you have something to say to brothers and sisters in the Lord. Life has overcome death in the Lord Jesus Christ. In His resurrection. He has guaranteed it. He has seen to it. So that we can comfort one another now in the midst of our tears. Cry, yes. Weep, of course. The tears will be streaming down as we're able to smile and sing. Christ the Lord is risen today. Hallelujah. Hallelujah. And as the Apostle Paul himself wrote then in 1 Thessalonians 4, the New Testament commentary on Deuteronomy 14, the very last verse, Therefore, brothers and sisters, having heard this law of the Lord as sermon, whose goal is your wisdom and your maturity within the relationship with God that we call covenant, having heard all of that, therefore, brothers and sisters, Encourage one another. Encourage one another with these things. To flee death and the power of death in whatever forms and fingers it reaches out in our culture to ensnare and grab us. Flee the darkness of death. The enslavement of vice and habit. Be what you're called to be. Children of the Lord your God. holy, chosen, chosen to walk blamelessly before Him. Let's pray together. Father in heaven, we do thank You that in the midst of our life, You give us instruction about dying and death and grieving over death so that we may look forward with anticipation, with hope, to the final victory which is ours in Christ Jesus. we thank you that for the Christian, death has lost its sting because of the finished work of Jesus Christ. Grant, Lord, that that truth may permeate all of our lives, our habits, our attitudes, our commitments. Deliver us from bondage. The bondage to our habits. The bondage to our lusts and desires. the bondage to our power and our prestige. Deliver us, O Lord, that we may truly be children of the Lord our God, free, living. And grant, Lord, that in the midst of death we may sing this song of victory, that our Lord Jesus, risen and ascended on high, will come back to bring us to be forever with Him. Until that day, Father, we pray you will continue to finish, to perfect and polish what you have begun in us by your Spirit. We look forward to that perfection when without sin and without sorrow, without suffering, we will behold you face to face in the joy of eternal bliss. Keep us in your grace and mercy for Jesus' sake. Amen. Thank you.