Deuteronomy chapter 31 verses 16 through 29. And the Lord said to Moses, Behold, you will rest with your fathers, and this people will rise and play the harlot with the gods of the foreigners of the land, where they go to be among them. And they will forsake me and break my covenant which I have made with them. Then my anger shall be aroused against them in that day, and I will forsake them, and I will hide my face from them, and they shall be devoured. And many evils and troubles shall befall them, so that they will say in that day, Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us? And I will surely hide my face in that day because of all the evil which they have done, in that they have turned to other gods. Now therefore write down this song for yourselves, and teach it to the children of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel. When I have brought them to the land flowing with milk and honey, of which I swore to their fathers, and they have eaten and filled themselves and grown fat, then they will turn to other gods and serve them, and they will provoke me and break my covenant. Then it shall be when many evils and troubles have come upon them that this song will testify against them as a witness, for it will not be forgotten in their mouths or their descendants, for I know the inclination of their behavior today, even before I have brought them to the land of which I swore to give them. Therefore Moses wrote this song the same day, and taught it to the children of Israel. Then he inaugurated Joshua the son of Nun, and said, Be strong and of good courage, for you shall bring the children of Israel into the land which I swore to them, and I will be with you. So it was, when Moses had completed the writing, the words of this law, in a book, when they were finished, that Moses commanded the Levites, who bore the ark of the covenant of the Lord, saying, Take this Book of the Law, and put it beside the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord your God, that it may be there as a witness against you. For I know your rebellion and your stiff neck. If today, while I am yet alive with you, you have been rebellious against the Lord, then how much more after my death? Gather to me all the elders of your tribes and your officers, that I may speak these words in their hearing and call heaven and earth to witness against them. For I know that after my death, you will become utterly corrupt and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you. And evil will befall you in the latter days, because you will do evil in the sight of the Lord to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands. The grass withers and the flower fades, but the word of our God will stand forever. We see here, first off, obviously a warning that God gave to Moses about the apostasy of the people. that they were going to turn aside. He warned Moses he were about to die and the people themselves will, after they enter into the land, will turn aside from me. Peter Craigie makes this comment on these opening verses that seems like a massive understatement. He says, the words that the Lord addresses to Moses on the eve of his death must have caused great sadness in the aging leader. And as I was dwelling on that, I mean, it just seems not even to sum up the heartbreak that Moses must have felt while he was addressing the people with this warning. He had already been obviously preaching to them on the plains of Moab, giving them this long speech, exhorting them to love the Lord, to trust the Lord, to obey the Lord. He had been calling his people to faith and faithfulness. And now the Lord had told him that they would not be faithful when they entered into the land, that they would turn away from him, that they would go after the gods of the peoples, the Canaanites. And it seems that, unfortunately, the time in the wilderness, and even the death of the generation that had been in the wilderness and left Egypt during the years of wandering, that time had not purged the rebellion from the people any more than the flood purged sin from the world. Unfortunately, it stayed with them, and they carried it with them into the Promised Land. Because we remember, brothers and sisters, that sin is not something external that gets into us, as the Pharisees thought. They were very zealous, of course, to wash their hands because they did not want ceremonial uncleanness to enter into them as they were eating. But the problem, as Christ pointed out, was not that which is outside of you. You don't eat sin and become sinful that way. Rather, we are sinners because sin dwells within us. We are sinful in our hearts. Now, the change in leadership also, as Joshua will take over, is not going to make the people more faithful. Moses comments he he sees that if the people had been rebellious while he were alive and While they were seeing the Lord's mercy towards his people the great things that he had done appearing for instance on Mount Sinai and they had also seen his anger towards the unrepentant and Well then, Moses has to unfortunately wonder exactly how bad they are going to be after he dies, after he is not with them. Which brings us to our second point. The Lord points out to Moses the setting of their apostasy and the response of the people. The sad thing is, the people will not become apostate because of any failure on the part of the Lord. Rather, he warns that people are going to be apostate when they have everything that they need. He's going to bring them into a land flowing, he says, with milk and honey. They'll grow fat. And unfortunately, in the midst of all of this provision, in the midst of a time of a lack of hardship, then they would begin to go after those false gods. Prosperity will be the setting for their apostasy, and it so often is. What happens is God's people forget the source of the blessings that they are given. They look at the blessings themselves and they say, are not these things wonderful? Are they not all that we need? And they forget who gave them these things, who mercifully put them in their hands, and they turn aside and they go after idols. God's people, we can be like the celebrants at the party of Belshazzar. You remember this foolish king who took over after Nebuchadnezzar. He held a party and he sent for the cups from the temple, those vessels that the Lord had set aside for his holy purpose. And they used them in the partying. We read in Daniel 5.4, they drank wine and praised the gods of gold and silver, bronze and iron, wood and stone. In the very midst of their partying, of course, the Lord brings them a warning that they are all drinking to their own doom. Now how often, though, is that seen repeated in the church? How often do we take that which the Lord has given us and praise other things? How often do we say, my hand has brought these things to me? How often do we think that it is material prosperity that we should be praising? Or how often do we think we should go after the almighty dollar or things like that, the various idols, power, fame, influence? I see in the church this awful vain questing after popularity. And I'm not talking just about the people of the church, I'm talking about the leaders of the church. Our hearts are led astray after idols, and we're tempted to want what the world wants. And we forget, who are we, but what the Lord has made us. And what do we have, but what the Lord has given us. If we are enjoying blessings, then ought we not to praise Him? Because He is the source of all of those blessings. Don't we pray? Don't we sing, praise God from whom all blessings flow? But we forget. And it's not like apostasy is a quick thing. Apostasy, the sad thing is it's like a slow motion car crash. You can almost see the cars approaching one another. Oh, dear. We're getting closer. But still, we keep driving. What a shame. We're going to collide. I see that happening in denominations. And it's almost as though there's nothing that can be done. Maybe if we press the pedal a little faster, it'll be averted. But no, that's not the case. What happens is we gradually turn away from the Lord. We go after these idols. And then another generation is born that does not know the Lord. And the apostasy continues. Certainly that would happen to them after they entered into the land that the Lord was giving them. But the funny thing is, maybe not so funny, the odd thing is that the people always come up with a false explanation for their hardships. The people here, the Lord warns, are going to come up with just such a false explanation. They will say they are suffering when they do suffer because God has forsaken them. They will make it seem as though God has left them alone, has abandoned them without a cause, when in fact the reason the Lord warns that He will forsake them is because their hearts will turn away from Him. It's not the case that he's going to go away from them for no reason, then suddenly bad things are going to happen and they'll lament that. What will happen is they will turn aside to these idols and they'll suffer as a result of it. Why? Because of their choice. And He tells them in advance, when you suffer, don't suffer because you think that I just abandoned you. Rather, you will be suffering because you broke the covenant. You will be suffering because you left the God of creation and you followed dumb idols that couldn't help you at all. Do you really think that the Lord will bless you in the midst of faithlessness? In the midst of your doing great evil? But people do assume that. I think too often we assume that the Lord is like some trust fund that continues endlessly to pay out dividends even though the beneficiary is a hopeless wastrel. Somebody who is misusing and squandering all the blessings that he gets. We forget what the Lord says, for instance, in 1 Samuel 2.30. For those who honor Me, I will honor, and those who despise Me shall be lightly esteemed. It really is the case, brothers and sisters. I've seen it happen. The Lord honors those who honor Him. Yes, we may not have all the things that we want, but I have seen time and again that the Lord provides His people with all the things that they need. But those who walk astray from the Lord, although they may be rich in the world's senses, Yet they are not honored by God, and they are truly poor in spirit, in a very real sense. They have not, because they have not asked. They do not have, because they do not ask. Well, third point, God makes various prophetic warnings against this time. It's not like this is going to happen to them suddenly and without warning. Moses gave his words, the words of the law, to the Levites. And they had, of course, the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Now, the tablets themselves were put inside the Ark of the Covenant. And then outside of the Ark of the Covenant, they also had the scrolls of the law, the Torah. These were to sit outside the Ark, and they would be read to the people on a regular basis. Inside the Ark, then, you had God's moral law. You had the Decalogue. You had something that was eternal, something that was equally binding in all places and all nations, and which was really kind of a summary of the holiness of God. It explained what God was like. God never lies. God never steals. God never covets. God is holy, holy, holy. And then, outside of that, we had, of course, what we would call the descriptive law. The Decalogue is prescriptive law in the civil and ceremonial laws. It's an application of the moral law to Israel. And then you had these descriptive laws that are based on the Decalogue, that are derived from the Decalogue. And then, unfortunately, those laws, they would act as a witness against the rebellion of the people against God. But, unfortunately, having all of those things before them, having the law read in their hearing would not turn them aside from breaking that particular law, turning away from God. Now, you see an example of that day after day when you pass those funny signs with the numbers on them. Have you ever passed any of them? They're white, they've got black lettering, and they say numbers like 25, 35, 65, and so on, and we read them, and they, you know, we may acknowledge them, we may not, But unfortunately, often they don't have much effect on our right foot. They don't actually cause us, for instance, to slow down. And just so, merely having the Word of the Lord before us doesn't always cause us to actually obey the Lord's Word. We know what the Ten Commandments say, but do we keep the Ten Commandments? We know what the Law of God says about various things. Do we always cleave to it? Do we never covet? Do we never steal? Brothers and sisters, we know better. Unfortunately, we do break the law of the Lord. Simply having it before us doesn't necessarily make us good and holy people. If it is not something that we have in our heart, and if we don't have a desire to obey from our heart, we will not keep it. So the Lord gives them something else. He gives them this song to memorize. He gives them His law in musical form, so to speak, to remind them of His commandments, to remind them also prophetically what would happen to them if they turned aside from Him, or I should say, unfortunately, when they turned aside from Him. And its form is such that the people would memorize it and sing it. And it would remind them, God willing, to turn back to God before it is too late. Now, when is it too late to turn back from God? Well, it's only too late to turn back from God after you've died. So if the words are still in your mind and in your mouth, it is not yet too late. And this is a function that the Bible still plays in the life of the people of God. It sets before us not only the law of God, but what to do when we've broken the law. It tells us where we can go for refuge. It's a constant reminder, of course, of what we should be doing. And that's one of the reasons why the songs that we sing in the church should be based on this word. They should be essentially true expositions of the word that we sing. And by that singing, we teach our children the commandments of the Lord. Now this song, something that the people would sing, would also be a witness against them. It would remind them of what the Lord had said to them, and it would stand against them like a witness testifying to your crimes in a court. He stands and he says, you did so-and-so. And so too this song would remind the people when they had gone astray from the Lord of what they had done. It would be kind of like saying to them, don't you remember what the song you sang as a kid said? And I don't mean Jesus loves me, I mean this song that Moses gave them, give ear O heavens. It would remind them of what the Lord had said and hopefully later on it would have an effect upon them. We'll talk about that in a little while. But in this song, the righteousness of God and the redemption of God would be set before them, but also would be set before them the rebelliousness and the spiritual adultery of the people and how only God could deal with it. And the people need these reminders because the penchant of God's people, unfortunately, has always been towards idolatry, especially as we've seen in times of prosperity, when times of good, we tend to go against what the Lord has said. One of the things that particularly struck me at the Banner of Truth, I mentioned to you before, we heard an Iranian pastor who has been laboring with the underground church there. He doesn't even share his name because so many of his associates have died for their faith. One of the things that he said is, suffering brings about faithfulness to the Lord. Suffering grows the church. He talked about the way that even in the midst of suffering, God's people had grown in a way that we don't see, unfortunately, here in America. Perhaps because one of the reasons for that is that we have it too easy here. We don't suffer like our brothers and sisters in the persecuted church, and as a result we don't see some of the same blessings that they do. Well, let me give you some applications. First, this should be obvious, but it is the duty of God's messenger to preach the truth to the people, and that is regardless of what the message is. and even when it is heartbreaking for the messenger to do that. Paul reminded Timothy in 2 Timothy 4, he said this, starting with verse 2. Preach the word. Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort with all lung suffering and teaching. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine, but according to their own desires, because they have itching ears, they will heap up for themselves teachers. and they will turn their ears away from the truth and be turned aside to fables. But you, be watchful in all things, endure afflictions, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry. One of the things that the Word reminds us again and again is that the messenger who truly loves the sheep, who truly loves the flock that God has entrusted to him, is the man who tells them not what they want to hear. And that's an easy thing. It was interesting as we were reading the Old Testament reading this morning, we saw all of these prophets lined up telling the kings what they wanted to hear. I was particularly struck that one of the false prophets, Zedekiah, even made his own sermon illustration these iron horns with these horns you will gore the syrians you know and i'm sure that was highly impressive to all that must be a word from god look he's even got look iron iron horns i mean come on that's that's an assurance that this is the truth but what was he doing Tickling ears. He was telling people what they wanted to hear. And we even have that man coming to call Micaiah, this last of the faithful prophets. What does he say to him? Give them something they want to hear. Come on, encourage them. They're so ready for battle. Just give a word. He wants them to go in there and give them the fight, fight, fight pep talk. But he doesn't. He goes in initially, and he says, yeah, yeah, go up and fight. And of course, they know immediately, oh, he's lying. He said something nice to us. But brothers and sisters, imagine the difficulty that Micaiah had constantly telling the people the truth, bringing the word to an apostate people, not telling them what they wanted to hear. And he suffered for it. What did the king say? Throw him in prison. Give him the bread of affliction, the water of affliction. Give him short rations. We'll repay him for what he's done. Faithful preaching is often repaid in that kind of affliction. It has often been the case that the most faithful ministers have been the ones who have suffered the most in this world, and not at the hands of the world. That we expect. As Christians, we expect the world to hate the gospel. The saddest thing is when the covenant people, the congregation, hate the gospel and say, don't prophesy to us the truth. Tell us smooth things. Tell us things we want to hear. Don't tell us about sin and the only answer for it. I was reminded of that. I preached at a wedding recently, and the majority of people who were gathered there were unbelievers. And here I am at a wedding, and I touch on the subject of death, and divorce, and things like that, and the reality of them. Now, death and divorce are in the world. You may have noticed that. And they do happen to people. And our divorce rates are truly insane. At this point, for a minister not to warn of divorce in the midst of marriage, I think, is a very wrong thing. But I could tell the people were looking at me like, you're supposed to be saying, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love. And then basically, man and wife. And then everybody, yay. So when I start talking about death and divorce and founding your household on a foundation that's gonna go, even though there were a lot of people who had households that had gone there, they didn't want to hear it. They didn't want that. Tell them something encouraging. Come on, they're ready to get married. Come on, get with the program, guys. And there's tremendous pressure on God's prophets to do that. Not in the Old Testament, not in the New Testament, but today as well. Constantly there is this pressure to give the people what they want, instead of what they need. And what you need, what I need, is constantly this Word of God. One of the reasons I go to the Banner of Truth Ministers Conference is because I do hear truth proclaimed. And sometimes, I've got to tell you, it kicks me in the rear. It really does, but I need that. I need that reminder. I need that convicting power of the Word. I need to be set straight. I need to be reminded of the way things are, and I need to be reminded of the power of God as the only thing that changes people. And for that I am grateful. So remember, this is a difficult ministry that Moses had to these people, telling them, warning them, but it was a necessary ministry as well. And even if the people would not hear, even if the people looked at him with those angry faces, yet God is glorified. Matthew Henry writes, many a sad thought, no doubt, it occasioned to this good man to foresee the apostasy and ruin of a people who he had taken so much pains with in order to do them good and to make them happy. But this was his comfort, that he had done his duty and that God would be glorified. And that should be fathers, even if you're telling your sons and your daughters things they don't want to hear, things that make them angry. You are doing your duty and you are glorifying God and your family. Second principle, I want to call it the Immanuel principle. Kids, what does Immanuel mean? Immanuel, you remember? God with us. That's right. It's the Immanuel principle and it's critical for God's people. And it's also critical for nations as well. We need God with us. If we do not have God with us, then we are in a terrible state. Moses understood that there would be nothing that was more important to the people than having the presence of the Lord with them. To be forsaken of God was to be in an awful state. Even to have an assurance, OK, you can go up to the promised land and enter into it without too much difficulty. The Lord had said after, for instance, their violation of His covenant at the foot of Mount Sinai, their terrible apostasy there, He had said, I'm going to send you, but I'm not going to go with you lest I break out. And Moses had interceded for the people. And he hadn't interceded in a way saying, God, be nice to us. He had said, God, go with us. He said in Exodus 33, 15, and he said to him, if your presence does not go with us, do not bring us up from here. God, what is the good of us entering into a land flowing with milk and honey if you are not there? Physical prosperity will do us no good unless you dwell in our midst. What a wonderful lesson Moses had learned from being with God. Physical prosperity, economic prosperity is of no use to any people if God is not in their midst. Why have we forgotten that as a nation? We seem to think that the answer to all of our problems will be found in prosperity. If we can just get the economy back on its feet, all will be well. We just need someone to get the economy back on its feet. Brothers and sisters, economic prosperity will not cure spiritual problems. Only the Lord can do that, and if He is not in our midst, it will not happen. Psalm 144.15 says this, Happy are the people who are in such a state. Happy are the people whose God is the Lord. It is a people who call the Lord their God and know that He is in their midst through Christ Jesus, who are a truly happy people. If He is not, then no amount of physical blessing will make them happy. What was the bitterest lament of Jesus upon the cross, for instance? In Matthew 27, 46, we have the answer. And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani. That is, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? The Lord Jesus Christ endured humiliation. The Lord Jesus Christ endured scourging. The Lord Jesus Christ endured crucifixion. But the greatest, greatest, greatest hardship He endured upon the cross, bar none, was the feeling that the Lord had forsaken Him. That moment when, as He was bearing our sins, the Lord's back was turned to Him. That was the thing that afflicted Him most. And for you, as God's people, that is the thing that should, the idea that God would turn away, the idea that God would forsake us, that we would become, as the old saying was, God-forsaken people. That should strike terror in our hearts. The idea that we would be given that writ of divorce that God gave to his people, calling them low on me, not my people, forsaken of God. That should be something that scares us more than any economic collapse, that would scare us more than a sudden disaster in the family, ill health, anything. Lord, do anything to me, but do not leave me, should be our prayer. And Moses warns us, as a people, they would forsake God and then they would blame the disasters on His forsaking them when they had walked away from Him. And that is the case. Often, God's people forsake the Lord and then assume that God has forsaken them. We see it in the nation today. There's this angry manifestation of atheism and anger towards God. Well, what I think, brothers and sisters, has happened is we have sown the wind, and we have reaped the whirlwind, and as we suffer social disaster after social disaster, we proclaim that those disasters prove there is no God. What do they really prove, though? They prove that as a people we have forsaken God, and we have forsaken His Word. We no longer pay any attention to that book that was outside of the Ark of the Covenant. We no longer pay attention to his word, and we see the effects of it. I see this in the lives of people who've plunged into sin and are reaping terrible consequences because of it. I remember I spoke with a woman who was angry at God, very angry at God, because he had not given her children with her husband. But prior to getting married, she had had six abortions. Brothers and sisters, the problem was not with God. The problem was with sin and our forsaking God. Now, whatever the outward troubles that we may be in, if we have the light of God's countenance, we can endure them. That's something we need to remember. With God, we can endure. With God, we have a solid rock to stand upon. With God, we have a light in the darkness. But if God leaves us, we are undone. We are miserable. There we are. poor, and blind, and naked, and without hope, and without help. With God, we are rich. Without God, no matter what our outward state is, we are poor indeed. Third and final applications. One of the uses of God's law, one of the most important uses, is to tell us where to flee, where to go to, even if we have not hearkened to His Word, even if we have walked away from Him. Even if we were raised in the church and have subsequently turned our back and gone away from Him, yet that law, that Word of God stands as a testimony to show us what to do. Matthew Henry writes this, if this song did not prevent their apostasy, yet it might help to bring them to repentance and to recover them from their apostasy. When their troubles came upon them, this song shall not be forgotten, but may serve as a glass to show them their own faces, that they may humble themselves and return to Him from whom they have revolted. Those for whom God has mercy in store, He may leave to fall, yet He will provide means for their recovery. Medicines are prepared beforehand for their cure. God's Word sets before us our sin, it does. And in that, sometimes it irritates us. It shows us the eternal consequences of our sin, not just the temporal ones. Yes, if we sin, it will not go well for us in this life, but it tells us some far worse news than that. It tells us it will not go well for us for all eternity. It sets before us the reality of eternal punishment. If we have turned away from the Lord, if we have become like the prodigal, if we've run away from God, it tells us what to do. It tells us to return. The prodigal, you remember this boy who forsook his father, who asked for his inheritance early and then ran off to sin in a foreign country. In the midst of those miserable consequences, while he's sitting in a pigsty, when he'd like to eat the food that's being given to the pigs, and doesn't even have that. He remembers his father's house. He remembers his youth. And he knows to return, and that's very important. A lot of people ask, what is the value of teaching your children the scriptures if they're not regenerate? What's the value of catechesis? That is, teaching them the shorter catechism if they're not regenerate. What's the value of having them in church and assaulting them on a regular basis with the word gathering them together in family worship, if they're not regenerate, or if they're not regenerated by the time they leave your house, what good will it have done? Well, what you have done, brothers and sisters, is regardless of what they have done with it, you have built into them a grounding in God's Word. You have given them the truth. Like this song, you've said it before them. Regardless of the lies they may be inclined to believe for a time, you've told them what the truth is. And you've also told them where they may go for relief in that day when their eyes are open to the emptiness of idolatry, which I hope as parents, if your children are not regenerate, you would pray for, that their eyes would be open. In one sense, it's like asking, what's the good of an exit sign if people don't realize there's a fire? Well, the good of an exit sign is that they will realize where to go when there is a fire and when they know that there's a fire. And so brothers and sisters, as we raise up our children and we teach them the truth, we are also showing them where to go, what to do, where to find refuge from their real problem, which is their sin nature. Let me give you an example of that, that principle and application. John Newton, who you will remember as the author of Amazing Grace, was raised in a godly family. He had a godly Christian mother. He ran away to sea, he became a sailor, and as one biographer put it, he became a very dissipated sailor. Eventually he became a slave trader, and he gradually sank further and further in his sins. But the Lord eventually brought him to himself. And you know what he remembered? Even in the midst of the depths of sin that he had sunk, he remembered the instructions of his mother. He recalled the godliness of his mother. He recalled the difference that he had encountered when he was living in his parents' home, like that prodigal he remembered back to the time of living in a Christian household. And he knew that there was truth there, and he went searching wildly through the ship, hoping to find a Bible. Eventually, he didn't find a Bible. He found Thomas Akempis' The Imitation of Christ. And he began reading that, devouring it. While it was not the word itself, it gave him instruction on where to find relief. And he kept on in that direction, in a sense running back to his father's house. And eventually he became an incredibly profitable minister, a man who was greatly used of God. Why? Why did that happen? Because his parents had built into him the Word of God. I know of countless examples where that was the case. Monica praying constantly for her son Augustine, for instance. constantly setting before him the truth. So even when he was wayward, yet he was constantly being pricked by those memories that his parents had instilled. And I pray that you are doing that. I pray that you are doing that not only with your children, but with those around you, constantly speaking the truth, so that when the Lord opens eyes, people know where to run. That was one of the reasons why this song was built. That's one of the reasons why the devil wants to stamp out all the public vestiges of Christianity, because he doesn't want anyone to know where to run for relief. He doesn't want any reminders that while there is a law of God that stands against us, there is also a way of relief offered by the Lord through salvation in His Son, Jesus Christ. That's why he's so zealous to take both the law out of the public sphere and all mention of Christ. We can mention any other religious or political figure, but say Jesus and the mic is cut. Why? Because there's a spiritual reality out there, and the reality is this. There is a hell. There is a devil. There are three great enemies, the world, the flesh, and the devil, who are working day after day to try to overturn the kingdom of God. They will fail, but they will wreak havoc in the meantime. And you are engaged in that warfare. Brothers and sisters, therefore, what should we be doing constantly? Ourselves, we should be going to this Word and we should be reading the truth in it. We should be coming to church and hearing the truth preached to us. And we should be proclaiming the truth to our children so that they will grow up soaked in this stuff, so soaked in it that when the day comes, they'll be able to wring it out and obtain that life-giving water that comes from the Word. I pray you're doing that. And I pray that you will continue to do so until you see the reality of this word manifested in the heavenly kingdom as you enter into it. Brothers and sisters, this song The song that Moses is going to give to the people is founded in a greater reality, and that greater reality is that there is a day coming when God will return, when Jesus Christ will come back, when his judgment will be brought on all those who have not turned to him in faith, when his judgment will be manifested, but also there is a day coming of mercy. There is a day coming when the fullness of His salvation will be given over to His people, and we will commune with Him forever. And I hope you're looking forward to that day, and you're not being sold that bill of sale, that farrago of lies that the world wants you to believe that this world is all there is. I would truly despair if I thought this world was all there is. It is the Word that tells me there is far more than this, and I pray that you're looking forward to that and teaching your children to look forward to it as well. Let's go before Him. God our Father, we do thank You for Your Word, and we thank You for the songs of faith that teach us where to flee. We thank You, O Lord, for instance, for that great hymn of the faith, Amazing Grace, that Your servant John Newton wrote. He wrote it because he knew the truth of it. He obtained grace, great grace at Your hand. And we thank you, O Lord, that you gave him a godly mother who taught him in his youth, so that when the time came, when his eyes were opened, he knew where to go for relief. We pray that we would do the same thing. We pray that we would teach the children of the church, and not just our children, but our grandchildren. O Lord, we pray that we would teach them all the truth of your word, and that we would be constantly acting as signposts, pointing men to Christ. and showing them, O Lord, the danger of remaining in an unrepentant condition, that it brings not only misery in this life, but eternal misery hereafter. Lord, help us to do that. We pray this in Jesus' holy name. Amen.