Sermon Tone Analysis

Text: Deuteronomy 5:17; 19:4-13

Theme: God values human life and expects His people to value it as well.

Date: 01/22/2023 File: Deut_01 ID: OT05-5

This morning we’re going to begin a series of messages from the Book of Deuteronomy.

But it’ll be a short series — only six messages.

The theme of the series is simply Final Words since this book is composed of a series of final sermons that Moses delivered to the Israelites prior to his death.

In Deuteronomy 5:6-21 Moses repeats the Ten Commandments.

These are the heart of the covenant the Lord had established with His people, and they are the heart of righteous behavior God imputes in Christians when he replaces our heart of stone with a heart of flesh.

In the New Testament we call this spiritual heart surgery the New Birth.

As Sovereign Creator, Yahweh has the authority to define how we should behave.

Our behavior is defined by one word — holiness.

In both Old and New Testaments, God’s people are commanded to be holy because God is holy.

No where is that holiness better exemplified then in the command to value life.

As many of you know, today is Sanctity of Life Sunday.

On January 21st — two days ago — the 49th March for Life was held in Washington D.C.

Those of us who are Pro-life have much to celebrate.

The most infamous court decision in American history — Roe vs. Wade — a legal decision that paved the way for 64 million abortions, was overturned by the Supreme Court last summer.

Amen, and amen.

Sadly, the decision that most of us here this morning celebrate, is a decision that has infuriated those who insist that killing babies in a mother’s womb should not only be legal, but be celebrated.

In a mere thirty years, liberal politics in America has degenerated from abortion being “safe, legal and rare” to “shout your abortion.”

The Apostle Paul wrote that in the last days it will be as if men’s conscience will have been seared with a hot iron.

The allusion here is one of applying a hot iron to the skin.

What happens to the skin?

It is cauterized and becomes rigid, stiff, and dead to feeling.

This is what happens when someone departs from the truth of the gospel.

When men no longer believe that, from the moment of conception, that the image of God is stamped upon that emergent soul, than men can treat that life as a commodity to do with as they wish — including disposal of it.

This morning I’d like to do four thing: 1) Read the essential Scriptures, 2) Articulate the Christian Doctrine, 3) Examine the Cultural Challenge, and 4) Outline the Believer’s Response.

I. THE SCRIPTURES

“These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens.

5 When no bush of the field was yet in the land and no small plant of the field had yet sprung up—for the LORD God had not caused it to rain on the land, and there was no man to work the ground, 6 and a mist was going up from the land and was watering the whole face of the ground— 7 then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living creature.”

(Genesis 2:4–7, ESV)

“For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”

(Psalm 139:13, NIV84)

“He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

16 For by him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things were created by him and for him.

17 He is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”

(Colossians 1:15–17, NIV84)

1. these passages, and many more, teach us that God is the Creator and Sustainer of life

a. he breathed into Adam the breath of life and Adam became a living being

b. in Psalm 39 David acknowledges that, you knit me together in my mother’s womb

1) even though a man and a women come together in sexual union, one providing the seed and one providing the egg, it is God who brings the two separate elements together and forms a person within the womb ... no child conceived is conceived “by accident” from God’s viewpoint

2) contrary to what some people think, the verse does not teach that we existed as a soul waiting to be born into a body, but that God’s foreknowledge of events is so certain that He knows us before our conception ever took place

c. the Colossians passage teaches that we are a extraordinary creation of God and not an evolutionary accident of the cosmos

ILLUS.

When Carl Sagan wrote, “The cosmos is within us.

We are made of star-stuff.

We are a way for the universe to know itself,” he was profoundly wrong.

2. from these verses we develop the doctrine of man and through them we come to understand our humanity

II.

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE

1. the doctrine of man teaches that a Sovereign God created human beings to reflect His image, to enjoy the blessings of marriage and family, to subdue the world and have dominion over it, to accomplish good works, and live in relationship with Him

ILLUS.

Some of you have seen the 1980 movie The Elephant Man.

It is based on the real life story of Joseph Merrick, an Englishman with severe deformities from neurofibromatosis.

He was so deformed that his only way to earn a living was being exhibited as a human freak named the Elephant Man.

If you’ve not scene the movie, I recommend it to you.

There is a scene in which Merrick is traveling by train to London.

When in public he always wore a hood with eye-slits because his appearance was so hideous that children fled and women fainted at seeing him.

As he leaves the train platform a group of young teens begin to follow and torment him.

All they see is a hooded man walking with a severe limp.

Soon the crowd grows and he is chased into a the men’s lavatory where he is cornered.

Someone grabs and removes his hood and the crowd gasps and recoils in shock, but then closes in to attack.

At that moment, he cries out, “I am not an animal.

I am not an animal.

I am a human being!”

2. we are not animals — we are the superlative act of God’s creative work

a. but worldviews have consequences

1) the Naturalistic evolutionary worldview maintains that we are merely animals ... a more highly evolved species of animal, but merely an animal

b. ever since Charles Darwin released his book Origin of the Species in 1859 the prevailing theory among the intelligentsia of the world is that there is no clear boundary between Homo sapiens and the lower species from which we supposedly evolved

1) it’s a scientific theory that nullifies the need for a sovereign deity who creates and rules over his creation

2) it’s a worldview that denies life beyond death

ILLUS.

Richard Dawkins, is an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University, and the most famous atheist in the world.

Dawkins says that, “The concept of our surviving beyond our deaths is akin to magical thinking.

... there are many things we don’t understand, but the particular thing of surviving our own death (is) palpable wishful thinking that goes against everything we understand about how the nervous system works…we are apes, we are African apes.”

c.

Karl Marx took evolutionary theory and applied it to human society, suggesting that a man has no inherent significance or value beyond his contribution to the well-being of society

1) in other words, the individual is merely a cog in the machinery of society and when the person’s usefulness to society ends they lose their right to use up valuable commodities that are better allocated to the strong and healthy

d. the result has been an ever-increasing devaluing of human life that considers the very young and the very old, or the very sick and the very disabled as very dispensable

1) Western culture has now become a Culture of Death in which the sanctity of human life is demeaned and those who would defend it, ridiculed

2) when a culture devalues human life and then airbrushes God out of public view it brews a toxic mix

3. a biblical view of the doctrine of man begins with an unapologetic commitment to a sovereign God who formed Adam from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life making him a living soul

a. the doctrine of man, therefore, encompasses four axioms

A. 1st, WE ARE THE PINNACLE OF GOD'S CREATION

1. the structure of Genesis 1 accentuates that mankind is not an afterthought, but is instead the pinnacle of God's creation

2. the psalmist asked, “What is man that you are mindful of him?”

(Psalm 8:4)

a. the question reveals that thoughtful people long ago were puzzling over the human race

b. even the ancients realized that man is fearfully and wonderfully made — that we are different than the rest of creation

1) man is the only creature among all God’s creatures who investigates himself

ILLUS.

The salamander does not ponder his origins — how he came to be, what he is, or why he enjoys living under logs and rocks or what lies beyond the twenty square yards of its territory.

2) man is the only creature among all the creatures who feels impelled to ask, “Who am I, and where did I come from?

and What makes me different from other creatures?”

ILLUS.

Only man asks these questions.

The Chickadee does not sit at the bird feeder pondering its "birdness."

3. philosophers, theologians, and scientists have mulled over these questions

a. the effort to explain human life has spawned religions, philosophies, legends, sagas, and scientific theories

b. in college classrooms, science laboratories, pulpits, and endless books humans continue to try to account for themselves