Sword & Trowel 2016: Issue 2 


heart, incline the will, and it has not happened to you. You are uncon- verted people. You have no spiritual life in you. If people were reasonable they would have responded to the evidence, and the mighty things that your forebears tasted and knew.’


VERSES 5-6: ‘I have led you forty years in the wilderness: your clothes are not waxen old upon you, and thy shoe is not waxen old upon thy foot. Ye have not eaten bread.’ You have not been able to plough


fi elds or harvest. You have been in a wilderness, fed by the miraculous manna from on high – ‘that ye might know that I am the Lord your God’. Moses expounds the depravity and ingratitude of man. Much of modern evangelicalism has come to accept the idea that so- cial and compassionate labours are equal to the proclamation of the Gospel. Some make them more important than Gospel Truth. This is more or less what the Lausanne message says, and teachers like Dr Tim Keller, along with many other famous names. They imply that the Gospel has no power unless you pave the way with social works, feed the poor, impress the people and so on. While we all believe in com- passionate works as most helpful fruits of salvation, the Gospel


View of the Promised Land from Mount Nebo in Jordan, bordering the plains of Moab where Moses presented the ‘evangelical covenant’.


page 20 The ‘Evangelical Covenant’ of Moses


does not depend upon them, and here is Moses explaining this. He tells them they had the miracles, the food from on high, the ‘everlasting’ foot- wear and their clothing preserved, but they were as insensitive, un- touched and unmoved as ever. God’s social provision was infi nitely more lavish than anything that we can do, but did not in their case open hearts.


VERSES 7-9 speak of the great military deliverances and advances, and Moses then says – in so many words – ‘In the light of all this I am going to urge you to receive and depend upon this further covenant, “that ye may prosper [lit – see all things clearly] in all that ye do”.’


Photo: 123rf.com


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