Choose life: Live with nothing to hide (Deuteronomy 29–30; John 12)

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Messiah Yeshua (Christ Jesus) taught that the life choices that are truly profitable long-term aren’t obvious to those with the worldview of the now (John 12:25).

That teaching parallels the main theme of the Torah reading נִצָּבִים Nitzavim (“standing,” Deut. 29:9-30:20): “choose life.” One would think that choosing life over death would be a no-brainer, but we learn that this command is simultaneously easy and extremely difficult.

We have the Torah command from Heaven for men in the people of God to be circumcised (Gen. 17:10–14; Lev. 12:3). But the Torah also teaches that fulfilling that command starts in the heart before it is acted out on the body (Deut. 10:16; 30:6; Jer. 9:25–26). That’s why Paul taught — in a way modern Bible teachers frequently misunderstand — that someone who submits to circumcision of the body without a circumcision of the heart first, the physical procedure is not just useless, it’s a mutilation (Galatians 5).

Some are so addicted to plastic surgery that there is no longer anything left to cut, lift or tuck, because they are using surgical procedures to try to fix a disfigured mental perception, which is futile.

There’s an old computer programming truism: Garbage in, garbage out. If you don’t have good information coming in, you will not make good decisions.

Secrets vs. revelation

Because of this need among the people of God to undergo Heavenly heart surgery, the focus of today’s study is Deut. 29:29.

The secret things [סָתַר satar, H5641] belong to the LORD our God, but the things revealed [גָּלָה galah, H1540] belong to us and to our sons forever, that we may observe all the words of this law.
Deut. 29:29 NASB

Hidden sins will be revealed, this is one of the most important spiritual lessons to grasp. The law is a like a mirror that shows us how far we are from God’s standard (James 1:21–25). When we measure ourselves against that standard, we inevitably fail (Romans 7). But when we ask God to renew us, He is faithful to change us from the inside out (Romans 8). That is the only way we will ever “measure up.”

Some believe that Deut. 29:29 is a standalone verse, detached from surrounding teaching, instructing that there are mysteries of God that need to be uncovered — as much as is revealed. There are those who believe this is a command by God to go fishing for mysteries and to reveal them.

“This verse can stand alone because of its differentiation between what God had disclosed and what he had kept hidden. However, in context these words address the puzzlement that would come when Israel found itself captive in a strange land. How could God’s severe discipline be brought into line with his promise of future blessings and his oaths to the patriarchs? This was not a question that Yahweh was choosing to answer for the present. Such matters would remain a secret. All Israel needed to know at the moment was that the terms of the covenant, the things revealed, belonged to them and their children. God was urging them to follow all the words of the law.”
Doug McIntosh, Deuteronomy, Holman Bible Commentary, vol. 3; ed. Max Anders. (Nashville: B & H Publishing Group, 2002), pp. 332–333. Emphasis added.

We are encouraged to seek wisdom as to why we are going through a particular trial (James 1:2–8). Apostle Ya’akov reminds us reminds that we are examine these challenges with full faith and trust in God, so that we become “perfect (margin: mature) and complete, lacking in nothing.” We are not called upon to consider ourselves a victim of everything that happens to us.

An ancient Jewish interpretation of Deut. 29:29 is that hidden sins would be the LORD’s to deal with, but revealed sins were the congregation’s to handle:

“Concealed acts concern the LORD our God.” You might then ask, “What can we do? You punish the many for the intentions of an individual. For if there is ‘some man or woman…whose heart is even now turning away from the LORD’ [Deut. 29:18] the result is ‘the plagues and diseases that the LORD has inflicted upon that land’ [Deut. 29:22]. But no one can know the hidden thoughts of his neighbor.”
God replies, in our verse, “I will not punish you for ‘concealed acts.’” They concern the LORD, and He will punish the individual for them.”

“But with overt acts, it is for us and our children to remove the evil from our midst.” If we do not sanction them, then the public is punished. Note that the words “for us and our children” have dots over the letters [לָ֤֗נ֗וּ֗ וּ֗לְ֗בָ֗נֵ֙֗י֗נ֗וּ֙֗]. This is to provide the further interpretation that the meaning of these words is limited: even overt acts did not provoke punishment of the wider public until after they crossed the Jordan, once they accepted the oath at Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal and became responsible for each other’s behavior.”
Rabbi Shlomo Yitzhaki (“Rashi,” 1040–1105), translated in Michael Carasik, “Deuteronomy,” The Commentators’ Bible. (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2015), paragraph 3906. Emphasis added.

Ancient commentators have noted that such “concealed acts” could come from the previously listed 12 deadly secret sins that bring about God’s condemnation (Deuteronomy 27:15–26, see Torah reading Ki Tavo):

Cursed is the one who makes an idol in secret: 2nd Commandment
Cursed is the one who dishonors father and mother: 5th Commandment
Cursed is the one who moves neighbor’s boundaries: 8th Commandment (theft)
Cursed is the one who misleads a blind person: 6th Commandment (murder/hate); 8th Commandment?
Cursed is the one who distorts justice for non-Israeli: 6th Commandment; 8th Commandment?
Cursed is the one who engages in deviancy with his stepmother: 7th Commandment (adultery)
Cursed is the one who gets perverted with an animal: 7th Commandment
Cursed is the one who seduces his sister or stepsister: 7th Commandment
Cursed is the one who knows his mother-in-law the wrong way: 7th Commandment
Cursed is the one who assaults his neighbor in secret: 6th Commandment
Cursed is the one who accepts a bribe to convict the innocent: 9th Commandment (false witness), 6th Commandment
Cursed is the one who doesn’t confirm the covenant by doing them: 1st Commandment (other gods)

Modern culture resurrects sins of the ancient past

There is yet another interpretation of Deut. 29:29 that takes us back all the way to the original sin of our first parents, Adam and Eve. It could be a warning against the same snare that caught the first Adam in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3): Do we trust that כל khol (“all”) the LORD has given us is טוב tov (“good”), that nothing tov is being held back for the seeker?

There is hard scientific evidence that humanity has declined since Eden. This loss of genetic information as humanity gets further and further from the ideal of Eden is real.

Our DNA has declined, which is why we should not be engaging in sexual relations with siblings and cousins. Even marrying second cousins is now genetically problematic.

Our language skills are also in decline.¹ When you study ancient languages and compare them with modern languages, our language skills — complexity of phrases, breadth of vocabulary — are so childish and simple when compared to those of our ancient, or even somewhat recent ancestors.²

The materialistic worldview teaches us that things can grow from simple to complex. But in the real world, what we see in so many areas is that things actually decline from complex to simple, from order to less ordered.³

Following God’s Torah is not a costume, or an acting gig. It should be who we are from the inside out. Our relationship is between ourselves and heaven.

The Torah community has to teach and enforce God’s standards. Paul had to call out a person in the Corinth congregation who was committing a very flagrant sin (1Corinthians 5), and we read in that the person repented and was returned to the community (2Cor. 2:5–10). We see in the history of Israel as revealed in the Torah and the Prophets, that heaven’s heart for Israel leans on the side of mercy, but also has to enforce justice from time to time.

When Yeshua tells us to “not judge” and to not call someone a “fool”, a “fool” does not mean “goofy” or “childish.” In the Psalms and Proverbs, a “fool” is someone who is a reprobate and a lost cause, who is so far from Torah that they are blatantly on the path of destruction. The issue with judging people as a “lost cause” is that we are crossing the line from judging actions, which we are called to discern, to judging the heart, which is the sole purview of God.

We are called to warn people of sin, but we can not use an arrogant tone when we do so. We have to be sure that the plank has been cleared from our own eyes first. We must be concerned when someone is acting in blatant sin, but we have to be concerned about them, not just their actions.

Choose ‘death’ to choose life

In Yeshua’s address to His disciples in John 12:20-50, we see the repeat of the main theme of Deuteronomy 29–30, which is the exhortation to choose life.

“He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it to life eternal.”
John 12:25 NASB

The interesting way that Yeshua phrases this is that those who hate their life in this world will keep it to eternal life while those who love life in this world will lose it. If you are greedy for the things of this life, you will lose your grip on them when you die. But often, we can lose our grip on the things of this world before we die. Material possessions can easy get consumed in natural disasters, such as floods, hurricanes, and earthquakes.

You spend your life accumulating things and in a short time, they can all be gone, consumed in a moment. They slip through your fingers the harder you try to cling to them.

Where we live, the natural consuming natural disaster we are most acquainted with is wild fires. All of us have either experienced losses due to wildfire or know someone who either lost their homes in wildfires, or even died in wildfires. None of us have escaped some connection with this kind of loss.

In one of the bands I play in from time to time, I know a guitar player who, as many guitar players do, owned more than one guitar. He had a quite a collection he had curated over the years, going back decades. He lived on Mark West Spring Road and all of you know what happened in that area during the Tubbs Fire of 2017. He was one of many in that area who were awakened in the middle of the night and barely escaped their homes with their lives, fleeing with little to nothing.

He had to make a choice as he was going out the door. He turned briefly to his left and looked one last time at his beautiful guitar collection. Each guitar had a different memory attached to it. Some were gifts. Some of them he bought with his own money. He then turned to his right and saw his father, mother and the rest of his family in the truck. He could save one or the other, but not both. He said he heard a voice that told him to just go. He chose his family. He chose life.

He understood that material things come and go. If you hold onto such things loosely, then you’re not devastated when a disaster comes along and takes them away.

When I say he lost everything, it wasn’t just his house or his guitars that the fires consumed. He also had a large fireproof safe. He also had to ask himself whether he would spend time fiddling with the combination or get to the truck. He didn’t have time to do both.

As he fled his house, he prayed to God, “Let there be one thing left standing when I return.” When he was able to return to his house, what did he find? The safe! What was in the safe? Nothing!

He had heirlooms that went back generations, all of it, everything went up in flames, but the safe was still there, like an obelisk, just sitting on the flat concrete slab, while everything around it was burned down to ash.

The paper money and collectables didn’t survive the intense heat of a 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit fire that raged for hours on end. Most fireproof safes are made to survive fires that last for 30 minutes or an hour, not for hours on end.

Yeshua confronted those who were so eager to seek after signs and wonders that they were not open minded to the things of God. Yeshua understood that those who wanted to know God, those who had sensitive hearts and were eager to know the things of heaven, they would understand His parables and get the message.

When the Apostle Peter preached to the people in the Temple at Pentecost, he faced a group of people who had to make a decision. Would they be indignant or would they repent? They had a choice to choose repentance or to choose to be stubborn and rebel against Godly correction. Yeshua warned that those who seek to preserve their lives over justify their wrongdoing will lose their lives, but those who are willing to lose their lives in repentance, for His sake, will find life.

People in California, who have lived in the aftermath of all thee wildfires are just at their wit’s end or anxiety. Anytime there’s a little puff of smoke off in the distance, people start panicking. And you can understand why if you’ve lost your house, you’ve lost loved ones, all you own has gone up in smoke and you have spent years rebuilding. There are those who have suffered lung damage from smoke inhalation, so it’s easy to understand many of our families, friends and neighbors suffer psychological trauma after these fires.

Survivor’s guilt is real. But if you hold your life loosely, then whatever comes along, doesn’t defeat us but makes us stronger.

Summary: Tammy