“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. These words, which I am commanding you today, shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9)
When watching scary movies, I sometimes find myself yelling at the person in the movie, you know, the scantly clad young girl about to go down into the basement where the screams are coming from. “Don’t go down there”, I usually yell, or something like that. But she can’t hear me, after all, it’s just a movie. And even if she could hear me, if she is like most people, odds are she wouldn’t believe me. She would still decide to go down into the basement to her doom. The above Deuteronomy passage starts with God’s first command to us – “Listen to Me.”
Listen to Me
God starts out by telling us to hear Him. “Hear O Israel”. Listen. God’s first command to us is to listen. Listen to Him. Listen to the testimony of all of the things He created that speak of Him and His awesome nature, His power, His wisdom, His intelligence, and His abilities. Listen to His word, the Bible. Listen to His Son, Jesus. Listen to His Spirit. Listen to His prophets. Etc. But most of us are like the girl in the scary movie. We can’t help ourselves. We don’t listen to God, we can’t hear Him, and simply must find out for ourselves what is down in the basement. So what does it mean to “hear”?
When someone says to us, “You are not hearing me”, they are usually not saying that their ears are not working. The sound waves are going into their ears, and the signals from their ears are going to their brain. Their auditory system is functioning as designed. When someone says “You are not hearing me” to us, it usually means that we are not responding to what they are saying as they desire us to. We are not “doing” what they want us to do, what they are telling us to do. To them, it is as though we are ignoring them. To “hear” in the sense that God is using the word in this passage, involves three steps – it is to listen, to believe, and to act. It may even not involve our actual ears. We could be deaf, and still hear from God, by reading His word for example. So if God is telling us to “hear Him”, what does He want us to hear?
God Speaks
God speaks to us in many ways. He uses the spoken word and His written word (the Bible). We can hear Him speaking when looking at the magnificent design of an animal, when pondering the vastness of the cosmos, by examining the complexity of the microscopic world, through studying the way DNA works, or experiencing love, etc, etc, etc…..there are many ways that God speaks to us, too numerous to list. Some have even said that the entire universe tells us of the glory of God and His greatness. In Psalm 19 we read:
The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night reveals knowledge.
(Psalm 19:1-2)
All of creation speaks to us about God. But often our condition keeps us from understanding what creation is saying to us about God. So to help us understand Him more clearly, God gave us the Old Testament Bible. But even with Moses and the prophets, the Psalms and the Proverbs, we were still having trouble comprehending Him, as evidenced by the history of Israel. So God sent us His Son, and Jesus literally explained God to us. His words and the words of His followers became the New Testament. God became a man, and literally spoke to us, to enable us to clearly “hear” what He wants us to hear. And who did He come to earth and speak to?
To the Jew First
God came to speak to all of us, but He first spoke to Israel. In Romans chapter 1 we read that “the gospel is the power of God unto salvation, to the Jew first and also to the gentile.” God came down to earth, became a man, and literally spoke to Israel. Did they “hear” Him? According to eyewitness accounts, a few believed, but most did not. One of the things he said was that Israel no longer has a monopoly on God. Jesus kicked the door open so that all people can come to God now through Him, regardless of race, nationality, gender, etc. Jesus knew it was His time to go when the gentiles started asking for Him.
“Now there were some Greeks among those who were going up to worship at the feast; these then came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida of Galilee, and began to ask him, saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip came and told Andrew; Andrew and Philip came and told Jesus. And Jesus answered them, saying, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.””
(John 12:20-23)
God has spoken to us, in many ways, and in these last days He has spoken to us in His Son, the man Jesus, the Messiah. What are some of the things that God says when He speaks to us?
The Torah, the Prophets, and the Writings
Starting in Genesis, God says He created the heavens and the earth. He created all of the life on our planet. He separated light from darkness, water from dry ground, heaven from earth. He created man, male and female, in His image. He gave us work. He created marriage and family. And He promised us a savior to rescue us from our sins. He gave us the Ten Commandments, the very basis of human civilization planet-wide. And He gave us countless pictures of the coming Messiah in the form of the tabernacle, the Leviticus 23 feasts, hundreds of verses of scripture, stories, prophecies, proverbs, psalms, etc. The entire Old Testament speaks of Jesus. It is quite amazing.
God Shows Up in Person
Then Jesus, the Messiah, God’s only Son, arrives on earth, and we see God walking and talking among us. He explains God to us. John says of Jesus in chapter one of his gospel that “We beheld His glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth”. John adds that, “No one has seen God, but the only begotten of God has explained Him.” Later in Jesus’s story, when officers are sent to arrest Jesus, they return empty handed and their explanation is, “Never has a man spoken the way this man speaks.” (John 7:46) God was speaking directly to us. And we have much of it recorded in the pages of the New Testament.
If you have never read the four gospels in the New Testament for yourself, or if it has been a long time since you did, I urge you to stop reading this right now and go read what God said to us when He was here. God’s words that are recorded in the four gospels in the New Testament are the most incredible words that have ever been written in all of history. There is nothing that even comes close to comparison. Maybe that is because they are the very words of God, spoken directly to us. There is a creator that made us, and made the entire universe, and He wrote a book which is intended to explain Himself and life to us. And at one point, He actually came to earth and what He said while He was here is recorded in that book. I think this is a book that we might want to read. When I read the gospels for the first time in my early twenties, I thought that it was the best material I had ever read. I wanted to know who had been keeping it from me all of my life, and why I had not been told about it before. This Man Jesus changed my life forever. His words are still transforming me to this day. The four gospels are the most significant written documents on our planet, and have probably impacted more people and done more good than everything else combined.
The Bible
So while the entire creation is “speaking” to us about God, the clearest “speaking” that we have at our disposal is God’s word, the Old and New Testaments. The Torah is there. The Prophets and the writings are there. The life of Jesus is recorded in the four Gospels. The Acts of the Apostles and the Apostle’s letters are recorded there. In it, God tells us about Himself. He speaks about us and our lives. In it He distinguishes between right and wrong. He informs us that we were created by Him, male and female, in His image. He explains to us why there is evil in the world (sin). He answers many of the questions that we have about Him and how we are to live our lives, treat others, etc. It is the most comprehensive document on the planet in this regards. And as soon as we think we have learned everything it has to say, a new room opens up, and like a spelunker discovering a new magnificent room in the caverns he has been exploring, God shines light in a new place in His word and we see things we have never noticed before, even though we may have read it a hundred times before.
Hearing Begins with Learning
The first aspect of truly “hearing” is to learn the content. To let it into our brains, pay attention to it, wrestle with it, question it, and so on, until we understand it. The goal of phase one of “hearing” is to let the content in and grasp it with our minds. The Holy Spirit plays a key role in this aspect of hearing. Without the work of the Spirit in us to “give us ears to hear”, the word of God appears as foolishness to us, particularly the gospel message. While this step can often require intellectual effort on our part, it is often more a matter of the will. God’s word, and the gospel, for the most part, can be understood by anyone – God is very straightforward, and the Spirit wants us to hear. When we do not “hear” God’s word, it is usually because we do not want to hear God’s word.
The Opposite of Hearing
“Earth’s crammed with Heaven, and every common bush afire with God;
but only he who sees takes off his shoes.”
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
At this point, it is important to note that the opposite of “hearing” is ignoring. Ignoring His word, ignoring the evidence of creation, ignoring the evidence all around us in the lives of others and the relationships we have with them. Either we are not listening at all, or maybe our ears are closed or the wires between them and our brain are down, or perhaps the information got in but we do not like the content or disagree with it, so we choose to ignore it. There are many reasons people do not even get past step one of “hearing”. Hearing is a choice that each of us must make. Some have even said that Jesus spoke in parables so that people could choose to hear, or choose not to hear, the message from God that He brought to us. We are first faced with the choice of whether or not to hear at all, and many do not ever get past this point. But assuming that we have accomplished step one, we have heard, the content has made it into our brain, and we comprehend it on some level, we now find ourselves at the second level of “hearing”. What do we do with what we have heard?
Hearing is Believing
Once the word of God enters a man, that man has choices to make. Back to the story of the girl in the scary movie, it doesn’t help her unless she hears me say “Don’t go down there,” and believes that what I am saying is true. If she disagrees with me, as many disagree with what God says, then she will head on down to the basement where the monster is waiting to devour her. Her disagreement led to her demise. When we hear from God in some way, if we accept the content, and believe the message that the content delivers, there now is the possibility of it impacting us in a positive way. There is much debate over our ability to believe, how it is accomplished, and whether we have a choice in the matter or not. For the sake of this discussion, let us assume that in some way we have a choice regarding whether or not to believe the message we have heard. The choice is ours to make, whether to believe God, or not to believe God.
As an example, let’s take the simple message that Jesus was the son of God, sent to earth to take away the sins of the world:
“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.”
(John 3:16)
We can either believe this, or not. If we believe it, we are well on our way to avoiding the basement in the scary movie, so to speak, and living to the end of the movie. If we do not believe it, then we are headed to the basement where the monster lies in wait in our scary movie analogy, and it is highly doubtful we will make it to the end of the movie alive. The second level of “hearing” is to believe the message. In Isaiah 53, the writer asks, “Who has believed our report, and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?” God knew that many would choose not to believe Jesus’s words. God knew this even back in Isaiah’s day, hundreds of years before Jesus showed up. Isaiah is a book in the Bible that is loaded with references to Jesus, the coming Messiah, and the dead sea scrolls verified that this book was beyond any shadow of doubt written before Jesus was even born. So the second aspect of “hearing” is to believe what we have heard, to agree with it. We do not have to understand it fully at this point, but we believe it and trust it to be the truth.
Hearing is Acting
The third and final aspect of biblical “hearing” as used by God in this verse is to act on what we have heard and believed. It is to take a step of faith. To trust what we have received, and to trust that it is true to the point that we are now willing to act on it, and then to do so.
The story is told of two men in a city who watched the weather before leaving for work one day. The weather report called for a 100% chance of rain. Both men got ready for work, and as they headed out the door, one man grabbed an umbrella and a raincoat. The other man did not. Which man “heard” (believed and trusted) the weather report that morning? The one who took the umbrella and took action based on what he heard.
True “hearing” should result in action on our part, in some way. Often it causes a change in our current course of action, as opposed to creating a brand new action, but it can result in either.
To wrap up the scary movie analogy, imagine if somehow the young woman at the top of the stairs, about to go down into the dark basement, could hear me yelling at her not to go down there. Imagine that she changed her mind, and did not become the next victim of the monster in the basement. Ridiculous, but not really.
God Writes Himself Into the Script
It is as though we are all living in our own version of a scary movie, and God is warning us of the dangers that await for us in the script. He has placed his warnings in everything around us – there are clues everywhere, but we are oblivious to them. So He sends us new warnings through Moses and the prophets, He sends us stories that illustrate what He is trying to tell us, but it is still not enough. We still cannot hear the message or understand its meaning.
We are so oblivious that He writes himself into the script. “Surely,” He thinks,”If I go to them myself by sending them My Son, they will listen to Him.” And Jesus enters the movie, and interacts with the Jews. But the majority continue to follow the script and head down to the basement. Only a handful of the Jews believe Him. Then He extends His message to others, into all of the other movies that are running (so to speak), and warn all of the actors in our analogy, on a worldwide scale, not just the ones in the movie about Israel. Maybe the analogy is not so ridiculous.
God has written Himself into the movie of our life to warn us that without Him, we are going to die and spend eternity apart from Him. Scary movies work because in some respects they are the truth. There really is a monster waiting for us in the basement of death. And the only way to avoid it is to believe Jesus, to have faith. This verse begins by telling us to hear, to hear God, to hear the message His Son brought us, to believe it, and to act on it. Listen, believe, act.
Who are You Listening To
Have you “heard” God’s message, or would God look you in the eyes and say to you, “You are not hearing me!” Do we agree with the message God gives us, or are we more inclined to believe the messages of the world? Did God create the heavens and the earth as He said He did, or do you believe some other explanation? Did He make us in His image male and female, or do you believe there are more than two genders? Is marriage between a man and a woman, as God defined it, or are there other possibilities in your mind? And what of the Ten Commandments – do you think adultery is okay? What about lying? Stealing? Coveting? And what of the man Christ Jesus, do you believe His report? Do you believe His words? Have you acted on them, or are you ignoring Him and His message?
While Deuteronomy 6 was originally written to the Hebrews as they were leaving Egypt and moving into the Promised Land, it is also meant for us today. God is telling us to hear Him now, before it is too late and we go down into the basement and are devoured. What is stopping you? What is holding you back from “hearing” God today? If you want to have a better end to your life story, and avoid the judgment of God that is currently in the script of our lives, join me in this short prayer.
Lord God almighty, I hear you. I hear you calling me, warning me, that a life lived without you is a life that is empty, devoid of meaning, ending in tragedy. I believe in You. I believe in Your Son, Jesus, and trust my life to Him. I confess with my mouth that Jesus is the Son of God, died for my sins, rose from the dead on the third day, and is seated at the right hand of God the Father, where He makes intercession for us. Save me from my sins and from the judgment that I deserve. I hear You, I believe You, and I will act on this belief starting today. Change the story of my life to be a good story of life, filled with joy and peace, rather than a life of tragedy, filled with disappointment, death, and destruction. I ask these things in the name of Jesus. Amen.
“So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of God.”
Romans 10:17
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