“Seeing vs Hearing”
Deuteronomy 4:9-31
November 28, 2021
Faith Presbyterian Church – Morning Service
Pastor Nicoletti
We continue this morning in the book of Deuteronomy, as Moses preaches to the second exodus generation of Israel on the edge of the promised land.
Our text this morning includes the verses we have looked at the last two Sundays, but then extends well beyond them.
With that said, please do listen carefully as we turn to Deuteronomy 4:9-31. This is God’s word for us this morning.
Moses said:
4:9 “Only take care, and keep your soul diligently, lest you forget the things that your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life. Make them known to your children and your children’s children— 10 how on the day that you stood before Yahweh your God at Horeb, Yahweh said to me, ‘Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children so.’ 11 And you came near and stood at the foot of the mountain, while the mountain burned with fire to the heart of heaven, wrapped in darkness, cloud, and gloom. 12 Then Yahweh spoke to you out of the midst of the fire. You heard the sound of words, but saw no form; there was only a voice. 13 And he declared to you his covenant, which he commanded you to perform, that is, the Ten Commandments, and he wrote them on two tablets of stone. 14 And Yahweh commanded me at that time to teach you statutes and rules, that you might do them in the land that you are going over to possess.
15 “Therefore watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that Yahweh spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, 16 beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, 17 the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, 18 the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth. 19 And beware lest you raise your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and bow down to them and serve them, things that Yahweh your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven. 20 But Yahweh has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day. 21 Furthermore, Yahweh was angry with me because of you, and he swore that I should not cross the Jordan, and that I should not enter the good land that Yahweh your God is giving you for an inheritance. 22 For I must die in this land; I must not go over the Jordan. But you shall go over and take possession of that good land. 23 Take care, lest you forget the covenant of Yahweh your God, which he made with you, and make a carved image, the form of anything that Yahweh your God has forbidden you. 24 For Yahweh your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.
25 “When you father children and children’s children, and have grown old in the land, if you act corruptly by making a carved image in the form of anything, and by doing what is evil in the sight of Yahweh your God, so as to provoke him to anger, 26 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that you will soon utterly perish from the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess. You will not live long in it, but will be utterly destroyed. 27 And Yahweh will scatter you among the peoples, and you will be left few in number among the nations where Yahweh will drive you. 28 And there you will serve gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell. 29 But from there you will seek Yahweh your God and you will find him, if you search after him with all your heart and with all your soul. 30 When you are in tribulation, and all these things come upon you in the latter days, you will return to Yahweh your God and obey his voice. 31 For Yahweh your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.
This is the word of the Lord. (Thanks be to God.)
“All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall, but the word of the Lord endures forever.” [1 Peter 1:24-25]
Let’s pray …
Lord, our eyes long for your salvation
and for the fulfillment of your righteous promises.
Deal with us, your servants, according to your steadfast love,
and teach us your statutes.
We are your servants, and so we ask you to give us understanding,
that we may know your testimonies.
As we attend to your word now,
help us to love it more than gold, even much fine gold.
Make us to hold to your precepts as right,
and to hate every false way.
Grant this, we ask, in Jesus’s name. Amen
[Based on Psalm 119:123-125, 127-128]
Introduction
As we come to our text this morning, it is easy for us to think we know what it is about … but to miss its main point.
For some, and maybe especially if you’re not a Christian, our text this morning is about religious division. It’s about the Bible narrowly focusing on the differences between Israel’s worship and other religious traditions, and missing all the things they have in common.
For others, and often for some Christians, the text is an archaic and irrelevant portion of the Bible. It’s hard for us to imagine being tempted to worship images of animals or the sun, and so the text feels dated and irrelevant to us.
For others, more familiar with a Christian theology of idolatry, we might hear this passage and begin to think of the figurative idols in our lives – the things we sometimes love more than we should, and which can compete with God for our ultimate loyalty.
And for still other Christians, this text is especially about how we worship and how important it is that our worship is done according to the details given in the Scriptures.
Now each of those topics are worth discussing and worth wrestling with. But, actually, none of those perspectives actually captures the primary focus of our text this morning.
As important as those other topics may be, the primary focus of our text is on the important distinction between sight-based religion, and hearing-based religion.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let’s take a look at the text itself again.
In verse nine, Moses begins by urging the people not to forget what they have “seen.” And what did they see? Well … nothing. I mean, they saw fire and darkness combined in extraordinary ways, as Moses mentions in verse eleven, but then in verse twelve he stresses that they “saw no form.” Instead, they heard God’s words. God wanted them to hear him, he says in verse ten. He spoke to them, we read in verse twelve. He declared his covenant, and he commanded the Ten Commandments, we read in verse thirteen. And he wrote them down so that they could be repeated to the people, and he called on Moses to speak his words to the people in verse fourteen. Over and over again in verses nine through fourteen the focus is on how there was nothing really to see when they stood before God at Mount Sinai, but there was much to hear. And then, from there, we get the application of that in the verses that follow.
Since Israel did not see an image that day, they are not to make an image or worship an image. But since they heard God’s word, they must continue to hear and respond to his word. Those themes are stressed in the verses that follow. Even the apparently random mention of how Moses will not get to enter the promised land himself, is actually consistent with this theme, since Moses’s sin was a failure to heed God’s word – to keep the specifics of what God had spoken to him. [Wright, 52]
As scholar Christopher Wright points out, the framework here is rooted in the experience of Mount Sinai, and the “remarkable fact that at Sinai God has been heard but not seen.” What mattered was not the fire and the darkness, but the “verbal revelation of God’s mind and will. Sinai,” Wright explains, “was a cosmic audio-visual experience, but it was the audio that mattered.” [Wright, 50]
There are a number of ways the Bible contrasts Yahweh, the God of Israel, with the gods of the surrounding nations. But in this particular passage, the primary contrast is “between the visible and the audible”.
“Idols,” Wright explains, “have a ‘form’ but do not speak. Yahweh has no ‘form,’ but he decisively speaks. Idols are visible but dumb. Yahweh is invisible but eloquent, addressing his people in words of promise and demand, gift and claim. This introduces a fundamentally moral distinction into the contrast between the faith of Israel and surrounding visual polytheism.” [Wright, 50-51]
Now, the point is not that visual arts or symbols are wrong in general, or even in worship. After all, the tabernacle of God, built to his specifications, was filled with visual art and symbols. [Jordan, Part III]
The idols described in this passage were not just any images. Rather, what’s being described are images used as the chief point of contact with, or information about, God. [Jordan, Part II]
And it is treating an image as the chief source of contact with or content about God – treating the eye as the chief organ for connecting with God – that is what our text is concerned with. The focus is on what religion – what knowledge of God – is to be ultimately based on.
Our text this morning highlights the difference between sight-based religion and hearing-based religion. And that is a theme we find throughout the Scriptures.
And it’s a distinction goes well beyond the senses themselves. The senses, as we discuss them this morning, are not the main thing we are looking at, but rather, we are looking deeper to what the senses point us to: to two different forms of religion that operate at a heart level – two different patterns of relating to God, of which the senses each give us a picture.
The difference between religion rooted in seeing and religion rooted in hearing – the difference between idol-based religion and Scripture-based religion – is a question about the very nature of true religion. And in that way, it is relevant to us all.
I’ll be drawing this morning from a series of essays by the theologian James B. Jordan. I don’t agree with Jordan on everything, but his reflections on these categories are quite helpful.
And to explore the distinction between these two patterns of religion – sight-based religion and hearing based religion – we will focus this morning on how each of them answers four questions:
- What is at the center of true religion?
- How does true religion shape us?
- Where do we experience true religion?
- And who bridges the gap in true religion?
What, how, where, and who.
What Is at the Center of True Religion?
So first, what is at the center of true religion?
Philosopher Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy has pointed out that, generally speaking, “sight deals with things, while hearing deals with persons.” [Jordan, Part I]
When you are approaching an object, sight is usually the best way to begin to understand it. When you approach an object, you first look it over. Maybe you pick it up to turn it around in your hands so you can see it from all angles. Even as you touch it, you’re also always watching it, seeing how it responds to what you do, and your eyes usually remain the chief source of information as you interact with the object. Sight deals especially with things.
But sight is not the best sense when it comes to interacting with persons. James Jordan puts it like this – he writes: “Looking at another person tells you virtually nothing about him.” Jordan continues with a reflection on his own appearance – he writes: “You may think I have a beard because I’m a hippie, but the real reason might be that I agree with R. J. Rushdoony’s odd notion that God commands men to have beards! Or I might have a beard to hide a disfigured face, or because my skin breaks out when I shave. The real reason, if you want to know, is that my wife likes my beard, and so do I, and that’s all there is to it. How do we learn about another person? By hearing what he or she has to say. Language reveals the inside of another person, something sight can never do.” [Jordan, Part I]
Of course it’s true that people can use words to lie. But even when they do, Jordan points out, once we realize that they have lied to us, that too reveals to us something important about them.
Ordinarily, sight deals with things, and hearing deals with persons. And one way to illustrate this is simply to consider what happens when we switch those things.
When we minimize or eliminate language from our interactions with another person, it is often because we are treating them less and less like a person, and more and more like an object. Think of the whole concept of “objectification”. More often than not, when one person objectifies another, they focus on the visual, while eliminating language altogether, or reducing the role of language to a narrow set of two-dimensional kinds of statements. When we treat people primarily as something to be seen, rather than a voice to be heard, we are often objectifying them – we are treating them as less than a person.
On the other hand, if we want to affirm someone’s humanity, it often takes the form of seeking to interact with them with language. And it is often through language that we access the depths of who they are as a person.
And, as Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck points out, this makes sense because we are made in the image of God.
After all, Bavinck reminds us, Jesus is identified in the Bible as the Word of God. And as the “Word” of God, we are told that he is God himself. The Word of God is the very Person of God. And as it is with the word of God, Bavinck writes, “so it is also with the word of the human. The word is the person himself.” Bavinck continues: “In language you have the person, his being at its deepest and most intimate; in the word he steps into the light and appears from his hiddenness and reticence. This comes from the depths of his being.” [Bavinck, 24-25]
Our appearance is shallow. But our words come from the depths of our being. And so it is with God. His word reveals to us the depths of his being.
Israel had that word of God in the Ten Commandments and the Torah. We have the fullness of the Scriptures in the Bible. There God speaks. There he reveals himself in deep ways rather than in shallow appearance.
And yet, Moses points out here, when it comes to God, people will often prefer a shallow appearance to words from his inner depths.
Why is that?
Well, for one thing, we have a tendency to want to treat God as an object. We all have a tendency to want to treat God as something we can control. That can take many forms. In the context of Israel here it took the form of preferring a God they relate to primarily by sight rather than by words. [Jordan, Part I]
But even if we have no interest in actual images, we can still fall into this underlying pattern of treating God as an object rather than as a person.
Do you do that? Do you tend to treat God more like a thing to be studied and manipulated and used, rather than as a person to be heard and known and responded to?
One way to test this out is to consider whether you allow God to be who he is, or whether you try to edit who he is. And this gets at the heart of sight-based religion verses hearing-based religion.
Jordan puts it like this – he writes: “When I use my eyes, I am in complete control of the information that comes to me, for I can shut my eyes. […] But the ear is unlike the eye. I cannot shut my ear. The only way I can stop the sound is to leave the room.” [Jordan, Part I]
Now, of course, we live in a day of noise-cancelling earbuds and such, but in some ways that makes the point. It has taken millennia of technological development since the days of Moses to find a way to artificially close our ears completely and at will. But we were born with the ability to close our eyes.
And whether we are dealing with images or not, in our hearts, we often prefer a God whom we can close our eyes to when some aspect of him comes up that we don’t like. We prefer to edit who he is – to close our eyes to the parts that make us uncomfortable. But hearing-based religion takes that option away from us. Hearing-based religion reminds us that we have no right to pick and choose. We have no right to look away.
God is a person. And he tells us who he is – we do not tell him. And as a person, he must be accepted as he is, not as we would like to edit him to be.
The first difference between sight-based religion and hearing-based religion is that sight-based religion tells us that a thing is at the center of true religion, while hearing-based religion tells us that a person is at the center of true religion.
How Does Religion Shape Us?
The second difference comes from how these two forms of religion answer the question: How does true religion shape us?
How does true religion shape us?
Sight-based religion, image-based religion, is there not so much to shape us as to satisfy us – to give us what we want. Sight-based religion does not shape us, because in sight-based religion God makes no demands of us.
And again – with each of these the point is not the sense of sight itself, but rather how that sense gives us a deeper view into a pattern of relating to God.
So, take a look at verse twenty-eight, where Moses describes “gods of wood and stone, the work of human hands, that neither see, nor hear, nor eat, nor smell.”
There are a few things to note from this. First of all, to the list of things that such gods do not do, we might add that they do not talk. And so they do not make demands on us. They do not challenge us, and so they do not shape us.
Second, we should note that as Moses points out, they are the “work of human hands.” Meaning, so far from them shaping us, we shape them. We can mold them according to our needs or desires. We can adjust them to what we want.
And with that we should note that a relationship to such a god is not a real relationship at all, but only a fantasy. It is a fantasy in which we imagine the sort of person we want, and we shape them and mold them according to our desires, and they never speak of their own independent will, they only say what we project onto them – what we want them to say. Such are the gods of sight-based religion. They are fantasy gods, who make no demands of us, but are there to simply fill our needs. They can never challenge us, and therefore they can never transform us. [Jordan, Part I]
Do you have such a god? Have you made yourself one from scratch? Or, have you, in your heart, been trying to reshape the biblical God into a god like that? And if you have, do you see how such a fantasy god can never really change you, and also never really relate to you?
Because real relationships – relationships that challenge us, relationships that change us, relationships that shape us, usually do so by words. Words of love. Words of disagreement. Words of challenge. Words of rebuke. And if we are to change, we need a God who speaks.
A speaking God can change us. A speaking God can make the kind of demands of us that come with a real relationship.
Starting in verse twenty-four, Moses speaks of God’s jealousy. And that language might make us uncomfortable, but we need to recognize that, as one commentator puts it, the jealousy language there is actually “the language of love.” [Block, 338]
It’s not the language of coveting, or of envy, but of proper jealousy – a right and loving desire to hold onto what is rightfully his. This is the same kind of jealousy by which a husband or wife is devastated if their spouse cheats on them. It is a loving jealousy that loves another and rightfully expects them to be faithful. God loves his people. And he will not have them committing spiritual adultery with false gods. And because he is a God who speaks, he can demand our faithfulness in a way that a silent god cannot.
A God who speaks is a God who can demand faithfulness of us. A God who speaks is a God who can change our lives.
Our culture … and if we’re honest, our own hearts … is distressed by a God with words – a God who speaks – because that means God can speak to us authoritatively, and it makes it more difficult for us to project our own preferences onto him.
Think about that in our culture. Worshiping a god or some sort of spiritual being is not offensive to most people in our culture. It doesn’t cause others to tense up. You can talk about being spiritual all you want, and most people are fine with it. But if you share that your god has said something – has spoken – that’s when people start to get nervous. Their guard goes up. Because a person who speaks can challenge us. A person who speaks can confront us. A person who speaks can contradict us.
The truth is that much of the polite religious tolerance of our own day is predicated on the assumptions that our gods must be silent. Or if they speak, they only speak concerning those who want to listen to them. They never make a general claim on other people. Our gods are tolerated so long as they have a mute button – and anyone who doesn’t want to hear them can mute them.
But silencing another human being is an insult to their dignity. How much more so with God? And yet, that is what our culture wants, and if we are honest, that is often what we want as well.
Have you tried to silence God? Have you tried to make for yourself a silent god as a replacement, crafting him or her with your own hands, shaping them into what you want? Such a god may exist as a fantasy. But such a god can never change you.
A real God, a God who can change us, must be a God who speaks.
How does true religion shape us?
Sight-based religion tells us that God does not shape us so much as we shape him. But hearing-based religion gives us a God who can make a claim on our lives – a God who can therefore transform us into something new.
Where Do We Experience Religion?
Third, where do we experience true religion?
This point will be brief, but it is worth noting.
As Jordan points out, idol-based religions tend to isolate their worshippers. Idol-based religions tend to be about individuals coming before a shrine or an image. It is silent worship, where we can go to a holy site on our own, or, even when we are surrounded by others, each person is having their own private experience – they are alone in the crowd – each looking at the image, each having their own private thoughts in their own hearts. [Jordan, Part I]
In contrast, hearing-based religion is by nature communal. We can be in the same room, and we can all choose to look at different things. But we cannot choose to hear different things. There is a communal aspect of hearing that simply is not present when it comes to seeing.
And according to the Bible, while God is close to every one of us individually, we also need the communal body of Christ to experience God even further.
In verse ten of our text we heard God say, “Gather the people to me, that I may let them hear my words, so that they may learn to fear me all the days that they live on the earth, and that they may teach their children so.”
God did not interact with each person separately, though he certainly could have. Instead he brought them together and he spoke to them as one. It was a communal experience.
While sight-based religion often isolates us, hearing-based religion tells us that God is especially at work in the community of his people.
Who Bridges the Gap in Religion?
Fourth and finally: Who bridges the gap in true religion?
Because this whole conversation assumes that there is a gap. There is a gap in our connection with God. And someone needs to bridge it.
In idol-based religion, we try to bridge the gap in religion ourselves – by reaching up. We try to take pieces of creation, and turn them into mediators between us and God – into images that can help us connect to the divine. We take something lower than us, and we try to make it a ladder up to the heavens. And there is something absurd about that. [Jordan, Part II]
And our text highlights that. As one commentator notes: “the list of possible ‘shapes’ [an] idol might take” in verses sixteen through nineteen “is given in an order that precisely reverses the order of the creation narrative: human beings, [then] land animals, [then] birds, [and] fish, [then] the heavenly bodies. The point,” he continues, “is that idolatry not only corrupts God’s redemptive achievement for God’s people, but perverts and turns upside-downthe whole created order,” [Wright, 51]
The god of an idol calls humans to climb up to him – an absurd prospect.
But the God of Mount Sinai comes down to his people. And in coming down, he bridges the gap. And so, rather than expecting humanity to climb up to him, he sent his word down to them.
And he didn’t stop with his word. He also came down himself, and he acted to save his people from their enemies, and even from themselves.
Because the gap exists because of us. We have sinned. We have distanced ourselves from God. And yet, even so, he has, and he will deliver us.
We see that in our text – that God has delivered his people in the past, and God will deliver them in the future.
Moses reminds them in verse twenty – he writes: “Yahweh has taken you and brought you out of the iron furnace, out of Egypt, to be a people of his own inheritance, as you are this day.”
And then Moses tells them that even when they fail – even when they turn from the speaking, personal God of the Bible, and chase after silent gods instead, even so, when they repent and call on Yahweh, he will forgive them. He will deliver them. That is what we read in verses twenty-nine and thirty. And then in verse thirty-one he says: “For Yahweh your God is a merciful God. He will not leave you or destroy you or forget the covenant with your fathers that he swore to them.”
Which is key. Because after all that is said about the difference between idols and the one true God, after all that is said about sight-based religion and hearing-based religion, Moses knows that Israel still will fail. He knows that Israel will still objectify God. They will try to shape God, rather than let him shape them. They will turn creation upside down and try to climb to God themselves rather than receive his presence by grace.
And even though they do – even though they act in ways that widen the gap between them and him, still, if they repent, if they call on him, God will come, and he will have mercy on them, and he will save them from their sin. He will once again bridge the gap.
And, of course, that is what Advent is all about.
It is the first Sunday of Advent – when we remember the coming of our Lord – how God the Son came down from heaven to earth. And as we have already heard this morning, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners.” [1 Timothy 1:15] He came to bridge the gap that we made by our sin.
Conclusion
As we sum up our reflections this morning, two distinct pictures emerge. Man-made religion – sight-based religion – treats God as an object, designed to serve our desires in isolation, as we try to climb up to God.
Meanwhile, Biblical religion – hearing-based religion – is about a relationship with a person, who shapes us in community, as God himself comes down to us.
We get a wonderful picture of that in the very concept of Advent, and the incarnation of Jesus Christ. But if we think about it … Advent also complicates things.
After all, in the advent of Christ – in his coming, his incarnation – there was, in fact, something to see. The Apostle John, described Jesus, God the Son, as: “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning the word of life — the life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us — that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you” [1 John 1:1-3a]
Doesn’t that kind of throw the whole “seeing vs hearing” thing out the window? The apostles not only heard Jesus – they also saw him.
That is true. And yet, it was temporary. John saw Jesus. And yet, as he writes, he doesn’t see him anymore. Jesus came. He lived, he died, he rose from the dead. And then he ascended back into heaven. And he is not currently seen. And so, God’s people are called once again to rely on hearing rather than sight. After all, John calls on the churches not to see what he saw, but to hear of what he saw. He calls them to hear.
Is that the end of it, then? Is there no place for sight?
Well, no, actually there is a place for sight. There is at Christ’s return. There is when he comes and makes us, and all things, new.
For at the last day, John tells us that the people of God, gathered around the throne of God and the Lamb of God “will see his face.” [Revelation 22:4] For, the Apostle Paul tells us, “now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face.” [1 Corinthians 13:12] And, John adds, “when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.” [1 John 3:2]
What we learn from all this is that seeing God is a good thing, but it’s not something that is for us right now. [Jordan, Part II]
Sight itself is not bad … it just must remain in its proper place. And it is not yet time for sight.
In our fallen state, brushing aside hearing and rushing into sight leads to all of the problems we have described so far – it leads to relationships that treat others as objects, not people, that tend to use them for our own desires rather than let them shape us, and it tends to isolate us rather than draw us close.
This is one reason why a biblical view of marriage and sexuality takes the shape it does. In marriage there is a proper place for husband and wife to see each other fully – to be naked and unashamed. But before that time there are words. Ordinarily, many words before such sight is granted. Words in which they get to know one another as persons. Words in which they shape and are shaped by one another. Words in which they bind themselves to each other in a covenant. And after such words, sight is called for.
That pattern is even more clear in a relationship where there is hurt. Words are needed to address the wrong. Words are needed to bring repentance. Words are needed to heal. Only then can deeper intimacy follow.
And so it is with us and God. Right now, what we need are words. We need words to teach us to treat God as a person, rather than as a thing. We need words to shape us – to call us to repent and to trust in the Lord. We need words to tell us of the commitment God has made to us in the gospel – a commitment out of sheer grace – and we need words to communicate our commitment to him. We need words to draw us into God’s community – into the family of God. We need words to assure us that God has drawn close to us, and that he will bridge the gap. What we need now are words.
But the time will one day come for sight. The time will come, when, in Christ, we shall see him as he is – we shall see him face to face.
That is the promise of the final advent of our Lord.
But for now, we must listen. And so let us listen to the Word of God in the Scriptures, as God reveals himself to us in it. Let us allow his word to challenge and to shape us. Let us cooperate as he uses his word to draw us into community. And let us trust him that as he has come to us in his first advent to save us, so he will come again in his final advent to be with us forever. Now we will hear him. But then we will also see him face to face.
Amen.
—
This sermon draws on material from:
Barker, Paul. Introduction and notes to Deuteronomy in The ESV Study Bible. Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2008.
Bavinck, Herman. Herman Bavinck on Preaching & Preachers. Translated and edited by James P. Eglinton. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2017.
Block, Daniel I. The NIV Application Commentary: Deuteronomy. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2012.
Jordan, James B. “The Second Word” Parts 1-4. June 5, August 10, October 7, December 7, 1994. Accessed at Theopolis Institute, originally published at Biblical Horizons:
[Note: Though there were a number of items I have drawn from these articles for this sermon, there is also much in them that I disagree with.]
Mathis, David. “We Will See His Face: What Is the Beatific Vision?” Desiring God. March 11, 2021. https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/we-will-see-his-face
Wright, Christopher. Deuteronomy. NIBC. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996.
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