“For you they are no empty words;

they are your very life, and by them you shall

live long in the land which you are to occupy”

(Deuteronomy 32:47).

I heard the announcer over a Memphis radio station tell of a man who was looking for a job. The announcer gave the man’s age, his training and skills, his years of experience in his chosen vocation, and then ended with this statement: “The applicant seeking employment has moved his family to the Memphis area because he has a son with a health problem, a solution for which the family is seeking in the Memphis medical and hospital center.”

A matter of health or sickness, a matter of life or death, for one member of one family gets the number one priority, so that job security for the father, convenience and comfort for the family, and the other children’s educational opportunities are all sacrificed, or at least laid on the line, if only the necessary treatment and care can be secured for that one threatened life.

Moses had come to the end of his life. He knew it. Before he died he had some farewell words he wanted to say to his people. They had been a slave people whom he had liberated. They were a foolish and sinful people who had tried his patience over and over. They were a weak yet willful people whom he had borne in his arms in the wilderness and with whom he had grown exasperated. Time and again Moses had prayed to God for his people when the Lord Almighty had grown angry at their disobedience and threatened to destroy them. Moses had prayed, “Forgive them, O Lord. Forgive them, or blot my name out of your book of life.”

Now in parting from his people, Moses, the great liberator and law-giver, knowing that he will no longer be there to guide, shield, and defend them, gives them his farewell message: “Take to heart all these warnings which I solemnly give you this day: command your children to be careful to observe all the words of this law. For you they are no empty words; they are your very life, and by them you shall live long in the land which you are to occupy after crossing the Jordan.”

“It’s a life and death matter,” Moses is saying to the people for whom he had laid his life on the line. “It’s a life and death matter that you reverence these words and obey them.”

What are these words that Moses insists are no mere words but are the very essence of life for his people? Why, the whole contents of the book of Deuteronomy, the whole moral and religious law delivered by Moses to the people from God himself. The moral code is there, God’s plan for people’s behavior in relationship with each other: Do not kill; do not steal; do not lie; do not commit adultery; do not covet.

The religious code is there as well, God’s plan for every person’s relationship with God, based on faith and love and obedience: Worship one God with the whole of one’s heart and mind and soul; honor the family relationships as sacred unto God; keep one day of every week for worship and rest and the nurture of one’s soul in the midst of the covenant people of God.

Moses knew he was dying. God was raising up a new leader for his people in Joshua, Moses’ successor. But the real leader, Moses knew, was God. God would guide and rule his people through his word. Therefore, they must reverence, learn, and obey God’s word, for that word was no mere word — their very lives depended on it.

But don’t times change the value, the relevance or irrelevance, of any given word? Surely ours is a day, a period of history, when there is widespread disdain for the old, the outmoded, the ineffective and ineffectual customs and systems and maxims of the past.

The young are particularly fed up with the preachments of moralistic Christian culture. The old rules and regulations that governed manners and morals, the canons of taste, the notions of the obscene and objectionable — haven’t all these been washed away by the flood tides of rapid social change?

In his book My Name Is Aram, William Saroyan tells of his Uncle Khosrove’s habit of shouting in all sorts of situations, “It is no harm; pay no attention to it.” One day when Uncle Khosrove is in the barber’s chair having his mustache trimmed, his son runs from their home, eight blocks away, to tell his father their house is on fire. True to form, old Khosrove sits up in the barber’s chair and shouts, “It is no harm; pay no attention to it.”

No matter how loudly we shout “It is no harm; pay no attention to it” in our impatience with old-fashioned moral integrity or in our exuberance over freedom from ancient religious scruples, the old words of moral integrity will not go away, and the ancient human values that the old words enshrine will not be transvalued. Still they remain; as Moses stated, “They are no empty words; they are your very life.”

It was more than fifty years ago that Harry Emerson Fosdick, as he describes it in The Secret of Victorious Living, said to his Riverside Congregation in a time when free love and trial marriage were greatly in vogue:

In its long history mankind has tried every conceivable experiment with the sex relationship-polyandry, polygamy, monogamy, promiscuity, wives and concubines, prostitution. Can you think of any basically new arrangement to be tried? And out of this long experimenting of the race there has arisen, so it seems to us, the great tradition: a man and a woman loving each other so much that they do not care to love anybody else in the same way at all, and so building a permanent home that puts around the children the strong security of an unbroken affection. That describes the loveliest family life in the world. That is the great tradition…. By no hook or crook can we ever make one step of real progress in this country if we give up the great tradition of the home.

In the making of every personality two mighty currents converge. One we call heredity and the other, environment. By heredity we mean what we get in physical, emotional, and intellectual equipment from our parents through biological transmission. Heredity is what the baby comes into the world with from the union of the male and female who produced him, legitimately or illegitimately, known or unknown, whether conceived in Christian wedlock or from a pad of communal cohabiting. Whatever is bequeathed through the biological process is heredity.

Environment, the other stream so powerful in the producing of every person, is the training, the schooling, the associations, and the atmosphere of home and street and playground and church and mass media.

But however strong and powerful in every personality are the twin currents of heredity and environment, the determining factor in the develop­ment of every person is his own personal response. What each person does with the treasure trove of heredity and environment determines human destiny. This is the point at which life or death is chosen. It’s like Grandma Moses used to say, “Life is what you make it — always has been, always will be.”

But how can words, any words, be so important, a matter of life and death? Words are symbols. Words enshrine values. The inspired words of God trap the imperishable values and qualities of individual and social life without which men and nations perish. When Charles de Gaulle died in his beloved France and the world was mourning the passing of a great leader, the November 23, 1970, issue of Time magazine summed up his life in these words: “Whatever the historical judgment on his leadership, De Gaulle demonstrated the importance of those great intangibles in the calculus of power-moral force, will, style, vision. To many men, these are only words; they were realities to De Gaulle, realities that the world often distrusts and yet yearns for more than ever today.”

A mother was talking with her son about the son’s son, her grandson. “Have you been taking him regularly to Sunday school and church?” Evasive­ly, jokingly, the reply came, “I’ll tell him that his grandmother is worried about his soul.” “No,” said the grandmother, “not his soul, but his life. I know and you know that the best place for a little boy, and, for that matter, for mature people, to learn how to live the best life is in Sunday school and church.”

“For you they are no empty words; they are your very life, and by them you shall live long in the land which you are to occupy.”

God’s word of life remains unchanged, unchanging. Our response of obedience or rebellion to that word spells for us life or death. There is never any mystery about one person, or great masses of men and women, persuad­ing himself that God’s word is an empty word, an impotent or irrelevant word, a mere trifle, or a vain thing. That is his necessary rationalization in order to abandon himself to the worship of the god he has chosen to serve in the place of the God and Father of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. But God will not be mocked. Regardless of the fidelity or infidelity of people, the word of the Lord abideth forever. The races and generations of men and women come and go. They are like the grass that withers and dies. Our only hope of abiding is in embracing God’s word of life, preeminently as revealed in his own son, Jesus Christ.

In Markings, the diary of Dag Hammarskjold, the great secretary-general of the United Nations, these words of a prayer he had written and prayed were discovered after his death:

Give me a pure heart-that I may see Thee,

A humble heart-that I may hear Thee,

A heart of love-that I may serve Thee,

A heart of faith-that I may abide in Thee.