Sermons

Expository Sermon on Deuteronomy 32
by Maylan Schurch
Bellevue Seventh-day Adventist Church 3/22/2025
©2025 by Maylan Schurch

(To watch this entire worship service, click the link just below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FeDABn6zsok

Please open your Bibles to Deuteronomy chapter 32.

After attending eight grades of Adventist education at a one room school known as Sunrise Elementary School near Redfield, South Dakota, I attended the nearby Plainview Academy for my freshman high school year.

Sadly, PVA closed its doors at the end of that year, which meant that the students and the staff moved away, leaving nothing but a few members of the Redfield Seventh day Adventist church. Our little group of 15 to 20 people began meeting in the Sunrise School classroom, with all the desks pushed off to the side, and cold gray metal folding-chairs arranged in rows.

This sudden departure of the Academy’s little music department drained us of all the piano-players we’d grown accustomed to. So church leaders began hunting around for replacements. The older of my two sisters, Onilee, played very well, so she was drafted to play for church.

I myself noodled feebly on the piano at that point, but only at home, and only in the key of C. The sharps and the flats intimidated me, so I stayed away from them.

One day two church ladies came knocking on our farmhouse door. I was upstairs, and paid little attention until I heard my name spoken. I crept to the head of the stairs, and listened intently, with growing apprehension. These two ladies were asking my mom, “Do you think Maylan would be willing to play the piano for Sabbath school?”

I went numb with horror, especially when my mom promptly responded, “Sure, he’d be glad to help.” The ladies expressed their gratitude, and departed. And I thundered down the steps to confront my mother in the kitchen.

“Mom! I can’t play the piano for Sabbath school!”

She said, “Sure you can. Why don’t you just call up the person who will be leading the songs and asked him which ones he’s chosen? I’m sure you know them all.”

So I called him up, and he told me the songs, and sure enough, I knew them. I could play them all in the key of C. So I told him I would see him Sabbath.

And I still remember what happened I sat there on that piano bench, and he announced the songs. I played them all in the key of C, and I discovered to my horror that on some of the songs people were forced to growl deeply in their throats, and on others they were singing painfully high. It was right then and there, sitting on that piano bench, my collar wet with sweat, that I discovered why not every song is written in the key of C.

Anyway, I began to learn a few other key sets, and things worked out. And as I sat there playing those hymns, week after week, I got more acquainted with them than I would have if I hadn’t been accompanying them.

One thing I discovered was that no matter what happened within the middle verses of the hymn, the last stanza was normally be the most encouraging one.

Even though “Amazing Grace” told us that we would need to travel “through many dangers, toils and snares,” the last verse assured us that “when we’ve been there 10,000 years, bright shining as the sun, we’ve no less days to sing God’s praise then when we’d first begun.”

The last stanza of “Jesus Paid It All” says, “And when before the throne I stand in Him complete, I’ll lay my trophies down, all down at Jesus’ feet.”

In at least one song, the final stanza turned out to be truly powerful poetry: “Could we with ink the ocean fill, and were the skies of parchment made, were every stalk on earth a quill, and every man a scribe by trade, to write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry, nor could the whole contain the scroll though stretched from sky to sky.”

Deuteronomy 32 contains an interesting song. If your Bible or your phone Bible app is in the habit of labeling chapters or passages with subject headings, they all probably call this one “The Song of Moses.”
What’s interesting is that the song of Moses is mentioned again, way over in Revelation 15. Only there, it is called “The Song of Moses and of the Lamb.” And Revelation’s version of the song is a whole lot shorter. Though Deuteronomy 32 version takes up 43 Bible verses, and the Revelation 15 version is just two verses. And I have a feeling that we could think of the Revelation version as the “last stanza,” the most encouraging stanza of the song.

From the fact that the Song of Moses shows up at the very end of the New Testament, it’s very clear that it is still important. But it’s also clear why God provided this song to Moses. That Deuteronomy 32 song was probably not one that I would ever have been called on to play for Sabbath school in my home church. It’s not a song you’d sing on a happy Sabbath morning.

In fact, glance back at at the chapter before, to Deuteronomy 31, and we will see what this song’s purpose was. God is speaking.

Deuteronomy 31:19 – 21 [NKJV]: “Now therefore, write down this song for yourselves, and teach it to the children of Israel; put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for Me against the children of Israel. When I have brought them to the land flowing with milk and honey, of which I swore to their fathers, and they have eaten and filled themselves and grown fat, then they will turn to other gods and serve them; and they will provoke Me and break My covenant. Then it shall be, when many evils and troubles have come upon them, that this song will testify against them as a witness; for it will not be forgotten in the mouths of their descendants, for I know the inclination of their behavior today, even before I have brought them to the land of which I swore to give them.”

So here, God is prophesying national apostasy, and He wants to embed this song into the people’s hearts to remind them of what will happen when they fulfill that apostasy.

Okay, but why do we need to spend sermon time on Deuteronomy 32? Well, this song is not entirely negative. And as I mentioned, it has a final stanza waiting for us in Revelation 15.

You see, what makes the Revelation 15 stanza so short is that a whole lot of the center portion of the Deuteronomy 32 version is not repeated there. That’s because the people singing the song in Revelation 15 are standing on the sea of glass, and accompanying this song on their harps. These are the ones who have gotten the victory over the gloomy and dangerous parts of Moses’ song.

And I think it would be a good idea for us to move quickly through the Deuteronomy 32 version and find what it has to say to us.

In fact, I’ve decided to approach it like this. We don’t want to find ourselves trapped in the center of Moses’ song, the gloomy parts, the rebellious parts. But how could this possibly happen to us? Let’s look at some answers, starting with verse one. Notice, the song starts out in a positive way.

Deuteronomy 32:1 – 5: “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak; And hear, O earth, the words of my mouth. Let my teaching drop as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, As raindrops on the tender herb, And as showers on the grass. For I proclaim the name of the LORD: Ascribe greatness to our God. He is the Rock, His work is perfect; For all His ways are justice, A God of truth and without injustice; Righteous and upright is He. “They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation.

The first four verses are a whole lot like this song of Moses and the Lamb in Revelation 15. They’re positive. They proclaim how great God is.

But then, verse five tells us what God knows about those Israelite people who were about ready to enter the land of Canaan.

So how could I possibly become trapped in the center stanzas of Moses’ song? If you taking down sermon points, here comes Sermon Point One.

What first might trap me in these dangerous stanzas is when I let myself forget what God has done for me.

And we know just how concerned about this God is, because of how this song’s lyrics continue:

Verses 5 – 14: “They have corrupted themselves; They are not His children, Because of their blemish: A perverse and crooked generation. Do you thus deal with the LORD, O foolish and unwise people? Is He not your Father, who bought you? Has He not made you and established you? “Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you; Your elders, and they will tell you: When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, When He separated the sons of Adam, He set the boundaries of the peoples According to the number of the children of Israel. For the LORD’s portion is His people; Jacob is the place of His inheritance. “He found him in a desert land And in the wasteland, a howling wilderness; He encircled him, He instructed him, He kept him as the apple of His eye. As an eagle stirs up its nest, Hovers over its young, Spreading out its wings, taking them up, Carrying them on its wings, So the LORD alone led him, And there was no foreign god with him. “He made him ride in the heights of the earth, That he might eat the produce of the fields; He made him draw honey from the rock, And oil from the flinty rock; Curds from the cattle, and milk of the flock, With fat of lambs; And rams of the breed of Bashan, and goats, With the choicest wheat; And you drank wine, the blood of the grapes.

Can’t you sense the agony in God’s voice? And in a very real sense, this Deuteronomy song is not only the Song of Moses, but it is also the Song of the Lamb. There is a lot of Bible evidence that the composer of this song was Jesus Himself. Over in First Corinthians 10, Paul makes this very clear. Listen to what he says:

“Moreover, brethren, I do not want you to be unaware that all our fathers were under the cloud, all passed through the sea, all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea, all ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank of that spiritual Rock that followed them, and that Rock was Christ.” 1 Corinthians 10:1 – 4.

So Jesus, the future Lamb of God who would take away the sins of the world, was right there, dictating those warning song-lyrics to Moses.

And what the Savior was saying was what He often said to the religious leaders of His own time, who had let themselves forget what God had done for them. Every time they saw Jesus heal someone, or raise someone from the dead, every time He tried to wipe away the cobwebs of tradition from a pure faith in God, every time these leaders saw Jesus do this, most of them turned their backs and refused to listen, and instead began to plot the death of this troublesome Prophet.

It’s pretty easy, isn’t it, to forget what God has done for us? It’s so easy to take His miracles for granted – and by “miracles” I mean the millions of miracles that happen in each human body every day.

Last week I was listening to a radio interview as I was driving in my car. The person who was being interviewed was a scientist who had a great deal of computer background. He was telling about a simple computer program he had been experimenting with. This program had basically only six or eight instructions, and once he had coded these in, he set it to work.

And what got him so excited as he watched this program work, and checked back on it from time to time, was that it seemed to be behaving something like the survival-of-the-fittest evolution system that this man believed in. To him, this seemed to prove that macro-evolution was the way humanity and nature and everything else had come into existence.

I don’t know the spiritual or non-spiritual background of this scientist, but he seemed to not be willing to allow the idea that any super-intelligent Creator could be involved in this planet.

It was a welcome contrast to read an article by Adventist physician and writer Dr. Jack Hoehn in the online Adventist Today newsletter this week. Dr. Hoehn wrote a thrilling article on human bones, and in this article he challenged macro-evolutionists to try to explain how bones and joints and cartilages could have evolved on their own. And then, at the end of his article, he said, “Let’s let Sir Isaac Newton have the last word,” and then he quoted the following paragraph from Newton’s book Opticks:

“How came the bodies of animals to be contrived with so much art, and for what ends were their several parts? Was the eye contrived without skill in optics, and the ear without knowledge of sounds? How do the motions of the body follow from the will…. Does it not appear from phenomena that there is a Being incorporeal, living, intelligent, omnipresent…?” (Sir Isaac Newton, Opticks, (1717/1718), The Third Book, Query 28, pp. 344-345.)

And Jack Hoehn concluded his article by saying, “Yes, sir. It does.”

Those Revelation 15 saints standing on the sea of glass and singing the final stanza of the Song of Moses and the Lamb seem to have spent a great deal of time remembering what God has done. The first part of the Revelation 15 song goes like this:

Revelation 15:3 – 4: . . . “Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the saints! Who shall not fear You, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy. . . .

And as we hear the echo of those singing saints, and as we glance back across the Testaments to the distracted and forgetful people in Deuteronomy 32, I think you and I need to resolve to spend a lot of time in prayerful study and gratitude about everything God has done.

I know that I am enjoying doing this as I read through the Bible this year using our chronological plan. At this point in the readings, we are about ready to enter a thrilling segment of Hebrew history in the upcoming weeks. So I would suggest you do what I do each week – go to your bulletin announcement page and “join the plan.” (Or click this direct link: https://bellevueadventist.org/chronological-bible-reading-plan/ Don’t feel like you’re missing out because you haven’t kept up since January 1. Just start reading now, and you can always start again next year.

There’s at least one more issue that God brings up in the Deuteronomy 32 version of the Song of Moses. And it’s a crucial one, even for today. Let’s start with verse 15. (By the way, “Jeshurun” is a poetic name for Israel.)

Verses 15 – 18: “But Jeshurun grew fat and kicked; You grew fat, you grew thick, You are obese! Then he forsook God who made him, And scornfully esteemed the Rock of his salvation. They provoked Him to jealousy with foreign gods; With abominations they provoked Him to anger. They sacrificed to demons, not to God, To gods they did not know, To new gods, new arrivals That your fathers did not fear. Of the Rock who begot you, you are unmindful, And have forgotten the God who fathered you.

What is another way I might possibly get myself trapped in the center stanzas of Moses’ song? Here comes Sermon Point Two.

What might first trap me in these dangerous stanzas is if I were to let myself forget what God has done for me. The next trap is if I become fascinated with Satan’s false gods.

Because idolatry is truly the main issue here, isn’t it? Put a marker here in Deuteronomy 32, because we’ll be back in a second, but turn to Revelation 15 and see who it was that was singing what you might call the “last stanza” of the Song of Moses and the Lamb.

Revelation 15:2 – 3: And I saw something like a sea of glass mingled with fire, and those who have the victory over the beast, over his image and over his mark and over the number of his name, standing on the sea of glass, having harps of God. They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb . . . .

Do you see who these people are who are doing the singing and playing on their harps? These are the people who have gotten the victory over the beast, the false god inspired by Satan who will have deceived so many. These saints, at the peril of their lives, have refused to receive the mark of the beast and his number. They’ve refused to take part in Satan’s idolatry.

And let’s listen as they sing that entire “last stanza” for us. This gives us guidance as to how to prepare for our own challenges:

Verses 3 – 4: They sing the song of Moses, the servant of God, and the song of the Lamb, saying: “Great and marvelous are Your works, Lord God Almighty! Just and true are Your ways, O King of the saints! Who shall not fear You, O Lord, and glorify Your name? For You alone are holy. For all nations shall come and worship before You, For Your judgments have been manifested.”

And I have an idea that whenever this song is sung, or was sung, both the Lamb of God and His faithful servant Moses were there to listen. Jesus and Moses had worked together to lead the Israelites to freedom, and Jesus and Moses had met again atop a mountain, to talk about what would happen to Jesus. Here’s how Luke 9:29 puts it:

Luke 9:29 As He prayed, the appearance of His face was altered, and His robe became white and glistening. And behold, two men talked with Him, who were Moses and Elijah, who appeared in glory and spoke of His decease which He was about to accomplish at Jerusalem.

Jesus and two of His most faithful partners . . . . Both Moses and Elijah had called Israel to repentance, again and again. Jesus had called His people to trust in God.

And as the Lamb of God looks down through the ages and watches us here this morning, His fondest hope is that each of us will draw quickly back from the middle stanzas of Moses’ song, and instead look forward to when we can be standing victoriously on that glassy sea, and singing together about God’s glory.