Deuteronomy 6:4-9:

The LORD 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. And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, 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. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

It is parliamentary that we saturate our lives with God’s word. Moses here commands the people of Israel to keep God’s word on their heart, teaching them to our children, talking about them constantly, written on our hands and mounted in our homes.

Now, whether that means we ought to literally saturate our environment with spiritual reminders or not is a different question.

But the point, perhaps at its most basic, is that we must be immersed in the Truth of the Gospel. All of our facets of thought must run through the conduit of God’s grace in Jesus Christ.

Easier said than done.

I always forget. And I cannot afford to. Tonight, Moses reminds me in the midst of his plea to Israel before entering the Promised Land.

Deuteronomy 8:11-17:

Take care lest you forget the LORD your God by not keeping his commandments and his rules and his statutes, which I command you today, lest, when you have eaten and are full and have built good houses and live in them, and when your herds and flocks multiply and your silver and gold is multiplied and all that you have is multiplied, then your heart be lifted up, and you forget the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, who led you through the great and terrifying wilderness, with its fiery serpents and scorpions and thirsty ground where there was no water, who brought you water out of the flinty rock, who fed you in the wilderness with manna that your fathers did not know, that he might humble you and test you, to do you good in the end. Beware lest you say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’

I’m apt to praise myself for my accomplishments. And indeed there is a place to be proud of our accomplishments and satisfied with what we’ve accomplished. But, only in its proper place. And that is in a place of remembering the Lord. Who is is and what he does.

It’s the Lord who is patient with us and disciplines us for our good.

Notice what Moses points out when reminding Israel to remember the Lord. The ‘good’ houses they would build and live in, the flocks and the gold and the silver that would ‘multiply’. Their  hearts that would be encouraged and ‘lifted up’ with their good fortune. And he beckons them to remember the tribulations that he brought them through. Not without pain and not without suffering. But by God’s patient and disciplining hand. They were prepared to remember God who is their good.

Who honestly remembers these always? I do not. But I wish to. And my prayers, I hope, will reflect that honest desire.

In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses warns the people not to make an image of any god. But he prefaces it by reminding them that they heard a voice, but they didn’t see anything.

“…watch yourselves very carefully. Since you saw no form on the day that the LORD spoke to you at Horeb out of the midst of the fire, beware lest you act corruptly by making a carved image for yourselves, in the form of any figure, the likeness of male or female, the likeness of any animal that is on the earth, the likeness of any winged bird that flies in the air, the likeness of anything that creeps on the ground, the likeness of any fish that is in the water under the earth.”

The fact that the people saw nothing was the ground Moses used, in this instance, to condemn the making of ‘carved’ images. After all, they did not actually see God, how could they possibly make a carved image of him, unless they filled in a lot of blanks with their own flimsy speculation.

Over the course of generations, that could be tragic. People might begin to neglect the the words they heard from God, and pay more attention to the form they’d created for him from their own minds.

As I read this this morning, it dawned on me that, in a way, we break this commandment quite regularly. Although, not quite in the way that Moses laid it out.

Today, while we have the complete Word of God, much of the church has a habit of going beyond what the scriptures actually say in an attempt to fill in gaps that God intends would remain open.

We have to be careful to remember that—like the Israelites who were permitted to make ‘carved images’ in one sense, they were not allowed to place them in the position of any kind of deity (especially God)—we also are allowed to speculate on spiritual things. We are even allowed to use our best judgments to make decisions and find the right path. But, we’re never allowed to elevate these speculations to the level of authority that the Word of God exclusively holds.

It’s not uncommon to hear complaints that the God of the Old Testament seems inconsistent with the God of the New Testament. As I’ve been finishing Matthew this week as well as Deuteronomy, the contrast is clear.

Deuteronomy 2:34:

"…And we captured all his cities at that time and devoted to destruction every city, men, women, and children. We left no survivors."

The Israelites, at the command of God, kill everyone in a city; men, women and children.

John 19:17-18:

"…So they took Jesus, and he went out, bearing his own cross, to the place called The Place of a Skull, which in Aramaic is called Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, and Jesus between them."

At God’s command, Jesus undergoes crucifixion. Sounds like the same God to me. But wait, what’s the difference?

"…In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God."

Jesus was the eternal Lord of all creation. The same God handing down decrees to kill all; men, women and children. But this time, stepped down as a man to receive his own decree of death, therefore taking the just death sentance for all who would believe.

God did not change, Jesus’ work nullified the need for that kind of judgment found in Deuteronomy.