Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 1-2.

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After the defeat of Sihon and Og, Moses gathered the people of Israel and began reviewing how they had gotten to where they were at that time and the laws which God had given them.  He begins by reviewing God’s promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob that He intended to fulfill in them.  Next, Moses reviewed his appointment of leaders and judges over the people and his instructions to those judges.  Actually, I want to take a look at what Moses told them wee the qualifications for a leader among them.  He told them that leaders should be “wise, understanding, and experienced men.”  Those three qualifications are important and we would do well to keep them in mind as we consider appointing leaders for ourselves today.  As I read that I realized something.  We often think of wisdom and understanding as synonyms.  Yet, the Bible often uses both together, along with other qualities, to describe characteristics that should be desired.  But, if they are synonyms, why use both?  The answer being that they are closely related, but not describing the same characteristic.  Wise means knowing long-term consequences of an action may be qualitatively different from the short-term consequences.  I believe that understanding is used in these passages to refer to something close to empathy.  Understanding means understanding how people will feel about a particular action, both in the short-term and in the long-term.  These two, wisdom and understanding, because they each bring a piece of the puzzle if we want to choose the best course of action.  I actually started writing about the leaders whom Moses appointed with the intention of commenting only on his instructions to them, which he reminded the people of Israel before him at the time of this passage, none of whom had been old enough to understand at the time Moses first appointed those leaders and judges.  Most importantly, Moses instructed them to be impartial in the cases brought before them, giving no preference to their kinsman (as all of the people of Israel) or to the outsider, no preference to the powerful and prestigious nor to the poor, weak, and outcast.  They were not to allow anyone to intimidate them because God stood behind their judgement if they chose righteously.

When I started writing, I intended for that previous portion to be just a short introduction to my thoughts on this passage, with this next part being the “meat” of my entry for today.  I noticed that when Moses spoke about the refusal of the Israelites to enter the land after the report from the spies he speaks as if those in front of him were the ones who refused, despite that entire generation having died in the intervening years.  This warns us to never say to ourselves, “Well, I would never have done what they did.”  If we do not commit the sins, do not repeat the mistakes, of those who went before us it is only due to the grace of God allowing us to learn from what they got wrong.  Which brings us to the lesson we should strive to learn from their failure.  Moses had reminded the people that God had promised to go before them into the land, just as they had repeatedly seen Him do from when the Exodus began in Egypt all through their wilderness experience.  So, the lesson: God does not ask us to trust us before He has demonstrated His power to us, but once He has done so He expects us to trust that experience.  God came to the Israelites when they were desperate and without any power to better their situation, slaves in Egypt.  He used His mighty power to bring them out of Egypt and then demonstrated His ability to care for them again and again in the wilderness.  Let us not refuse to follow God’s commands, but rather trust Him to go before us and overcome any obstacles.  This illustrates the need for following leaders with wisdom, understanding, and experience.  The wisdom to discern God’s will.  The understanding to acknowledge and address the fears that people have.  The experience to know that God will go before us to overcome obstacles.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.