Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 32-34.

In many ways Moses’ song recorded here applies to us today.  God had blessed us, but we turned from Him to false gods.  After World War II, Christians used the opportunities provided by the opening of the world to bring God’s word to places where it had rarely been heard.  That message was warmly received in many of these places and people throughout the world were greatly blessed.  In the 1970s and 80s great strides were made reducing hunger throughout the world.  Then. we put our trust in things which were not God, were not even gods, and God has brought calamity upon the world.  God is challenging us to take shelter from the “gods” we have chosen, gods which cannot shelter us, and, to be perfectly clear, would not if they could.  As He said through Moses God is once more telling us:

See now that I myself am he!
There is no god besides me.
I put to death and I bring to life,
I have wounded and I will heal,
and no one can deliver out of my hand.

God is calling us once more to turn to Him, listen to His word, and obey His instructions.   Let us once more pray to God for discernment, and when He offers it to us let us follow what it tells us.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 29-31.

As the Israelites prepared to cross the Jordan River into the land of Canaan, and Moses prepared for his death, they renewed the covenant which they had made with God at Mount Sinai.  A key part of that covenant was a warning that anyone who thought that they could gain the benefits of this covenant while continuing (or beginning) to worship other gods would suffer grievously.   This warning applies today to those who wish to gain the benefits of following Christ without giving up the idolatrous sinfulness they followed before coming to know Him.  Later in the passage, Moses tells the Israelites that he, and God, knows that they will break the covenant.  However, Moses had also told them that if they turned back to God after their rebellion He would hear them and bring them back to Himself.  The lesson here is that it is never too late, but that works both ways.  It is never too late for us to turn back to God, and we can never “rest on our laurels” and say, “Well, I obeyed God yesterday, so I don’t have to now.”  Today we have the choice of either life and prosperity, or death and destruction, the choice between obedience or disobedience.  There is one final piece to the message of this passage which I want to write about.   Moses told the Israelites that knowing God’s will was not difficult; God had written His Laws on their hearts, and on our hearts.  If we wish to do God’s will, we only need to examine our hearts to know what it is.  But we must truly desire to do His will and not pretend that our desires are His desires.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 27-28.

Today’s passage describes the first of several altars which Moses instructed the Israelites to set up in the land to remind them of what God had done in giving them the land.  They were to build an altar on Mount Ebal and write the words of the Law on it.  After they had built the altar half of the Israelite were to stand on Mount Gerizim and half on Mount Ebal.  Those on Mount Gerizim were to speak the blessings which come from following God’s Law while those on Mount Ebal were to speak the curses which would come upon those who disobeyed God’s Law.  Reading the blessings and curses described here I get the same sense that I got when I read Deuteronomy 11-13: the blessings and curses are built into the way in which God created the world to work.  Those who obey God’s commands will be blessed because that is how He created the world to work.  Those who disobey God’s commands will be cursed because they have done things which result in those bad things happening to them.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 24-26.

This passage contains multiple miscellaneous laws.  However, many of them have a similarity: do not mistreat the foreigner, the fatherless, or the widow.  Those three have one thing in common, they would have had little to no power to defend themselves.  Which gives us a theme running through most of these laws, do not take advantage of those weaker than yourself.

• Do not take advantage of hired workers who are poor and needy, pay them promptly
• Do not deny the foreigner or the fatherless of justice
• When harvesting, leave the hard to gather crops for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow
• When making a loan to a neighbor, if they are poor return their pledge to them before you go to sleep that night.
• When making a loan to a neighbor, do not enter their house to retrieve their pledge.  Wait for them to bring it out to you.
• When making a loan, do not take as security the tools the person uses to earn an income.

At several points the passage tells the Israelites to remember that they were slaves in Egypt.  We too should remember when we, or our ancestors, suffered hard times.  We should remember that, but for the grace of God, we too might be dealing with being weak and having trouble providing for ourselves.  Let us treat those weaker than ourselves as we would wish to be treated if we were in their circumstances.

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

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Deuteronomy 18-20.

Moses warned the Israelites against imitating the “detestable ways” of the people already living there.  To make sure we would know what he meant describes those “detestable ways”.  First, he calls sacrificing their children detestable.  Then he lists a bunch of methods for either determining or controlling the future: divination, sorcery, interpreting omens, witchcraft, casting spells, consulting the dead.  We have long considered sacrificing children to be something horrific (although I would argue that many today no longer do so as long as the sacrifice takes place before birth), but dismissed the others as relatively minor misdeeds by the uneducated.  However, this is not the only place in the Bible where we are told such acts are serious sins, comparable to sacrificing a child.  We must place our faith in God.  When He desires for us to know more about the future than what He has revealed in the Bible He will raise up a prophet to give us His message.  We will know that such prophets are from God because the message they give us will be consistent with what He has already revealed and the predictions which they make will come to pass.

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