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

Moses tells us that God’s commands are not too difficult for us, nor are they difficult for us to understand, or even difficult to learn.  God has put His word in our mouths and in our hearts, even in the mouths and hearts of those who reject Him.  You may have heard the statement that there are many paths to God.  Implicit in that statement is the idea that finding God requires a difficult journey.  That is only true if we make it difficult.  This passage, and others, remind us that God has revealed Himself through nature.  We know the nature of God and have a choice.  We can choose life, or we can choose death.  We can choose blessings, or we can choose curses.  We can choose to obey God, or we can choose to rebel against Him.  If we choose to listen to the words God has placed in our hearts, He will reveal Himself to us.  If we accept His gift, He will empower us to obey His commands and we will receive life and blessings.  If we reject Him, we will receive death and curses.  If we examine our hearts, we know this to be true.

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.

Moses tells the Israelites, and the foreigners living among them, to make sure that no one, and no group, among their number turns their heart(s) away from the Lord.  We should strive to do the same today.  However, in our society so few have actually turned the hearts to the Lord, that we should strive to turn their hearts to the Lord.  That is not something we can do with coercion and violence.  We can only get someone to turn their heart to the Lord with love and compassion.  Which brings me to the message of love and compassion we should have for people, also contained in today’s passage.  Following God’s commands leads us towards life, contentment, and prosperity, while disobeying His commands lead us towards death and destruction.  The prosperity is not that of this world, because those who follow God’s commands seek to store up wealth in heaven, not on this earth.  So, while those who follow God’s commands may acquire wealth in this world, that is not what they value, and those who follow God’s commands will acquire those things which the love of God causes them to value.  I want to circle back around to the message we should seek to communicate to those we care about: disobeying God’s commands leads to death and destruction.  Those who fail to follow His commands will find their lives empty with misery following them.  I see that in our society among those who blame their unhappiness on others, rather than recognizing that their own choices have led them into depression.

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 29-31.

Moses told the Israelites that the command he was giving them in his final address to them was not too difficult for them, and the commands which God has given us are not too difficult for us.  We do not need to commission someone to go to some far away place which requires special skills to get there.  God has placed His word in our hearts and in our minds. I was going to go a different direction with this, but as I typed that I was reminded of two stories I read many years ago.  The first was about a man in Vietnam after the fall of Saigon.  He was placed in a “re-education camp” by his government and tortured in many ways because he was more educated than they wished him to be.  He was constantly bombarded with ideas promoting how wonderful the government which was torturing him was.  He desperately desired  reading material, but it was denied to him.  He cried out to God for something (although as I recall the story he did not know God) to read.  One of his tortures was to be required to clean out the latrines by hand.  While cleaning the latrines, he found pages which his captors had torn from a book and used as toilet paper.  He carefully cleaned those pages and read them, hiding them in his cell.  Those pages had been torn from a Bible and provided him hope and inspiration.  If I remember the story correctly, it was in this way that he became a Christian.

The other story was about a group of anthropologists who went to the most remote part of the world they could imagine to record a society “uncorrupted” by Western Civilization.  They went to a remote spot in the jungles of Burma, which  had no recorded contact with civilization. The people there spoke a language which the anthropologists did not understand.  While there they recorded the songs sung by these people.  Upon their return, they spoke of their experiences among these people and played their recordings.  Imagine their surprise when the listening audience called in and said they knew the songs being sung.  They were old hymns they remembered from their childhood.  It turns out that in 1949-50 a group of missionaries in China had fled across the border into Burma.  Those missionaries died there in remote Burma, but not before planting the Gospel among this remote tribe.

The point of both of these stories is that God is not remote from us, those who seek Him will find Him., even those who do not know Who it is that they seek.  We do not need to go to some remote part of the world to find God’s will for us, but if we do go there, we will find God is already there waiting for us.

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

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

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

Each day we are given a choice.  A choice between life and death.  A choice to serve and obey God, or to follow the desires of our stubborn hearts.  Knowing what God wants us to do is not difficult.  He has given us His words and written them on our hearts.  There is no need to go to distant lands, or to seek mysterious teachers.  If we seek to serve and obey God He will give us direction right where we are.  The scary part is that we must make this decision each and every day.  The wonderful part is that, if we chose badly yesterday, we get to make a better choice today.