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 27-28.

Moses instructed the Israelites that when they crossed over into the Promised Land they were to set up half the people on Mt Gerizim and half the people on Mt Ebal.    Those on Mt Gerizim would declare a blessing on the people while those on Mt Ebal would declare a curse.  The blessing would be those the people would receive if they followed God’s commands and the curse they would receive if they did not.  Then the Levites would call out to the people a list of things which would bring a curse on the people and the people were to acknowledge that they had heard.

Moses then told the people the blessing they would receive for following God’s commands and the curses they would receive for disobeying them.  The blessings and curses were (and are) reciprocal to each other.  I am convinced that these blessings and curses are the natural (and by natural I mean that is the way God designed the world to work) results of following, or not following, the commands which God has given.  If you do the things which the Levites declared would result in a person being cursed in the first part of this passage, the results are likely to be unpleasant.  While a single individual who does a limited number of those things may never realize the harm they bring, a people who does even one of them as common practice will experience the curses listed.  The more a people does any one of these items the more likely they are to embrace all of these cursed behaviors. 

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 24-26.

The passage contains many miscellaneous commands to the Israelites.  However, there are two themes which go through many of them.  The Lord God redeemed you and look out for those who have fallen on hard times.    The second one follows from the first.  Our obligation to not take advantage of those less fortunate than ourselves and to assist them as we may results from the good which God has done for us.  Why should I treat others with dignity and respect?  Because God has cared for me.  Why should I go out of my way to see that those with whom I have no ties have a chance? Because God gave me a chance.  God has blessed us, so we should do our best to bless others.  If we do, God will bless us even more.  I am not sure why this passage brings this to mind, but it does.  At the end of the movie “Schindler’s List”, Oscar Schindler regrets every dime he spent on his own pleasure because perhaps if he had not spent it that way he could have saved one more person from the Nazi death camps.  

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 21-23.

The commands for dealing with an unsolved murder are interesting.  They assume that if the murder had happened in a town, someone would have witnessed it and it would be solved.  More importantly, the elders of the nearest town were required to offer a sacrifice for the murdered person and vow that they did not commit the murder themselves and that they did not know who did.  Can you imagine what would happen if we had a similar law in place in our major cities today?  What would happen if the mayor and members of city council had to pay out of pocket for every unsolved murder in their city?

There are two passages here concerning sexual purity which are not exactly related but which I am going to touch on together.  The first is something which can be easily overlooked.  The Israelites were allowed to have sex with women they captured in battle.  However, if they did so, those women were no their wives and they had they were obligated to them just as they were to a wife obtained in any other fashion.  This combined with several other passages leads us to the conclusion that the Law only sanctioned sex between a man and a woman if they were married.  There is the suggestion that if a man and a woman have sex, they are married.  

OK, I changed my mind and decided to make this second part on purity its own paragraph.  Several days ago I came across a post on FaceBook which suggested that the idea of virginity as we understand it today was a novel idea when Christians started referring to Mary as a virgin.  This passage shows us that this is not the case.  This passage lays out clear boundaries about determining if a woman was a virgin when she went to her marital bed for the first time.  If a man falsely accused a woman of not being a virgin when he married her, he was obligated to pay a severe fine and to support her as his wife for the rest of her life no matter what happens otherwise.  The point I wanted to make is that while Hebrew, and many other languages of the ancient world, did not have a separate word for virgin and for unmarried young woman, this was not because they did not have the concept of virginity as we understand it today.  Rather, the reason those words were interchangeable was because the social mores of the time assumed that an unmarried young woman was a virgin.

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 18-20.

There are several things in today’s passage which I want to highlight.  I am not sure if my thoughts on them are connected, we will see together as I write them out.  God forbids sacrificing children.  Connected directly with that are the practices of fortune telling, witchcraft, casting spells, and speaking with the dead.  When I read the prohibition against sacrificing children I think of the segments of modern society who treat abortion as a sacrament.   However, I had never noticed the connection between sacrificing babies and the other things mentioned here.  Now that I noticed the connection made here it strikes me that I believe the same connection is made throughout the Old Testament.  Further, it seems to me that many of those who promote abortion today believe in witchcraft, divination, and speaking with the dead (and vice versa).

Moses tells us that God will raise up prophets from time to time and that God will personally deal with anyone who refuses to listen to the messages those prophets deliver.  Most importantly, Moses tells us how to recognize such a prophet.  If the prophet speaks in God’s name and what they say does not happen, or come true, they spoke without God’s authority.  We need to pay close attention to this, whether we are listening to such a prophet or we believe that we have been given a prophetic word from God.  There are numerous examples of men throughout my lifetime who sought to increase the clout of their ministry by making dire predictions.  A few of them were men who, until that point, I had held in high esteem as men of God.  When their predictions failed to come true, I dismissed them as spokesmen for God.  In each case, I believe they saw troubling things going on in our society and that those things would lead to disaster.  I believe they were correct in this part, but, in order to get people to change, they spoke a message on God’s behalf which God had not given them.  I believe that they were correct that the things they observed in our society will lead to disaster.  At the time, I believed (and was proven correct) that it would take longer for that disaster to come than they predicted.  It seems to me that they made their prediction in order to cause their listeners to view these problems with greater urgency, but, by doing so, they exceeded the authority which God had given them.

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 5-7.

Moses made a second presentation to the Israelites where he laid out the specifics of the covenant which he called on them to keep in his first address. He starts off by restating the Ten Commandments, or the Ten Statements. He reminds the people that God has spoken these Words directly to the people of Israel at Mt Sinai. I was struck by a different understanding of one of them than how I had previously understood it. The one I am referring to I learned as, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,…” However, in the NLT it reads, “You must not misuse the name of the Lord your God.” I learned the first one to mean that you should not use God’s name as an expletive. The second reads to me as a warning against using God to promote our own self-interest. When you use the name of God, or a quote from the Bible, to support the position you took on an issue you are running a significant risk of violating this command. When tempted to use the Bible, or your religious beliefs, to bolster your arguments, ask yourself this, “Did I come to my belief because of that Bible passage? Or, do I understand that Bible passage that way because of my belief?” If the former, then the passage is possibly relevant to the discussion. If the latter, use the passage with extreme caution.

Moses goes on to say that we must love God with all of our being. We should commit ourselves to him with all of our heart, with all of our soul, and with all of our strength, with every ounce of what we are. I cannot emphasize enough the value of what Moses says here:

And you must commit yourselves wholeheartedly to these commands that I am giving you today. Repeat them again and again to your children. Talk about them when you are at home and when you are on the road, when you are going to bed and when you are getting up. Tie them to your hands and wear them on your forehead as reminders. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.

The point of all of the above is that we should go overboard to make sure we know and remember God’s commands. Actually, it tells us that there is no such thing as going overboard in the attempt to know and remember God’s commands. By going back again and again and reading, reciting, learning what God has told us of His will we learn how to not misuse His name. Of course it is not enough to know God’s commands backwards and forwards. We must also desire to DO His will.

Finally for today, Moses reminded the Israelites that God did not choose them because of anything they were or had done. God chose them because He loved them. They did not deserve God’s love, just as we do not deserve God’s love. God loved them because He chose to love them, just as He chooses to love us. Because He loves us, He has told us what we must do to be blessed, but if we reject Him and His instructions He will not hesitate to bring down the full consequences of our actions upon us. The Bible contains account after account of those who suffered the consequences of rejecting God.