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- What attributes of God’s character does this passage reveal?
- How does the passage point to Jesus?
- How should the truth of this passage change me?
- How do the events of today’s reading help you better understand the grand narrative of Scripture?
Deut. 10-11
The Promised Land sounds like the Garden of Eden all over again. The land was full of God’s presence and blessing. However, it also held temptation. In both cases God wanted those in His presence to, “love the LORD your God, walk in all His ways, and remain faithful to Him” (Deut. 11:22b). In the Garden, this meant not eating from a single tree. For the Israelites, obedience looked considerably more complex. The point, though, is that the specific commands and temptations don’t really matter. It’s all about fully acknowledging God’s sovereignty. That is what it means to keep our hearts humble before God. Sadly, our pride insists on convincing ourselves that we know better than God. So we choose disobedience – going our own way – over submitting ourselves to Him. In the end, it is this pride from which God saves us.
Deut. 12
This chapter expands on the thought about choosing our own way versus choosing God’s way. The people of the land made places to worship their no-gods wherever they saw fit. God told His people not to worship Him that way. He said, “You are not to do as we are doing here today; everyone is doing whatever seems right in his own sight.” (Deut. 12:8). Instead, God said that He would choose a specific place for His people to come into His presence and worship.
This is important for two related reasons. One is that God is sovereign. It is not we who determine what pleases or exalts Him. Rather, He is the standard for everything. We may think, as the Jewish leaders of Jesus’ time did, that we are serving and honoring God. The truth, however, is that if we are doing that in our own way, we are only serving and honoring ourselves.
The other important point about God’s choosing a specific place to worship is that it demonstrates the truth that there is only one way to come to Him. That way is not actually a place, but a person. It is Jesus. It doesn’t matter what we say or how we live, if we do not acknowledge what Christ did for us on the cross, we are attempting to come to God in our own way. And we’ve already seen where going our own way gets us.