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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. 13
God takes His sovereignty seriously. Thus, He takes our complete devotion to Him seriously. Either God is our Master, or He isn’t. There is no splitting that up. However, there is something worse than not being wholly devoted to God. That something is trying to take others with you. If you think about it, turning others away from God is the work of the devil himself. So to engage in such activity is to serve the devil. You can’t get more opposed to God than that!
Deut. 14
God commanded a tithe of one tenth of everything the Israelites gained. Every third year that tithe went to support the Levites, who belonged to God. But for the rest of the time, God said, “You are to eat a tenth…in the presence of the LORD your God at the place where He chooses to have His name dwell” (from Deut. 14:23). So basically, whatever they gave to God as their tithe, He gave back to them. This makes me think that the tithe was not just about acknowledging that God is the One who provides, but also about honoring His relationship and presence with us. It is a physical representation of how we find our complete satisfaction in the presence of God.
Deut. 15
God, through Moses, makes opposing statements in this chapter. First He says, “There will be no poor among you” (Deut. 15:4a). A few verses later, however, He states, “For there will never cease to be poor people in the land” (Deut. 15:11a). What’s up with that?
Here’s the thing – the first statement carried a condition. “There will be no poor among you…if only you obey the LORD your God…” (from Deut. 15:4 & 5). Turn that around and what I hear is that if we obey God’s commands there will be no poor people. That’s because God commands us to provide generously for the poor – those who are unable to provide for themselves. We actually see this in play in the early church in Acts chapter 4. The entire group of believers shared their possessions, selling their excess to distribute to the needs of others. As a result, “there was not a needy person among them” (Acts 4:34a)
The second statement above assures us that there will be no shortage of opportunity for us to honor God through this command. Perhaps one of the reasons God does not distribute to everybody equally in this life is to give us opportunity to both bless others and be blessed by others. If we do it right, nobody really suffers from the unequal distribution. Instead, it brings us all blessing. Another thing I see in all of this, though, is that we cannot get it right without God’s help. It wasn’t until He filled His followers with His Spirit that they started to get it right. Yet even then it wasn’t perfect – consider Ananias and Sapphira in Acts 5. So the poor will remain among us until God’s ultimate salvation is complete and our desire should be to love them out of love for God as the opportunity arises.