Deuteronomy 11--Love and Serve the LORD

Deuteronomy 11
English Standard Version

Love and Serve the LORD
11 “You shall therefore love the LORD your God and keep his charge, his statutes, his rules, and his commandments always. 2 And consider today (since I am not speaking to your children who have not known or seen it), consider the discipline of the LORD your God, his greatness, his mighty hand and his outstretched arm, 3 his signs and his deeds that he did in Egypt to Pharaoh the king of Egypt and to all his land, 4 and what he did to the army of Egypt, to their horses and to their chariots, how he made the water of the Red Sea flow over them as they pursued after you, and how the LORD has destroyed them to this day, 5 and what he did to you in the wilderness, until you came to this place, 6 and what he did to Dathan and Abiram the sons of Eliab, son of Reuben, how the earth opened its mouth and swallowed them up, with their households, their tents, and every living thing that followed them, in the midst of all Israel. 7 For your eyes have seen all the great work of the LORD that he did.

8 “You shall therefore keep the whole commandment that I command you today, that you may be strong, and go in and take possession of the land that you are going over to possess, 9 and that you may live long in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to give to them and to their offspring, a land flowing with milk and honey. 10 For the land that you are entering to take possession of it is not like the land of Egypt, from which you have come, where you sowed your seed and irrigated it, like a garden of vegetables. 11 But the land that you are going over to possess is a land of hills and valleys, which drinks water by the rain from heaven, 12 a land that the LORD your God cares for. The eyes of the LORD your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year.

13 “And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the LORD your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, 14 he will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. 15 And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full. 16 Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; 17 then the anger of the LORD will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the LORD is giving you.

18 “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 19 You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 20 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, 21 that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the LORD swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. 22 For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the LORD your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, 23 then the LORD will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you. 24 Every place on which the sole of your foot treads shall be yours. Your territory shall be from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the river Euphrates, to the western sea. 25 No one shall be able to stand against you. The LORD your God will lay the fear of you and the dread of you on all the land that you shall tread, as he promised you.

​26 “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, which I command you today, 28 and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the LORD your God, but turn aside from the way that I am commanding you today, to go after other gods that you have not known. 29 And when the LORD your God brings you into the land that you are entering to take possession of it, you shall set the blessing on Mount Gerizim and the curse on Mount Ebal. 30 Are they not beyond the Jordan, west of the road, toward the going down of the sun, in the land of the Canaanites who live in the Arabah, opposite Gilgal, beside the oak of Moreh? 31 For you are to cross over the Jordan to go in to take possession of the land that the LORD your God is giving you. And when you possess it and live in it, 32 you shall be careful to do all the statutes and the rules that I am setting before you today.

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Before we get started, thank you to all of who who have been reading this who have been praying for me.  While I am not back to full-strength yet, I have been able to return to work.  You may have noticed that I've missed some of my journal entries or they were coming later in the day.  That's because I've been sleeping at least 12 hours a day while I was sick.  "16 Therefore, confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working." (James 5:16).  I do believe that the LORD has protected me throughout this time and it is the LORD who will bring be back to full strength in His time.  For now, I must learn how much I need to rely on the strength that He gives me for each new day.

We are to love the LORD always and to show that love to Him through our obedience to His Law--His charge, His statutes, His rules, and His commandments.  We see a different set of words in Psalm 119, but we see the same idea there.  He tells them to be careful to obey Him and not harden their hearts like Pharaoh did, because they saw how the LORD destroyed all of Pharaoh and his army with plagues and with the Red Sea.  He told them to be careful to not rebel against the LORD and His leadership and the order He had established in the Law like Dothan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, son of Reuben, did when they assumed that they too could be priests and there were a group of Levites that rose up in rebellion with them.  The LORD consumed all those offering "false fire" and let the ground swallow up all the men and their wives and children along with all their possessions for those that were in rebellion against the LORD, against Moses and against Aaron to the point where they would not even come out of their tents because the LORD commanded them to do so.  They were ready to stone Moses and Aaron and choose a new leader for themselves, but all of them who were leaders or followers in that rebellion died that die.

​These were to be warnings to the people to keep the whole Law of the LORD as they entered the Promised Land, so that they would not face such judgment, and so they would experience the blessings of the Law and not the curses (we'll see that later).  Even things that we would imagine are "natural," God says they are direct result of His blessing due to their obedience or lack of obedience--the fruitfulness of their harvests, the amount of rain that He provides for them (or if they are in a season of drought, which we'll see the LORD specifically do in the time of Elijah--He will stop up the rain from heaven for seven years because of how wicked His people had become).  They will have good harvests of wine and oil--their two major commodities and signs of wealth for these people.  The LORD warns them not to worship the gods of the Canaanites (the Baals that were worshiped as gods of fertility, rain, and the harvest--all the things that the LORD is promising to provide here, but if they started to worship false gods for these things, then the LORD would have to cut them off from these things to show that those gods were not providing anything for them).  "It is the LORD that cares for you."  Such an important phrase in all these words of commanding obedience, and the LORD says He is with them from the beginning of the year to the end of the year--He does not sleep or slumber like some imagined the pagan gods going on vacation to somewhere warmer during the winter when there were no crops to take care of and they celebrated the return of their gods in the Spring and carried on all kinds of pagan rituals to try to entice their gods to wake up and come back to them.  The LORD is always present among His people and always sees them and always cares for them.

We are to be saying these words to ourselves and to the others around us everywhere we are and everywhere we go.  The Bible is not just for one hour a week inside the four walls of a house of meeting, but is what we should be always talking about all day every day as we get up, and as we lie down, and as we work and as we rest.  We should be speaking and singing, and praying the Word of God so that it is hidden in our hearts so that we might not sin against the LORD.  We are to show that we love the LORD and His commandments this way (and all of His Word, but specifically here Moses is teaching the people to be careful to obey the Law, and you can't obey the Law, if you are willfully ignorant of the Law, and willful ignorance is no excuse to the LORD).  It is the job of every generation to teach themselves and the next generation.  No one gets a pass because because "no one ever told me."  God set up a system of holidays and worship that would perpetually be bringing these conversations to the forefront and reminding everyone of who they were because of who God had made them to be--He made something out of nothing by taking those who were slaves and not a people and making them a great nation for His good pleasure and to the praise of His glory.  He did many mighty deeds and marvelous works to bless them and they also saw His hand of judgment against all who opposed Him and His plan for His people.  They have seen that His Law is consistent with His nature.

If they obey and remain the people that God has called them to be--a people that can live in HIs blessings, then He will drive all the Canaanites and other peoples out of the Land and disposes them so that the Israelites can inherit the Land of Promise that they did nothing to win or keep.  The LORD would give them more land than they would need for themselves so that all the peoples of all the world who also wanted to live under the covenant and the blessing of the LORD would have room without taking away any of the Promised Land given to Israel, and the LORD would give Israel more than enough to take care of themselves and everyone else who came under their protection, as long as they would be obedient.  But if they rebelled and disobeyed as the LORD warned them not to, the LORD set up a curse for them that the land would not be fruitful, the animals would not be tames and would attack them so that they would not even be safe in their walled cities, they would have drought and famine, and eventually the LORD would remove them from the Promised Land and let it lay fallow if the people turned to other gods and disobeyed the Law of the LORD (we'll see the LORD will send them into exile after 490 years for a period of 70 years because of the 70 Sabbath years that they never observed).  The LORD has been up-front and told them everything He knows they will do and everything that He will do in response.  It's like with Cain when he was getting angry at Abel and the LORD spoke to him kindly and told him to watch out because sin was crouching at his door and wanted to be master over him, and that if he would only do what was right, he too would be blessed.  God is giving the same kind of opportunity for obedience to His people, but like Cain, God already knows the choice they will make that is going to ruin their lives and the lives of their children after them, yet God continues to give them that choice because without the ability to chose, there is no love and there is no gospel--we chose to love Him now because He first chose to love us when we were still sinners and at enmity with Him.  There will be a day and time when we will perfectly obey the Law and will no longer be able to chose to sin--that is in the New Heaven and the New Earth, but that is not the way things will be here and now.  Isn't it amazing though that so many of us long for God to force us to make the right choices though?  This is because we know if up to our own free will, we make the wrong choices (pretty much every time if we're honest about it).  We can thank God that He as a loving Father knows our weaknesses so well and that He set up good boundaries and fences for us (knowing that we're still going to try to rebel and want to go on the other side of the fence) and that He has set up a series of blessings for our obedience and curses for our disobedience to use both the "carrot and the stick" to encourage us to behave in a way that is consistent with who He has called us to be until the time when we mature and the Law is no longer external to us, but our hearts have been changed by the New Covenant (see the New Covenant passages in Jeremiah and Ezekiel) and the Law is written on our hearts and the Spirit of God teaches it to us and we desire to love and obey God.

Right now in the story, the children of Israel are just that--rebellious children who need to be constrained from doing evil and taught how to do what is right and honestly we are all there with them too.  The LORD wants to give them good things, but He knows if He gives them good things while they are being disobedient they will imagine that obedience doesn't matter because they will be blessed simply for being His children (we see this as the attitude of the Pharisees) or maybe they even imagine that the LORD is blessing their disobedience, so they become even more disobedient.  The Law is not evil--it is good like all rules and boundaries that the those in authority set up, but especially like rules we set up for our families and children about how we are going to be different in our house than everyone else, and those rules apply to anyone that comes into our house, even if they are not part of our family, and when people from outside the family break the rules, they may be asked to leave the house and go back to the place where they make the rules for themselves, but that rarely happens to the children who live in the house in the custody and care of the parent--things have to get really bad for a parent to kick their child out of the house, but it can and does happen.  That's what it will feel like to Israel when the LORD puts them in exile in Babylon for 70 years.  Until then God is going to discipline His children because He loves them with the hope that they will be corrected and come back into a right relationship and even with the hopes that one day they will "grow up" and be transformed so that the rules will no longer be something forced on them, but that they understand and desire to keep because of their love for their parents who made the rules and they see their obedience as an expression of their love.

Again, thank you all to those who have been praying for me.  I have been finding it harder to wake up early enough to write these articles, and I'm sorry about that for those of you who have been coming every day looking for what the LORD is teaching me.  Please pray for me to have the strength to both put the LORD first in reading His Word and then also to have the strength to make it through each new day that He has given to me, and please pray also for the LORD to help me walk in obedience to Him every step of the way, not out of fear of punishment, nor even purely out of a desire for blessing, but out of the love that we have for each other as part of the New Covenant that I've experienced.  If you want to know what I mean by this, then please contact me through Discord or Facebook.  I'd be happy to talk to you.