More on Deuteronomy

Deut. 6:5-9
"Love the Lord your God with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give to you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home or when you walk along the road. When you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them the doorframes of your houses and on your gates...

...In the future, when your son asks 'What is the meaning of the stipulations, decrees, and laws the Lord has given you?' Tell him..."

I wonder if CS Lewis got his idea to write about the signs in The Silver Chair from this. I read the verses this morning. I've been reading a chapter a day. At this rate, I'll be plugging away for three years in order to read the entire Bible from cover to cover. Oh well. As long as God's speaking to me, I guess...

Of course this jumped out at me first because this is the commandment Jesus later coins as the most important. This is the commandment at the center of the rest of the commandments that will follow--some of them rediculous sounding, like the ones my brother just made film about (like not touching shrimp or something? Maybe I'll let you know when I get there.) Some are more practical, like don't have sex with your family members or your neighbor's wife. These days, it's weird to read all the commandments and try to decide which ones are still good to obey, or wonder if God gives commandments still that are so specific. Do we still have stipulations and decrees from God?

We're told that Jesus made it possible for us to fulfill this great command--to love him with everything we've got. We believe there's grace now--we don't have to do anything to recieve it. But I think obedience is still important to God. Our obedience comes from what he's doing within us, sure, and it doesn't determine our salvation, sure, but something else is going on, too. Jesus is renewing our minds.

Maybe the commandments for us have changed in nature--the ones that make it possible to live out the great commandment(s). They have become more personal. In my walk with God, there seems to be something he's trying to teach me and this lesson changes over time. The specifics, anyway. At one point, the early point, I believe he was teaching me to put him first, which required that I do some fasting from things that used to distract me from Him. Later on, his message to me was to chill out and find that he's everywhere. Not to be so careful all the time or I'll miss the work he's doing.

When we read the Gospels, we see that his messages are individual. At one point he's telling a guy to hush about who healed him. He tells another person to go around and tell everyone what she's seen. He tells the Pharisees they need to stop being hypocrites and he tells another guy his faith has healed him. But I think the reality is that we are all of these people, at one point or another. All of His messages to them are relavant at different stages in our lives. Because we are changing beings. We should be, anyway. We should be growing.

I'm a firm believer in a God who speaks to me all the time, who is always teaching me something and I just have to give him my attention to learn what that thing is. This is the message that I believe Moses mentions to the Israelites in his Deuteronomy sermon. I don't think he's telling the people to write all ten (or nine?) commandments on their gates or to fill their foreheads with so much writing, but to be alert to the commandments that are pressing on them. We're not always in positions to lust, for instance, but there may come a day when we struggle with that, so that's when we remember what God has to say about it. The same with being angry at a sibling, etc.

But maybe, because our spirits are awakened by Christ in us, God's individual messages to us take on a more spiritual nature, like the string of commands Paul has to offer the addressees of his letters. Maybe God's telling us to have joy, or peace, or remember that he's alive in us. Maybe these are the lessons we tell our sons and daughters now. Because the outward stuff--the physical stuff is taken care of through Christ's ressurrection. Now we're alive in a different way and need to focus on what's going on with our thoughts.

In truth, I believe that both messages were always apparent--the physical and spiritual laws, even before Jesus came to the earth. David certainly seems to need to hear about peace at times--and I'm sure the other things too. From the psalms, it seems that the spiritual gifts were as available then as they are now. So I think the messages to hear about joy, patience, humility, and to stop grumbling have always been out there for people.

I guess it all just comes back to that idea--what is God saying right now? And how are we responding to it? Do we read a message in the morning and then forget about it? Do we write it down but never read it again? Do we write it on our hands? Talk about it with our friends? Sing about it as we walk to work?

Or maybe it's the story that we tell--that's how we remember. Just like God asked the Israelites to constantly remind each other of how he brought them out of Egypt, we must return to the story of what God did for us--what he brought us out of, what he put to death so we could be resurrected.

In God's diverse messages for us, there is always something we need to be reminded of. And they always point back to the same old thing--loving God with everything he's made us out of.