December 22, 2022

Passage Read: Deuteronomy 4-7
Meditation Verses: 5:28-29

Thought

Everything the people said was good, but the Lord knew what was really in their hearts. Forty days later they would be making new gods and worshiping them. What they said was good, but what they would become was not. They promised to obey the Lord through His messenger—they wanted someone else to do the scary work of knowing God and His desires, then come tell them. They would obey, they said, but they were already pulling back from Him in this very noble request. They were already establishing a distance from Him so that they could drift and claim ignorance or just do what they wanted because they weren't continually confronted by His holiness and majesty. And He knew it.

Application

So many people claim to love the Lord, but are unwilling to meet Him face to face. They know He is a consuming fire and will burn away their chaff, and they fear they'll have nothing left afterward. Better to maintain the illusion of love by not being confronted by their hollowness. Better to not know too much about the Lord, to not know Him too well, so they can go on in their ignorance and live life as they want, with no thought that they might not be all that great, that they might not be as loved as they think they are. It sounds noble to send someone else to do the work of knowing God, then come back to tell us what we're supposed to do, but in the asking, we've already decided we're not that interested in knowing God personally and carefully. No wonder the Israelites struggled so much, and no wonder the church is in the state it is today. We're still doing the same thing, saying we want to know God, but unwilling to put in the effort. We'd still rather have someone else tells us what God wants while we go on about our preferred business.