The Closeness of God
This chapter of
Deuteronomy gives us several great perspectives – some that I think we should
take to heart. Take Deuteronomy 4:7 for
example. How great is it that we have a
God who has drawn so close to us! How
great is it that we have a God who wants to know us intimately!
I recently had a
conversation with a new friend about the closeness of God. And for the record, I love how God uses those
kinds of discussions to actually teach me – the one to whom people are coming
for answers! But this person essentially
asked me how it is that we live in a universe so big – with so many
unimaginable forces at work, celestial bodies in motion, etc – and yet I can
think that God has the time to know me individually. After all, isn’t God keeping the universe in
balance, making sure planets don’t hit each other, and other such tasks? Does God really have the time for my life?
Now, I love this
question. These are the kinds of
intimate and personal questions that really make faith important. I applaud the thinking ability of person who
asked this question of me. But think
about the answer for a second. What is
more likely to go wrong: the earth jumps out of its orbit or I jump out of my
relationship with God?
If you answered the
latter, you are absolutely correct. God
knows that the universe is going to continue to follow the laws of physics that
He put into place. Nature is unable to
break the laws of physics, but I am quite capable of breaking the laws of
relationship that God has established for me.
So it actually makes sense to say that our God is not a God who is too
busy holding the universe together.
Actually, it makes sense to say that a God who loves us will stick close
to those who love them to help and support them because He knows that we are
much more likely to “break” than the universe!
That’s the beauty of
verses like Deuteronomy 4:7. We have a
God that knows us so intimately that He can tell us our thoughts even before we
know them! We have a God that knows us
so well that He can tells us our character with far more skill than we
ourselves know it. How great indeed it
is to have a God that has drawn that close to us!
This point is so
significant to Moses that after moving on to other topics he returns to it in
Deuteronomy 4:32-40. How great is our
God who is personal, who leads us out of trouble, who rescues us from our
distress, and who loves us! How great is
our God!
Parenting is Done by Parents…
I’m going to stop
here for a second as we transition out of the first few verses and go into
Deuteronomy 4:9-14. Note the command
found in verse 9. Teach these things to
your children. This is a command spoken
to parents. Yes, Moses was charged with
teaching God’s ways to the nation. But
Moses was not charged with the responsibility of teaching these things to every
individual. Moses taught the leaders,
the leaders taught to the next layer, and it trickled down until the end of the
line where God’s ways are being taught by the parent to the child.
This is the way God
wants it to work. This is the way that
God knows faith is transmitted. One
person is not supposed to do all the work.
One person trains a few, who trains more, who trains more, who trains
the rest.
I have to laugh at
this a little bit, because I live in a culture that assumes spiritual
instruction happens by people who have and Master of Divinity degree on their
wall or at least have gone to a Bible college.
The majority of our culture has assumed that there are trained people
who are responsible for handling the teaching of spirituality.
Think about this for a second. If our culture has by and large abdicated the
teaching of social customs, ethics, and logic to our schools (trained teachers)
then why would it seem so hard to believe that most Americans have also
abdicated the teaching of spirituality to our pastors (trained theologians)? What are we doing as a country by allowing
our parents the option of abdicating their God-given responsibilities?
I’m going to clue you
in on a little secret. A pastor can only
do so much – and that so much is far less than what a parent can
accomplish. Parents see their children
every day, a pastor may see a child for at most 4 hours – 8 if you count weekly
worship, which I don’t – a month and only then if the pastor is teaching the
classroom of Sunday School. Parents
usually have a plenty of opportunities for one-on-one teaching moments with
their individual child while most pastors or even Sunday School teachers
don’t!
There is a reason why
Moses tells the Hebrew people to train their children. Moses knows that if spirituality is going to
be passed on from one generation to the next then it must first and foremost be
a pattern taught in the home. Or, at
least, that is by far the easiest way for it to be transmitted across the
generations. This section of Deuteronomy
may be the most important section of the Bible when it comes to understanding
how spirituality is transmitted across the generations. It happens at the home best.
Warning
This blog is already
running long, and there is so much left unsaid.
Let me end on a note of warning.
Moses tells the people in this passage that if they turn from God and
worship other things – whether manmade or thing in the sky – that the Lord will
turn the people over into their desires.
They will be dragged of and placed into slavery of those things. Here’s why this warning is so potent. We know it happens. The Hebrew people are dragged into slavery
under the Babylonians and Assyrians.
After they return to establish Israel, they are conquered under the Greeks
who oppress them religiously like nobody else ever had. {I’m
referencing good old Antiochus Epiphanes, for whom the word anti-Christ was
first coined}. Then along came the
Romans, who ultimately tore down the Jerusalem temple once and for all.
God is deadly serious
when He says that if we turn our hearts away from him that we will find
ourselves enslaved. We may be enslaved
to other people: how many people live a lifestyle that makes them a slave to
their job? We may become a slave to our
thoughts: how many people have such an unhealthy perspective on what happiness
is that they are a slave to pursuing something that doesn’t exist? We may be a slave to our culture: how many of
us get more upset when we miss our favorite TV show than when we miss a Sunday
of worship? There are other examples,
but I think you can take it from here.
Just remember
something: God is serious when He tells us through Moses that when our hearts
wander we will become enslaved. We have
enslaved ourselves just as human beings all throughout history have become
enslaved to something or someone. It
happens all the time, and many of us are so accustomed to it that we don’t even
see it as slavery anymore. Take these
verses seriously.
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