Year 7, Day 155: Deuteronomy 4

Theological Commentary: Click Here

When I read Deuteronomy 4, the overarching theme that I hear is the importance of remembering.  God has done marvelous things for these Hebrew people.  He has brought them out from under oppression.  He has brought them through a desert and sustained a whole community of people and animals for forty years in a dry land that is ill-equipped to support life.  He has allowed them begin to conquer the people on the east side of the Jordan River.

These Hebrew people need not question what God will do for them in the future.  Of course God will be with them; He has been with them all along!  There is no need to doubt God’s presence, His hand, or His power.

For me, this is a great lesson about which I need to be reminded.  It is easy to worry about the future.  It is easy to doubt that things will go as needed.  It is easy to believe in Murphy’s Law and assume that everything that can go wrong will go wrong.  But I need not live in that perspective at all.  Has not God been with me my whole life?  Has He not been active in my life?  Has not the presence of His hand and the force of His power been there, sustaining me for as long as I’ve been alive?  I might not always do a great job recognizing it in the moment, but if I look back I can certainly see it at work.

There is one last thing that Moses says about remembering.  Since God has been with the people, the great error the people can be made is falling away from God because they forget about Him or because they do not acknowledge His work.  The people need to remember God’s work and walk with Him.

Again, this message applies to us as much as the Hebrew people.  Since God has been with us in our life, we need to remember Him.  We need to walk in His ways, or at least try.  We need to be repentant when we fail, acknowledging our mistakes rather than testing our God.  Since God’s presence in our future is not in doubt, our obedience to Him should not be in doubt, either.

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