Year 7, Day 162: Deuteronomy 11

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I love the straightforward nature of Deuteronomy 11.  In this chapter, Moses is quite clear with the Hebrew people.  Observe the Lord’s command and prosper.  Make the Lord angry and His protection will go away.

I don’t know why we as human beings find this to be a difficult concept.  It simply makes sense.  When we show someone that they are important to us, we tend to have better interactions with them.  When we indicate to another person that they are meaningless to us, we tend to have worse interactions with them.  It’s simply not a hard concept to understand.  So why do we find this concept so difficult?

I’m sure there are as many answers to that question as there are people in the world.  But I’m guessing that much of the time – at least for me – it revolves around how much I care.  You see, if I don’t care about God and His ways, then I don’t really care whether or not my interactions with Him are favorable or not.  On the other hand, in those moments when I really need God and I want Him to care about me, I tend to pay attention to God and try to win His favor.

It isn’t that the concept is hard to understand at all.  It is my level of buy-in that changes.  I see the same thing in students, too.  Those students who enjoy my subject matter always come to class and do well.  Those students who may not enjoy my subject area but still value school in general also come into the class and find success.  Then there are those students who really don’t care about putting their best foot forward.  They stumble and fall, not finding success until their parents see their report card and start to punish them unless the grades improve.  Then, the students start caring more and the grades pull around.  But here’s the thing.  Even in those instances, I’m not fooled.  The turnaround isn’t because the student has started to care about school.  The turnaround is because the parent found something that the student does care about and tied the consequences of school to the consequences of whatever they do care about.

That brings me back to God.  He isn’t fooled by us, either.  There are people who genuine care about God and His ways because it is in their heart.  Then, there are those people who will only care when they need Him.  There are those people who will only give God their attention when something has gone wrong and they don’t care for the consequences.  We’ll see that time and time again in the story of the Hebrew people.  We see that time and time again in Western civilization, too.  But in the end, God is no more fooled than I am as a teacher.  God knows which people genuinely care and which ones only care until the consequences are less dire.

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