The 10 Commandments... Again - Deuteronomy 5

Chapter 5 is basically just a rehashing of the 10 commandments but there are a few points that are interesting. The first has to do with the reference in the last chapter when Moses asked the people if they heard God speak to them from fire. In verse 4 Moses reminds the people that when the original covenant was made with their parents at Mount Horeb 38+ years ago, “the Lord talked with you face to face in the mount of the midst of the fire.” Moses also reminded the people that when God spoke to them directly, they were afraid and asked Moses to intervene on their behalf and have God speak to him so that they wouldn’t have to. TB mentioned that after the people told Moses that they were too scared to hear God personally and that they wanted Moses to talk to God and just tell them what He said, the people did stick around to wait and hear what God had to say, they just packed up all their stuff and went home. That’s interesting to consider because if the God of the whole universe is speaking from a fire on the mountain and it’s too scary (which I understand) I think I would still hang around and wait to see what He had to say, especially considering that this God was miraculously providing food and water and protective fire. I wonder what that was like to experience, like I wonder if I was in that same situation, would I have felt the same way, like a nonchalance about this booming voice coming from a mountain fire? I’ve never experienced anything like that before so it’s hard to know how I would react. I feel like all people throughout history are the same in the capacity for faith but maybe that’s not true. There are numerous places in scripture where speaking to various peoples, the prophets have said “if the miracles shown to you had been shown to other people, they would have believed without question,” so maybe that goes hand in hand here.

Another point to mention in in verse 16 which is the ‘honor thy father and thy mother… that thy days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with thee, in the land which the Lord thy God giveth thee.” TB makes two notes about this verse. First is that the mention of the mother is unusual for this area and time in history. He said that women were considered property and that the most important relationship a man had was who his father was and his father’s favor toward him. God’s specific mention of honoring your mother is evidence that Jesus Christ is the champion of women, and that God holds one’s obligation to parents as being equal between father and mother. No one gender is more important than another, which was very progressive at the time. The second point about this verse is that this is the only commandment that comes with a promise of a reward for obedience, that our days may be long upon the land.

After going over all the commandments, Moses gives the promise that if “ye shall walk in all the ways in which the Lord your God hath commanded you, that ye may live, and that it may be well with you, and that ye may prolong your days in the land which ye shall possess.” This promise is repeated throughout the scriptures over and over again, if we are obedient to the commandments, we will be blessed. But this has to be taken in an eternal perspective I think because I think we’ve all experienced negative things happening even when we’ve tried to be righteous. That’s the hard part I think, and definitely something that I’ve been struggling with recently. If we were righteous and only experienced good things always, then obedience wouldn’t be based on faith but instead would be transactional, like “I’ll be good if you bless me.” And if unrighteousness always immediately resulted in a loss of blessings then people would be obedient to avoid the bad. It would be completely transactional, there would be no faith involved in the motivation or decisions at all. So if we endure in the faith that God will keep his promises to work all things for our good and bless us if we are righteous even when things go wrong, that’s where the relationship is built. What is faith, in conjunction with signs and wonders and knowledge and logic and common sense? How does that all fit together? What kind of faith was expected from the Israelites when God rained manna every morning? What did that faith look like? It must have looked like obedience. But is faith more than just obedience? Because I’ve tried to be obedient to the commandments as best I could, is that the pinnacle of faith? I’ve been having some conversations with my brother today about this very topic. What does building faith look like for me in my specific circumstances? Is it just general obedience to the commandments as best I can? Is it striving to be better at obedience? Is it an understanding of the scriptures? Is it an eternal perspective? It’s a very abstract concept and I’m going to have to think about this for a while.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

And Another One - Leviticus 20

Chapter 20 is another conglomerate of already discussed commands, but starts off with something a little unfamiliar which is giving of children “unto Molech.” We first heard about Molech just recently and It doesn’t say exactly what happens to these kids, like if they are given to serve Molech or if they are to be human sacrifices, which TB suggests that that is the case. Any one who gives their children to be given “unto Molech” or I would imagine any other type of god as well, are to be put to death, more specifically, “the people of the land shall stone him with stones.” It’s interesting that God prescribed the method of execution here and TB suggests that if it was like beheading or shot with an arrow or something like that, then it would only take one single skilled executioner to perform the task. But with stoning, it takes a whole group of people hurling stones at the person for a while before they actually die. The point, TB says, is to make sure that lots of people participat...
Read more

Purification Offering 2 - Leviticus 5:1-13

5:1-13 – The first 13 verses of chapter 5 are a continuation of the Purification offering talked about in chapter 4. Again, these are sins that are committed without knowing it, or because of the fallen world that we are in. The IM notes that the reasons for making this type of offering, as explained in chapter 5, are “omission (failure to report a crime one has witnessed), oversight (unconscious defilement), and rashness (thoughtless oath making).” This is like if someone accidentally stepped on a dead animal while walking. To be honest, I didn’t really follow everything that they were talking about with which sins were to be resolved through which sacrificial offering TB did make a point that I thought was pretty on point. He noted the same thing I did, that there were a lot of sacrifices for a lot of different sins and he said that going in depth with all of them felt like we were slicing the onion really thin with this. I appreciated that because that’s exactly how I feel about, t...
Read more

Jasper & Sardine Stone - Revelation 4

4:1-5 - The first 3 chapters of the book of Revelation included instructions to 7 church leaders in Asia Minor. Starting with chapter 4, John gets in to another vision that he had of “things which must be hereafter.” John sees “a door was opened in heaven” and heard a voice “as it were of a trumpet talking to me.” He sees “a throne was set in heaven, and one sat on the throne.” The description of the scene set before him is unique, I’ve never heard it described like this and I don’t know exactly what it means. John describes a man sitting on the throne who looked “like a jasper and a sardine stone: and there was rainbow round about the throne, in sight like unto an emerald.” I googled “sardine stone” and it’s a red colored stone, one article defines it as “a gem of blood-red colour.” I was surprised because I thought that it would be white. After doing some digging, I found what was important to know about this from an article about “Jasper and Sardine stone” from biblestudytools.com...
Read more