After Pentecost Devotional - Day 53

“His commands aren’t in heaven, so you can’t excuse yourselves by saying, 'How can we obey the LORD’s commands? They are in heaven, and no one can go up to get them, then bring them down and explain them to us.'” Deuteronomy 30:12

Access to God's plans, values, and purposes is not an issue. It never has been an issue since the days of Abraham and Moses. The issue has been that we simply do not want to live according to those dictates, values, and purposes. It is a question of human will that runs counter to what we understand to be a higher ethic and morality. It is a question of distrust, anxiety, and the fear that by living according to God's principles we might miss out on something.

We like to make following God difficult, but it really isn't. The same call to a higher moral and ethic was obvious for many peoples around Palestine in Moses' day. It was a common enough theme that treating strangers with hospitality was a sign of one being just. It was common to understand that the poor, widows, orphans, and strangers need and should have protection. The Hebrews knew it. The worshippers of Baal knew it. Those who followed Lillith, Ra, Dagan, Molech, Marduk, and the myriad other gods of the peoples around Israel knew it. It was not a question of knowledge, it was a question of application.

Along with faulty application comes the desire to distance ourselves from what we know we should do. That is what this text was getting at. We like to create structures, rules, and regulations to make following God a difficult, unknowable process. Along that journey, we relieve ourselves from the need to follow God, as we just can't know any better. We give up our responsibility for following God to pastors, priests, theologians, and saints. We use the veil of religion to keep an intimate knowledge of God our of our hands, relegated to a special class of people who have an access we simply don't want.

Then we can sit back and go through the motions of religious observance while ignoring the weightier matters of life. We exclude ourselves from having to practice what we know to be true. We excuse ourselves for not knowing how to apply the principles of the gospel of Jesus. We claim it is too hard. We claim it must be for some otherworldly reality. We claim that it cannot apply to our circumstances.

We know better. We just don't want to know better.

The message Jesus preached was not difficult to understand. He simply applied the higher ethical principles of the same laws given through Moses. The reason he got in trouble with the religious of his day was not that he was teaching anything new. It was the fact that he was doing away with the religious barriers to approach God. He was granting access to those meek, lowly, oppressed, poor, ill, despised, and otherwise rejected as unworthy by polite society. It was all there in the Law and Prophets for anyone willing to see.

We just don't want to see.

It is time for us to assess our lives under the same lens to discover where we are trying to keep God at bay.


"Lord, burst through my efforts to keep you at a distance that You might be fully present."

—©Copyright 2016, Christopher B. Harbin
http://www.sermonsearch.com/contributors/104427/ 
My latest books can be found here on amazon

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