But let’s not waste any more time! Who’s with me?! Let’s Go!

While many of the themes of obedience and story continued in the second half of the chapter, Deuteronomy 2 had some very interesting things to say about the God who is writing the story and the people who are acting it out.

God vs. Idols

The people get a warning: when you enter the land, you may become complacent and will turn to idols. If you do, you will be exiled to foreign nations and be forced to serve their gods.

And these gods? They are made by human hands. They are objects of wood and stone. They are incapable of sight, hearing, eating, or smell.

Wait, what?

I am guessing that was set up as a contrast to God. If that is so. That means God has at least four of the five senses.

What a fascinating way to not only describe God, but to contrast him! Those other gods can’t do things that our God can. Our God has human characteristics. Specifically the sensory characteristics.

Interesting that Moses didn’t say that the idols were incapable of touch. I guess of all the senses, that is the one they actually CAN do.

And Another Thing . . .

God is also described as merciful.

If you want to know what merciful means, I would look at the next few phrases.

• I will not abandon you
• I will not destroy you
• I will not forget you

I wonder if mercy means staying with someone to ensure that they are ok. Here’s why I think that.

Abandonment is a passive way of killing someone. Destroying someone is, obviously, an active way of doing it.

But God will do neither. He will remember his people and he will stick with them. Even when they have screwed up as royally as they will.

Speaking of His People

“For ask now about former ages, long before your own, ever since the day that God created human beings on the earth; ask from one end of heaven to the other: has anything so great as this ever happened or has its like ever been heard of? Has any people ever heard the voice of a god speaking out of a fire, as you have heard, and lived? Or has any god ever attempted to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by trials, by signs and wonders, by war, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, and by terrifying displays of power, as the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? To you it was shown so that you would acknowledge that the Lord is God; there is no other besides him.”

That is all.

So I am going to take my own advice and go slowly when I need to through Deuteronomy.

I made it about half way before I needed to stop.

And it is getting late so I’m a little tired.

Obedience = Life and Land

If you look at my “How I do it” page, you will notice a list of things I look for when I’m studying. One is repetition. One is repetition. Another is looking for connectors like “since” and “so” and “therefore.” Check this sentence out!

“give heed to the statutes and ordinances that I am teaching you observe, so that you may live to enter and occupy the land that the LORD, the God of your ancestors is giving you.”

Not a lot of repetition, but this sentence basically happens three times in the chapter.

The “so that” caught my eye.

Obedience to God’s commands (statutes and ordinances) is what gets people into the land and lets them stay there. The fact that this is repeated three times makes me think Moses really wanted the people to know that.

Laws and Story

Moses is giving the people a big set up to reteaching the law. Rather than jumping in, he reminds them of their story. He reminds them of the first time they got the law. I’ve talked about this before. None of the people he is talking to were there when it happened.

But he could have just told them the law.

Why does he tell the story?

Why do we need to know that God spoke the commands on the mountain after God brought the people out of Egypt?

Why did he wait 3 chapters before getting to the law? Why spend so much time telling the story?

I think that should tell us something about laws and propositional statements: Statutes need a story.

None of the things that Moses is about to tell the people will make any sense unless they are within the context of God rescuing his people from slavery and establishing them as his own holy nation.

Story comes first. Then they get to hear what to do about it.

Egypt: The Iron-Smelter

There is a really interesting phrase in Deuteronomy 4 that I haven’t seen yet in the Bible.

But the LORD has taken you and brought you out of the iron-smelter, out of Egypt, to become a people of his very own possession, as you are now

My first thought was that the Israelites were smelting iron in Egypt. But then I read something that made me rethink it.

What if it is a metaphor?

What if God was using Egypt to create his people?

If so, the people of God were forged in slavery, oppression, marginalization and despair.

Then they were rescued. Then they were given an identity, a culture, life, and now, land.

Yes, they need to remember this.

We all ought to remember where we came from.

Ready? Ready?

I see you down there Issachar! Look at me when I’m talking to you!

Ok good. Here we go.

Actually, I just need to talk to the Reubenites, Gadites, and the Half Tribe of Manasseh, or, Half-asseh. heh heh.

You and your cows have decided to settle in the land east of the Jordan. You have no need to remind me that you have a lot of cows. I know. I can see them and smell them.

But here’s the deal: That doesn’t get you out of fighting with the rest of Israel. We’re in this together people! And you don’t get to sit this one out just because you have a lot of cows.

I’ll tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. When we all cross over into the land, why don’t you guys go first?

It’s only fair.

Then, when everyone has their own land, you can go back to yours.

And your cows.

Israel Gets “Joshed”

Joshua, my boy. Come here.

You are going to lead these people very soon. You will take over for me.

There are a lot of big scary people across the Jordan River. You might be tempted to be afraid of them. But remember, the LORD has given them over to us. We can take ‘em!

You aren’t even the one fighting. God does it! Ha! What a deal!

Remember that. And help everyone else remember that.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go talk to God about something.

Are You There God? It’s me, Moses.

Hey.

Sup.

Sooooooooooooo, I just wanted to say that you have been seriously coming through in the clutch lately. What you did with those Amorite kings was pretty awesome.

Though I’m not sure why you wanted me to include that detail about Og’s bed. Why do I need to know that it was 13 feet long and 6 feet wide? Who in the world needs a 13-foot long bed?!

Anyway, you are pretty much the best and I was wondering if I could, oh, I don’t know, go in and see the land you are giving to your people.

I’ve heard some really good things about it.

Just a peek?

“Enough from you! Never speak to me of this matter again!”

Sigh.

So I decided to take some of my own advice from yesterday and read it slowly and carefully with as much curiosity as I could muster.

And wouldn’t you know it, the results were very interesting.

Call & Response

One of the first things I did was make a list of everything that God does and then make a list of everything that Israel does in the chapter.

God is the initiator. Israel is the responder.

He says go. They go.

He says “make sure you don’t go to war with the descendants of Esau or Lot.” So they don’t go to war with the descendants of Esau or Lot.

He says “Go to war against the Amorites.” So they go to war with the Amorites.

This is in stark contrast to the first chapter. There, we had a couple of stories where the Israelites did their own thing or deliberately disobeyed God’s command. The results were less than spectacular.

This generation is shaping up to be different. They listen and respond. They, it would seem, learned the lesson their parents failed to learn.

Giving Him Over

I’m not sure if this is the first time the phrase “gave him over” occurs in the Bible, but at the very least, we get a picture of what it means.

Here are the phrases immediately following Moses telling the people that the LORD gave him (the King of the Amorites) over to them:

• We struck him down
• We captured his towns
• We utterly destroyed men, women, and children.
• We left not a single survivor
• We kept livestock as spoil for ourselves

The Israelites learn God has given the Amorites over to them. The result is total destruction (except for the livestock). They must have an understanding that the phrase “given over” means complete annihilation.

I wonder what that means for the rest of the times that phrase shows up in Scripture.

A Question

Curiosity Alert!

God told Moses to not go to war with Esau or the Ammonites. Instead, they were to ask to go through their land and buy food and drink and then be on their way.

Not so with the Amorites. They are to do battle with them and take possession of the land.

So what does Moses do? He asks if they can come through and buy food and drink and be on their way.

Huh?

Fortunately, God has hardened King Sihon’s heart and he won’t let them do it. So they go to war and destroy him.

So my question is,

What?

I don’t understand. Someone help me!

Welcome back to my six part series on how to be transformed by reading the Bible. My thesis is that to be transformed by the Bible, we must Learn the Story of God and Live the Story of God.

Previous posts have dealt with issues that keep us from doing it. Today I will switch gears and begin to share helpful things we can do.

In part 1, I mentioned that reading the Bible wasn’t easy. You can’t just pick up Leviticus and “get something out of it.” This causes many people to not even try. I’ve said before that reading the Bible isn’t easy. Here are three things to help you.

1) Just Read It.

I’ll be running the Corvallis Half-Marathon in April. But right now I am nowhere near the condition I need to be in to do it. So rather than not running it or just giving it the ol’ college try on the day of, I am training.

12 weeks of training. I am doing three short runs a week and a long run on the weekends. This will get me in shape to run the 13.1 mile race 2 months ago.

Reading the Bible is no different. We have to train ourselves. We have to learn discipline. We have to get up and do it even when we would rather stay in bed.

I wish there was more to this one, but I don’t know how to be more clear. You can’t learn the story or live it if you don’t know it.

Just read the dang thing.

2) Slow Down

One reason I have learned so much from this blog about the story of God, is that I have read it slowly. Slowing down has been so helpful!

There is no law that says you must read through the Bible in 90 days, or a year. Heck, I’ll probably do it in seven.

But when you give each chapter and section and book the time it deserves, the story starts to come together. Places in Scripture you may have found dry and boring can begin to take new life. They might become, dare I say it, interesting.

You’ll miss it if you feel like you have to just burn through it.

3) Ask God to Help You Be Curious

Curiosity is a holy character trait. Don’t believe me? Read Mark 4. Or read Exodus 3. Moses almost missed that burning bush but his curiosity got the best of him. And the world was changed forever.

When we want answers right away, we aren’t being curious. When we immediately dismiss something we’ve read as boring or irrelevant, we aren’t being curious.

But when we slow down enough to ask a question, we are exercising our curiosity muscle. And that’s good. And when you have a question, write that sucker down and ask it to someone!

When we read through that genealogy to see what might be there, we are being curious.

When we make a spreadsheet of how many animals the Israelites had to sacrifice, we are being curious.

I think we are born curious. And then I think our curiosity can get beat out of us by a whole host of things if we aren’t careful.

So when you sit down to slowly read through your Bible, say a little prayer that God will make you curious about what you read. Trust me, there is good stuff in there.

We’ve all heard the proverb, “Curiosity killed the cat.” Did you know there is a second line?

“Satisfaction brought it back.“

What have you found helpful in just reading the Bible?

But I admit, I am a little nervous about this one. Why?

I can’t ever remember how to spell “Deuteronomy.”

Does the “E” or the “U” come first? I’m going to have to be writing this word for the next month and a half. Someone please make up a little memory song that will help me. Like “I before E except after C.” or something like that.

What Is Deuteronomy?

Well, from the looks of it, Deuteronomy is Moses’ “I’ve been to the Mountain Top” speech to the Israelites. 10 points for you if you get that joke.

They are about to finally go into the Promised Land. Moses has gathered them all together to give them one last reminder of who they are and what they are about.

I was expecting to jump right in to the laws, but Moses went in a different direction.

He reminds the people of their story.

He reminds them where they have been and where they came from.

Which is good, since none of them were actually there when it started. None of these people were in Egypt. None saw the plagues. None experienced that first passover. Many have known nothing save for wandering in a desert their entire lives.

Great, this nation is made up entirely of former slaves or nomads.

That is a strange way to start a nation if you ask me.

What Parts of The Story Do You Tell?

So Moses has a captive audience and wants them to know their story. What parts does he tell? What do they absolutely need to know?

There was a Journey.God led them from Horeb to the hill country of the Amorites. He was about to give them the land he had promised.

They had leaders. Rather than one all-powerful king, authority was spread out among the tribes. Wise, discerning, and reputable people were selected to justly and fairly lead the Israelites.

They Scouted the Land. People went ahead to see what the land was like and what route they should take to conquer it.

There Was a Rebellion. Those who went ahead discouraged the people from wanting to come into the land. They said “The LORD hates us,” and that the people of the land would surely destroy them.

They were punished. Because of that, not one person who left Egypt was to enter the Promised land (save Joshua and Caleb). This included Moses himself.

A new leader was appointed. Joshua would take up the mantle of Moses and lead the people into the land.

There was another rebellion. This time, the people rebelled by trying to get it right. They attacked the Amorites but unlike before, God was not with them. They were defeated.

That’s all we get in chapter 1. We’ll see how Moses continues in chapter 2.

Yesterday, as I studied the end of Numbers, I realized that much of the book deals with an inheritance. The Israelite people are wandering through the desert waiting to come into the land that God promised them. It is their inheritance.

And then I thought about the good and bad inheritances the people got.

The spies that went into the land gave an inheritance of fear and despair.

They also robbed an entire generation of receiving their inheritance.

Moses gave his people an inheritance of the spirit of leadership and prophecy.

Zelophehad’s daughters gave all Israelite women a chance to have an inheritance.

The Bible is supposed to confront us. It is supposed to make us examine our own lives. It is supposed to make us change the way we think and the way we live. Therefore I will celebrate Numbers by sharing with you some things that I want to leave behind for those that come after me.

I want to leave a good inheritance.

These may seem a little scattered and are pretty specific to my own context, but I want to share them with you anyway.

Multi-Ethnic Bible Teachers

I work for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, a ministry of and for college students. This week I was in Dallas with other IVCF staff studying Luke for a huge missions conference in December. The majority of the Bible teachers at that conference are white men, like myself.

But what would it be like if there were teachers from every nation? Every Ethnicity?

I think that would be amazing. There is already a guy who will teach who is from Kenya. That means that about 300-500 American college students will learn Luke from a Kenyan. Yes!

I want to raise up minority men and women who can lead those students in Scripture.

That means I will have to pray for God to lead me to them. I will have to leave the places I am comfortable and go to where they are. I will have to learn. I will have to be ok making mistakes. I will have to work through conflict and misunderstanding. I will have to be humble.

And it will take a long time.

But it will be worth it.

Asking Hard Questions

When I think back on the people who have influenced my life the most, one pattern becomes clear: They all asked me difficult questions about my life. They didn’t let me get away with stuff. They didn’t let me settle for something that wasn’t good.

And I remember them. And I am a different person because of them.

Now I am in their role. I work with college students. And more often than not I chose to act out of fear and not ask the hard questions.

Not anymore.

I want to leave an inheritance of challenge. I want to ask the hard questions. I want to courageously challenge my students to follow Jesus with everything they have. I don’t want them to settle. I don’t want them to take the easy way out. I want to inspire them to hope in a God who is making all things new.

That will mean I will have to get in their lives more. It will mean I will have to risk. It will mean I will have to get uncomfortable. It will mean I will have to listen. It will mean I will have to spend time praying for them and dreaming for them.

But it will be worth it.

Those are two things I want to leave as an inheritance.

What about you? What do you want to leave as an inheritance?

Remember Zelophehad’s daughters? Well, from now on if they want to keep that inheritance they got, they have to keep it in the tribe. It’s ok though, they have some strapping young cousins on their father’s side to marry.

Once again, this is a strange way to end the book.

All that lead up to entering the land. All that talk about how Moses is about to play his final show.

And nothing.

Just a chapter about keeping the inheritance where it ought to be.

But you might say that the whole book was about an inheritance. The whole story up to this point has been heading towards the claiming of an inheritance.

A good land flowing with milk and honey.

A future.

A chance for the children and grandchildren of slaves to embrace their new lives as a kingdom of priests to the God who rescued them.

And this rescuing God, he seems determined to give his people this inheritance even though they try their hardest to reject it. They went into the land he was giving them and decided they didn’t want it. Too scary. Big people there and all.

They started worshiping other gods. They started wishing they could go back into slavery. They started attempting to subvert and replace their leader, Moses.

And an entire generation came and went because of it.

But the inheritance remains.

It is sitting there, ripe for the taking, on the other side of the Jordan River.

God is making good on what he said.

Can we stop and think about that for a second?

God is about to do what he said he would do generations ago. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Jacob’s sons, their children, and their children’s children’s children. All of them waiting to receive that which was promised.

This is not some individualistic salvation happening here. This is God’s faithfulness to a community, a people, over centuries.

God made a promise to Abraham that he would be a great nation with innumerable descendants but he never met his grandsons. And now, on the shores of the Jordan, his faithfulness to that faithful God is finally bearing fruit.

God is in it for the long haul.

And his people should be too.

How would that change our vision? How would that change how we lived? If we viewed our faith as one of inheritance: the gift that God gave us so that we could give it to others?

So tomorrow, I will share with you how I will be celebrating Numbers. I will share with you what I want to leave as an inheritance for those who come after me.

You can read part 1: Why We Don’t Read the Bible

and part 2: The Teacher’s Edition of Life. 

Let’s start with a story, shall we?

Ten years ago I was just finished with my sophomore year at the University of Oregon. Several people from my InterVarsity Fellowship spent the summer in Los Angeles learning about God’s heart for justice, the marginalized, and the oppressed.

One of the first things we did to get oriented to this new way of thinking (and it was VERY new to me) was to study Isaiah 58. I’ll give you a little snippet of the text.

Is such the fast that I choose,
a day to humble oneself?
Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush,
and to lie in sackcloth and ashes?
Will you call this a fast,
a day acceptable to the Lord?

Is not this the fast that I choose:
to loose the bonds of injustice,
to undo the thongs of the yoke,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to break every yoke?
Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,
and bring the homeless poor into your house;
when you see the naked, to cover them,
and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

Now, I don’t know how clear that reading is to you, but this was how I interpreted what I read: God thinks his people are doing too much on the sabbath. They are working too hard doing all this “loosing bonds” stuff and “sharing their bread.” What they really ought to be doing is repenting in sackcloth and ashes. They should be bowing their heads. Isn’t that was is acceptable to the Lord?

I shared my brilliant observations with the group and to my surprise received about ten blank stares.

One girl, Laura, a Latina student from SoCal, kindly invited me to read it again.

Then the color drained from my face.

I realized that I had interpreted this passage to mean the exact opposite of what it actually said.

Thank God for Laura

And thank God that you don’t have to read the Bible by yourself. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t.

1) You Are Not As Smart as You Think You Are

That is not to say that you are an idiot, but let’s be honest, you ability to understand, interpret, and apply a book as complex as the Bible is limited at best.

My very first comment on this blog was a person telling me how I had missed the point of the chapter.

The Bible can be understood. It can be interpreted well. And it can be applied in a way that makes the world better. But do you really think that you can figure all that out by yourself?

I read Isaiah 58 and almost ended up doing the very thing God was warning against!

2) You Have Tons of Biases and Assumptions

Your experiences. Your Ethnicity. Your culture. Your geographical location. Your gender. Your tradition.

All of these things shape how you approach the text of the Bible.

Most of the time these things go unquestioned, particularly if you are part of the dominant or majority culture. “Of course this is what it means!” you might say.

Until you do a Bible study with someone from Kenya or someone who is a first or second generation Asian-American. Then you realize that there are entire worlds of meaning that you have never even considered.

3) Personal Reading is a Relatively New Idea

Most people throughout history didn’t know how to read.

How were they supposed to have quiet time? How were they supposed to spend time in the word?

Well, most likely, they weren’t. That is a luxury of an affluent and literate society. It also is a product of the individualistic philosophies of the Enlightenment.

So we shouldn’t act like personal Bible reading is the be all, end all of spiritual growth. I think it shouldn’t even be in the list of most important practices.

What do you think are the pros and cons of personal, individual Bible reading? Do you think there is any inherent irony in the fact that my whole blog is basically that?

I just wanted to let you know that I am in Dallas, TX for the next couple of days doing some Bible Study training with other InterVarsity Christian Fellowship Staff.

We are working on some passages from the Gospel of Luke in preparation for this year’s Urbana Student Missions Conference.

Therefore, I will not be updating the blog for the rest of the week until Sunday’s post on Learning and living the story.

I do want to say how great it is to be with other people (from all over the world. There is a guy from Kenya and actual Canadians here!) who love to dig in to the Bible. I am humbled at this opportunity we all have to influence a generation of college students.

So I will see y’all on Sunday!

Yee-Haw!