Scripture readings: Deuteronomy
32:36-47; Romans 15:1-13
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| Around Tall Timber Ranch (Camp), Cascade Mountains Above Leavenworth, WA Between the White and Napeequa Rivers |
When I was little, when I
would do something wrong and absolutely no one was there to see it, my mother
would immediately know about it. She would say to me, “I can read you like a
book.”
I don’t know what scared
me most about this. Was it her ability to read me? Or, was it my frightening
ability to be read by anyone who took one look at me?
The Book of Deuteronomy
tells us that God can read his people like a book. God tells Moses to finish
his book by writing into it what God reads in his people. God gave it to Moses
in the form of a song.
It’s a very long song. As
a whole, it isn’t pretty, but it is beautiful. The song is the story of God and
his people from beginning to end; or from the first beginning to the new
beginning, in the kingdom of God. The song tells us the long, long story of
God’s plan to make a new world out of the one that causes us, and him, so much
distress.
The song tells Israel the
long story of what their history was going to be, and their part in God’s plan
to include the whole world in the joy of his good news. The song teaches them
that their part in the story does no credit to them.
It also speaks to us about
what our own long history consists of, and our part in that same plan. Those
who come to the God of Israel, though Jesus, the King, Son of David, Son of
God, from all the nations, also become part of “The Israel of God”, as Paul
tells us in the New Testament. (Galatians 6:16 - see also Gal. 3:39; Rom. 9:6;
and Phil. 3;3))
So, the long song is our
story as well. Because of this, the song tells us that we share the same credit
in the story as Israel.
The song has its beauties.
The Lord is like rain, and showers, and dew on new grass. The implication is
that we definitely need the Lord to be rain for us. It also makes us think
about the real rain we need at the end of this year’s fire season.
The Lord is like a rock,
everybody loves a rock. In Desert Aire, there are never enough rocks on the
ground, but people building a new house always have to bring in more rocks, the
bigger the better.
The Lord is our creator
and, more than that, the Lord is our Father.
The Lord is like a mother
eagle, who catches us (her eaglets) when we fall out of the nest. The Lord
carries us on his wings, so that we can learn to fly with him.
So, our place in the song,
on the wings of God, is beautiful, but we’re not pretty. God finds us in the
middle of a desert. God has to bring us out of the barrenness, and out of the
lonely wasteland.
Perhaps you can remember
something like that, yourselves. Could the desert mean a fruitless life, a
lonely life, a howling angry life? Could the desert mean lovelessness,
helplessness, emptiness, failure, or blame?
But there’s grace in the
desert: the grace of God. Even a single life can make a long, long song with
grace at the beginning and at the end, and grace is there to set right all that
goes wrong in between. For all of us, this is a long song of the life of every
soul, through all the ages of time, in this world as we know it. (32:1-43)
The song is a picture of
all time, and it doesn’t have a lot of concrete, definable events. The desert in
the song is Egypt, where the Lord found Israel in slavery. The heights are the
high country of The Promised Land with its walled cities on the hilltops. The
honey, and milk, and curds, and oil, and wheat are the abundance of the new
land which the Lord gives to them. It’s a land that makes them fat. (32:10-14)
Even in the Bible, being
fat can be bad. When Jeshurun (which is God’s pet name, or love name, for his
people, and it means “My Upright One”). When the upright one gets fat, he kicks
and abandons God. (32:15)
This lesson goes all
through the Bible: of being so close and blessed by God that you forget who he
is. You worship what God gives you, instead of worshiping God. You don’t think
you’ve changed, but you have.
To say, as the song says
it, “They are a nation without sense,” could happen to us, in our own way. We
could worship our work or our retirement. We could worship our freedom or our commitment.
We could worship church instead of Jesus.
Even when we come into
God’s country, with God’s help, God often has this new work to do. His job
becomes getting rid of our new false gods, showing them up for what they are.
When God takes those new false gods down, the Lord will say (in the words of
the song): “Now where are their gods?”
This long song is, for
Israel and for us, sort of a long view of our history: past, present, and
future. Long as it is, it’s too short to tell us everything. Even the Bible,
long as it is, is too short to tell us everything. It’s designed to tell us not
what we want to know, but what God believes we need to know, and God does not think
like us.
This shouldn’t be that
hard to see. God has a plan, and he’s planned it to be good to Israel, and the
same plan is planned to be good to everyone else, as well. Israel goes wrong
and gets disciplined, to say the least. All the nations go wrong in their
relationship with God’s people, and with each other, and they all get
disciplined, to say the least. All of this happens in this one song.
Songs are poetry, and
Hebrew poetry often works by repeating the same idea over, at least twice, in
adjacent phrases, or a progression of phrases. The mystery of the way God works
can be seen in one pair of phrases: “The Lord will judge his people and have
compassion on his servants.” (32:36) The poetry of this half sentence is an
equation of judgment and compassion. Judgement and compassion are not two
separate things. They are two measurements of the same thing.
They aren’t two stages of
the same thing. They aren’t a process, as we might think. Judgment and
compassion are two expressions of God’s love, or God’s faithfulness. Any good
parent can understand this.
Preachers can get this
wrong. We are warned about the dangers of judging because it’s so easy to get
it wrong, even though we have to do it.
Preachers can get this
wrong. For instance, some preachers blamed the sinfulness of the city of New
Orleans for bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina, but I
didn’t hear any preachers blaming the sinfulness of the city of Houston for
bringing on the destruction caused by Hurricane Harvey. When preachers do this,
they create many of the unnecessary problems that the world has with the Bible.
I’m just saying that when
we are confused about (and when we misapply) God’s judgment and compassion, we
can misunderstand everything that happens in this world.
The song is really about
the Lord’s unchanging love. It tells us that, in the end, the Lord will bless
all the nations and bring them together in joy and praise. This comes out right
at the very end of the song. “Rejoice, O nations, with his people, for he will
avenge the blood of his servants; he will take vengeance on his enemies and
make atonement for his land and people.” (32:43) And so it’s all good.
Paul says that this verse
is about bringing Israel and all the nations together, and it’s about a gracious
acceptance of other people who are different from you. He says that this verse
is about the gentiles, but the word “gentiles” means “nations”, not merely non-Jews.
Paul’s quote is the same as the verse in Deuteronomy. “Rejoice, O Gentiles,
with his people.” (Romans 15:10) “Rejoice O Nations.”
Paul means us to know that
this whole long view of the history of humanity is about the mercy of God. It’s
all about hope.
We don’t often look at the
world around us with hope, or thoughts of mercy. Mw might not even look at our own
lives with thoughts of God’s mercy. Because of this, the long song of God and his
people is God’s loving provision for us. Our life needs hope.
The song was written into
God’s law, and God’s law isn’t only a matter of rules. The law of gravity isn’t
about a rule like “what goes up comes down”. That often shows up, with gravity,
but it’s about much more.
Any truly important law is
more about the nature of a thing: like the Declaration of Independence and the
Constitution of the United States are more than rules. They define the nature
of what we are as a nation. God’s law presents us with a picture of the nature
of God and the nature of God’s ways.
The song is about God’s
ways of judgment and compassion working as one. Paul makes the two one in the
gospel: the gospel is the good news of the righteousness of God given to us in
Jesus (the King of the Jews), crucified for the sins of the world (and for our sins),
and risen from the dead.
The song in Deuteronomy
tells us that the hope and joy of Israel and the nations will be complete
because of God’s atonement of his people’s sins. But the song has the nations
joining Israel in their joy, praising God with one voice. God’s atonement doesn’t
only work for Israel. It works for everyone.
Atonement is a solution to
a problem. Atonement, heals a conflict or a division. You could say that (by happy
chance) atonement means “at-one-ment”. The problem that atonement solves is the
conflict and division between the human race and God because of human pride,
self-worship, missing the mark, and sin.
Jesus is God becoming
human and (by dying and rising from the dead) bridging the gap between God and
his fallen children, who have been caught by the power of sin and death. The
atonement that changes the world, and all people, is a bridge built by God, in
Jesus.
In another way, atonement
means “covering”. It refers to the blood of a sacrifice covering the wrong, and
the sickness, and the sin that divides us. God provides the covering blood, in
Jesus.
I know this can sound yucky.
It works in such a strange way, as if God, looking at us covered with the blood
of Jesus, sees his Son in us, and upon us. We have peace with God through the
blood which God, himself, provided for us to give us a new identity in Jesus.
In the song, and in Paul,
we see the long view of history: the wars, the brutality, the pride, the wrong,
and the injustice of it all. The long view, without answering all our questions
about how and why, tells us that the long view is about the hope which God, in
his love, has worked out for us.
I saw a post on Facebook
that said this: “The hardest part of being a parent is watching a child go
through something really tough and not being able to fix it for them.”
This is true on a human
level. But “we live, and move, and have our being” in God. (Acts 17:28) God has
the power, and the judgment, and the compassion to fix us, and to fix this
world as we know it.
All of us, as God’s
people, like those who traveled with Moses to the promised land, have a long
view held up to us for our learning and for our encouragement. Our part is
often not very pretty, but God’s part makes it beautiful.
We are told to learn God’s
song. We are told that: “They are not idle words for you – they are your life.”
(32:47)
In Moses’ song, we can
read ourselves like a book. Our life depends on being able to read ourselves,
and our part in this long journey, in this long song.
Our life depends on
receiving the gift that comes from God’s good judgment and compassion: his infinite
love for us, and for the whole world, in Christ. In Christ, God covers us with compassion
and with faithfulness. We need that if we want to make our journey of faith
with hope.
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