Today's reading: Deuteronomy 6; Revelation 6
I think we see something really important in understanding the heart of God in Deuteronomy 6 that a lot of people get wrong, and that is what God expects from His people.
As we have been reading through Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers we have encountered a LOT of laws and rules for Israel. There are all the different types of sacrifices and offerings, and all the detailed regulations around how each of those was to be done and managed, there are laws around ritual purity and impurity, there are laws for property rights and inheritance propagation, there are regulations around festivals and Sabbaths, and laws and regulations for a bunch of other things as well...
With all these different rules and laws for Israel, it is easy to think that the reason God and Israel have so many problems throughout the Old Testament is that there are so many rules that they keep missing little things here and there. You see this mentality among Christians a lot these days. There is this assumption that God has a massive list of rules and lines you can't cross, and then He is sitting there in Heaven, watching, just waiting for you to misstep somewhere so He can mark you down or kick you out. I mean, He specifically tells Israel that if they mess up too much He is going to kick them out of the land, doesn't He?
The short answer is, "No, no He does not."
In Deuteronomy 6, God does tell them that they are to keep His commandments so that it may go well with them, but what are the commandments in view? It might be easy to think of all those laws from Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers because we just read all those, but this isn't Moses handing the people a book, this is Moses giving a speech, and the rules and laws he just laid out for them in Deuteronomy 5, right before he makes these comments about keeping those commands, are the ten commandments. To be blunt, God does not set a very high bar for them. Basically, "Stay faithful to God, don't worship other gods, don't work on the Sabbath, honor your parents, don't murder, don't commit adultery, don't steal, don't bear false witness, and don't covet your neighbor's things." Those other regulations for worship and such certainly play into faithfulness to God, but nobody was ever sent into exile for failing to quarantine a house for the proper number of days after a spot was found to be spreading in the plaster... Israel was sent into exile for turning away from God entirely and worshipping other gods instead of Him.
What God is concerned about, both with Israel then, and with us today, is believing loyalty. Is our faith and trust in Him, or is it in something else? For Israel, this question often manifested most in whether they would stay faithful to Yahweh or whether they would abandon Him for the gods of the nations they were dispossessing from the land. For us today it is not so often about turning from Yahweh to worship other gods, but just because we don't have an idol in our closet we are bowing down to doesn't mean we aren't turning away from faith in Christ.
So just as God was not keeping a checklist back then, just waiting for one too many infractions before He sent Israel into exile, neither is He doing that with us today. God's desire is that His people remain faithful to Him and continue to trust in Him.
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