The Bible Recap - Day 074 (Deuteronomy 11-13) - Year 7
Episode Date: March 15, 2025SHOW NOTES: - Follow The Bible Recap: Instagram | Facebook | TikTok | YouTube - Follow Tara-Leigh Cobble: Instagram - Read/listen on the Bible App or Dwell App - Learn more at our Start Page - Become ...a RECAPtain - Shop the TBR Store - Credits PARTNER MINISTRIES: D-Group International Israelux The God Shot TLC Writing & Speaking DISCLAIMER: The Bible Recap, Tara-Leigh Cobble, and affiliates are not a church, pastor, spiritual authority, or counseling service. Listeners and viewers consume this content on a voluntary basis and assume all responsibility for the resulting consequences and impact.
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Hey Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble and I'm your host for the Bible Recap.
Today we drop back in on Moses parting words to the Israelites before his death.
And he starts with a command we've heard often, but we've never really drilled down on it.
God has commanded us to love Him.
The word love here indicates emotion.
It's action adjacent, but it's emotion specific.
How do you command a feeling?
Jen Wilkin says,
"'The heart cannot love what the mind does not know.'"
And I'm guessing that by fixing your eyes
on His word daily, by looking for Him in Scripture
instead of for yourself,
that you love Him more now than you did 75 days ago.
The more we take our eyes off ourselves
and get to know this infinitely lovable God,
the more we will love Him.
Moses speaks specifically to the adults among the crowd
who were alive even when the Exodus happened,
and he reminds them again to remember who God is and what He has done for them.
In 1116, he tells them to pay attention to their hearts.
There are things around them that will entice them to worship them, and they have to be
vigilant to not be led astray by these new, shiny things.
If they stay faithful to God, no nation will overtake them.
God has already proven that he can defeat bigger armies.
There's an interesting image at the end of chapter 11.
He tells them to choose between blessing and cursing,
represented by two different mountains,
Mount Gerizim, the Mount of Blessing,
and Mount Ebal, the Mount of Cursing.
The Israelites will perform the ceremony he commands
for this later in Deuteronomy,
so we'll just put a pin in it for now,
but know that we're coming back to it.
Moses continues to warn against idolatry, and if it's starting to feel like he's repeating himself,
it's because he is. First of all, he's old and old men tend to repeat themselves a lot, but second and most of all,
that's what we all do when something is important. This is the theme of Deuteronomy.
Moses is very concerned about their faithfulness to God.
And it's good for us to read these things as well
because we all need daily reminders of who God is.
God called them to remember His word
when they sit and when they walk,
when they lie down and when they stand,
which happens lots of times a day.
So surely we can read it once a day.
He tells them again to destroy all the paraphernalia of worship to other gods,
and he includes a word we've seen a few times but haven't talked about yet.
The word is Asherim.
Asherah was a fertility goddess, and the Canaanites worshipped fertility.
Let's be honest, the Israelites kind of seemed to as well, but in their own way.
The Asherim are wooden poles with a figure of
Asherah on them. God commanded them to destroy these when they entered Canaan. Another phrase
you may see referenced sometimes when we're talking about idolatry is the term high places.
Most of the pagan worship sites were set up on hills and on mountaintops or under especially
distinct trees. So anytime you see God telling them to destroy the high places or the trees, He's talking
about destroying the places of Canaanite worship.
Moses also reveals that there will be a major shift in how some of the laws and sacrifices
work once they get into the Promised Land.
First, in 12.5, he says there will be one specific place in the Promised Land where
God will make his dwelling place.
This is nothing new, really.
The manifest presence of the Lord dwells above the Ark of the Covenant in the Tabernacle,
but the Tabernacle will no longer be in the midst of the encampment.
It will be in the midst of a whole new land, and they're going to be spread out over that land,
which is the size of the state of New Jersey.
There will be Levites allotted to live among each tribe, but the tabernacle, wherever it goes, is the only place where
they can offer burnt offerings. Moses says that all the Israelites will travel to that
one place, even if their allotment of land is far away, and when they go, that's where
they will worship God and make their sacrifices to Him. I don't know how you felt reading this, but I kind of panicked. If I had been an Israelite and I wasn't in the tribe that got
the tabernacle, I would be scrambling to marry into whichever tribe did. Not because I don't like to
travel, but because I would want to be as close as possible to wherever that mercy seat was going to
be. I cannot imagine having to move away from the presence of God.
But one thing they all get to start doing once they enter Canaan is eating meat whenever
they want.
And even the people who are unclean can eat meat too.
What this likely implies is that up to this point, the only meat anyone could eat was
meat that had been offered to God.
And since having that offering come in contact with an unclean
person would make it unclean, then unclean people had to be
vegetarians by default.
So now with this new situation unfolding where they'll all be
spread out instead of living in one encampment, they'd have to
travel a long way to make sacrifices, which would mean
they'd only get to eat meat when they made that trip.
With this new addendum, God is basically saying,
"'You can eat meat in your own land any time you want.
It doesn't have to be sacrificed to me first.'"
Moses warns them not to add or subtract from anything God has commanded, and he gives them
a heads up that there could be people who will mingle the truth with lies as a means
of enticing them in little by little. For instance, in 13.1-2, he gives the example of a false prophet or a diviner who provides
some correct insights, but who uses that wow factor to lure people away from Yahweh.
Just because someone speaks truth, that doesn't make them a prophet of Yahweh.
Even a false prophet can be right, but it doesn't mean we should follow them
or seek truth from them. Moses said God may sometimes use this kind of thing to reveal
their hearts to them. And then God commands that the false prophet or diviner get the
death penalty. Not only because that's what is required of the covenant when someone breaks
the first commandment, but also as a means of protecting their covenant community from further spread of the lies.
God demands this kind of allegiance to Himself over strangers and even over friends and family
members who try to lure them into apostasy.
These are intense preventative measures, but these laws are supposed to deter people from
rebelling or enticing others into rebellion, and they're a necessary step in God's plan
to restore humanity in relationship with himself.
This is a protective measure for everyone.
Where did you see God's character on display today?
What was your God shot?
There was a subtle thing that showed up three times
in chapter 12, verses seven, 12, and 18,
that really sets Yahweh apart from all the other false gods.
In each of those verses, he says something like,
"'You shall bring your burnt offerings and sacrifices,
and there you shall rejoice.'"
When people made their sacrifices to false gods,
it was to appease them or entice them
to give them what they wanted.
It was an attempt at initiating some kind of response,
either, hey, please stop punishing me, or, hey, please give me what I'm asking for.
But with our God, none of that is how we approach Him.
Our offerings to Him are a response to His initiation.
And it's not about appeasing Him, it's about rejoicing in His provision and relationship with us.
What a great contrast to every other God.
All those worshipers of false gods are missing out on the rejoicing,
because Yahweh, He's where the joy is.
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