Читать книгу The Grand Sweep - Large Print - J. Ellsworth Kalas - Страница 87

Prayer Time

Let us pray daily for our nation, for all nations, for our churches, for all our appointed spiritual leaders, and for ourselves that we will be sensitive to the contribution we might make to spiritual renewal.

How the Drama Develops DEUTERONOMY 6–26

We are constantly tempted to compartmentalize our faith. This is business, we say (or politics, or “life”), and this is religion, and we watch carefully lest the two should meet. Not so with Israel—and not so with true biblical religion. These chapters in Deuteronomy mix the sacred and secular as if they were intended to be one—as, indeed, I’m confident God intends—not that our sacred should become secularized but that we should redeem the secular and infuse all of life with the quality of the sacred.

For instance, Deuteronomy 16 begins with regulations regarding the Passover, the Festival of Weeks, and the Festival of Booths, then—without any real transition—a paragraph on the appointment and conduct of judges and public officials. And then again, just as abruptly, a rule defining forbidden forms of worship. A scholar might suggest some later compiler brought these materials together carelessly. I doubt it. The Hebrew regard for its sacred Scriptures didn’t countenance casual handling. I think, rather, that the mixture of events had its own sacred logic. Our logic seems often to be that the sacred belongs here, and the secular there; Deuteronomy’s logic is that they belong together—indiscriminately, in fact. Living this way brings blessing to life: “Observe them [these rules] diligently, so that it may go well with you, and so that you may multiply greatly in a land flowing with milk and honey, as the LORD, the God of your ancestors, has promised you” (Deuteronomy 6:3).

The logic, of course, is this—that all of life is lived under the hand of God. Some meats are forbidden. Why? Because the Lord has declared them unclean (14:3-21). We may reason that it is because these animals were greater health hazards, and perhaps they were. But the Law had its own bottom line: God said so. Is someone in financial need? “Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted”; don’t even “entertain a mean thought”—and in the end, “the LORD your God will bless you” (15:7-11). The rule is very pragmatic and very humane: Life is lived under the hand of the Lord God.

In truth, these laws wouldn’t work unless people saw them as from the Lord. Come to think of it, it’s hard to think of any way to make laws effective except as we hold before us a concept of a God who is holy and who desires holiness of us. And people need a good memory too. The Jews are told to be just to aliens and orphans because “remember that you were a slave in Egypt and the LORD your God redeemed you from there” (24:17-18). And when first fruits were brought to God’s house, it was to be with a humbling song of gratitude: “A wandering Aramean was my ancestor” (26:5). Unless we have a good memory (good in a moral sense as well as an intellectual sense), we will not have a proper impetus to godly living.

No wonder, then, that these laws were to be taught to the children, repeated at home and while traveling, and worn on hands and foreheads and on the doorposts of houses (6:6-9). Obeyed, they convey order and beauty to life; ignored, life falls apart. The word religion comes from a word that means “to bind or tie back,” probably in the sense of tying us back to God. But good religion also binds all of life together so it is whole and effective. That’s what these laws, ultimately, are all about.