Moses’ great concern for the people is that they will forget
the Lord and all He has done for them.
When they come into the land and they eat their fill and they enjoy the
fruit of the land and its bounty, will they remember Him? He says the temptation will be to say in your
heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand have gotten me this wealth.’ This particular generation might not face
that temptation but there will always be that temptation to future generations,
that is the reason for the festivals like Passover and Sukkot, to remind each
generation in their turn of the story of what happened. There will also always be the temptation to
chase after other gods when we believe we got this on our own, but now gods
might come in handy so that we continue to enjoy it all or that we might have
more of something. I got myself this
much, perhaps adding some god to the mix will give me more. Moses gives a solemn warning to those who
abandon the Lord, you will surely die.
Where have we heard that before?
The Lord’s prayer is one way of remembering how indebted we
are to the Lord. We ask for our daily
bread and we ask for forgiveness, not to be led into temptation and to be
delivered from the evil one. The little
parable that follows it is sometimes very frustrating to me as I believe that I
am asking for good things and sometimes not only denied those good things but
instead am given scorpions instead of eggs, serpents instead of fish, etc. The reality is that I honestly don’t have the
wisdom to know what is good for me, what I think is a scorpion might actually
be an egg. The prayer is one that calls
us to humility and to recognize that the world is a messed up place and we
don’t know ultimately what is even best for us, the best thing we can do is pray
for God’s kingdom to come and His will to be done, that all things be set
right, that I might see things rightly now.
“Every good and every perfect gift…” As I just noted, I don’t honestly know what
“good” is. When I look back on my life
so many of the things I thought were good at the time turned out to be not good
at all and some of the most painful things in my life turned out to be places
where God was doing something that led to great good. When will I learn to trust that will be so in
pain now? A long view of things coupled
with the humility to acknowledge I don’t know what is good and evil apart from
Him and the trust to believe He truly loves me and wants good for me would be
the best thing I could cultivate. If I
simply did what I know of the word and left the rest to Him, my life might be
less frustrating to me and I might see Him more often.
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