Numbers 32-Deuteronomy 7 (Day 13)
It starts toward the end of Numbers and continues through Deuteronomy: Moses prepares the people for the transition from wilderness wandering, to battle, to settling in the promised land. Moses will not enter the land. If my count is right, Moses himself mentions this three times in the first six chapters of Deuteronomy. He got irritated with the people of Israel. That irritation spilled over into disobedience to God, and so Moses joins the rest of the first generation of those freed from Egypt yet destined to die outside the boundaries of the promised land.
Boundary Speech: From Remembrance to Trust
Moses’ farewell speech takes place at the edges. The wilderness itself is one giant boundary between slavery and inheritance. Moses himself is near the boundary between life and death.
In this place and time “between,” the speech of Moses itself pivots between remembering and anticipating. He commands the Israelites to remember what God has done for them, to teach it all to their children, and to recognize the ways that God’s actions in their history have shown them God’s loyal character. The memory of God’s faithfulness will (or at least it should) help them trust God when they are in the midst of uncertainties that lie in the future for them. These early chapters of Deuteronomy make the point that God will hold up God’s end of the bargain. God has freed them; God will give them the land.
The pivot from remembering to trusting should work better than it does for most of us. Given what they know of God’s faithfulness, why do the Israelites so quickly and so often fail to trust God in the chapters and books of Scripture yet to come? One might also ask, why do we?
"Not as the World Gives...."
One of my favorite quotes is a line from Annie Dillard, possibly from Holy the Firm. “Ask. Seek. Knock.” she writes, alluding to Matthew 7:7, “But you have to read the fine print: ‘Not as the world gives do I give to you.’” Maybe trust is so difficult for us because we just forget. We forget about God’s deliverance. We need someone to remind us of God’s past faithful and generous actions, especially when the present and future are frightening. But maybe there is something more than poor memory at play here, too. I wonder if something in us doesn’t know that, even though faithfulness and generosity are elements of God’s character, one may also say of God what Jesus said of himself: “Not as the world gives do I give to you” (John 14:27, RSV). That not-as-the-world giving is not always what we are sure we need. The temptation, then, is to think we might be better off taking matters into our own hands.
In the readings to come, I’ll be looking for how God’s faithfulness and generosity surprise the Israelites not only because (a) they forgot that God is faithful and generous, but also because (b) they defined faithfulness and generosity rather differently from the way God did.
Comments