by Abby Mohaupt
Deuteronomy 10:12-22
12 Now in light of all that, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of
you? Only this: to revere the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, by
loving him, by serving the Lord your God with all your heart and being, 13 and
by keeping the Lord’s commandments and his regulations that I’m commanding you
right now. It’s for your own good!
14 Clearly, the Lord owns
the sky, the highest heavens, the earth, and everything in it. 15 But
the Lord adored your ancestors, loving them and choosing the descendants that
followed them—you!—from all other people. That’s how things still stand now. 16 So
circumcise your hearts and stop being so stubborn, 17 because the
Lord your God is the God of all gods and Lord of all lords, the great, mighty,
and awesome God who doesn’t play favorites and doesn’t take bribes. 18 He
enacts justice for orphans and widows, and he loves immigrants, giving them
food and clothing. 19 That means you must also love immigrants
because you were immigrants in Egypt. 20 Revere the Lord your God,
serve him, cling to him, swear by his name alone! 21 He is your
praise, and he is your God—the one who performed these great and awesome acts
that you witnessed with your very own eyes. 22 Your ancestors went
down to Egypt with a total of seventy people, but now look! The Lord your God
has made you as numerous as the stars in the nighttime sky!
The
young adult group read this text during one of our Lenten Bible studies and we
focused on what it means for us to follow God and love others. How do we
understand what it means to love a God who doesn’t play favorites? How are we
called to act?
At
the end of our conversation, we decided that acting with justice out of love is the point of this passage,
as it is the point of much of the Bible and our call as people of God. In fact,
in his commentary on Deuteronomy at the beginning of The Message, Eugene Peterson writes “the book of Deuteronomy
gathers up the entire process of becoming a people of God and turns it into a
sermon and a song and a blessing. The strongest and key word in Deuteronomy is love. Love is the most characteristic and
comprehensive act of the human being. We are most ourselves when we love; we
are most the People of God when we love. But love is not an abstract word
defined out of a dictionary. In order to love maturely we have to live and
absorb and enter into this world of salvation and freedom, find ourselves in
the stories, become familiar with and follow the signposts, learn the life of
worship, and realize our unique identity as People of God who love.”
How
will we act with love today and every day?
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