Daily Devotional • March 15
A Reading from Deuteronomy 11:18-28
18 “You shall put these words of mine in your heart and soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and fix them as an emblem on your forehead. 19 Teach them to your children, talking about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise up. 20 Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, 21 so that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your ancestors to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth.
22 “If you will diligently observe this entire commandment that I am commanding you, loving the Lord your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, 23 then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations larger and mightier than you. 24 Every place on which you set foot shall be yours; your territory shall extend from the wilderness to the Lebanon and from the River, the River Euphrates, to the Western Sea. 25 No one will be able to stand against you; the Lord your God will put the fear and dread of you on all the land on which you set foot, as he promised you.
26 “See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse: 27 the blessing, if you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today; 28 and the curse, if you do not obey the commandments of the Lord your God but turn from the way that I am commanding you today, to follow other gods that you have not known.
Meditation
We cannot honestly say that no one ever told us about the consequences of disobeying God’s commands. Moses teaches that the words that God has delivered through him are to be the guiding light of our lives as God’s people. They are to be “in view” in every aspect of our lives and all that God has said must be passed down from generation to generation in the Church. God has made a covenant with his people, and, as with any covenant, there are promises to be realized if the covenant is followed and consequences to be suffered by the party that breaks the covenant. There is no fine print or incomprehensible grammatical constructions in God’s covenant—he spells it all out quite clearly in Scripture and gives us his Spirit to help us be clear in those areas where we might not be inclined to want to understand.
In revealing his will through the giving of the Law, God has revealed himself to his people. Furthermore, after Pentecost, God has given his Spirit to convict his Church of the truth of the Law, to empower it to live according to his precepts, and to internally experience his presence. No longer is it essential that we post Scripture everywhere we look, because his Law is engraved on the hearts of those who believe. But what this giving-of-himself-through-the-giving-of-the-Law means is that when we reject the Law through disobedience, we are actually rejecting God in order to follow another god of our own making. Disobedience then, is idolatry and with idolatry comes the abandonment of God and the curse of a broken covenant.
Chuck Alley is a retired Episcopal priest (St. Matthew’s, Richmond, Va.), and an adjunct associate professor of anatomy on the medical faculty of Virginia Commonwealth University. Avocationally, he is an avid woodworker.
♱
Daily Devotional Cycle of Prayer
Today we pray for:
Cathedral Church of St. Luke, Orlando
The Diocese of Malek – Province of the Episcopal Church of South Sudan
The Rev. Dr. Chuck Alley, former rector of St. Matthew’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, teaches anatomy at Virginia Commonwealth University Medical School.
