Deuteronomy 10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you except to fear the Lord your God by walking in all his ways, to love him, and to worship the Lord your God with all your heart and all your soul?”
Have you ever seen someone with special skills make something hard look easy? A friend of mine let me try his trumpet once. He could make it sing. I blew into it and no sound came out at all. My dad had a knack for carpentry. He cut out pieces of wood, and they just seemed to fit together. I tried it and the lines were not straight and the angles were not square. There is more to this than meets the eye.
Moses makes God’s standards of behavior sound kind of easy at first. “This isn’t rocket science,” he seems to say. It boils down to something quite simple. Knowing what God wants isn’t that hard to understand.
Knowing it and doing it are two different things, though. There is more to this than meets the eye. “Fearing the Lord your God” isn’t primarily a matter of being afraid of him. It is about acknowledgment. It is about recognizing God as God. He, and no one or nothing else, stands above us with power over every feature of our existence. He blesses or withholds blessing. He makes things work out for good or harm. Our survival, our livelihood, depend on him–not on our environment, not on our government, not on our employment, not on our investments, not on our friendships, not on our families, not on our own cleverness and ingenuity.
There are many things that compete to be the “big thing” running our lives. In this sense we may “fear” people, possessions, relationships. We stand in awe of them as though they have god-like power over us. We compromise our morals and principles to keep them happy and keep us safe. We lie for the boss to protect our jobs and stay on his good side. We bite our tongue around family members to keep the peace even though the situation is crying for someone who has the guts to call someone out for his nonsense.
If there were an x-ray that let us peer into our souls, they would look like one of those homes on Hoarders, cluttered and choked with things we can’t let go of because we are terrified we can’t survive without them. As these things grow in importance and influence on our hearts, God himself shrinks in our view. He seems more and more irrelevant. We imagine he doesn’t make that much difference.
That is a spiritually fatal mistake. The Lord is the “big thing” running our lives, whether we acknowledge this or not. Any attempt to replace him or ignore him will end in us beating our heads against the wall. “Fear the Lord your God, by walking in all his ways,” Moses commands. It’s not hard to understand why he deserves such a place of respect in our hearts and minds. Look at how great and powerful he is. Look at how gracious he has been, forgiving our sins and redeeming our souls. But this standard for serving him is hard to put into practice, which is why Moses has to repeat it here.
