Deuteronomy 10 starts with Moses telling of receiving two new stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. These were the same as the first ones God had written. Moses placed them in the Ark of the covenant as God commanded. The remainder of chapter 10 and all of chapter 11 offers Moses’ admonition to the Israelites to love and obey God, because of His great love for them. He tells them of the consequences for obedience and disobedience, and then tells them to choose “life,” which means to choose obedience, rather than choosing “death,” which would be the result of disobedience. These chapters offer us a strong reminder that in every era we receive consequences for our actions. While we typically think of the word “consequence” as negative, consequences are simply the logical outcomes of previous actions. The logical outcome of loving and obeying the God of the universe is “life.” While we know people, including ourselves, who have loved and obeyed God and still experienced challenge and difficulty, the principle remains: loving and obeying God leads to life. Because of Jesus’ coming, because of His perfect life, sacrificial death and resurrection, we who trust God, and love and obey Him in the power of the Holy Spirit will experience life in all its abundance. We might experience bumps on the road in the short-term, but in eternal terms, our lives will be blessed.
Deuteronomy 11 offers us a crucial truth for God’s people in any era of history: Do not worship as the pagans worship. Worship only as God decrees. The Israelites were about to enter a land filled with idol worshipers. God told them to destroy every idol and every “high place” where the idols were worshiped. The analogy for us is not to indulge ourselves in pagan worship practices, whether witchcraft or Satanism, eastern religions or any practice that doesn’t originate from our desire to worship the one, true living God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We live in relationship with God through Jesus Christ. The world over, people practice religion–the pursuit of “God” or a deity through actions designed to please or appease the god of that religion. Religion is as old as humanity, but only through the one, true God do we gain a relationship that brings lives of meaning and purpose here and now and forever.
John 18 records the betrayal, arrest, and trial of Jesus. It also records Peter’s denial of Jesus. As we move through the chapter, we might easily miss a couple of amazing responses to Jesus in it. First, when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, and He told them He was Jesus they “fell back.” 400 trained soldiers faced one man, Jesus, and at the mere admission from Jesus that He was the one they were seeking, they fell back. We might think of Jesus as a “nice” man, as a “pleasant” man, and to be sure, Jesus must have been kind and caring as we see through His interactions with so many. But John shows us in the situation when the soldiers came to arrest Jesus, a military or at least police action, Jesus’ mere presence was enough to frighten 400 soldiers!
During Jesus’ interaction with Pilate, Jesus told Pilate His Kingdom was not of this world. Pilate responded, “So you are a king then?” Jesus neither confirmed nor denied the position, but told Pilate, He came to reveal the truth. Pilate asked, “What is truth?” but didn’t wait for Jesus’ response. Pilate had the truth standing in front of him, and could have learned the deep truths of God and reality. Instead, he walked away, returning to the crowd and telling them he found no guilt in Jesus. Despite finding Jesus not guilty, he condemned Jesus, because he was afraid of the crowd. We could say the crowd was more guilty than Pilate, because they called for Jesus’ crucifixion. But Pilate had both the power and authority to free Jesus. Instead, because of his fear of the crowd, and his fear he might lose his position, he succumbed to the crowd. Lest we be too hard on Pilate, think of how often we have been in a position to stand up for Jesus, but let the opportunity go, because we either didn’t want to start an argument, or didn’t want to be seen as a fanatic. We always find it easier to condemn others’ actions, than to hold ourselves accountable for our own. But as Jesus reminded the Pharisees back in John 8, we can only condemn others if we have no sin ourselves.