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Full Episode
Hey, Bible readers, I'm Tara Lee Cobble, and I'm your host for The Bible Recap. Today we drop back in on Moses parting words to the Israelites before his death. And he starts with a command we've heard often, but we've never really drilled down on it. God has commanded us to love him. The word love here indicates emotion. It's action adjacent, but it's emotion specific.
How do you command a feeling? Jen Wilkins says, the heart cannot love what the mind does not know. And I'm guessing that by fixing your eyes on his word daily, by looking for him in scripture instead of for yourself, that you love him more now than you did 75 days ago. The more we take our eyes off ourselves and get to know this infinitely lovable God, the more we will love him.
Moses speaks specifically to the adults among the crowd who were alive even when the exodus happened, and he reminds them again to remember who God is and what he has done for them. In 11.16, he tells them to pay attention to their hearts. There are things around them that will entice them to worship them, and they have to be vigilant to not be led astray by these new shiny things.
If they stay faithful to God, no nation will overtake them. God has already proven that he can defeat bigger armies. There's an interesting image at the end of chapter 11. He tells them to choose between blessing and cursing, represented by two different mountains, Mount Gerizim, the Mount of Blessing, and Mount Ebal, the Mount of Cursing.
The Israelites will perform the ceremony he commands for this later in Deuteronomy, so we'll just put a pin in it for now, but know that we're coming back to it. Moses continues to warn against idolatry, and if it's starting to feel like he's repeating himself, it's because he is. First of all, he's old, and old men tend to repeat themselves a lot.
But second, and most of all, that's what we all do when something is important. This is the theme of Deuteronomy. Moses is very concerned about their faithfulness to God. And it's good for us to read these things as well because we all need daily reminders of who God is.
God called them to remember his word when they sit and when they walk, when they lie down and when they stand, which happens lots of times a day. So surely we can read it once a day. He tells them again to destroy all the paraphernalia of worship to other gods, and he includes a word we've seen a few times but haven't talked about yet. The word is asherim.
Asherah was a fertility goddess, and the Canaanites worshipped fertility. Let's be honest, the Israelites kind of seem to as well, but in their own way. The asherim are wooden poles with a figure of asherah on them. God commanded them to destroy these when they entered Canaan. Another phrase you may see referenced sometimes when we're talking about idolatry is the term high places.
Most of the pagan worship sites were set up on hills and on mountaintops or under especially distinct trees. So anytime you see God telling them to destroy the high places or the trees, he's talking about destroying the places of Canaanite worship. Moses also reveals that there will be a major shift in how some of the laws and sacrifices work once they get into the promised land.
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