Deuteronomy chapter 1 is an interesting picture of leadership, governmental structure, and foreign policy as dictated by God to His people. While the New Testament certainly highlights God as a person, expressed through Jesus Christ, I often feel like Deuteronomy also gives incredible insight into the personhood of God. What is He like, what does He think, and what does He feel? For that reason, it’s one of my favorite books of the Bible.

v.6-8 “The LORD our God spoke to us at Horeb, saying, 'You have stayed long enough at this mountain. Turn and set your journey, and go to the hill country of the Amorites, and to all their neighbors in the Arabah, in the hill country and in the lowland and in the Negev and by the seacoast, the land of the Canaanites, and Lebanon, as far as the great river, the river Euphrates. See, I have placed the land before you; go in and possess the land which the LORD swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to them and their descendants after them.'"

I wonder how I would respond if someone said to me: ‘I’ve made a promise to you, that you can have this thing. But to get to it, you must walk through the valley of your enemies.’ Often, when we approach God about His promises, we have this idea that a promise means He’s just going to hand it to us. But it’s not always like that. I’m not speaking about a works oriented salvation or a name-it-and-claim-it attitude; I am talking about being responsive. What I mean by that is: obedient. The people of Israel were promised the land but they had to respond with obedience to receive the promise, not as a matter of contingency, but as a matter of practicality. If they never traveled to the land, how were they ever to possess it?

In my own life, I frequently sit in the desert and say, “God, why have you not brought me the promise land?” and God is saying, “Walk through the door of obedience and you will find it.” I don’t hear very many sermons on obedience and that concerns me a little. Pragmatically, I see Christians living as if grace has replaced obedience. It hasn’t. They go hand in hand. Grace propels us to obey when we are incapable of doing so (thus, the boasting rights belong to His Spirit) and grace continues to give us chances to obey when we have failed to do so in the past.

Hebrews 5:9 And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation.

Unrelated but very funny:http://cappuccinosophy.blogspot.com/2008/06/euro2008-live.html