Oops - I shrunk God

Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!  Deuteronomy 5:29

We read this and our mind’s eye moves to the target audience for this verse: proud parents who have a few kids, who attend church regularly, and who want the ideal life for their family. Surely they are the ones to whom these words would easily appeal… “so that it might go well with them and their children forever!” These are the same people who would buy life insurance, plan ahead, seek the best for their children educationally, socially and financially.

There is nothing wrong with these things, but that is not the context of this verse. Too often we take something that God intended for national application and we shrink it to personal proportions. We shrink the teaching about national economics to be personal finance principles. We shrink laws about education and apply them to Sunday School. We shrink national health care principles and make them personal diet fads.

At the root of this is that we take God himself—the dynamic, cannot-be-contained, out of the ordinary, unlimited God—and we put him in a box called Principles, or Rules for Life, or ancient truths, or Religion. ‘Phew!’ you say, ‘I am not religious, thank God. He cannot be talking about me.’ I am. I am suggesting that whenever you shrink your scope of application to be exclusively personal (versus your family as an intentional foundation for something bigger) you have misapplied truth and shrunk God. Said another way, if your secret motto is ‘think personal, act local’ you are on the wrong bus.

Oh, that their hearts would be inclined to fear me and keep all my commands always, so that it might go well with them and their children forever!  Deuteronomy 5:29

This verse is breathed by God in the midst of his instructions on how to build a new nation in the Promised Land. Personal is good—it keeps us real. But personal to the exclusion of national and global could be a case of poor understanding, misunderstood identity, dodged destiny, or the stark truth that we don’t want the face to face with God that a nation-wide scope demands. So we tell our Moses to go and speak to God for us while we go home and ponder the small interior of our little tents.

“Go, tell them to return to their tents. But you stay here with me so that I may give you all the commands, decrees and laws you are to teach them to follow in the land I am giving them to possess.” Deuteronomy 5:30

Application

• What’s it going to be—your tent or your nation, just your kids, or your country?
• Who is going to see God’s face—your pastor (Moses) or you?
• Where are you going to apply truth—just inside your home, or also in your work and nation?