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Being God's People

3 – Love the Lord, But Why and How?

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“You shall love the Lord your God” is, perhaps, the most famous commandment in all of Deuteronomy, but it is also strange, for how can love be commanded? In this session, we explore what exactly this command asks of us and why love is owed.

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Who are we as God’s people? Moses’s final words to the people of Israel help the Church today grasp what it means to belong to God.
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Deuteronomy, the long sermon preached by Moses on the shores of the Jordan River, is treasured by Jews and Christians and regarded as among the greatest summaries of what it means to be the people of God. New readers may feel Deuteronomy is nothing more than rules and commandments, but in this session, we’ll explore why that is not the case: how these laws, in fact, are an expression of love.

“Remember…” Moses asks the wilderness generation to reflect on how God has taken care of them, how they have lacked for nothing, and what happens when they forget. God’s deliverance, watchfulness, and provision come before Law, and the opening of Deuteronomy underscores the need for God’s people to consider first how God is dependable and worthy of trust.

Proverbs tells us “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,” and Moses tells us the same in Deuteronomy, instructing us not only to fear the LORD but also to walk in his ways. In this session, we discuss how the people of God are to imitate God by doing what he does.

Idolatry is among the greatest dangers God’s people face in every generation, for what we worship determines how we live. In this session, we discuss how Moses’s warnings against idolatry apply to us today.

Practicing the Sabbath is intimately connected to caring for those in need. That is why Moses tells the Israelites that, as long as they follow God’s laws, there will be no poor among them. In this session, we explore one of the most striking and commonly neglected commands in Deuteronomy.

Strange as it is that God commands his people to love, stranger still that he commands them to rejoice. In this session, we’ll discuss the religious festivals that God calls Israel to celebrate in Deuteronomy, and what we can learn today from their traditions of rejoicing.

Power tends to corrupt, and in Deuteronomy, we find multiple laws that aim to limit power and hold accountable those who wield it. For the law reveals how God desires to protect his people from the corrupted hearts of their neighbors.

Many of God’s laws in Deuteronomy seem good to modern readers, especially protections those who are vulnerable and provisions for those in need. But some are less pleasant, such as instructions for capital punishment and war conduct. In this session, we consider these laws and what we can learn from them today.

We know Jesus’s command to love our neighbor; why do we need these additional commandments in Deuteronomy? Without them, we might not understand what loving our neighbor really means. In this session, we explore how and why loving our neighbors includes loving their lives, property, and marriages.

How should the past influence the way we live today? In two seemingly contradictory passages, Moses tells the Israelites to remember the exodus and show mercy, and in the next, to remember the exodus and show no mercy at all. In this session, we discuss what to make of biblical remembrance.