Nielsen’s Nook

Shema Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai ehad (Hear O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is alone God). This famous sentence from Deuteronomy 6:4 seems to give us a rubric for understanding the book of Deuteronomy, if not our entire lives as those created by the LORD.

J. G. McConville, in his commentary on Deuteronomy, sees Deuteronomy chapters five and six as a single literary unit.¹ I find this resonates with my own thinking more globally about the meta-narrative found in the scriptures and is not disharmonious with approaches like that found in the IVP Dictionary of Biblical Imagery in which Deuteronomy five is said to be “a miniature version of the book as a whole”.²

The thought that impresses me is how easily we drive a wedge between the content of the two chapters. In chapter five we find the reiteration and reapplication of the Ten Commandments to the Israelites at the end of their 40 years of wandering in the desert. In chapter six we find the concern to be the worldview of covenant keeping as a means of true life.

The Ten Commandments are unfortunately left in the realm of abstract moral principles for most of us. Certainly do not covet is a bit abstract. Do not covet Jim’s wife is more concrete, but we still do not have a handle on what exactly coveting looks like. Certainly we would recognize the results of coveting if Sam were to engage in an adulterous relationship with Jim’s wife; however, the adultery is an effect of a more intimate and sinful disposition.

The Ten Commandments find their concreteness in the person of the LORD, our God. They describe One who is perfectly content in Himself and thus never covets, for example. They implicate us because we are created in the image of this One LORD, to live in the likeness of Him described in the Ten Commandments, thus living in consequent fellowship with Him. Concretely, breaking the Law of God is a direct and personal affront to the most holy LORD, exercising a desire to distance ourselves from God.

In this way, we can find that some kinds of obedience serve actually to distance ourselves from the LORD. We go to church on Sundays, perhaps the exceptionally spiritual go Wednesday evenings. But do we go to get God off our backs or do we go because we can’t help but worship the one our soul loves? When I see a police officer on the highway, one of my immediate reactions is to press the brakes a bit to slow down. This is a sort of obedience, making sure I am under the speed limit. However, it is obedience for the sake of avoiding a relationship with the lawgiver, which is in this case the State.

God has not made a covenant with his people so that we can do enough to call ourselves his. He has made and fulfilled a covenant with us in the person of Jesus that we might live out the likeness of God in fellowship with him from the heart. We are not more justified when we obey the Lord as Christians, but we do grow in grace and the appropriation of the Spirit of the LORD at work in us to will and to act (Philippians 2:12-13). Consequently, if we find our dispositions to the LORD different on Monday than they are on Sunday, we should be alarmed and we must ask the LORD to dilate our hearts that we would love loving him all the more.

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¹ J. G. McConville, Deuteronomy, Apollos Old Testament Commentary; 5 (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2002), 139.
² Leland Ryken, Jim Wilhoit, Tremper Longman et al., Dictionary of Biblical Imagery, electronic ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000, c1998), 205.