Not long after my dad passed away, I found one of his old diaries while cleaning out my parents’ home. From 1972, the little book provided some insight on his busy life at that time, revealing his daily schedule, his worries about the near future, and a little comic relief, as well.
Inside one particular calendar square from April of that year, with his two boys playing little league baseball on different teams—in what appeared to be a rush—he scribbled down only a single line: “Baseball,” he wrote, “is ruining our lives.”
It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy seeing my brother and me play, it was just that it was a big-time commitment, and he had two daughters, three and five years old, aging parents he was caring for, a wife, a law firm to run, clients to court, and other professional obligations. He couldn’t be in several places at once.
Deuteronomy is a book we don’t study much even though it’s quoted by Jesus quite a lot during His ministry. Though it has much in common with the three books preceding it, Deuteronomy is a kind of highlight reel of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers recast as a dramatic speech given by Moses right before his death at the edge of the Promised Land, where God has led him.
The wilderness transit of the Israelites is revisited with a special emphasis on Mt. Sinai and the Ten Commandments. The terms of the Covenant between God and the Israelites and the Levitical rules related to holiness, worship, and behavior are reviewed. Finally, at the end of his speech, Moses exhorts God’s people, encourages his successor, and blesses the twelve tribes before passing away, though we’re told even at the end that Moses’ “eye had not grown dim (and) his vigor had not fled.”
In essence, the book tells the Israelites how they must live if they are to survive and prosper. They’re instructed to well-remember the experience of the Exodus, their desert wanderings, and the ways God had always been faithful to them. They’re told if they remember all these things and follow God’s commandments, things will go well. But if they don’t obey and if they don’t remember, things will not go so well. Near the conclusion of his address, Moses summarizes it all like this:
See, I set out for you today life and good, and death and ill...I command you today to love the Lord, your God, to walk in His ways, and to keep His commandments...that you may stay alive, and become many…
However, to me, the most powerful moment in the book occurs as Moses passes the mantle of leadership to Joshua to begin to guide and command the people he, Moses, has led for a generation.
“Be strong. Take courage,” Moses tells Joshua, then promises both everyone present, and their descendants as well, something truly remarkable:
...God, your God, is striding ahead of you. He’s right there with you. He won’t let you down. He won’t leave you.
It’s a recurring motif in these first few books of Scripture—God going out ahead of His people. But what’s even more compelling about Moses’ statement here is not just the “God is striding ahead of you” part, but the “He’s right there with you” part, especially when you consider the two together. God, Moses is saying, will be out in front of you, advancing ahead into your future, but also right beside you simultaneously.
“Well, which is it?” Joshua might well have asked Moses. “Will God be out in front us or here right beside us?” to which Moses might have paused to consider the incredible arc of his long and miraculous life.
Born a slave in Egypt, his desperate mother had placed him in a basket, sending it down the Nile to save him from Pharoah’s death decree over all the Hebrew slaves’ firstborn sons. Against all odds, he’d been taken into Pharoah’s own courts, then was later exiled for 40 years before encountering the Burning Bush. Returning to Egypt to free his oppressed people, he’d been through the Red Sea, then up to Sinai to receive the Ten Commandments, then across the wilderness to battle formidable enemies, before now arriving safely near Jordan’s shore.
“In my experience,” he might have told Joshua, “it’s been both.”
Indeed our Heavenly Father’s divine capacity to be with each and all of us in many places at once, both out ahead of us and right beside us simultaneously, is exactly what identifies Him as God.
Our God.
God—Lead us. Be with us. Amen.
