The Meaning Of Life

https://biblehub.com/nkjv/deuteronomy/31.htm

We finish Chapter 31 with a passage that instructs the Hebrews to read the law every seven years; seven is a perfect number in the Bible. My question is, is why do churches not do this today? Wouldn’t it be great if today’s churches read the law every seven years, if not more?

My personal belief is that they are trying to get away from “the law”. The law interferes with their personal lives. They think that just because our Messiah came, the Old Testament no longer applies. That is flawed, very flawed. They teach the Ten Commandments, but ignore everything else in the Old Testament.

“If you’ve seen Me, you’ve seen the Father”. Again, Jesus is saying that God is just like Him, and if God is just like Jesus, why isn’t the Word of God and his laws not be valid?

Before you say it, no, I’m not a proponent of building altars and offering bulls and birds as a sacrifice to God. Those practices were an atonement for their sins, and because that didn’t stop sin, God had to send His only son to be atonement for our sins. But the rest of his laws should still be valid.

As an example, God didn’t not want us eating “unclean meats” because, well, they’re unclean. We wouldn’t dream of cooking dinner in a dirty pot, yet we eat “unclean” animals. And I’m well aware of the passage about Peter dreaming about “unclean” meats and God say that “nothing He blesses” is “unclean”, but that was in the context of God sending Peter to minister to the men that Peter considered unclean. And do we really thing that if we “pray over a plate of bacon”, that God blesses it? God, has to bless it, not us, and He told us not to eat it. But then again, we like bacon. We like pork chops. We like shrimp and mudbugs.

I’m not here to criticize people for eating unclean meats, personally I think it is more of a “health” law than it is an actual sin (even though disobeying God is a sin), and I am certainly a sinner myself. I’m just trying to make a point that, yes, the law still applies to us and that the Old Testament is still valid, so why not review the law in church? And again I say, we are followers of Christ, and Christ was a Jew, so why aren’t we “spiritual Jews”?

The rest of the chapter has a passage about God’s prediction of rebellion. God is all knowing. God knows the future. And God knew the children of Israel would rebel, just like He knew Adam and Eve would sin. Why didn’t He stop it? If God had stopped it, He would’ve proven Satan’s point.

God gives us freewill to choose whether to obey, or whether to rebel. If God made it a point to eradicate sin, which would have meant eradicating Lucifer, He would have demonstrated exactly what Lucifer was tempting the angels with, that God was an angry tyrant who wanted to “rule” over the people. The angels had a free choice to make, and Lucifer, an angel, made the wrong choice. And he caused a third of the angels to follow him.

In order to prove He was not an angry tyrant, as Lucifer had described, God has to give freewill. He knows when we sin, He knows when we were going to sin. All of those nights I was puking in the toilet because I drank too much, and all of those nights when I prayed that “if God gets me through this, I’ll never drink again”, God knew I was going to drink again. It’s that simple.

So God knew the children of Israel were going to rebel, and this passage served as a warning, “not to rebel”, even though they were going to anyway.

Our lives are so simple. The answers to all of our problems are found within the Good Book. All we have to do is study and learn. And by all means, do not try to find loopholes.

If we want to find the God that made man, we have to forget about the God that man made.

Amen.