Tuesday after the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity Sunday
Posted on October 1, 2024 by under
Scripture: Deuteronomy 10:12-21 (NKJV)
10:12 “And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, 13 and to keep the commandments of the Lord and His statutes which I command you today for your good? 14 Indeed heaven and the highest heavens belong to the Lord your God, also the earth with all that is in it. 15 The Lord delighted only in your fathers, to love them; and He chose their descendants after them, you above all peoples, as it is this day. 16 Therefore circumcise the foreskin of your heart, and be stiff-necked no longer. 17 For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no partiality nor takes a bribe. 18 He administers justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the stranger, giving him food and clothing. 19 Therefore love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. 20 You shall fear the Lord your God; you shall serve Him, and to Him you shall hold fast, and take oaths in His name. 21 He is your praise, and He is your God, who has done for you these great and awesome things which your eyes have seen.”
Devotion
The Lord requires His people “to walk in all His ways,” but salvation remains “by grace alone”! Along with this requirement (literally, just ‘asking’, but by a superior), coming only after deliverance from Egypt and renewal of the promise to Abraham, the proper view actually requires more than reduction to works-righteousness provides. We are helped to this understanding by the word “and”. (It begins verse 13 being italicized in the New King James Version, indicating that it doesn’t appear in the Hebrew manuscript, just as it doesn’t before “to walk in all His ways.”) This indicates that the rest of verse 12, and again all of verse 13, entails the fleshing out of the phrase “to fear the Lord your God.” (The latter “and” that appears in the Septuagint doesn’t contradict this.)
To fear Him rightly is not to run away from Him (‘servile fear’), but to walk in all His ways because you love Him (‘filial fear,’ the way good children look up to loving parents), and therefore seek to serve Him completely. In other words (v. 13), you keep and treasure and do the commandments and statutes delivered to His people, recognizing that they are “for your good.” In short, it is to live as though you believe that what He commands—or even allows you to suffer—is in your best interest every bit as much as whatever He does to help and deliver you. It’s how one saved by grace alone lives.
Collect: O God, forasmuch as without Thee we are not able to please Thee: Mercifully grant, that Thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ, Thy Son, our Lord, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee and the Holy Ghost, ever One God, world without end. Amen.
Scripture taken from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
