Rules, rules, and more rules

Day 37: Deuteronomy 16-20

God wants us to obey him. He wants us to follow his rules, his commands. He wants us to do the right thing. As I've gotten older, however, the right thing doesn't always appear so clearly to me. While God's rules and laws still persist today, on many issues he doesn't say anything, so it's left us to up to interpret morality, ethics, the right thing. We must look at the Bible and make choices about what kinds of behaviors and attitudes God wants us to have.

The Jews, though, don't seem to have such leeway. Every single thing was written out, handed down by God for the Israelites to obey. The reading today seems full of rules, rules that I don't always understand, and I find myself having to, once again, stand back from the rules themselves and look more towards what God is doing.

Here, it seems as if God is teaching his people how to live. He's not just giving them commands and rules so that he can punish them when they don't follow them. Instead, God seems to be showing his people how he expects them to live, how he expects a follower of Yahweh to live, act, and behave. That's what God is doing.

It's not about right and wrong for the sake of right and wrong. Instead, the rules are there as a code of living as a follower of the Lord. God wants them to keep his commands; he wants us to keep his commands. But he wants this not because of himself (although he is definitely worthy of it); he wants this for us. Following his rules, laws, and commands is better for us, and it will allow us to live the life he envisions for us to live.

So even if his commands and laws aren't so crystal clear to us at times, if we know God, we can better follow them when we aren't so sure about the right thing to do.