3. De las amenazas a los recursos
3.4. Para afrontar la hiperresponsabilización: estrategias
(Deuteronomy 6:16-25)
16. Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God, as ye tempted him in Massah.
17. Ye shall diligently keep the commandments of the LORD your God, and his testimonies, and his statutes, which he hath commanded thee.
18. And thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD: that it may be well with thee, and that thou may-est go in and possess the good land which the LORD sware unto thy fathers,
19. To cast out all thine enemies from before thee, as the LORD hath spoken.
20. And when thy son asketh thee in time to come, saying, What mean the testimonies, and the statutes, and the judg-ments, which the LORD our God hath commanded you?
21. Then thou shalt say unto thy son, We were Pharaoh’s bond-men in Egypt; and the LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand:
22. And the LORD shewed signs and wonders, great and sore, upon Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his household, before our eyes:
23. And he brought us out from thence, that he might bring us in, to give us the land which he sware unto our fathers.
24. And the LORD commanded us to do all these statutes, to fear the LORD our God, for our good always, that he might preserve us alive, as it is at this day.
25. And it shall be our righteousness, if we observe to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us. (Deuteronomy 6:16-25)
In Matthew 4:1-11, in the account of our Lord’s temptation in the wilderness, we see that three times our Lord answered the devil, and all three times it was by quoting a verse from Deuteronomy. In His first answer, He quoted Deuteronomy 8:3; in the second, Deuteron-omy 6:16; and, in the third, DeuteronDeuteron-omy 6:13. Thus, two are from this chapter. Deuteronomy 6:13 forbids the invocation of any other god than the LORD God in all oaths. This means that the legal and actual foundation of all society, and of all spheres of society, must be in the God of Scripture and His law-word. An oath is an invocation of a society’s ultimate and absolutely essential ground of all truth and law. In too many states now, a man’s oath rests simply on a
man’s word; we have shifted the foundation of society from God to man, and man is depraved, a fallen creature.
In Deuteronomy 6:16, “Ye shall not tempt the LORD your God, as ye tempted him in Massah,” we are forbidden all efforts to prove, test, or evaluate God; God stands in and of Himself and His word.
At Massah, Israel, needing water, declared, in contemptuous unbe-lief, “Is the LORD among us, or not?” (Ex. 17:7). Israel was saying, in effect, God is meaningless for us unless He serves us. The test of God becomes what He does for men. In J. A. Thompson’s words,
“To test God is to impose conditions upon Him and to make His re-sponse to the people’s demand in the hour of crisis the condition of their continuing to follow Him.”1
In vv. 17-19, the covenant requirement of faithfulness to the cov-enant law is stressed. Obedience means the blessing of prosperity, possession of the land, and the defeat of all enemies (cf. Ex. 23:27-32). Obedience must not be perfunctory but diligent. The direction of our lives must be to fulfil our duties diligently. We do not keep the law, then, to avoid trouble, but because we delight in righteous-ness or justice. Our Lord says, “Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness [or, justice]: for they shall be filled”
(Matt. 5:6).
In v. 18, we are told, “thou shalt do that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD.” The brief marginal note in the Geneva Bible says simply, “Here he condemneth all man’s good intentions.”
Our intentions and our ideas of good and evil count for nothing.
What matters is the law-word of God. Hence, our concern should be
“that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD.”
God had promised Canaan to Israel. How much of it they pos-sessed now depended on them. Their conquest depended on their faithfulness to God’s law (v. 18). God had promised to cast out all their enemies from before them (v. 19), but this was contingent upon doing “that which is right and good in the sight of the LORD.” God can and does impose conditions upon us; we can never impose con-ditions upon God.
In vv. 20-25, the education of the young is commanded. The amount of teaching by parents of their children is minimal in a hu-manistic society. The child is assumed to be naturally good, and,
1. J. A. Thompson, Deuteronomy (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, [1974] 1978), 125.
The Free Society (Deuteronomy 6:16-25) 123 having the family’s heredity, is held to be well equipped for life.
The sad fact is that man’s fallen estate is neglected in such rearing, and the child grows up an alien to his family because sin is always divisive.
Three things are stressed in this emphasis on education. First, the emphasis is on witness. The natural curiosity of the child is to be di-rected towards knowing the meaning of the faith. The child must be encouraged to know the meaning of the law, and of the history of the faith. This is particularly important today. The present genera-tion has been cut off from the past by miseducagenera-tion in the schools and by vague and general teachings in the church. To be cut off from the past is to be a barbarian.
Second, our history, like that of Israel, is one of deliverance and blessings. Youth today knows, or believes it knows, much about the evils of our time, but it has no awareness nor appreciation for the hard-won victories of past generations. Again, this is the mark of the barbarian. None of us are born into an empty world, and we must not leave it emptier when we die. We have a God-imposed duty to leave the world richer for having been here (Matt. 25:14-30).
Third, not only is the teaching of the law required, but it must be stressed that it is for our good always, “that he might preserve us alive” (v. 24). The survival of a people and of civilization depends on this. God’s law must not be taught as a burdensome imposition.
That was the teaching of the Pharisees, who turned the law into a yoke. The law is our protection and liberation. Remove two laws alone, Thou shalt not kill, and, Thou shalt not steal, and it becomes at once obvious how devastating the consequences would be, and how liberating God’s law is. It is for our good always, as v. 24 makes very clear.
One aspect of biblical education was music and songs. For exam-ple, in Deuteronomy 31:19, we read,
Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it to the children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the children of Israel.
The song in question is the whole of Deuteronomy 32. Of course, many other portions of Scripture were memorized and sung by young and old, and also the Psalms, as a part of their education.
Receiving the law was a first step in education and towards free-dom, but it had to be followed by obedience. Memorization was for
centuries, together with music, an essential part of education. Calvin favored the singing of the creeds and more.
According to A. D. H. Mayes, in v. 23,
he brought us out: this expresses, in legal terms, Yahweh’s eman-cipation of Israel from Egypt; cf. Exod. 21:2ff, where the verb is frequently used of a slave legally gaining his freedom.2 This is at the heart of the text. The people must know God’s law, and each successive generation must be taught the law, for there is no freedom without it. To imagine a free people or society without law is to imagine a state of anarchy. This is, of course, where human-istic doctrines of freedom are very rapidly taking us. As in Rome and in the Renaissance, and so now also, this moral anarchy is always ac-companied by statism and tyranny.
Archbishop Cranmer, commenting once upon a godly society, said, “There must be great strength to support such good days.”3 This is something our age has forgotten: there is no cheap or easy road to the good society for fallen men. It requires the strength of men faithful to God’s law to establish and maintain a good society.
Freedom comes not from lawlessness nor antinomian doctrines but only from godliness and the obedience of faith.
To attempt the establishment of a good society without God is stupidity; the Marquis de Sade knew better than modern humanists what the outcome would be. “It shall be our righteousness, if we ob-serve to do all these commandments before the LORD our God, as he hath commanded us” (v. 25). Justice for us and our society means, in other words, keeping God’s law. The just and free society is the godly society.
2. A. D. H. Mayes, Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1979] 1981), 80. 3. John Peter Lange, Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, reprint, n.d.), 97.
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