The Big ‘If’
Deuteronomy 30:11, 14
“For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. … But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.”
What sort of parents would we be if we gave our children impossible tasks and then punished them when they inevitably failed to accomplish them? We’d be malicious, loveless parents, wouldn’t we? Think of it: what if my four-year-old daughter, Skye, begged me for lunch today and I replied by sticking her in the driver’s seat of my truck, put the keys in the ignition, and told her to drive herself to the grocery store? And imagine if, when she failed to reach the gas pedal, or when she jumped off the seat to slam the pedal and broke through the garage door, I sent her to her room for the rest of the day without lunch? Or think of this: what if I told my third-grade son, Micah, to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Old English and assigned him to write a 12-page literary-critical analysis of the themes and characters, adding footnotes from scholarly journals in MLA format, and told him to have it finished by dinner time or else I’d toss his Legos in the garbage?
Listen, friend: when our good and loving Father gives us righteous commands, when He tells Adam not to eat forbidden fruit and pilgrims not to fashion golden idols and Christians not to fornicate and adulterate and despise our neighbors, He doesn’t thrust us into a vehicle that our legs and hands are too deficient to drive. And when He gives us simple but thorough commands in this covenantal law, He writes them in our own tongue, dumbing them down to our cognitive level, condensing what could’ve been a Chaucerian sort of encyclopedia into a childlike ‘see spot run’ sort of picture book that we can readily understand and apply.
The question for us today isn’t ‘how well will we exegete the law?’ but ‘will we obey it?’ Because we can! And we should! And our day will be saturated in the favor of our good Father if we do.