Word of Encouragement (12/15/2022)
“The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he. 5 They have dealt corruptly with him; they are no longer his children because they are blemished; they are a crooked and twisted generation. 6 Do you thus repay the LORD, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you? (Deut. 32:4-6)
Last time, we saw how God’s title, “the Rock,” intimated that Israel sinned not only against God’s law but also His grace. We see in vv. 5-6 a more explicit expression of that idea: even though God gave them the privilege to be adopted as His children, they repaid this grace with evil, by committing the kind of sins unfit for their privileged status.
According to the ESV, v. 5 reads, “They have dealt corruptly with him; they are no longer his children because they are blemished; they are a crooked and twisted generation.” It sounds like God has disowned them because of their sins. The Hebrew of the middle section is a little tricky. More literally translated, it reads, “their blemish is not His sons’....” So, the KJV translates, “their spot is not the spot of his children....” Also, the New Living Translation (which is a very loose translation) reads, “when they act so perversely, are they really his children?” We get a different sense of the verse, don’t we? It is not that God disowned them because they sinned; they sinned and rebelled against the LORD as if they were not His adopted and privileged children.
We know that this is the right understanding of v. 5 because v. 6 affirms that the Israelites were still God’s children at that time: “Do you thus repay the LORD, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?” Moses rebuked them for their thanklessness—not only for the absence of gratitude but also for the wicked rebellion against the LORD, their Father. God made them His children and established them as His chosen nation, but they repaid this kindness with the blemishes of their heinous sins. For this, Moses called them “a crooked and twisted generation.”
What an apt description! Sin makes our hearts crooked, and our vision twisted. We begin to call good evil and evil good. We look upon God’s blessings with disdain and look around for worldly comfort and pleasure. Remember how the Israelites despised manna and long for the vegetables and fruits of Egypt? They considered being able to eat them under the cruel Egyptian bondage far better than living as a free people under the protection and provision of God.
They would not have thought that way if living under God’s reign came with all the vegetables and fruits they had in Egypt, too. And it was not that God would deprive them of such things forever. After all, they were on their way to the promised land, a land flowing with milk and honey. But if they had such things in abundance all the time, they would view God merely as a means to make their lives better in this world. Before they entered the land of abundance, flowing with milk and honey, they had to learn to value God for God, for their redemption from the Egyptian bondage (not so that they don’t have to slave away for a foreign nation but so that they could freely worship God and serve Him!).
Is it a small thing to be chosen by God and adopted as His children to have a special communion with God? Paul describes the condition of the fallen human race in this way: “having no hope and without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). The worst thing that can happen to a human being, who is made in the image of God, is to live without God in the world. It doesn’t matter how much stuff he has or how comfortable his life is: without God, he is not what he should be, and he does not have the only thing that makes his life worth living, and he is eternally condemned. Christ came, suffered, died, and rose again from the dead so that we might have God as our eternal Father. May the Holy Spirit fix our crooked and twisted hearts so that we may wholly embrace this truth and find joy inexpressible no matter our circumstances.