As you know, I’m currently reading through the book of Deuteronomy, which is where Moses did a great amount of teaching and recapping of the Israelites journey thus far. I’ll be honest in saying, at first, it made me feel like God sure was dumping a lot of rules and responsibility on these people, as well as many, many ceremonies calling for a ton of burnt offerings. How on earth can a person travel, work and survive on a daily basis, while living in obedience to God?

Directly on the heels of this thought, came the idea of comparing todays current global, national, and local Holidays and Laws. Let me tell you that it quickly became apparent that this is a rabbit hole, or more aptly put, a vortex of surfing dogs in Hawaii!

I was blown away at the sheer number of Holidays we currently recognize, both federally, as well as globally and culturally… I eventually stopped counting. We as a society can’t seem to help ourselves from assigning some form of importance to nearly every day of the year. I realize that this is probably a gross exaggeration, but come on… now we not only celebrate Mother’s Day, Receptionist Day, Valentines Day, but let’s now add on Woman’s Day too? What gives? Have we quite satisfied ourselves with enough pats on the back? This is just a single theme of Holidays that we annually roll out the carpet for, so if I broke down all of them, we’d be here til the cows came home!

While the sheer number of recognizable holidays was sinking into my brain, I switched gears a bit, to look at the comparison of laws given by God to the ones given us, currently, by our government… I didn’t have to look, to know we have easily surpassed God’s numbers! God gave us 10… and we can’t even follow those with any form of regularity. Our government is so lazy that instead of rewriting a law that is appropriate… they just add new ones, ignoring the ones that came before, in my humble opinion.

My point is, we may have come forward by several thousand years, but our human nature is still the same… it just looks different! We read through scriptures, or any other form of history writings, feeling appalled at the things that humans did in the distant past! Are we not still doing the same terrible things, simply changing the label that’s attached to that particular sin? Considering these things, for me anyway, is both eye opening and humbling!

Wisdom and discernment are the best rule of thumb, in regards to reading the scriptures, as a whole! It is always so easy to judge others, while looking on from a place of piety, assured that we would never behave as they did in our distant past. For crying out loud, we do that with each other… forget about thousands, hundreds, or even 20 to 30 years ago… we can’t help but crucify each other every other day of the week! I pray that you notice I’ve included myself in this assessment, as I am not above sinful behavior any more than you, or the Israelites.

What I am seeing though, through all of my reading, is a faithful God working tirelessly, with our best interest in His mind! This discovering of my own nature, within the pages of the Israelites story actually brings me a great amount of comfort. When Satan tries to plant seeds of shame and/or hopelessness in my mind, I’m so grateful to be reminded of Gods journey with the Israelites. He didn’t give up on them all those many generations ago, and I am comforted with His faithful presence to us, in the here and now. As far as obeying all the stiff laws, performing the many sacrifices and Holy Holidays to be recognized, I feel like Gods list is far easier for me to align with, than all the ones we’ve tried to come up with on our own. If I’m following His laws, obeying the earthly ones becomes much easier, almost as if their not even necessary.