February 4 - Deuteronomy 13:3

February 4. Deuteronomy 13:3

“…you must not heed the words of those prophets or those who divine by dreams; for the LORD your God is testing you, to know whether you indeed love the LORD your God with all your heart and soul.”

It is so easy for us to listen to everyone else about how to follow God or what we have to do to obey God.  We turn preachers and singers, authors and speakers into folk heroes, according them the power to interpret the word of God for us.

History is filled with tales of charismatic leaders.  Some of them are amazing teachers and have changed the course of Christianity for good.  People like Martin Luther and John Wesley.  Others like Jim Jones and David Koresh did enormous damage to the people that listened to them. 

We laugh at smarmy televangelists and cringe at the immense number of gullible people that they have hoodwinked over the course of their careers, but it isn’t easy to discern between someone who gathers people around because they truly have something good to say or someone who simply draws people by the force of their personality.  Many times it begins as truth, but power and greed corrupt the truth that once came from their mouths.

We’d like to think that we are smarter than those who followed the wrong people, but the truth is that as long as we rely on someone else to interpret God’s word for us and elevate that person to a level that sets them between us and God, we are allowing our hearts to be led by man and not by God.

Moses told the people of Israel that God was testing them with these false prophets and diviners.  The Lord wanted to be right there with His people … part of their every day lives, but that didn’t make sense to them, so they began to rely on others to interpret His words and their actions in response to Him.

If we love the Lord with all our heart and soul, we will remember that He is closer to us than any other human being and we can trust that He will give us the interpretation of Scripture that we need to know.  His truth is within each of us … it isn’t far away, we need be confident that it is a relationship based on His goodness – not on our fallibility or that of anyone else.