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NASB | Deuteronomy 6:3 "O Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, just as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | Deuteronomy 6:3 "Therefore listen, O Israel, and be careful to do them, that it may go well with you and that you may increase greatly [in numbers], as the LORD, the God of your fathers, has promised you, in a land flowing with milk and honey. |
Subject: Let Go of Offenses and Resentments |
Bible Note: "It is easy for us as modern Christians to point the finger at the Israelites and take them to task for the fact that they forgot God. The complaining we see in the wilderness, the cycle of apostasy, judgment, and restoration that we see in Judges, the good king/bad king alternations that we see in 1–2 Kings -- these all emphasize the incessant inability of the Israelites to heed Moses’ admonition to 'take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery' (Deut. 6:12). We get tired when we read through Jeremiah and chapter after chapter is devoted to enumerating the sins of Israel and telling of Israel's coming judgment. We feel that we are superior to Israel, more spiritual, less likely to forget God. "But we, too, get distracted by the demands of our days, by the busyness of our times. We forget that as Moses warned that declining from the commandments of God displays a forgetting of God, the same applies to us. We tend to think that ignoring, or rather, not fully living up to one commandment of God is a small thing. But the result is not simply disobedience. It is the beginning of idolatry, of making a god in our own image, a god we can easily obey. But did Jesus not say, 'If you love me, you will keep My commandments' (John 14:15)? Yet, we find His commandments so easy to ignore. 'Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you' (Eph. 4:32), Paul says, but we want to hold on to offenses and resentments. It feels good to bear a grudge. But that is not the way Christ teaches. To bear a grudge, to envy the gifts and graces of others, to covet the possessions of others -- these are steps on the way to forgetting God." --Dr. Benjamin Shaw |