Canter Bridge

Moses’ narration of events occurring from the time Israel encountered YHWH at Zion through to the dramatic moment in which he delivers his sermons to a people about to wet their feet in the Jordan is a damning tale.

From this lawgiver’s perspective, YHWH has been attentive to the people’s needs during their generation of wandering. This same postponed generation has seen YHWH guide them through the politics of semi-nomadism, the necessary passages through claimed turf, and cultivated in them a desire for a place to call their own.

Moses ask rhetorically what other nation has known a god to walk in its midst as YHWH has walked in Israel’s. What other nation has been given statutes and ordinances that produce community and life, as Israel has received? His delineation of Israel’s life among the nations is a familiar one: They worship idols while Israel worships the living God who has set up camp in their midst.

How sadly then does Moses’ anticipation of Israelite idolatry ring upon the ears and settle achingly upon the heart. It will lead, he tells them, to YHWH driving them out from the land he will have given them. They will become conquest’s flotsam and jetsam among those same, darkened nations from which they once seemed so distinct.

Yet Moses tells them this terrible chapter will not become the story’s last, for there will be redemption and a future even from that bleak, future starting point:

From there you will seek the LORD your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul. In your distress, when all these things have happened to you in time to come, you will return to the LORD your God and heed him. Because the LORD your God is a merciful God, he will neither abandon you nor destroy you; he will not forget the covenant with your ancestors that he swore to them.

When another biblical writer urges his readers to ‘seek the Lord while he may be found’, the urgency depends upon the very real possibility that even a patient God may grow weary of waiting. However, the exhortation depends as well upon a truth that settles even closer to the bedrock of reality: YHWH is infinitely discover-able, for those who seek—in the Mosaic, Deuteronomic sense—with all their heart and soul.