Day Five – Deuteronomy 31:19-21; 32:1-18

Day 5 – Deuteronomy 31:19-21; 32:1-18

I have a question for you. Do songs stick in your head? Can you remember lyrics and choruses from popular tunes of the past? I can. They come back to me with remarkable clarity. In fact, sometimes they are more clear than my memory for my latest password for my computer! Songs and melodies “stick” in our brains. Thus, we do need to be careful what we listen to, don’t we? I can remember singing along with an old song I remembered from my teen years and stopping in horror. Yikes! Those lyrics were not good. And yet there they were in my memory banks.

Well, Moses, through God’s guidance, gives the Israelites a song to sing and learn. It must have had a catchy tune because it was one that would be sung for generations. It was written as a warning and a prophecy, both. God knew that the Israelites were going to let Him down. Here we have been, shaking our heads at the rottenness of Jericho and Sodom and Gomorrah. Today, we see that the “good guys” are going to go bad as well. We people are a hopeless bunch without God within us to help us. It’s why Jesus needed to come to earth to save us. Even with really good rules and a God who loved them, the Israelite people did not stay faithful. We are no better. We also would have gone astray and chosen selfishly without the help of the Holy Spirit.

The song we read today speaks a lot of God’s faithfulness. We see His steadfast love represented in many of the verses. We also read of His anguish and woundedness as His dear people who He nurtured and cared for walked away from Him and chose detestable things and false gods in His place. God wanted the Israelites to know what lay ahead for them if they did not stay true to what was good and kind and wise. They entered the land of Canaan. They were given so many good things there. And then they forgot their God.

We can forget too, can’t we? When life is good and we have all the things, we can get pretty lackadaisical about the Lord. We forget that “Every good and perfect gift is from above coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows” (James 1:17 NIV). We don’t acknowledge the One who made us and gives us our very breath. Sometimes it literally takes hardship to make us realize how little control we have over life and how much we need God in our lives. This is where the Israelites were going to find themselves in just a few short generations.

I’d love to hear what verse you chose, today. I felt it was a LOT easier to find a verse in this song than it was to find a verse in yesterday’s hard reading. I loved reading the reminders of God’s love and faithfulness in this song. Be sure to comment if you wish. I’d love to know what you chose.

My verse: Deuteronomy 32:11 “Like an eagle that rouses her chicks and hovers over her young, so he spread his wings to take them up and carried them safely on his pinions.”

My response: Father! When the journey is hard and my feet are weak, spread Your wings and carry me, please. How I love Your nurturing nearness to Your own little chick … me!