Warning: Comfort Zone

 

…with great and good cities that you did not build, and houses full of all good things that you did not fill, and cisterns that you did not dig, and vineyards and olive trees that you did not plant and when you eat and are full, then take care lest you forget the LORD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. Deuteronomy 6:10b-12

 

In the margin of my Bible, next to these verses, I have written the word, “comfortable.”

I, and most of you, live lives of comfort. We do not want for food, clothing, shelter, or heat. We can satisfy almost any desire fairly easily. We live in a land flowing with milk and honey.

We can fall into the trap of thinking that we have provided our own comfort, we have earned it, or we deserve to be comfortable because of past pain.

These verses from Deuteronomy point out that our comfort can be a stumbling block to our faith. They are a warning not to let comfort blind us to God’s provision of all we have.

God gave this warning because Israel had been wandering in the wilderness for forty years to get to the Promised Land. They had been “roughing it” long enough and God had promised them relief in the new land that would be flowing with milk and honey” (Exodus 3:8).

These verses (Deuteronomy 6:10-12) are strategically placed between the verses at the beginning of the chapter where Moses was teaching that Israel was to love the Lord with all their hearts, souls, and might, and that they were to engrave God’s Words, spoken through Moses, onto their hearts. He went on to tell them their responsibility to teach them to the next generation.

On the other side of these verses Moses reminds God’s people (all of us) not to let their (our) relief become so comfortable that they forget the LORD and go after other gods. He then reminds us, again, that we are to keep His commands and statutes (Deuteronomy 6:17). (Moses obviously thinks this is an important lesson as he repeats it again in Deuteronomy 8:11ff)

Then, Moses tells them why. Later, when their sons would ask about the meaning of God’s testimonies and statutes, this generation was to pass down how good God had been in bringing them out of Egypt. Moses told them to say that God had kept His promise to bring them out. He instructed them to point out that it was God who had given them the land. And, he said they were to tell that God did this so they would, “fear the Lord our God, for our good always.” (Deuteronomy 6:24)

Deuteronomy 6 clearly points us to the responsibility we have to teach the next generation about the goodness and faithfulness of God. What is preventing us from doing so?

Are we so comfortable that we are not thankful and so, have forgotten the command to teach them? (Deuteronomy 6:7)