Take a moment to read Deuteronomy 4 before reading the devotional below.
When I was in middle school, we would play giant capture-the-flag games. Around twenty of us would gather at sundown, and we’d play for hours. I remember one game when it was so dark that I was able to hide for several minutes from the enemy team simply by lying down in the middle of a field. No one tripped over me, so no one found me. I remember another game when the other team one, and I got really mad. One of their players pretended to be on our team, and he led a group of us into an ambush. We should have remembered who was on our team, where each person’s loyalty truly lay.
As Moses winds down the first of several speeches in the book of Deuteronomy, he speaks of two topics that are intimately linked: obedience and idolatry. Modern people often think of “idolatry” as a private, religious issue. They think of it as relating to personal times of prayer, or times set aside for church or religious observance. Religion, however, was never meant to be a private, personal issue. Religion fundamentally deals with the issue of a person’s deepest loyalty. It asks these questions: who will you trust? Who will inform your day-to-day decision making? Whose leadership will you follow? As the Israelites prepared to receive the land they’d been promised, God wanted them to clarify their own loyalties. Most importantly he wanted them to choose ONE. At the deepest level, our loyalties can truly be divided. One loyalty, one commitment, one trust will always outweigh the others. It is that one highest loyalty that will inform our actions.
Moses has spent much of Deuteronomy so far reminding the Israelites that obedience and loyalty to God have brought blessing to their lives. He wants them to understand that obedience and loyalty to God will also be the path to maintaining that blessing. Deuteronomy asks us the same question: where is your highest loyalty? The Israelites didn’t know what the future would hold. Neither do we. For all of us, that future hangs in the balance while we answer this question: where does our loyalty lie?