Shema (part 3)

Paragraph 2

Deuteronomy 11:13-21, “It shall come to pass that if you listen obediently to my commandments which I am commanding you today, to love LORD your God and to serve Him with all your heart and all your soul, that I will give the rain for your land in its proper time, the early and late rain, that you may gather in your grain and your new wine and your oil. I will give grass in your fields for your cattle, and you will eat and be satisfied. Beware that your hearts are not deceived and that you do not turn away and serve other gods and worship them. Or the anger of LORD will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens so that there will be no rain and the ground will not yield its fruit; and you will perish quickly from the good land which LORD is giving you. You shall therefore impress these words of mine on your heart and on your soul; and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontals on your forehead. You shall teach them to your sons, talking of them when you sit in your house and when you walk along the road and when you lie down and when you rise up. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so that your days and the days of your sons may be multiplied on the land which LORD swore to your fathers to give them, as the heavens above the earth.”

There are a few things I want to draw out of this paragraph:

Here we see that there definitely is a command to love God. Also, I recently found out that the perfect mood could carry the force of a command. So “you shall love” (as well as the other perfect mood phrases) may be understood as both a prophecy and a command or as either one or the other.
God’s words are to be on our heart and soul. One of the stated duties of the priests was to teach the law to people. But this paragraph is not written only to priests. All of God’s people are to study and teach the Word of God. Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. God’s Word is to be our sustenance. His Word is life. How high is our view of the very words of God?

This paragraph contains to imperative command to take head to not be deceived, which would result in turning away, serving and worshipping false gods. Deception does not usually come in loud obvious ways. Deception seems harmless and even good, but it turns your focus away from LORD, when you focus on something worthless and put your energy into it, you begin in a sense worshipping and serving falsehood.
The Israelites could have been fooled into thinking that the forces of nature were in control. They might see the superstitious practices of their pagan neighbors as harmless. But those fun little seasonal activities would lead them down the slippery slope of focusing on rules that people came up with instead of what God had already told them.

If you’re not a farmer, then you probably don’t care whether it rains or not. You might actually prefer that it doesn’t rain. In America, we don’t really worry about famine. We can easily become content and feel like everything’s okay and it’s going to stay that way. But God is in control of nature and kingdoms. And no matter how hard you work the ground and no matter how sweet of a trade deal you have with other countries, God is the source of life and sustenance. At any time our whole world could be turned up side down. It is on God that we must depend, not on our government, not on our employers, not on our education.