Deuteronomy 11 - Always Remember the Perfect Justice of God
13 “And if you will indeed obey my commandments that I command you today, to love the Lord your God, and to serve him with all your heart and with all your soul, 14 he[c] will give the rain for your land in its season, the early rain and the later rain, that you may gather in your grain and your wine and your oil. 15 And he will give grass in your fields for your livestock, and you shall eat and be full. 16 Take care lest your heart be deceived, and you turn aside and serve other gods and worship them; 17 then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you, and he will shut up the heavens, so that there will be no rain, and the land will yield no fruit, and you will perish quickly off the good land that the Lord is giving you.
God reminds Israel once again about the times He has punished those who stray from His statutes, including His own people. God reminds us that we must teach these statutes to our children and see to it that His people always keep consistent with the loving changed heart that desires to follow His statutes, otherwise the land we live in will not last and judgement will come. This circles back to making sure our children know what the moral law and assigned roles we have are under God's rule in our lives. Not only teaching them what these are, but why they exist. Not a single one of God's statutes are arbitrary and each one has a special loving reason, from the roles of men and women, to laws against sexual immorality and homosexuality, to warnings against idolatry. All of it has a purpose and none of these moral laws expires or was written by mortal men. All is from God as God is the sovereign creator and knows what is best for His creation.
We should never forget the lands of Sodom, Gomorrah, and Egypt. These acts of judgement by God are not mere symbolic stories in a fictional book about "be true to yourself or become lost". There are supernatural consequences for rejecting God's law if "being true to ourselves" directly conflicts with God's outline for our lives. Let us never forget Jeremiah 17:9.
9 The heart is deceitful above all things,
and desperately sick;
who can understand it?
Our fallen flesh deceives us on a regular basis and it is an extremely common thread throughout the Bible that horrible evil can be wrongly justified through a warped sense of what our hearts define love as when we let our flesh control our desires and direction in life.
18 “You shall therefore lay up these words of mine in your heart and in your soul, and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. 19 You shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting in your house, and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise. 20 You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, 21 that your days and the days of your children may be multiplied in the land that the Lord swore to your fathers to give them, as long as the heavens are above the earth. 22 For if you will be careful to do all this commandment that I command you to do, loving the Lord your God, walking in all his ways, and holding fast to him, 23 then the Lord will drive out all these nations before you, and you will dispossess nations greater and mightier than you.
God carefully instructs His people to not modify or leave out sections of His outline for their society or face dire consequences. God lived up to this consistently throughout the Old Testament and that law still applies today. God should always be the one ruling our lives especially when it comes to right and wrong and we need to be careful to never let any perceived notion of love contradict the love that God has instructed us to show. All of this must be from a heart that seeks to love God as well, and must never be done out of anger and mistreatment of others or a self-righteous desire to be better than anyone. A careful balance that is absurdly difficult, if not outright impossible to truly live up to. Thank God we have the grace of Jesus each day we fail to live up to this perfect standard.