Daily Thoughts from Deuteronomy 7:6-8: Chosen (B’chir)

9. Chosen (B’chir)

 For you are a people set apart as holy for Yahweh your God. Yahweh your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his own unique treasure.  Yahweh didn’t set his heart on you or choose you because you numbered more than any other people — on the contrary, you were the fewest of all peoples.  Rather, it was because Yahweh loved you, and because he wanted to keep the oath which he had sworn to your ancestors.

(D’varim 7:6-8)

He slept until midmorning.  As he lay there with his eyes open the idea of getting up seemed hard to conceive.  His body was saying, “Stay down,” even though he felt some compulsion to get up and get going.  But why should he get up?  What was there to do today that was so important?  Obviously he was tired and his body needed the extra rest.  Besides, it was just one day after another out here.

The yeshimon had seemed a little exciting, if daunting, at first as he considered what it symbolized for his people.  He would be recreating the wanderings, recreating David’s flight from Saul, both of which led to coming into the land to conquer and to rule.  Had he romanticized it?

Here it was only nine days into it and he was tired of it.  He was alone.  He was hungry.  He was tired.  He was scared half the time.  Hmm, he wondered how long Adam and Eve had been in the garden before they ate the forbidden fruit.  What role, if any, had drudgery played in their temptation?  Or was working in the garden always exciting?

He had to admit that the one thing that had taken place while he was here was the way suffering was moving him into even deeper reflection, even deeper orbit around the time with the Father, and rich enjoyment of the torah.  It was this last thought that got him moving.  There was no midday meal to look forward to but there was his precious scroll.

He opened to Moshe’s address to Israel about being the b’chir, the chosen, of God.  His choice of Israel was an acknowledgement of Avraham, Yitz’chak and Ya‘akov, of His love for them and His readiness to honor His promise to them.  They had been chosen to accomplish God’s purpose and He had used them to produce what was now a mighty nation.

And now, like them, His Father had chosen him.  Born under such unique circumstances with such powerful signs.  With such prophetic words spoken over him.  Even after his parents stopped rehearsing those words with more than rare frequency, they never left him.  And that sense of immediacy he had with his Father was so powerful and pervasive!  He had thought at first everyone experienced the Father that way, but he had been wrong.  The teachers in the temple had looked at him in such a strange way.  He knew he shouldn’t feel this way, but he knew God better than they did and understood the Scriptures better than they did.

Yes, he had studied, yes, he had committed to memory, but many of them had 30 years or more on him.  And everything he read about Messiach seemed like it was screaming his name.  If there was a garment fashioned by the tailor that fit him any better he could not conceive it.  And oh, that special commissioning at his baptism!  No, the Spirit wanted him here.  Yes, it was draining, but perhaps that was the point.  How faithful would he be throughout and at the end of this?  Would the weightiness of God’s choosing him become light by then as it seemed to for Yisrael?

“Father, may it never be.  May I stay as true to your purpose as you are.  Teach me what you need to teach me through this suffering.”

Barely had he finished when he saw him.  There was someone out there, quite some distance away.  He seemed to be off the road and settling by a little copse of bushes many, many strides away.  Another seeker of solitude like himself?  Someone running from justice?

Strangely, as he looked at the man, it seemed the man turned and looked right at him.  That was unnerving to say the least.  How could he even see into the darkness of this cave, if, in fact, he did see him?  He suddenly did not want to meet this man.  Loneliness aside, it felt better when this man was not in sight.  “How do I sleep tonight,” he thought.

“I guess I’ll sleep the same way I slept when an animal was stalking me, or when those evil red eyes were staring at me.”  He committed himself again to his Father.  He spent the rest of the day keeping an eye out to see if the man in the distance came closer.  He did not.