Daily Thoughts from Deuteronomy 12:1-7: The Place (Hamaqum)

14. The Place (Hamaqum)

Here are the laws and rulings you are to observe and obey in the land Yahweh, the God of your ancestors, has given you to possess as long as you live on earth.  You must destroy all the places where the nations you are dispossessing served their gods, whether on high mountains, on hills, or under some leafy tree.  Break down their altars, smash their standing-stones to pieces, burn up their sacred poles completely and cut down the carved images of their gods. Exterminate their name from that place.

But you are not to treat Yahweh your God this way.  Rather, you are to come to the place where Yahweh your God will put his name. He will choose it from all your tribes; and you will seek out that place, which is where he will live, and go there.  You will bring there your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tenths that you set aside for Yahweh, the offerings that you give, the offerings you have vowed, your voluntary offerings, and the firstborn of your cattle and sheep.  There you will eat in the presence of Yahweh your God; and you will rejoice over everything you set out to do, you and your households, in which Yahweh your God has blessed you. 

(D’varim 12:1-7)

Dawn flourished as did his soul after a night of sleep hard-earned.  Going without food made him weak but not too weak to get up and walk about.  Once again satan was nowhere around and he decided to take a short walk to commune with his Father and have a change of scenery.  He would read when he returned.

“Father I am weary.  I feel your power when I defend your glory to him and I sense Your desire to see him repent, even though we know he will not.  But I become fatigued as a result.  It seems to be a fatigue beyond what I would experience simply from fasting.  My body is fatigued but so is my soul.  I am being drained like that cistern from constant withdrawals of water.  It is as if he is subtracting something from my spirit and it feels like I cannot get it back.  But then the sleep You give me and the help You give me are restorative.  New rain has filled the cistern once again.  Continue to draw me close to You and to recall what you said to your servant Zechariah, “’Not by force, and not by power, but by My Spirit’, says Yahweh Tzava’ot.”

“You are My beloved son in whom I am well pleased and My Spirit remains with you.  He will be your strength and your supply of living water.”

Returning to the cave he was disheartened to see satan there, waiting for him.  He gave no greeting but went to his scroll and opened to read.  He read out loud as usual but was hoping that what he read would be so distasteful to satan that he would leave.  That did not happen.

“Yahweh sought to use Yisrael to destroy the names of those gods but He did not succeed, did He.  They finally did treat Him as just another god among many.  He destroyed their precious Jerusalem, the place of His own dwelling.  What a ruinous experiment and wasteful.  Even now Jerusalem is more in my hands than you realize.  The holy city is not so holy as they would pretend.  My army makes inroads every day.”

“You boast in what you do not know and fail to see that Yahweh’s promise is not dependent upon Jerusalem’s current faithfulness or unfaithfulness.  She will remain the holy city even should she once again be destroyed.  His people will one day all eat in His presence and rejoice.  The nations will seek out that place as they grab hold of the hem of Israel.  And the names you have proffered as gods will indeed be exterminated from that place.”

“Now it is you who are boasting.”

“I boast in the name of Yahweh, Creator of the heavens and earth, your Creator, and the One whose promise never fails.  You know the prophecies.  They will not fail unless He should fail, and He cannot fail.”

“Then why do I still have victories?  What is He waiting for?  You?  Since you are the son of God why don’t you impose your will on the people and force them into line?”

“You would be delighted to claim, would you not, that God’s people serve Him because He forces them to.  Even as you said of Job, “Is it for nothing that Job fears God,” you would say of Jerusalem, “It is as a mere slave that she worships Yahweh and would not choose Him for any other reason than that He overpowered her.  But He has not overpowered her and He has not overpowered you.”

“He could not overpower me and I will never submit to His worship.  And you underestimate my attractiveness to many of your precious brothers and sisters.  They love me and they love my path of life without Him.”

“Do not mistake their love of your path for love for you.  No doubt you have influenced many to join the path but they do not do it for love or worship of you.  Like you it satisfies their baser desires to remain without a law, though the freedom they think they have found is the severest form of bondage.”

“Where is your freedom, son of man?  Look at you here in the wilderness, depriving yourself of food because you are “free” as you do Yahweh’s bidding.  You are spectacularly boring.”

“Not boring enough to drive you off.”

“I would compassionately win you to reason and to true freedom, sacrificing my own needs that I might rescue you.”

“Sacrifice is in your vocabulary but not in your character.  You do only that which furthers your own demented aims, and if keeping torah makes me boring then I revel in my ‘tiresome’ state.”

There was no reply and silence reigned for hours.  It was quite frustrating for him to take this tactic.  He never really answered any charge against him and seemed incapable of pressing even his own arguments.  There was never any final solution, only more specious claims and emotional attempts at a knockdown.

He meditated on what he had read and found comfort in God’s promise of this land to Yisrael forever.