Don't forget, son, there is someone up above
When we find success, we think our own goodness got us there. This is a mistake. Before Lynyrd Skynyrd said it, Moses did.
Israel was approaching the Promised Land, but hadn’t arrived. It was so close that Moses could see and probably even smell the land of milk and honey, the land he would never touch.
Deuteronomy is Moses’ farewell address to Israel, the people he led from Egypt and through the desert. It could’ve been written by Lynyrd Skynyrd.
Throughout, Moses reminds Israel there is someone up above — the same God who plagued Pharaoh and led them out of slavery in Egypt. The God who fed them manna in the desert. The God who let them wander safely in the desert, for 40 years, without as much as blisters.
Israel hadn’t handled the struggle very well. They grumbled about how life was better in Egypt. When Moses went up a mountain for 40 days to talk to God, the Israelites got bored, and Aaron built them a golden calf to worship. Only on Moses’s words, for Israel, and his prayers, for Aaron, did either survive the Golden Calf Incident.
Weak men make hard times: The tragedy of Adam and Aaron (substack.com)
Moses was worried Israel wouldn’t handle success any better. Success has a way of changing people. Israel was a “stiff-necked people” to begin with. It was not hard to foresee that they might backslide, when comfortable in their new homeland.
Moses warned against it.
In Deuteronomy 9:4, Moses tells Israel: “After you find success, do not say to yourself ‘The Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness.”
When we win, it’s easy to forget how we got there.
It’s easy to stop crediting the “mighty hand” that drove us, and heap glory on ourselves. Moses himself made this mistake in Numbers 20, when striking a rock to produce water.
“Listen, you rebels, must we bring you water out of his rock?” Moses asked, in Numbers 20:11.
By “we,” Moses meant himself and Aaron. Hebrew has no “royal we,” and in any event, God felt snubbed. He reacted to the snub harshly.
“Because you did not trust in me enough to honor me as holy in the sight of the Israelites, you will not bring this community into the land I give them,” God tells Moses in Numbers 20:12.
On this day, God was not the God of second chances. Moses, a man who told God up front he was a bad speaker, misspoke. And it cost him the fruit of a 40-year journey. When people say the Old Testament is harsh, this is what they mean — and Moses fared better than many an Israelite on the journey.
Moses had Lived Experience in what happens when people forget the God who blessed them. He could have used himself as a cautionary tale. But he found more currency in portraying himself as a victim.
Moses told the Israelites that it was their misbehavior that cost him a trip to the Holy Land.
In Deuteronomy 3:25, Moses asks God: “Let me go over and see the good land beyond the Jordan — that fine hill country and Lebanon.”
In the next verse, Moses tells Israel that “because of you the Lord was angry with me and would not listen to me.”
Bible readers know different, but the Israelites did not have The Book to refer back to. It was bad grammar or bad manners that denied Moses his trip to Israel, not the behavior of the Israelites. They’d never know it, from listening to Moses.
It’s not because of ourselves, or our own good choices that we are blessed. We would be found guilty of any manner of misdeeds, if judged on our record alone. We are blessed despite ourselves, and because God loves us. This is what Moses talked about in his Ideal Last Lecture.
If you make an idol of winning, or yourself, or the fruits of your success, bad things are coming.
“If you ever forget the Lord your God and follow other gods and worship and bow down to them, I testify against you today that you will surely be destroyed,” Moses said in Deuteronomy 9:19.
Deuteronomy 9:20 continues: “Like the nations the Lord destroyed before you, so you will be destroyed for not obeying the Lord your God.”
Covenants are as far as it gets from unconditional love. They come with conditions, benefits, and penalties.
If you’re not holding up your end, if you forget there is someone up above, you’ll find you’re not as good as you thought, back when you were blessed.