TUESDAY
Deuteronomy 10:17-19 says:
17 For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. 18 He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. 19 Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
The God of the Bible is the One True God
What we see here in this passage is something truly amazing. We see the self-sufficient, all-powerful, almighty, and awesome true God of gods. The God of the Bible described here is a great and true God. He is the God over all gods, He is the Lord over all lords. Verse 17: “For the LORD your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God.”
So, what is being established here is that this god is the God who reigns over all gods. His Greatness knows no limits.
Then Moses says, on the basis of this greatness, God “does not show partiality” and he “does not take a bribe.”
The point of this bribe imagery in our passage is to stress God’s transcendent power. God does not take a bribe because he has no motive to take a bribe: he already owns all the money in the universe.
How many leaders and politicians do we hear taking special interest money? Or bribe money? How many earthly judges do we have to worry about showing partiality?
The God we worship, the God of the Bible, is above all of that and is so good and so mighty, and so just that we can trust his Judgments won’t be partial or corrupt, but rather righteous and good and perfect.
God does Justice
But the astonishing part of the passage here comes when we pick up in verse 18. After hearing about this God of gods, and Lord of lords. Listen to this…. “He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.”
On the basis of God’s transcendent power, Moses says, He executes justice.
And this is the great counter-cultural truth of the Gospel, that the Lord of lords, the Great One True God, the God who created the universe, is near to the lowly, is near to the orphan, the poor and the sojourner. This God executes justice for those who need it most.
This is what makes Christianity unique to all other world religions and worldviews.
In all other world religions, humans must work their way up to God.
In all other religions, the person has to “do the work” to earn the favor of God. In Buddhism, you have to work your way up to enlightenment. In Mormonism, you have a list of requirements to earn favor within the religion. You have to go to the temple to do the work of the religion, only to hope that you have done it right.
But the Gospel of Grace says that God came down to us, lived a perfect life, died a gruesome death, but rose and ascended victoriously. And this almighty, powerful God, who raised Jesus from the dead, created and now governs the universe, and is interested in justice for the vulnerable. So, what should this cause us to do? Verse 19
We should participate in Justice.
19 Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.
The Justice that overflows from the character of God should prompt and move us to participate in justice in our own lives. In verse 19, here, the instruction to Israel is to love the sojourner, because they were once sojourners. This is the same for us.
If we look at the areas of need around us. If we look at the homeless, or the poor, or the oppressed with contempt. If we think we are above or better than anyone, what the Bible is saying is that we are forgetting where we came from and what God has done for us.
This attitude of superiority or even avoidance is in defiance to the heart of God. God, in His grace through Jesus Christ has reached down to the lowly, the poor, the sojourner, of which we all are apart from Christ. In other words, because God has delivered you when you were a stranger to Him, you should have the same burden to see others delivered.