Take a moment to read the entire chapter of Deuteronomy 32 before reading the devotional below.
I looked out a second floor window in downtown Atlanta as dusk settled and commuters headed home for the day. I was on a week-long mission trip, and that one moment changed my life. I experienced a sense of solitude that I had previously only connected with nature. It was the feeling I had sitting alone along the side of a lake or standing at the edge of a cliff getting lost in the awe-inspiring view. It was a private and intimate encounter with God, and it led me to write. I don’t write much poetry, but the experience of those twilight moments in Atlanta could only be expressed as a poem.
Deuteronomy 32 captures all the major themes of Deuteronomy and re-expresses them in poetry. There is the theme of God’s faithfulness and Israel’s unfaithfulness, the themes of justice and idolatry and obedience. These themes are now expressed in the deeply passionate, profoundly artistic medium of poetry. Poems must always be read differently. They invite us to read with our hearts, not just our heads. They use symbols and word pictures and comparisons that are designed to evoke feelings and reactions. That means that poems can’t be skimed asif they were a news story on CNN or Fox News. Poems must be read slowly, carefully and imaginatively.
He wants to engage your mind, your heart, your soul and your will. God designed you as a multifaceted person, and he deeply values each aspect of your being. A fully orbed relationship with God is mentally stimulating and passionate and obedient. It challenges the mind, the heart and the will. Most importantly, God never asks you to reject one of these aspects of yourself in favor of the others. In fact, the design of God’s truth is to draw your mind, heart and will into one fully integrated being. That is what God’s truth promises to do: it will make you more yourself by drawing together all the disparate and disintegrated parts of who you are in order to recreate an image of God that shines through the totality of your being.