Deuteronomy 8:11 “Be careful not to forget YHVH your God by not obeying his mitzvot, rulings and regulations that I am giving you today. 12 Otherwise, after you have eaten and are satisfied, built fine houses and lived in them, 13 and increased your herds, flocks, silver, gold and everything else you own, 14 you will become proud-hearted. Forgetting YHVH your God — who brought you out of the land of Egypt, where you lived as slaves; 15 who led you through the vast and fearsome desert, with its poisonous snakes, scorpions and waterless, thirsty ground; who brought water out of flint rock for you; 16 who fed you in the desert with man, unknown to your ancestors; all the while humbling and testing you in order to do you good in the end — 17 you will think to yourself, ‘My own power and the strength of my own hand have gotten me this wealth.’ 18 No, you are to remember YHVH your God, because it is he who is giving you the power to get wealth, in order to confirm his covenant, which he swore to your ancestors, as is happening even today. 19 If you forget YHVH your God, follow other gods and serve and worship them, I am warning you in advance today that you will certainly perish. 20 You will perish just like the nations that YHVH is causing to perish ahead of you, because you will not have heeded the voice of YHVH your God.”
What is the real challenge in your life?
Moses is telling us here that the real trouble in life comes when you have it all.
A prosperity mindset says that once you get enough, all of your problems go away. But the truth, as Moses tells it, is that your problems just begin.
Once your physical needs have been met, your spiritual trial begins.
“The real challenge is not poverty but affluence, not insecurity but security, not slavery but freedom.”
-Jonathan Sacks
When you have all you want, you don’t need anyone else. Unless you need them in order for you to get more.
There is a natural cycle the occurs in the lives of men:
“People first sense what is necessary, then consider what is useful, next attend to comfort, later delight in pleasures, soon grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad squandering their estates.”
-Vico
We always need just a little bit more. Then a little more after that. Until such a time as you have everything -- and subsequently absolutely nothing.
The only way you defeat this cycle is through gratitude.
The Feasts are given to us as a reminder of where we were and where we’re going. A regular meeting with Abba to ensure we don’t get lost in the ways of the world.
But is that enough?
Maybe if we had this in our face once a week, then we’d finally get it right?
Well, we do have that. It’s the Sabbath. The one day each week where we lay down the useless striving in order to get a glimpse into living with Abba Himself.
But even that doesn’t seem to be enough. This world has tremendous power. Why can’t we escape it?
Looking back shows us His mighty hand in our lives, and looking forward shows us His mighty hand in the lives of us ALL.
As you consider your past, you usually consider only your journey. But once we look forward, we must consider the collective journey of us collectively.
But right now, at this moment, it’s about gratitude and humility. None of this is by your own hands and you are powerless to change the future.
There is a Switchfoot lyric that captures this quite well:
“The funny thing about a name is,
You forget what the reason you were playing the game is”
This life is 100% NOT about you.
We have our daily lives set before us to completely determine our path to Shechem.
It’s no accident that we are about to embark on a full list of blessings and curses set to overcome those that choose to or fail to exercise sincere gratitude.
“The worst thing that could happen to them, warned Moses, would be that they forgot how they came to the land, how God had promised it to their ancestors, and had taken them from slavery to freedom, sustaining them during the forty years in the wilderness. This was a revolutionary idea: that the nation’s history be engraved on people’s souls, that it was to be re-enacted in the annual cycle of festivals, and that the nation, as a nation, should never attribute its achievements to itself – “my power and the might of my own hand” – but should always ascribe its victories, indeed its very existence, to something higher than itself: to God.”
-Jonathan Sacks
Part of the essence of gratitude is that it recognizes that we are not the sole authors of what is good in our lives. The egoist, says Andre Comte-Sponville, “is ungrateful because he doesn’t like to acknowledge his debt to others and gratitude is this acknowledgement.” Thankfulness has an inner connection with humility. It recognises that what we are and what we have is due to others, and above all to God. Comte-Sponville adds: “Those who are incapable of gratitude live in vain; they can never be satisfied, fulfilled or happy: they do not live, they get ready to live, as Seneca puts it.”
“The fool is always getting ready to live”
-Seneca