Learning from Nationals

Abram and Melchizedek
Peter Paul Reubens (1625)

Chaucer, Browning, Eliot and Paul Simon all wrote about April. This year April relieves a winter unusually rugged by European standards.
Like January, March ripped past while I was looking the other way. Our family has lots of March birthdays and anniversaries. Travel made the month a blur. I saw California's coast and the Pacific coast of China without ever crossing that ocean.
March ended on an up note. Yesterday the Daily Telegraph reported that Christopher Hitchens’ younger brother has written a repudiation of the atheistic rants which appear all too frequently from Christopher’s obnoxious pen. The Rage Against God is the name of the new work by Peter Hitchens, himself a former atheist. Since the book won’t be available till May 1st, I have no idea whether the effort is sufficiently biblical or even Christian. I was somewhat daunted by a comment in the pre-pub video. Peter suggests that Christopher is beginning to soften. But the only evidence he offers is that the atheist has quit smoking. Self-preservation is always a wise policy for an atheist, but it doesn’t necessarily signal a move toward theism. Still, news of the forthcoming book is exciting, and it gives us hope of better things from the Hitchens family.

March leaves me with another positive memory.
Missionaries are supposed to teach, not just so we can leave behind students but so we can leave teachers in place long after we depart .It's an exquisite feeling to learn from someone who once learned from us. One Hungarian I work with often gifts me that experience. I baptized him over 20 years ago. Now he takes me to school.
Whenever I meet with a National I nearly always ask, “Tell me what you’re learning in Scripture." When I ask this particular friend I always reach for my notebook.
This last time he took me to Deuteronomy 17. (You remember Deuteronomy 17 don't you?)
In that place Moses is instructing Israel on the ways of kings, warning against false hopes for success as a nation.
First he warns against the tendency of kings to depend on military prowess. "...he shall not multiply horses to himself." v.16. Thus the key for Israel would not be military.
Then he mentions the false hope of political alliances."Neither shall he multiply wives to himself..." v.17. Presumably the motive for multiplying wives was not merely biological. It was the habit of those ancient monarchs to forge alliances by marrying the sisters and daughters of foreign rulers.
Moses intimates that security for Israel could not be gained in that way. Inter-marriage among European ruling houses was especially fashionable in the 18th and 19th Centuries. It proved no safeguard against World War I --which George Will called "The war to save the world from Queen Victoria's grandson."
Finally Moses warns against the hoarding of wealth- a tendency definitely not limited to kings. "... neither shall he greatly multiply to himself silver and gold." (v. 17b)
If a nation is not to hope in strength along military, political or economic lines where exactly does strength come from?
"It shall be when he sits upon the throne of his Kingdom that he shall... copy this law in a book...and it shall be with him. and he shall read therein all the days of his life; that he may learn to fear the Lord his God...that his heart may not be lifted up above his brethren, that he may prolong his days in the Kingdom, he, and his children , in the midst of Israel."
It's a wonderful lesson is it not?
Not only for Kingdoms but for ministries, and for families.
What a pity that it's a lesson universally unheeded.
It's a thing worth noting that Jesus vanquished the tempter in the wilderness by quoting two passages in Deuteronomy. Having been given food will we not take it in? Having been given armor will we not put it on?
More tomorrow during THIS HOLY WEEK.