“Then it shall come about when the LORD your God brings you into the land which He swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to give you, great and splendid cities which you did not build, and houses full of all good things which you did not fill, and hewn cisterns which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees which you did not plant, and you eat and are satisfied, then watch yourself, that you do not forget the LORD who brought you from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery” (Deut 6:10-12).
At the heart of arguably one of the most important passages in the Hebrew Bible (see Deut 6:4-5; Matt 22:36-38) there’s a warning to God’s people not to forget (v. 12). Not to forget what? The gospel! “The LORD who brought you from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery.” And herein lies the reason we must never allow ourselves to treat the gospel as entry level theology for little children and brand-new believers. Rather, the gospel is our best defense against forgetting the LORD (v. 12), idolatry (vv. 14-15), testing the LORD (v. 16), disobedience (vv. 17-19), and turning our children into legalists (vv. 20-25).
Remembering God’s First Love
In fact, the gospel is the divine power which enables us to keep the greatest commandment: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD is one! You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deut 6:4-5). How do we continue fanning the flames of our first (i.e., “most important”) love (Rev 2:4)? By remembering it is God who first loved us (1 John 4:19), and gave us his only Son (John 3:16). He even loved us while we were yet sinners (Rom 5:8), and his love for us is beyond measure today (Eph 3:19).
The gospel is our best defense against forgetting the LORD!
Do we long fulfill the command to love God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might? Then we must remind ourselves daily God was the first in the relationship to love us with all his heart, with all his soul, and with all his might!
“The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the LORD brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt” (Deut 7:7-8).
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved), and raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come He might show the surpassing riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:4-7).
