Throughout God’s Word there are themes—repeated lessons and stated Love/Hates (Things God loves…Things God hates). The repetition is obviously there to drive home the point that some things please God (and we ought to be perusing those things), and other things greatly displease Him (we ought to avoid these at all costs).
In the Old Testament it was so easy to see—it often boiled down to obedience brings blessing and disobedience brings cursing—over and over and over again.
- Obedience = Blessing
- Disobedience = Cursing
Sometimes it’s repeated so much I’m almost tempted to skip over certain chapters with an, “Alright, alright, I get it—been there, done that. Can we move on now” attitude. However, in doing so, I prove I don’t really get it at all. I confirm I still have some growing up to do in this area. Afterall, who is it that tries to wriggle away when they are being scolded or told what they did wrong?
Children.
Often, when caught red handed doing something they know they are not supposed to do—their reaction is to tell you, ‘Yeah, yeah, I get it. I heard you. Can I go now?” As parents, we know they physically heard us. Often they can repeat the infracted rule verbatim—so knowing whether or not they were within audible range is not really what we’re after. No, we want to know what it will take for it to sink in, internalize, be embraced, understood and acted upon.
For that, it takes repetition.
When I took martial arts for years I dreaded the fact that a new move would take at least 3,000 repetitions before it was internalized enough to become a part of me. But I’d work on it anyway—over and over and over again because I really wanted to get good—and I did, so don’t mess with me. I noticed that even up to a thousand times practicing the move and using it in sparring—it still came s-l-o-w and mechanically. But something clicked as you closed in on 3,000. At this point, when I would spar, my new move would naturally come to me at the appropriate time.
I learned over the years that if God wanted something repeated over and over again in His Word—that ‘something’ is extremely important and I’d better internalize it—sooner rather than later. To not do so could lead to disaster as it so often did for the Israelites. In fact, it got so bad at one point that an entire age group became a ‘throw away’ generation. Because they refused to learn to obey unquestioningly and to trust God—God decided to leave them in the ‘cursed camp’ for good. At that point they were taken out of the game—benched for life and doomed to a spiritually irrelevant existence. I’m hard pressed to think of anything worse that could happen to a Christ follower.
Thank God this dismal outcome is so easy to avoid. I’ll show you how tomorrow.