2019-10-25

Deuteronomy 17: 1-18

Purge evil without God brings dire consequences.
Purge can be defined as
1. To clear of guilt.
2. To cause evacuation from, e.g. purge the bowel.

If you had a colonoscopy before, you would remember how a powerful laxatives purge your digestive system until your colon are clear.  Then, your gastroenterologist scope your colon to identify and remove potential cancer cells.  Just like Jesus Christ, He is our great doctor.  His Law reveals our hidden sins.  We cannot remove our sins by our own efforts.  We have to rely on His cleansing blood on the cross to purge our sins.  Unlike colonoscopy, we need to redo it every 5-10 years.  Jesus Christ purges our sins once and for all.

After the purging of sins, we need to carefully read His word in order to fight with our spiritual enemies.  In Matthew 12:43-45, an unclean spirit left a man and passes through arid places seeking rest and does not find it.  It decided to return to the house he left.  The unclean spirit find the house vacant, clean and put it in order.  It brought seven more wicked spirits to occupy that house and the final plight of the man is worse than the first.
A preacher once told me that if we empty our minds through meditation, we run the risk of letting evil spirits enter our minds.

Therefore, brother and sister, do not practice emptying our minds without meditating on the words of God.

In 14-18, God foretold the Israelites that they would reject God as their King and replaced Him with earthly king.  The King must be an Israelite.  The king must not acquire great numbers of horses for himself or make the people return to Egypt to get more of them.  He must not take many wives and accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.
God told the King to write for himself on a scroll a copy of the law and to read it all the days of his life so that he may learn to revere the LORD his God and follow carefully all the words of this law and these decrees and not consider himself better than his brothers and turn for the law to the right or to the left.
God promise to keep the king and his descendants reign for a long time if they follow His laws.

We learn it from the Bible, the Israelite kings did not obey His commands.
Earthly kings are not perfect; but our perfect king, LORD Jesus Christ will one day return to this earth and reign with us forever.            —- Alan Yam