Wisdom International Devotionals

by Seth Davey

 Well Done, Thou Good and Faithful Servant Deuteronomy 34:10-11 And there has not risen a prophet since in Israel like Moses, whom the LORD knew face to face, none like him for all the signs and wonders that the LORD sent him to do in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, and for all the mighty power and all the great deeds of terror that Moses did in the sight of all Israel. As we conclude what has been a two-year journey through the life and ministry of Moses, let’s join this scribal eulogist in a reverential epitaph for this outstanding life. Still today, thousands of years after Moses bade farewell to the world on Mount Nebo, he’s rightly heralded among the great heroes of history. But what was the secret of his greatness? Was it that miracle-staff that parted seas? Was it his royal upbringing in Pharaoh’s palace? Was it his fearlessness in the face of Sinai’s torrents? Oh no—it’s far more mundane than that. It’s that he simply prayed one da...

 Prologue or Epilogue? Deuteronomy 34:1, 4 Then Moses went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo, to the top of Pisgah, which is opposite Jericho. And the LORD showed him all the land, Gilead as far as Dan. … And the LORD said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, ‘I will give it to your offspring.’ I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not go over there.” Every saint’s biography is both an epilogue to battles won as well as a prologue to future battles. Each saint is a chapter in redemption’s voluminous epic: a grand chapter, a necessary chapter, a powerful, inspiring chapter, but not the end of the story. Every great prophet, priest and king, every pastor, missionary, and evangelist, every parent, grandparent, and great grandparent, every believer, whether he dies in childhood or lives to old age, ends his story on the pinnacle of Mount Nebo, drawn there to the summit of finite earthly existence by the Father’s hand, wishi...

 In the Arms of Love Deuteronomy 33:27 “The eternal God is your dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms.” My wife is 33 weeks pregnant with our fourth child, a precious baby girl, and we’re anxiously awaiting her arrival in seven weeks. I’m refreshing my memory on the art of swaddle-folding, an art I mastered five years ago when Skye was a newborn, as well as mentally preparing for the beautiful but difficult toll that those first six months of infancy will take on us. I’m praying already for Christlike stamina and Christlike patience and Christlike compassion, the likes of which I’ve sorely lacked in the past and rigorously wish to pursue for the present and future. I realize that this little soul in my wife’s womb, created in the image of God, and fashioned for a special purpose, will need more over the next few years than her momma’s milk and regular diaper changes and total provision; she’ll need to be swaddled and cradled and held in my arms.  Deuteronomy ...

 To Our Rescue Deuteronomy 33:26 “There is none like God, O Jeshurun, who rides through the heavens to your help, through the skies in his majesty.” Sit for a moment and reflect on the various ways that our one-of-a-kind God rides through the heavens to meet us and help us in our time of need. Think of this promise in spatial terms, in terms of the distance between heaven and earth, and of the way our transcendent King, Who inhabits highest heaven, comes down to our level, breaking through the cloudy barriers of our stratosphere, low enough for our finite eyes to behold Him, and we have no earthly clue as to how far He’s had to travel to get to us, or how, even before making the trek, He would’ve noticed our predicament from such a distance, or why, even in noticing, the predicament was worth His expenditure. We can’t even begin to fathom how far God has come to help us, much less why. And that will forever remain the mystery of our LORD’s incarnational Passion in redeeming lost, r...

 How Lovely is Your Dwelling Place! Deuteronomy 33:12 Of Benjamin he said, “The beloved of the LORD dwells in safety. The High God surrounds him all day long, and dwells between his shoulders.” This is too far-reaching a comment to make in a format as brief as this, but the overwhelmingly grand truth whispered here in Deuteronomy 33:12, and in other Old Testament Scriptures like it, causes me to muse on the way in which God, through the 1,500 years of biblical progression, inverted His approach between the Old Testament and the New. Here’s what I mean. Throughout the Pentateuch, the life of faith has generally been orchestrated through obedience to a set of prescribed ceremonial rites, civic duties, and sacrificial obligations. That is, as a rule, God has revealed Himself to His people through various forms of physical sacrament as it were—sacrament meaning ‘signs’—certain operations at certain times and in certain places that give members of the Mosaic commonwealth a means of draw...

 The Bright Morning Star Deuteronomy 33:1-2 This is the blessing with which Moses the man of God blessed the people of Israel before his death. He said, “The LORD came from Sinai and dawned from Seir upon us; he shone forth from Mount Paran; he came from the ten thousands of holy ones, with flaming fire at his right hand.” What an analogy to leave with these pilgrims before heading home to glory! What greater, vaster, more central, more unconditional illustration of God’s love for His people could Moses have drawn their eyes to than the one thing that shines down from heaven day in and day out, giving warmth and light to all living things? Although physical, material objects can never serve as perfect like-for-like pictures of the infinite, spiritual realities they express, they do tell us something significant. Which is why God has effectively furnished the universe with signs and symbols of His likeness so that we never have an excuse for missing Him in our day to day lives (Roma...

 Bucking the Trend Deuteronomy 32:5-6 “They have dealt corruptly with him; they are no longer his children because they are blemished; they are a crooked and twisted generation. Do you thus repay the LORD, you foolish and senseless people? Is not he your father, who created you, who made you and established you?” The fact is a difficult pill to swallow, and it’s one archeologists, historians, and anthropologists labor to overlook at all costs, but one that even the most primitive, tribal persons understand intuitively, that somehow, by some means, the earth has been corrupted from an idyllic former state. Yet, every religionist understands through the veiled eyes of conscience and reason that the mortal corruption in the physical world is inextricably linked to the moral corruption in our souls, and that neither is coincidental. In fact, that’s what makes the current, sophisticated fad of progressivism so ironically barbaric, because while progressivism recognizes that men are vill...

 The Song of Moses, pt. 2 Deuteronomy 32:4 “The Rock, his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness and without iniquity, just and upright is he.” “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom, but fools despise knowledge and instruction,” wrote Solomon in Proverbs 1, which means that wisdom proceeds from a right relationship and in no other manner. That is, one doesn’t even begin the process of spiritual growth until they understand their relation to God. Such understanding is the conception of wisdom—it’s cocoon as it were. Disregard IQ scores and PhD degrees and innovative technologies and medals in the fields of molecular biology and quantum physics and business acumen and stock market savvy. None of that adds up to wisdom’s simple and necessary qualification for advancement. That’s why some of the greatest fools in history have been Pharisees and Sophists and philosophers and Nobel Prize winning scientists and city slickers, whereas some of the gr...

 The Song of Moses, pt. 1 Deuteronomy 32:1-3 “Give ear, O heavens, and I will speak, and let the earth hear the words of my mouth. May my teaching drop as the rain, my speech distill as the dew, like gentle rain upon the tender grass, and like showers upon the herb. For I will proclaim the name of the LORD; ascribe greatness to our God!” One thing I love about prophetic songs in the Scriptures is the way the poetic voice shifts from first person to third person from stanza to stanza. How some lyrics pour out directly from the hymnists’ mouth, till the LORD Himself breaks through the orchestration with words of His own. In that way, prophetic psalms read like a call and response between the human singer and the divine Composer: the Spirit taking the melody and the human accompanist singing the harmony. Can there be any more profound a prize to strive after as human instruments than to sing so truthfully and righteously that Almighty God would join in the song?! In effect, Moses isn’...

 How Great a Treasure Deuteronomy 31:24-26 When Moses had finished writing the words of this law in a book to the very end, Moses commanded the Levites who carried the ark of the covenant of the LORD, “Take this Book of the Law and put it by the side of the ark of the covenant of the LORD your God, that it may be there for a witness against you.” Megan and I enjoy watching documentary-type shows related to historical mysteries, and we recently watched one about sacred relics allegedly imbued with mystical powers. The misconceptions surrounding these artifacts are as sad as they are ludicrous. For instance, one Buddhist Temple houses a tooth that belonged to the Buddha, and pilgrims travel from across the world just to be in its presence. Priests wash the tooth daily and bottle the water for pilgrims who think that drinking it will provide spiritual enlightenment and miraculous healing. Yet, sadder than that are the misconceptions surrounding certain devices related to Christ’s Pass...

 Oh, Say, Can You See? Deuteronomy 31:16, 19 And the LORD said to Moses, “Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them … and they will forsake me and break my covenant. … Now therefore write this song and teach it to the people of Israel. Put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the people of Israel.” A little anthem can go a long way. When Francis Scott key penned the lyrics, “Oh, say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o’er the land of the free and the home of the brave,” he couldn’t have foreseen the unifying force those lines would have in later generations. The calm they would bring to rival fans at baseball games, the tears they would ignite at a soldier’s funeral, the way they’d tug on the heartstrings of peoples from different tribal traditions and ethnic backgrounds and cultural practices, leading men, women, and children of all ages in a Marionette-type dance...

 Pro-Life Advocacy  Deuteronomy 30:19-20a “I call heaven and earth to witness against you today, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your offspring may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying his voice and holding fast to him, …” The terrifying trajectory of neo-liberalism being manifest all throughout society today was prophesied by C.S. Lewis in his essay, “The Abolition of Man,” where he warned that man, in his attempt at self-actualization, will finally sacrifice his own humanity on the altar. And we’re seeing the effects of that plague he saw shadows of a century ago. The loss could come in many different forms. Man could give all his power to artificial intelligences, creating robots and computers and microchips that do all his God-given work for him, becoming subservient to mechanical overlords and willing the transition himself. Or the loss could come through trans-humanist ideology, where men exploit genet...

 The Big ‘If’ Deuteronomy 30:11, 14 “For this commandment that I command you today is not too hard for you, neither is it far off. … But the word is very near you. It is in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it.” What sort of parents would we be if we gave our children impossible tasks and then punished them when they inevitably failed to accomplish them? We’d be malicious, loveless parents, wouldn’t we? Think of it: what if my four-year-old daughter, Skye, begged me for lunch today and I replied by sticking her in the driver’s seat of my truck, put the keys in the ignition, and told her to drive herself to the grocery store? And imagine if, when she failed to reach the gas pedal, or when she jumped off the seat to slam the pedal and broke through the garage door, I sent her to her room for the rest of the day without lunch? Or think of this: what if I told my third-grade son, Micah, to read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Old English and assigned him to write a 12-page...

Deuteronomy 30:9-10 “For the LORD will again take delight in prospering you, as he took delight in your fathers, when you obey the voice of the LORD your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that are written in this Book of the Law, when you turn to the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul.” The prosperity movement, as it’s often called, is running rampant in the Western World. Generally speaking, prosperity teachers condense Christianity into a form of materialism, espousing that God’s fundamental work in our lives is a social advancement rather than a sanctifying one. Some teach that poverty and sickness are equivocal to the seven deadly sins. Others teach projectionism, that if we just took seriously God’s vision for our success and manifested it out into the world, willing ourselves to accomplish it as it were, then we’d get what we desire out of life. Yet, so often, teachings like these, though grounded to some degree in biblical doctrine, crucially o...

Deuteronomy 30:4 “If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of heaven, from there the LORD your God will gather you, and from there he will take you.” I find the extremity of Moses’ hypothetical picture here amazing, especially since he’s writing in an era without aircraft and space shuttles. I’d expect him to write, “If your outcasts are in the uttermost parts of the earth,” which would’ve been a remarkable statement in its own right, and one that we can hyperbolize in this way: “Listen, even if you’re stuck in an icecap on the peak of Mt. Everest or stranded in a dark cavern in the depths of the Bermuda Triangle or lost in the deepest, remotest jungle of the Amazon, you’re still, even there in that obscurity, in the palm of God’s good hand!” As David writes in Psalm 139:9-10, “If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me.” But the poet Moses doesn’t stop there. No—language and s...

Deuteronomy 29:29 “The secret things belong to the LORD our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.” Before we heaved our first infantile breath in this world, that inaudible pulse of life out of which our ligaments and sinews and organs were formed plunged us into an ocean of divine mystery and divine manifestation: an ocean so vast that, at our best and most advanced, at the pinnacle of our powers, in the prime of our reason, we’ve only waded knee-deep in wisdom’s shallow tides. Hear, o wise man, Almighty God thunder to Job through a whirlwind of words in chapter 39, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. When the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for Joy?” And then read the desperate cry of the Ecclesiast, who’d yearned to set foot on the floor of Providence’s Marietta trench, but couldn’t withstand the pressure of the dee...

Deuteronomy 29:18-19 “Beware lest there be among you a root bearing poisonous and bitter fruit, one who, when he hears the words of this sworn covenant, blesses himself in his heart, saying, ‘I shall be safe, though I walk in the stubbornness of my heart.’ This will lead to the sweeping away of moist and dry alike.” Scriptures like these cut deep and fill me with shame. Shame, because I immediately recall to mind moments where I prayed precisely that, or at least lived it out even if the practice never formalized into a silent blessing. Like those Sunday mornings when I’d lead a congregation in singing, full of the joy of the LORD, but only after a weekend of shameful behavior in private. Oh how cursed is our ability to pardon ourselves of all sorts of vices as long as we’re, you know, ‘doing the LORD’s work’! How many single moms, burned out by the expenditure of child-rearing, have ‘rewarded’ themselves with a bit of self-exonerating drunkenness? After all, motherhood is a daily burd...

Deuteronomy 29:10-12 “You are standing today, all of you, before the LORD your God: the heads of your tribes, your elders, and your officers, all the men of Israel, your little ones, your wives, and the sojourner who is in your camp, from the one who chops your wood to the one who draws your water, so that you may enter into the sworn covenant of the LORD your God, which the LORD your God is making with you today, …” In the very last chapter of the Bible, in Revelation 22, in the closing remarks that bookend Redemption’s literary drama, the Spirit, through John, calls out a final offer to men that has now resonated for the past two thousand years. An invitation from Holy God to fallen sons of Adam who wish to rise higher, and to walk in Eden once again, who yearn for that pastureland of promise where lions and lambs lie down together and where war and suffering is drowned out in everlasting peace. Revelation 22:17 sums up the story well: “The Spirit and the Bride say ‘Come.’ And let th...

Deuteronomy 28:28-29 “The LORD will strike you with madness and blindness and confusion of mind, and you shall grope at noonday, as the blind grope in darkness, and you shall not prosper in your ways. …” Consider that Moses didn’t write the Torah in the way a novelist like J.K. Rowling wrote her Harry Potter series. Moses didn’t publish Genesis first and wait a year or so to market it, then publish Exodus to gain more momentum, then publish Leviticus a year later, till, by the time Deuteronomy hit the press, readers were hooked. No, Moses wrote Genesis through Deuteronomy effectively as one book—the Law—with each new chapter proceeding from the former, each revelatory movement of the Spirit’s movement over the chaotic surface of the deep a progression from the first. That’s why assemblies in the time of David and Josiah will spend an entire day or even a few days reading the Torah from start to finish, not beginning in Leviticus 10 or Exodus 20 or Deuteronomy 28 but in Genesis 1, where...

Deuteronomy 28:15, 20 “But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments … then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. … The LORD will send on you curses, confusion, and frustration in all that you undertake to do, …” Notice that as Moses nears the end of this five-volume testament called The Torah, he takes readers all the way back to the beginning once more. A clear and cogent reminder for us that God’s gift of freewill to Adam and Eve and of their rebellion against God via that freedom is not merely a recounting of the origination of sin in the world but also a beckoning to us to take seriously the consequences of our own actions. The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil may have disappeared from the earth’s topography, and so too that luscious, heavenly garden, but the same determinative, cosmic forces of human existence remain: God’s Word, our choice, and the blessing or curses that will follow our decision.  It ...

Deuteronomy 28:12-13 “The LORD will open to you his good treasury, the heavens, to give the rain to your land in its season and to bless all the work of your hands. And you shall lend to many nations, but you shall not borrow. And the LORD will make you the head and not the tail, and you shall go up and not go down, if you obey the commandments of the LORD your God, …” The human mind is far less enigmatic than we’d like to admit. In fact, the study of anthropology never needed PhD psychologists and theorists and millions of clinical trials to figure humanity out (a pursuit that is expanding now more than ever before), which is a bit humorous since thinkers as far back as the Sumerians, and then on to the Greek metaphysicians and astronomers, and then up to Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers, all thought they’d cracked the human code but really only cracked it wider open than ever. Oh how poor and wretched we are in our ingratitude! See, friend, how do we know that the Bible isn...

Open Wide the Floodgates Deuteronomy 28:2-6 “And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field. Blessed shall be the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground and the fruit of your cattle. … Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out.” Promises as thorough and all-encompassing as these can both lead the Christian pilgrim to deepened longing for that heavenly Promised Land and to deepened despondency over a perceived lack of fulfillment in the here and now. We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Maybe you’re there even now: you’ve remained faithful to God, you’ve upheld His Word even to the chagrin of friends and family, you’ve sacrificed money and career and a first-class ticket on the cruise ship to wear a cross instead, but your business still went under. Or you filed ...