How do we guard against backsliding? Deuteronomy is a book full of light and full of fire. Here again the words of the law are uttered, but in reading, one is conscious rather of the driving power of love’s great reason than of the binding nature of law’s requirement, not that the requirement of law is lowered in one single particular, but that love speaks with wooing winsomeness and tender constraint. It utters the same thunder, but always in the tone of infinite pity.
The distance between yourself and the LORD matters nothing. The first cooling of passion is the tragedy. The final corruption is but a sequence to be expected; and which cannot be avoided save as the first love is restored.
The issues Moses described are identical with those which follow the path of backsliding. What is this process? Mark these things:
Lest you… act corruptly (Deut. 4:16)
Lest you… make yourselves a carved image (Deut. 4:16)
Lest you… do evil in the eyes of the LORD, to anger Him (Deut. 4:25)
The first is purely personal, perhaps hidden from men: Corruption of self. The second is a sequel to self-corruption: The making of a carved image. Finally, the third is an overt / openly apparent act of evil. What is self-corruption? It is the devotion of the life to something lower than the highest. The first movement of backsliding may be accomplished without committing any sin which the age names vulgar. In the moment in which a man takes his eye from the highest and sets it upon something lower, he has set himself upon the decline which ends in the desert and in the agony of rejection. Self-corruption is the first step in the backslider’s pathway, the choice of something lower than the highest.
What is the “highest” for you? The “highest” is obedience of God’s commandments.
As Moses spoke to the Israelites in Deuteronomy 4:1: “Now, O Israel, listen to the statutes and the judgments which I teach you to observe, that you may live…”
You saw that, and you turned your eyes from it to something a little lower, to some ideal you built for yourself when you allowed the false ideal to intrude into the realm of your own thinking, your own desire, you own choosing.
That was the beginning of the whole story.
When a man corrupts himself, the issue is that he thinks falsely of God. When a man corrupts himself, he corrupts the idea of God by putting something false in the place of God. In the old days, it was a carved image.
Deuteronomy 4:16: “…lest you act corruptly and you make for yourselves a carved image…”
By “you”, the LORD is referring to “you”: Men of highest vision and noblest passion and fair ideals, men who have seen; but have turned your back upon the vision. You shall serve gods of wood and stone, which see not, hear not, smell not, eat not. A carved image need not be in the form of an idol made of wood and stone but can be any object that takes the place of God in our lives.
That is the issue of backsliding.
It is this idolatrous act that if nurtured and given prevalence in your life, will lead you to do evil in the eyes of the LORD in an open and perverse manner – a repulsive abomination in His Presence.
But there is hope.
Deuteronomy 4:29: “From there you will seek the LORD, your God, and you will find Him, if you search for Him with all your heart and all your soul.”
Deuteronomy 4:31: “For the LORD, your God, is a merciful God…”
Turn back to the LORD by seeking Him with all of your heart and all your soul, with every fiber of your existence. Make a return back to your first love, for by doing so, you will find the LORD… or rather, you will be restored to the LORD, your Heavenly Father.
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