Deuteronomy 14:1 Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not cut yourselves, not make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.
I love to travel, and it is a good thing because I do an awful lot of it for revival meetings and other work. One of the things I enjoy about travel is the great variety that you see in different parts of the country. There are distinctions in different regions of the country and even in different states. There are some foods that if I were to name them, some would know what I was talking about and most would not because it is a very regionally informed thing. If I were to use certain words as expressions, there are people from certain states who would comprehend those expressions because they use them, but most people would not know what I was talking about.
So, there are distinctions. I was listening to someone last night and I could tell he was from a certain area just from the slight inflection in his voice. Now, I may have been wrong, but the point is that if I was wrong, I was misled by my perception of what he was projecting. The truth is that what you do is to be an accurate and clear indication of who you are.
In Deuteronomy 14 we are reminded of who Israel was and by application who we are as children of God. Who were the children of Israel? Well, they were children of the Lord. Verse 1 says, “Ye are the children of the LORD your God: ye shall not…” There are a number of “you shall nots” and a couple of “you shalls” here. Why? Among other things, it was because they were to belong distinctly to God.
Verse 2 says, “For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God.” Then it says they were chosen by the Lord “to be a peculiar people unto himself.” What does it mean to be peculiar? Well, it depends on where you are. Some things that we might do in America that we don’t think about at all would be very odd to people from another country. What we do here is distinct to our country. You don’t realize how identifiable some of your actions, words, or customs may be until you go somewhere where they are not so common.
Being married is one of the most revelatory things I’ve ever done because it shows me in what ways Rices are distinct. Things that we do that I think are normal turn out to be weird things that no one else does. So, what you do as a child of God, a believer, is to be an accurate and clear indication of who you are. Sometimes we can get kind of silly about this and think, “Why do we have to be different?” As a child of God, you are fundamentally different from those around you, and if you don’t express that difference, that is hypocrisy.
So, what are these expressions that show distinction? Deuteronomy 14:1 says, “Ye shall not cut yourselves, nor make any baldness between your eyes for the dead.” This was a custom of the people into whose land Israel was coming. God was telling Israel that their own customs were to express their distinction as God’s own people. They were to communicate themselves differently than the heathen around them.
Their diet was to be different. Verse 3 says, “Thou shalt not eat any abominable thing.” Why were they not to eat these things? Verse 21 says, “For thou art an holy people.” They were different, not like everyone else. Jesus later would say that it was not what goes into the man that defiles him, but it is what comes out of him. So we are not stating here that this is a diet that you are to hold today, but I would say that even diet is something that expresses a person’s culture. The reason you eat differently than those in far off countries is because you don’t live in those countries. You belong to your country. The point is that the children of Israel’s expression, even their diet, was to show that they belonged to God.
The way the children of Israel used money was also to show that they belonged to God. Verses 22-23 say, “Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase…that thou mayest learn to fear the LORD thy God always.” So, the way we tithe and give should show who we are. The Israelites were to give to the Levites because they had no part nor inheritance with the rest of Israel. They were to give to the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow that “the LORD thy God may bless thee in all the work of thine hand which thou doest.”
So, there are a lot of things we could talk about specifically, but the bottom line is that every part of your life, your expressions, even to the way you eat and use your money, are to be expressions of who you are. If you have trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, you are a child of God and you are a different person. You are a peculiar person who belongs to God, and that should be obvious in every part of your life every day.