Deuteronomy 17:16 But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt
If you want to make progress today, Deuteronomy 17 is your chapter. It talks about progress, not with that exact word, but that is very clearly what the Bible is talking about. God is giving the children of Israel a heads up about the Promised Land into which they are going. The premise of success of any kind is that God gives it and God determines what it will be.
For instance, Deuteronomy 17:14 says, “When thou art come unto the land.” Notice the certainty. God says not if, but when. He continues, “Which the LORD thy God giveth thee, and shalt possess it, and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are about me.” It goes on to say that they will take the king “whom the LORD thy God shall choose.” Verse 16 says, “But he shall not multiply horses to himself, nor cause the people to return to Egypt, to the end that he should multiply horses: forasmuch as the LORD hath said unto you, Ye should henceforth return no more that way.”
So, it doesn’t matter how fast I am going, how rich I am, how healthy I am, how much people applaud what I am doing if I am going in the wrong direction. That is not progress. Progress is not merely the opposite of static, being still; progress is going in the right direction at whatever speed. Notice the contrast between “come unto the land” in verse 14 and “return to Egypt” in verse 16. God’s one consuming heartbeat was that they not go back where they had come from. To go back is not to make progress.
Verse 17 says the king should not “multiply wives to himself, that his heart turn not away.” In contrast to turning away from God’s way, verse 19 says, he is to “keep all the words of this law… to do them,” Verse 20 says that a king’s heart was not to be “lifted up above his brethren, and that he turn not aside from the commandment.” Instead he was to do right “that he may prolong his days in the kingdom, he, and his children, in the midst of Israel.”
When it comes to kings, whatever they did would be a great influence on the rest of the nations. When Solomon was king, he had horses brought in from Egypt. He had a lot of silver and gold. He also married many women who did not belong to God, including Pharaoh’s daughter. Was any of this good? No! Apart from the fact that polygamy and greed are wrong, these things turned his heart away from God, and therefore led people to turn away from God.
In Acts, Stephen delivered a powerful message to those who were very national but who had left following Jehovah because they rejected the Jehovah that God had sent. Stephen says the children of Israel had turned back to Egypt in their hearts. That is something a child of God can do today, turn away from God and back toward the world.
I’m a skier of sorts and a fall line is the point at which gravity begins to exert itself on your ski tips. So, if the fall line is straight ahead of me, that means right ahead of me is progressing downhill. If I want to stop, I turn my skis right and left across the fall line. They are not pointing up and down, but left to right. The moment I commit my ski tips to the fall line, to point downhill, gravity is going to do what gravity always does. It is going to pull my skis down that mountain, and me atop them, at increasing speed. Now if I am on the wrong trail, it doesn’t matter how beautifully I ski or how fast I go because if it is the wrong trail, it is not progress. This is not to say I can’t change course, but the longer I stay on that trail, the faster I go and the harder it is to make it to the right trail.
The question for you is, “Toward what and whom are the things you allow in your life pulling you?” Progress is always determined by your reference to God. So, to what are your habits, decisions, interests, and priorities pulling you? The whole point God was making was, “You are coming into the Promised Land. That is progress because you are following Me. Don’t turn back to Egypt. It doesn’t matter how many horses, beautiful wives, or riches are there because that is not progress.
What about your habits? You probably don’t even know about your habits because there are things you do automatically, but your phone knows. When your phone suggests something to you because of what you always do, it means your phone probably knows you better than your mom and maybe even you. Are your habits pulling you toward God or away from God? No matter how efficiently you may be gaining, if it is not pulling you toward God, it is not progress.
What about your decisions? Now, if you make one wrong decision, that does not mean you are out of the will of God and cannot turn back, but you also can’t think that if a decision is small, it doesn’t matter. It does matter. All it takes is gravity and time to fulfill what the decisions point you toward, like skis down a mountain. The decisions you make today are important. We aren’t wise enough to know what is important and what is not. That is why it is important we do right in the small things every day.
What about interests? Some interests may not be intrinsically wrong, but are they pulling you toward God or frittering away your life? All of us need diversions that help us relax, recharge, and rejuvenate, but those are not as important as knowing the truth of God’s Word because one is progress intrinsically and the other is a distraction.
What about your priorities, things you do prior to anything else? You may say, “My priority is God, but what do your actions show? I Timothy 6 says that God has given us richly all things to enjoy. So, it is not that things are always wrong, but any of them can become wrong when they pull you from God because that is not progress.
The point of gravity is probably where you are standing right now, the fall line with a trail to your left and a trail to your right. You have the Word of God on one side and the world which Egypt represents on the other. Which route will you choose? You may not think you are choosing, but your habits, decisions, interests, and priorities are going to pull you one way or the other. Progress is what we want, but progress is always determined by our reference and our relationship to God.