Deuteronomy 6:4–9
Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates. Deuteronomy 6:4–9
It is a truth universally acknowledged that at least 50% of people don’t read IKEA instructions.
‘My intuition will guide me,’ I say to myself. The tragicomedy begins: left and right units swapped, wrong bolts forced into wrong holes, personal injury, and cursing the earth from which this chipboard came.
The instructions would of course tell me what to do and how to (safely) do it: I would do well to pay them closer attention. At least until I’ve absorbed their principles and my intuitions are better aligned with the designer’s intentions.
And that’s an insight that would help me read my Bible too.
In the passage above, Moses speaks to a people standing on the edge of their promised land. It’s 40 years after the Exodus, after the law was first given at Sinai, and the people have survived the wilderness. Moses re-preaches the law, urging a new generation to love the Lord alone and to let his intentions shape their lives. He tells them to embed this law in their homes and on the road, when they lie down and when they get up; and by attaching it to their heads and hands.
This is where Scripture begins its own teaching on how to use Scripture: not as a take-it-or-leave-it instruction manual, but as a trusted companion that forms God’s people to live his ways in their real-world days. Understood like that, even the most oddly specific parts of the Levitical law reveal timeless truths about God’s character and the shape that holiness takes in the messiness of the real world.
This means that I – and you – have a Bible that is for our work, rest, relationships, decisions, and everyday rhythms. Letting its principles seep into our lives helps us become the kind of people whose intuitions are sanctified, and are even humble enough to read IKEA instructions.
Jesus models all this beautifully in his own wilderness experience. The Son of Man inhabited the Scriptures – and he called on them not as a spoken-word performance piece, but to reveal how God’s word shaped who he was and how it steadied his course.
So the invitation is simple: let Scripture travel with you. Let its guidance shape your intuitions when you face life’s confusion – whether flat-pack or wilderness. Do that, with Jesus as your example, and you step into the promise that, a chapter before, Moses longed for the people to grasp: ‘so that you may live, and that it may go well with you.’
Tim Yearsley