Our lives are the interweaving of both history and geography, of both time and place.
How often we associate places with key events in our lives. My father delighted to show us his boyhood home in Scotland, the schoolyard where he played, even the shop where he purchased his treats. So in the instructions the Lord gave His people in Deuteronomy 12, He focused on the places they would encounter in the land. One set of places they were to “utterly destroy” (v 2): “all the places where the nations which you shall dispossess served their gods.” In the process, they were to “destroy their altars, break their sacred pillars, and burn their wooden images with fire; you shall cut down the carved images of their gods and destroy their names from that place” (v 3). And why? What would be wrong with keeping a nice grove of trees planted on a hill where once the Canaanites danced around an idol to their god? Because the associations of those places were repulsive to Him. Could you imagine inviting friends to a dinner party in a concentration camp? That’s how God saw it, “for every abomination to the Lord which He hates they have done to their gods; for they burn even their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods” (v 31). So once the land was cleared of all such habitations of evil, “then there will be the place where the Lord your God chooses to make His name abide. There you shall bring all that I command you: your burnt offerings, your sacrifices, your tithes, the heave offerings…and all your choice offerings which you vow to the Lord. And you shall rejoice before the Lord your God” (vv 11-12). With deepest irony about that same place, Mount Moriah, we read, “When they had come to the place called Calvary, there they crucified Him” (Lk 23:33)—God’s Lamb at God’s place so forgiven sinners could also “rejoice before the Lord.”