Careful to Observe

The Sailing Ship

Deuteronomy 28 opens with a conditional: if you diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all his commandments which I command you today… The word translated “carefully” carries weight. It does not mean broadly agreeing with the commandments in principle. It means attending to them — watching, observing, adjusting.

The picture is a sailing ship. A sailing ship does not sail in a straight line. It tacks — angling into the wind, constantly off the perfect course, constantly correcting. To a casual observer, the ship seems always to be heading slightly wrong. But the cumulative effect of constant correction is arrival at the destination. The ship that does not correct does not arrive.

Be careful not to turn aside to the right hand or to the left. What does turning aside mean? Ultimately, what does it mean? It means following other gods. That is what Jesus says it means. That is what the passage implies. Any sustained deviation from the law of God — not a single stumble, but an uncorrected drift — is in effect the worship of something else. Another system of values, another ultimate authority, another god.

This is not a point that the contemporary church is comfortable with. The idea that ordinary, comfortable Christians who would never consciously worship Baal might in practice be doing precisely that — by virtue of sustained, uncorrected deviation from the law of God — is confronting. But the word does not soften it.

De Facto Antinomianism

There are two forms of antinomianism.

The first is explicit: a direct rejection of the law of God as binding on the Christian. This position is held openly by some and is at least honest in its premises.

The second is de facto: an agreement, in principle, that the law of God is wonderful and important and binding — combined with a practice that does not actually course-correct in terms of it. The person says yes to the law and no in their life. They may not even notice the gap.

Both arrive at the same destination: a turning aside to other gods. The god of comfort, the god of approval, the god of pragmatic necessity — these are not usually named or worshipped deliberately. They are served by default, when the compass bearing of God’s law is not actively consulted and the inevitable drifts are not corrected.

The picture of constant course correction makes this concrete. It is not enough to have agreed with the law once. The command is to be always returning to it, always measuring against it, always correcting the deviation to the left, always correcting the deviation to the right. This is a lifelong, active, demanding discipline.

The Food Question

One area where this course correction is especially neglected is food. Genesis 3 shows us the devil’s opening move: has God indeed said you shall not eat of every tree? The first sin was a sin involving food — specifically a violation of a divine dietary command under the influence of seductive reasoning.

The dietary laws of the Bible have been dismissed as obsolete by most of the church for centuries. I love a bacon sandwich is the response that ends the conversation. But what is the meaning of dismissing what God has said about food? In one reading, it is a small, personal matter. In another reading, it is the same move that Satan made in Genesis 3: God has no right to tell me what I can and cannot eat. I will decide what is good for food.

This is not to make eating pork the central ethical issue of the Christian life. It is to observe that the pattern of reasoning — God’s dietary instructions are arbitrary, archaic, and do not apply to me — is a pattern of reasoning that echoes the first sin with surprising fidelity.

More broadly, the connection between what we eat, how the brain functions, and what we call mental health is an area of remarkable neglect in the church. The bacteria in the gut, the function of the brain, the capacity for meditation and clarity of thought — all of these are connected to the food that goes in. The mind that is commanded to meditate on the law of God day and night requires a functioning brain. The body is not the enemy of the spirit; it is the spirit’s instrument. Treating it accordingly is part of what it means to be careful to observe.

The App That Doesn’t Exist

There are apps for tracking calories, heart rate, sleep quality, exercise form, and almost every other dimension of physical and psychological life. The human capacity for measuring what we value is impressive.

But there is no app for measuring progress in the knowledge and application of God’s law. There is no genre of tools designed to help a person say: here is where I am in my understanding of the covenant; here are the areas where I am drifting; here are the specific corrections I need to make. No curriculum for covenant faithfulness exists in the marketplace. No subscription service alerts you to the gap between what God has said and how you are actually living.

This is not coincidental. It reflects what is actually valued. People invest time and money into measuring what matters to them. The absence of covenant faithfulness from the measured landscape is a theological statement, made in practice rather than doctrine.

There is a need here. Not necessarily an app, though that is one possible form. A programme of engagement with the promises and warnings of scripture — positive and negative, specific to the person’s situation and learning style, designed to be internalised rather than merely assented to — would meet a need that nothing currently meets. Kings in Israel were required to copy out the law by hand. The point was not simply preservation of the text. It was internalisation — letting the word get into the body, not just the intellect.

Mental Health Is Meditation

Here is a thought worth sitting with: mental health, for the creature that God made, is meditation on his law day and night.

This is not a metaphor. It is a description of how the human being was designed to function. The mind made to meditate on the law of God, directed to other objects — or to nothing in particular — is a mind operating outside its design parameters. The anxiety, the despair, the fragmentation, the restlessness that characterise the modern condition are at least partly the fruit of minds that have no word of God to return to, no compass bearing to correct by, no law to meditate on.

The command to meditate on the law day and night is not an impossible demand made of a different kind of person. It is a description of what the mind was made for. And like anything operating within its design parameters, a mind doing what it was made to do is a mind that flourishes.

Be careful to observe. Course correct constantly. That is not the burden. That is the path to the blessing.