Cleave to Him

Ye shall walk after the LORD your God, and fear him, and keep his commandments, and obey his voice, and ye shall serve him, and cleave unto him. – Deuteronomy 13.4

Cleave is a fun English word. It is an auto-antonym – a word with opposite meanings. Cleave means divide and it also means to cling to or to hold on to.

When I think of this word I think of a child who is holding on to a parent for dear life. Nothing is going to pry them loose. They are stuck tighter than glue.

I think this is a picture of how God’s people are to cleave to our God. We cleave ourselves from the things and ways and philosophies of the world and then we cleave to God with the same tenacity with which we used to cleave to the world.

The rest of the verse tells us how to cleave to our God. Walk after His ways, fear Him, keep His commandments, and serve Him. These are practical things we can do to cleave to God and His ways.

Most of us can remember times in our lives when our only hope to ‘grab ahold’ of God and hold on for dear life. At those crisis moments it is all we can do.

And we can be sure that we are going to face those crisis times again. And at those times we can be pretty sure that we are going to face times like that again in the future. And, if I know me, I am going to hold on to God for dear life and depend on His alone to get through the crisis.

So why not just cleave to Him during the in-between times? Why not just cleave to Him whenever things are going okay? Why wander at all?

The nice thing it is that it is not all up to me. God is holding on to us and He is not going to let go – so why not just snuggle up and cling to Him?