God gives prosperity to human beings. He blesses wealth and multiplies lands, gardens, houses... You do not have very many houses and gardens? Do not despair: there is not only material wealth but also the wealth of the soul, of one's inner world, the wealth of the spirit! Only in spiritual abundance does a person come to know God...

Or is it the other way around after all? Does the Kingdom of God belong instead to the poor in spirit, those who mourn, and those who hunger (Matt. 5, Luke 6)? And is it not harder for a rich man to enter it than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle? Is this not what today's reading warns us about?

At times one hears that the religion of the Old Testament was, compared with Christianity, a religion of the flesh; that well-being was understood by Old Testament people too materialistically, too earthbound; that the main signs of God's blessing were good harvests and good increase of livestock, many children, abundance and prosperity, triumph over the enemy in war. Some verses of the Torah, it would seem, confirm such an attitude. And yet speculations of this kind should be considered more a tribute to the spiritualism traditional in church-adjacent circles than a properly Yahwistic attitude.

As for Yahwism, which is usually what is meant by "Old Testament religion," it was completely alien to every kind of spiritualism, as indeed was Christianity, which was never a "religion of the spirit" or a "religion of suffering," as some called it, but the life of the Kingdom. Yahwism, for its part, knew a spiritual foretaste, a spiritual anticipation of that life. And Yahwism saw nothing blameworthy in earthly well-being, on one condition: that this well-being is not achieved by violating the Torah, the commandment given by God. The point here, of course, is not that before the coming of Christ people were naive enough to think that righteousness in the fallen world is accompanied by prosperity. One need only open Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job to be convinced that spiritually mature people did not suffer from such naivete even in pre-Christian times.

The point was something else: believing Yahwists looked at the God-given land as the Kingdom of God, which lacked only the righteousness of those who lived on that land in order to be revealed in fullness. And it must be acknowledged that there was a truth in this approach, though not the whole truth. In fact, the essence of the Kingdom of God does not lie in the nature of the universe, but in its relation to God. If God is at the center, the world becomes the Kingdom. And God, from the time of the Sinai theophany, had already come to His people and made a covenant bond with them precisely in order to remain among His people forever. And the people truly were called to become a community of the faithful, while the place where they lived was called to become the Kingdom. Of course, this concerns an ideal and a supreme task, one that could not be adequately resolved before the Messiah came into the world. And yet the people always carried an understanding that well-being on the God-given land is possible only if that land is the Kingdom. For God loves His people. And He wants them to be happy.

Describing the path the people have traveled, the book of Deuteronomy presents it to us as the way of the Torah. There is no room here for the theory of rewards and punishments so common among religious people, according to which a person receives a reward for carrying out what God has prescribed and punishment for violating His prescriptions. Here the logic is entirely different. A person follows God because only such movement can be called a way. Everything else is tracklessness leading nowhere. Walking God's way, a person arrives where God wants to bring him.

God wants to bring the person to the place of meeting with Himself, to the place of His presence, in order to sanctify the person and give him the possibility of a new and full life. In the book of Deuteronomy the Promised Land becomes such a place. God leads His people there in order to renew both them and the land itself, making it a prototype of the Kingdom. That is precisely why the traditional religious scheme of rewards and punishments does not work here. The point is that, by definition, the people cannot deserve what they receive: this concerns fallen humanity, and the people of God are no exception, since they too consist of fallen people.

By definition, the fallen person is not ready for a meeting with God, and also by definition does not deserve either the Kingdom or the Promised Land as its prototype. Only God Himself makes both individual people and the whole people as a whole ready, and He does so in the process of moving along the way by which He leads them. If the people travel the path laid out for them by God, step for step behind the One who laid that path out, they will become ready for a meeting with God and for life in God's presence on the land given by God.

Life itself on this land is also unthinkable outside the context of relations with God. The land is given to the people not as property, but for use, on the condition that they do not forget God and do not begin to rely on themselves instead of Him. This is not a statute or a disciplinary measure, but a simple fact: without God it is impossible to live on God's land. It exists first of all as a place of God's presence, and only afterward as a natural phenomenon, as a place, a territory, a geographical reality. Change the order of priorities, and the land is lost. This is what Moses warns his people about, speaking on God's behalf.