The Lord speaks through Moses again, to explain how the Israelites are to observe the remembrance of God’s wonderful deliverance from Egypt. The repetition of these instructions demonstrates how important they are.

Towards the end, Moses explains that their actions of remembrance will be “like a sign on your hand and a symbol on your forehead”. This is similar to Proverbs 3:3 which tells us to remember mercy and truth by binding them around our foreheads and writing them on the tablets of our hearts.

For centuries, some observant Jews have taken these commands literally. Paragraphs from Exodus and Deuteronomy are written on four strips of parchment and placed in two small leather boxes. During prayers, an observant Jew straps these boxes on his forehead and on his arm. Jesus did not criticise this practice, but he did have something to say about certain Pharisees using overly wide boxes as a demonstration of how holy they thought they were.

However, these instructions are probably best seen as figures of speech. If we say that we bind or write the word of God on our heads, hearts and hands, it really means that we know it (our heads), we believe it (our hearts) and we act on it (our hands).

Each of these – knowledge, faith and actions – on its own isn’t really enough. We can know about Jesus without believing. We can believe without acting. We can do good deeds without either knowledge or belief. Just as our heads, our hearts and our hands work together to achieve amazing things, so the Lord calls us to knowledge and understanding, belief and faith, and actions and deeds. This is the ‘head, heart, hands’ of our walk with the Lord.

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NEWBOLD COMMUNITY CHURCH