The One Year Bible - Day 93

Great passage today, one of those, "I don't get it" passages in Deuteronomy 23: "If a man's testicles are crushed or his penis is cut off, he may not be admitted to the assembly of the Lord."
We can simply dismiss this statement and presume it can't really mean anything for us today. After all, God is a God of love right? He wouldn't want someone to not worship Him just because he was deformed?
We have to ask what this meant for the Jews and therefore what it might mean for us, not just this but similar prohibitions on illegitimate people and Ammonite/Moabites. I am not an expert on the OT as you have probably gathered but having children was something very significant for the Jewish nation. To not have children was shameful and implied that you had sinned to cause the situation to arise. To not be able to rear children was therefore considered an impediment to worshipping God, after all if you had sinned to deserve your handicap, why would you be able to worship God?
What would this mean to us today? Well at the lowest level, it could simply imply that we need to deal with sin before we are able to fully come into the presence of God. That isn't too surprising but perhaps there is something further, if child-rearing is a way of leaving a legacy, a way of spreading God's kingdom, perhaps God is also saying that he does not want people to worship Him who don't have a mind to spread the gospel, those who are not interested in legacy but are simply in it for themselves?
In a similar vein, illegitimate children imply a mixture, people who are neither hot nor cold and we know that God hates mixed motives. He would rather somebody was cold than luke-warm!
Moabites and Ammonites are harder to translate into modern day types but bearing in mind that both were born from human intervention (when Lot's daughters had sex with Lot to keep their lineage going) and both opposed Israel when they came into the Promised Land. Perhaps they simply represent the mixture of human will with God's kingdom, a poisonous cocktail and one which carries with it a simple prohibition of worship to God (10 generations means forever).