Introduction to Deuteronomy, Part 2

Moses’ farewell speech is a whole book, a book that is thirty-four chapters long. It is one of the most oft-quoted books in the Bible: 83 times in the New Testament. Only 6 New Testament books do not allude to it directly. Why is this? What makes this book so great?

We need to consider Deuteronomy in its historical and biblical context. It is the last book in the Pentateuch, the collective name for the first five books in the bible: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Tradition has attributed all five books’ authorship to Moses but modern scholarly work has called this into question. However the greatest Old Testament scholar who ever lived, Jesus Christ, attributed them to Moses so I’m going with Him. Together the five books cover thousands of years of human history and God’s works and interactions with people in that history, all the way from the beginning of creation to the beginning of sin and evil to the beginning of God’s redemptive plan to restore and renew mankind and bring it back to Himself.

GENESIS is not a horrible rock band with Phil Collins but the first book of the Bible named for its first word “in the beginning.” In it we are told that God created the universe and everything in it and He made it good (ch. 1 and 2). He made mankind different from the rest of creation, “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Gen. 1:27). Instead of staying servant to God, man reached for independence apart from God by rebelling against His word, bringing evil and sin into the world. As a good, loving, just, holy God God can no longer live among mankind and He casts them out of the garden He had lovingly made for them. But even in His punishment God makes a promise (3:15) to destroy this problem of evil and sin.

So time moves on and the earth fills up with people and consequently fills up with evil; we get an extreme example of one way God could fix the sin problem (see Noah, ch. 6-10). The narrative of Genesis takes leaps and bounds through many generations and peoples and cultures to finally settle and focus on one family, the family through which Jesus Christ, the answer to the sin problem promised in Genesis 3:15, would come.

That family begins in an evil country in an evil city with an evil guy named Abram who probably worshipped the moon or other crazy things as a part of the culture of the Chaldeans. One day, thousands of years ago, in order that His promise thousands of years before might come true thousands of years later, God calls this man Abram out of his life of idolatry and sin and out of his home and country, saying:

“Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” (Gen. 12:1-2)

The whole Bible is about God’s redemptive plans to reconcile the world to Himself, and here in the book of beginnings we get the master plan: out of the evil people of the world God will take one and make him righteous and make him a father to many children (which is particularly hilarious in Abram’s old age), thus carving out a people for Himself that will not sin and will not rebel against Him.

But this is not the end – God’s plan is not just to save a certain people, a “chosen people”, no, ultimately the nation of Israel, the people descended from Abram and (more specifically) his grandson Jacob, was chosen to bring God Himself into the world through Jesus Christ so that all nations will be blessed. For that is how horrible our sin problem is, it requires God to lower Himself to our level where He was hated, tempted, and eventually murdered.

God’s plans for salvation begin right in Genesis, right from the beginning, and the Pentateuch focuses on the origin of the nation of Israel and its (long) journey to a land promised to them by God.

Genesis ends with Israel growing but not where God wants it – they are growing in the land of the Egyptians, a powerful and influential culture who could very easily turn all th Israelites to worship their many false gods. God wants to give Israel its own land where they can be a light to the nations of the one true God.

EXODUS continues the narrative of God’s people as the Egyptian opinion of its Hebrew neighbors turns from good to bad. They enslave Israel and force them to do manual labor for fear that Israel might turn against them (Ex. 1:8-10). They are enslaved for centuries and God’s promise seems lost and His power seems weak and laughable to the nations. This is when God lifts up a man named Moses to lead His people out Egypt in spectacular ways that will be talked about forever. In fact people still talk about those events to this day, even if they don’t believe it.

After God leads His people out of Egypt He wants to lead them to the land He has for them but Israel’s stubbornness and sinfulness is quickly revealed. They continually complain and gripe about the wilderness and being led out of Egypt (e.g., Ex. 16:2-3). As a result God leads them in circles in the wilderness for forty years to test them and make sure they will stay faithful to him.

Leviticus and Numbers pick up the narrative of the time in the wilderness. They are also Law books, which is the other important thing to happen before Israel enters the Promised Land.

God gives the Law to Moses for many reasons, the first one being to point out sin. In the New Testament in his letter to the Romans the apostle Paul talks about the Law and its purpose:

Now we know that whatever the law says it speaks to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be stopped, and the whole world may be held accountable to God. For by work of the law no human being will be justified in his sight, since through the law comes knowledge of sin. (Rom. 3:19-20)

And:

Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. (Rom. 7:7)

Basically the law is given so that we can see our sin and evil – if there is no standard of right and wrong then people could do whatever they feel like and claim that it is “right” in their eyes. This inevitably leads to chaos and anarchy (see the book of Judges). This why the law is good, but it is bad in that it cannot stop people from doing wrong. It can only tell them they are doing wrong. As Paul says:

So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. (Rom. 7:12)

The Law given to Moses was also given for Israel’s protection (there are many practical laws like ‘wash your hands before you eat’ which we now do naturally because we know what germs are) and to set God’s people apart from the rest of the world (this is why many laws seem obscure and not morally wrong). God wanted something to be different about Israel.

LEVITICUS is largely a Law book, a book recording the laws and commandments of God. Exodus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy also have their fair share of laws and commandments.

NUMBERS is a Law book, but also a narrative of the time in the wilderness, and a collection of records of the number of people in Israel during its time in the wilderness.

This is where Deuteronomy sticks out and why it is loved. Many of the commandments in Deuteronomy are not mere “Don’t do this…” statements, they get to the central issue, the human heart, which is what God cares about.

For forty years God kept His people and Moses from entering the Promised Land and at the beginning of Deuteronomy those forty years are up. Moses is close to death. He meditates on all that God has done for him and his people (ch. 1-3) and what the Law means (ch. 5-11) with a few more laws (ch. 12-26). It ends with a song of praise by Moses and his death.

G. Ernest Wright says that Deuteronomy asks a lot of questions (taken from the Interpreter’s Bible Dictionary):

“What is the meaning of God’s great acts in saving and preserving a chosen people who so manifestly do not deserve or merit his gracious consideration?”

“What is the meaning of the covenant and the revelation of God’s will within it?”

“What are the peculiar temptations of the nation in its land, and wherein lies its true security that its days may be prolonged upon the good earth which God has given it?”

If we were to read the Pentateuch and skip the rest of the Old Testament we might be rather optimistic about mankind’s ability to succeed in its requirements lined out in Deuteronomy. If one wanted a testimony of God’s worth and power the first five books alone have enough to leave awe and fear in a person. Deuteronomy is a book about a beginning and a great opportunity for mankind to pursue God and not give into sin. If so, everything will go right for His people.

You don’t have to read much further in your Bible to get severely depressed. Israel does get its land but it begins to screw things up right away, intermarrying with the people of the land and turning to their gods and idols. The book of Judges is a frustrating cycle of God’s people turning from God, then getting into trouble and needing help, then turning away from Him again. The rest of the Old Testament has similar depressing events.

What does this mean? Did God just not choose the right people? Did He back the wrong horse? Were the hopes and promises in Deuteronomy written in vain? Was the Law given in vain?

This is the ultimate problem with the Law: it condemns but cannot fix. It cannot take a heart of stone and turn it into a heart of flesh. The heart of man is the root of the sin problem and the Law is not able to fix it. But it wasn’t mean to, because God had a master plan from the start. A master plan that feels far off, especially when we walk through bloody scenes of death and revenge in the Old Testament. These are honest accounts of what humans can do to each other, and often when evil is happening we can’t see any way that God could still win.

Deuteronomy says that the greatest commandment is this:

You shall love the LORD your God will all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (Deut. 6:5)

We can easily agree that ourselves and everybody has fallen short of this. We now to our very bones we have. Paul says “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23) and if to not love God with all our hearts and souls and might then we have all sinned. This is the greatest commandment because it is the heart of all the others, if you follow this one perfectly you will never break any of the other laws. However even if somehow you follow all the other laws but neglect this one you have lost the heart of the Law. To follow the Law without a love for God is stupid. It’s a waste of time.

So we are all condemned, and judging by Israel’s history there’s not much hope. There’s no hope in our generation because we can see that we are unable to completely follow the Law and there’s no hope for the next because, as the wise King Solomon points out, “there is nothing new under the sun” (Ecc. 1:9).

Does this leave the law unfulfilled? Is the law only for our judgment? As a matter of fact the law was fulfilled when God answered His promise to crush sin by coming to earth to dwell among us. The law was fulfilled by the second member of the trinity, Jesus Christ, by the power of the third member, the Holy Spirit, to the glory of the first, the Father.

After Jesus was baptized the Holy Spirit led Him into the wilderness, just like the people Israel. There He was tempted like them in similar ways for food, water, comfort, even power. Jesus is directly confronted by the serpent who tempted man to fall and rebel thousands of years before, but instead of failing like every man and woman before Him, Jesus says “No” to the serpent’s words.

Jesus rebukes Satan with three quotes, all from Deuteronomy (8:3, 6:13, 6:16). Jesus did what we – and Israel – could not, that is, He loved the Lord with all His heart and will all His soul and with all His might. He fulfilled the Law, never sinning once against God.

Not only did He satisfy the Law’s requirements for holiness, He also satisfied the requirements for justice and God’s righteous judgment on all of us who have failed and sinned and rebelled. Jesus did this by taking my sins and your sins to the cross to be crushed and destroyed in His perfect body:

For our sake he [God] made him [Jesus] to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Cor. 5:21)

If Jesus is the fulfillment of the Law let us turn our hearts and minds to Him as we begin Deuteronomy, let us see Christ more clearly and exalted, while ourselves more humble and penitent, because through Christ we are free from the law, and, as Paul writes:

But now we are released from the law, having died to that which held us captive, so that we serve in the new way of the Spirit and not in the old way of the written code. (Romans 7:6)

Praise God! Amen.

10/19/09