Deuteronomy 30-32

You might recall that on February 6 I said we should remember Leviticus 26 as we move forward through the Scriptures. Our readings yesterday and today echo the same message, with blessings for following the LORD and curses for turning away from Him. Let’s keep these blessings and curses in mind as we watch Israel’s history play out.

With today’s reading we can already see the trajectory of that history. We may not yet know all the characters that we will meet along the way. We may not yet know all the twists and turns of the plot. But we can see the overall arch of the story, because the LORD is clear-eyed about it Himself.

The LORD is no fool, no gullible chump who naively expects a “happily ever after” relationship with Israel. He knows their hearts (and ours). He knows that they will fail to keep the covenant, that they will stray from His path. We see this repeatedly in today’s reading. Starting from the very first verse (Dt. 30:1) and continuing on through the entire “Song of Moses” (Dt. 32:1-43) there is a clear recognition that although Israel may enjoy the blessings for a time, the curses will certainly come to pass. Moses says this directly, just before the “Song”:

For I know that after my death you will surely act corruptly and turn aside from the way that I have commanded you. And in the days to come evil will befall you, because you will do what is evil in the sight of the LORD, provoking him to anger through the work of your hands.

Deuteronomy 31:29

But the LORD invests in Israel anyway. He is faithful. He made promises to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and He intends to fulfill those promises. Further, despite Israel’s assured failure to keep the covenant, the LORD nonetheless anticipates their eventual repentance and return, and He promises to receive them back. (Dt. 30:1-10; Lev. 26:40-45) And so He shows Himself even more faithful and gracious.

And He is faithful and gracious still. As with Israel, He calls us to life, and that life is not far off or unattainable, because that life is in Christ Who is ever present with us. (Dt. 30:11-14; Romans 10:6-8) So choose life. Choose Christ. Every day and moment by moment. But if in your desire to choose life, you ever think that you have failed too often or too deeply, so that the Lord couldn’t possibly welcome you back, recognize that it is His own Spirit prompting you toward life. He is the One calling you, so answer the call in humility, confessing and repenting of your sin, and you will find that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ is faithful and gracious still.

Deuteronomy 28-29

And if you faithfully obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments that I command you today, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you, if you obey the voice of the LORD your God. Blessed shall you be in the city, and blessed shall you be in the field.

Deuteronomy 28:1-3

But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes that I command you today, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you. Cursed shall you be in the city, and cursed shall you be in the field.

Deuteronomy 28:15-16

Obedience or disobedience. Blessing or curse. Prosperity or tremendous destruction. The choice is clear, so take your pick. What will it be?

The LORD lays out for the people of Israel the terms of His covenant with them. He paints a glorious picture of abundant blessing for obedience but a stark picture of devastation for disobedience. They have a choice to make. And so do we.

I daresay that with the options laid out before us today, most of us consciously make the rational choice in favor of obedience, blessing, and prosperity. Who wants destruction? But then our thinking gets a little clouded, because we look around at the world and we do not always see this “formula” for blessing and curse working out as expected. We see prosperity coming to people who evidence little or no interest in following God. Meanwhile we see saints suffering. And so we doubt. (See Psalm 73.)

But then we rightly remember to look at things in the light of eternity, not just this world. We remember heaven and hell, and see that the blessing and curse formula may still work out if we consider the afterlife. So we immediately set about making resolutions to establish ourselves as citadels of righteousness and thus win the blessing. And in so doing we sow the seeds of our own downfall, not because we choose obedience, but because we think to rely on ourselves, our own strength and resources, to achieve it. And we fail.

Yes, we must by all means strive for obedience, but we must do so in humility and faith, recognizing that any power for real obedience comes not from ourselves but from the Holy Spirit because of the work of Jesus Christ. In saying this I am well ahead of our reading schedule, speaking of things not yet revealed to the Israelites. Indeed, they have yet to understand their own current scenario, so Moses says, “But to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand or eyes to see or ears to hear.” (Dt. 29:4) Let us lay that to heart and pray that God would indeed give us hearts to understand, eyes to see, and ears to hear, that we might rightly walk in obedience through faith in the completed work of Christ.

Deuteronomy 24-27

You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.

Deuteronomy 25:4

I hope we all know that we are not now bound by the letter of all these laws. First of all, I am guessing that most of us are not descendants of Israel, and so are not really part of the “covenant community” to which these laws are given as part of that covenant. Second, even if we were descendants of Israel, we have a New Covenant in Christ, which supersedes this Old Covenant. (We’ll eventually get to that much later in our readings.) And we should all be exceedingly thankful for that New Covenant because otherwise we’d be subject to the curse of Dt. 27:26: Cursed be anyone who does not confirm the words of this law by doing them.

Even though we may be free from needing to strictly observe all these laws, we still need to pay attention to them, because they give us principles that express God’s heart. They show us what is right, what is just, what is fair, what is proper. And so it is with this law regarding oxen. On the surface it just says that an ox should be allowed to eat as it works. On the surface the law applies only to oxen. So, strictly speaking, muzzling a cow being used for the same task would be OK, but I think we all recognize that the LORD would frown on such an interpretation. We should instead look for the LORD’s heart and extrapolate a bit. We should recognize that the LORD expects us to act with compassion, even justice, with oxen — and much more generally than with just oxen.

Saint Paul quotes this verse twice, in I Corinthians 9:9 and in I Timothy 5:18, to argue that ministers of the Gospel deserve to be paid for their preaching and teaching. And he is right, of course. We should not expect our pastors and other church staff to live as paupers or to have to work a second job just to put food on the table. We should, in fact, recognize the tremendous value of their ministry and generously give to provide for their needs.

As we approach the end of Deuteronomy and we look back over the Torah and the 613 commandments that the rabbis tell us it contains, let’s not just consider the letter of the law and all its detail. Let’s find the spirit of the law, what God is really and truly looking for. Let’s recognize that it is all summed up in those two greatest commandments, to love God and to love our neighbor.

Deuteronomy 21-23

So you shall purge the evil from your midst…

Deuteronomy 21:21b

This is an oft-repeated refrain in Deuteronomy. (See Dt. 13:5; 17:7,12; 19:19; 21:21; 22:21,24; 24:7; as well as 1 Corinthians 5:13.) Maybe we should pay attention.

It would be easy for us to get side-tracked here (again!) by our own discomfort over these statements. We think that God should be “nicer” to the guilty parties. Or we perceive some disconnect between the LORD here and the God that Jesus calls “Abba.” But let me again just say that God does not change, and if we feel like He is somehow in the wrong, the problem lies somewhere on our side, not His.

My guess is that for most of us the real problem is that we do not take sin seriously — at least, not nearly as seriously as God does. Nor do we understand what constitutes life. Life is not mere existence. Life is relationship with God. So when we say that sin should be ignored or treated lightly, what we’re really saying is that we think sin is no big deal — and that our life with God is no big deal, either. So let’s be clear: Sin breaks our relationship with God; it destroys our life; so God hates sin.

So you shall purge the evil from your midst…

The lesson for us here is not that we should go on witch hunts, killing anyone guilty of anything. (We would all be dead!) The lesson is that we should be ruthless in our treatment of our own sin. We are not to tolerate sin within ourselves. We are to kill it. But we tend to treat the Cross of Christ as a mere “get out of jail free card.” We see the Crucifixion as merely taking our penalty — which then just enables us to keep on sinning, penalty free. That is not the Gospel. That is ludicrous! As Saint Paul explains in Romans 6, we have been crucified with Christ, and so Paul rhetorically asks, “How can we who died to sin still live in it?” (See also Romans 8:13 and Colossians 3:5.)

Let’s start treating sin — our own sin — that thing we cozy right up to — as the disgusting, horrendous abomination that it is and let God nail it to the Cross.

So you shall purge the evil from your midst…

Deuteronomy 16:18-20:20

You shall appoint judges and officers …, and they shall judge the people with righteous judgment. You shall not pervert justice. You shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice, and only justice, you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the LORD your God is giving you.

Deuteronomy 16:18-20

Justice. Now there is something close to God’s heart. He has indeed woven into all of us an innate sense of justice, and we all have a desire for justice (at least, justice for the other guy…). Time and again we see that the LORD is a God of justice. Time and again the LORD tells us to seek justice.

But what is justice? Simply put, justice is doing what is right, and it is setting right whatever is wrong. It is not just about punishment for bad behavior; it is about restoration of peace and order.

So where might we find justice?

Is justice inherent in democracy? Hardly. The clearest example of democracy — where the will of the majority is done — is a lynch mob. We all know that is not justice.

Is justice meted out in our “criminal justice system?” Perhaps sometimes. Certainly not always. We’ve all witnessed miscarriages of justice within our current system, miscarriages in both directions, where the innocent are wrongly punished and the guilty are wrongly acquitted. In addition, our system generally pays more attention to the criminal than to the victim and rarely pursues restitution; that is, we punish thieves with prison time, for example, but the stolen property might never be restored to its owner.

Is justice found in our civil courts? Again, sometimes, but not always. Millions of dollars for spilling one’s coffee can hardly be called justice, but neither can billions of dollars from pharmaceutical companies ever undo the devastation of the opioid epidemic.

What then? While we all can (and should) work for justice in and through our courts and other governmental systems, seeking justice is generally much closer to home. It is a matter of acting justly ourselves in all our dealings on a daily basis. It is working diligently for one’s employer. It is fairly compensating one’s employees. It is filing an honest tax return. It is properly disciplining one’s children. It is accepting responsibility for one’s failures. It is a word kindly spoken to the grocery check-out clerk. It is stopping to help change a flat tire. It is leaving a fair tip at a restaurant. It is loving your neighbor as yourself.

Deuteronomy 12:29-16:17

Today Moses sets forth a zero-tolerance policy against idolatry:

• Don’t even inquire about how the soon-to-be-dispossessed nations serve their gods (Dt. 12:29-31)
• Execute any prophet that advocates going after other gods (Dt. 13:1-5)
• Execute even your closest loved one — friend or family — who entices you toward other gods (Dt. 13:6-11)
• Utterly devote to destruction any city or town that follows after other gods (Dt. 13:12-18)

Why such intolerance? Because the LORD loves His people. He desires to bless them. He desires that they have life. And life is found in relationship with Him. The greatest blessing anyone can have is the LORD Himself. Therefore, anything that gets in the way of a good relationship with God is unhealthy, destructive, deadly. So God moves to protect His people from that destruction.

Of course, any sin interferes with a good relationship with God. Any sin is unhealthy. But idolatry is especially so. It is the most egregious of sins — the most “in your face.” It is inherently a direct rejection of God and a turning toward something else in preference to Him. So the LORD — out of love for His people and to preserve their life — must deal most severely with anything that would draw His people away into idolatry.

Why then, are we so tolerant of idols in our own lives? No, I don’t imagine that many of us actively bow down to statues or sing songs of worship to Canaanite gods. That form of idolatry is long out of fashion. But I am quite certain that we each have our idols, things that keep us from wholehearted devotion to the LORD. Most such idols go unrecognized and unacknowledged, mainly because they are so dear to us that we do not even want to consider life without them and because we’ve been indoctrinated by our culture that our idols are either innocuous or even good. I won’t try to tell you what your idols might be. That’s for you to figure out in conversation with God. But here are a few of mine that I continually need to work to keep off their pedestals:

• Family
• Success
• Reputation
• Possessions
• Entertainment (or my “right” to a little R&R)

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things, especially family. I should indeed love and care for my family. I should indeed try to succeed (otherwise I will most certainly succeed in failing). But sometimes such things — even family — can be too dear, too important, and so interfere with my devotion to God. And that must not be so.

Deuteronomy 9-12:28

Do not say in your heart, after the LORD your God has thrust them out before you, “It is because of my righteousness that the LORD has brought me in to possess this land,” … Not because of your righteousness or the uprightness of your heart are you going in to possess their land… Know, therefore, that the LORD your God is not giving you this good land to possess because of your righteousness, for you are a stubborn people.

Deuteronomy 9:4a,5a,6

Do you get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the blessing of the Promised Land is not because of Israel’s righteousness? If it were not obvious to the Israelites before now, by repeating the point three times, Moses makes it abundantly clear that the Promised Land is not a reward earned by Israel’s good behavior. Israel is not outstandingly righteous; instead, they are a stubborn people. Moses goes on to drive the point home, reminding them of their rebellious ways. So don’t think too highly of yourselves, Israel.

Does that mean, then, that Israel’s behavior does not matter? Clearly not. The LORD is very much interested in shaping Israel into a nation that reflects His righteousness through relationship with Him:

And now, Israel, what does the LORD your God require of you, but to fear the LORD your God, to walk in all his ways, to love Him, to serve the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul, and to keep the commandments and statutes of the LORD, which I am commanding you today for your good?

Deuteronomy 10:12-13

The entire book of Deuteronomy can be seen as one gigantic exhortation for Israel to walk in righteousness, to walk with the LORD, not against Him — to cooperate with Him, not oppose Him. All of it is for Israel’s good. And all of it is the LORD’s initiative.

The same, of course, is true for us. We do not earn our salvation by works of righteousness. Instead, our salvation enables and produces righteousness, all for God’s glory. God loves us. God calls us. God justifies us. God works righteousness in us and through us. We must cooperate, but it is all God’s initiative.

As we go through this season of Lent, let’s remember that we are not “all that.” We are dust and to dust we shall return. But we are dust into which the LORD God Almighty breathes Life, His Life that we are to display to the world.

Deuteronomy 5-8

With four chapters in today’s reading, there is quite a lot that we could talk about. But I would be remiss not to focus on the Greatest Commandment, upon which everything else depends:

You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

Deuteronomy 6:5

Yet what can I say about that? What can I say that has not been said? What can I say that would not fall short? I cannot embellish those words, nor can I fathom them. The best I can do is to point to them and urge us all to sit with them in stillness, to let the LORD convict our hearts and draw us to Himself.

Deuteronomy 3-4

Know therefore today, and lay it to your heart, that the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.

Deuteronomy 4:39

There are any number of things we can learn as we read through the Scriptures. We can be fascinated by ancient history and cultures. We can pick up on nuances of human character. We can gain insights on how to relate to one another. We can learn the difference between right and wrong. We can debate the finer points of dietary laws or animal sacrifice. But in all of it, we better not miss this one: the LORD is God in heaven above and on the earth beneath; there is no other.