There’s something appropriate about reading Deuteronomy at the start of a new year. In the abstract, the book is all about reviewing the past and gearing up for what’s next. It’s a call to reflect honestly on one’s previous failures, to rehearse God’s provision, and resolve to future faithfulness. Maybe reading Deuteronomy is an evangelical’s perfect New Year’s resolution.
I wish I could tell you those are the reasons I’m reading it right now. The real reason is that I find Deuteronomy endlessly fascinating and, furthermore, that I forgot I read it last January. Which is to say that my current devotional reading is neither strategic nor innovative.
That’s probably just as well.
In any case, I’m reading through Deuteronomy (this Scripture journal has become my new favorite devotional tool) and I want to share some reflections about it as I go.
A Tiny Bit of Context
Deuteronomy records the final events of Israel’s long-time wandering in the wilderness. Forty years prior, God delivered Israel out of Egyptian slavery. Shortly thereafter, an older generation of Israelites stood at the border of the Promised Land, and God told them to go on in and take it. But they refused (Numbers 14). They recognized that the land was good to live in, but they failed to trust that God was good enough to give it to them: “Why is the Lord bringing us into this land, to fall by the sword?” (Numbers 14:3). Inheriting the land required taking it away from the inhabitants who lived there already. Those inhabitants wouldn’t go down without a fight and they were bigger, stronger, better armed. The Israelites lost their nerve.
In response, God forbade everyone who was 20 years old and older from ever entering the land in their lifetime. He sent them to wander for forty years, until that whole generation died. Their children stand, here in Deuteronomy, where their parents stood years before and are faced with the same question: will they trust God and enter the land he promised to give their parents?
In terms of format, the book is mainly a long speech, or series of speeches. In terms of chronology, Deuteronomy covers very little time—maybe forty days. It’s just long enough for Moses to explain the Law (1:5), commission Joshua to be Israel’s next leader (31:7), write a copy of the Law for the priests (31:9), write and perform a song (31:19, 22, 30), go up on a high place to view the land he is not allowed to enter, and die (34:1-5). After that, the people mourn his death for thirty days (34:8), and then they move on.
A Posture and a Point of View
In my current re-reading of the early chapters, two things have stood out to me. Before he goes into the details of the Law, Moses prescribes both a posture and a point of view from which he wants his audience to hear all that follows. The posture has to do with motivation—why should we bother reading (and obeying) it?—while the point of view is instructive for interpretation—how should we make sense of it?
Assuming the Right Posture
When you recall that this younger generation is in the situation it’s in because their parents were unfaithful, it’s easy to imagine they might approach the Law with a posture of fear. It would be reasonable for them to say, Listen—our parents screwed up. We spent our entire childhood as nomads because they failed to do what God asked them to do. Our own children came up in terrible and traumatic conditions, because of our parents’ poor decisions. We don’t want the same things to happen again. So we better do what God says, or else—who knows what worse things may be in store for us? From this posture, it doesn’t matter if the Law is good or just, you just have to do it or bad things may happen. A posture of fear turns the Law into an insurance policy against God’s anger.
This is the wrong posture.
Moses wants the people to receive the Law with a posture of gratitude. Time and again he reiterates that the contents of the Law are not just good but uniquely good. So good that when people in neighboring lands hear about the statutes and commandments that guide Israel’s communal life, they “will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people’” (Deuteronomy 4:6). And God’s purpose for giving his people a good and just Law is so they can live long and prosper: “that your days may be long” (6:2). Living according to God’s Law is not only good for this generation. It is given “that it may go well with you and with your children after you” (4:40). These are not the arbitrary and petty demands of an all-powerful killjoy. They are “for our good always” (6:24). A posture of gratitude turns the Law into a gift.
Reading as you and I do from the twenty-first century, there is another possible posture from which to engage with Deuteronomy. We could assume a posture of judgment. There are parts of the Law that feel out of date, out of character with a God of love, and even downright immoral by our own contemporary standards. It’s tempting to read as if we know better. It’s tempting to read the Law from a safe distance and to be selective about which parts we allow to pierce our consciences. Reading with the assumption that everything here is for our good always can help us engage the parts that don’t feel like they are for our good or anyone else’s. More on that in the weeks to come, I’m sure.
Assuming the Right Point of View (“You”)
If assuming the right posture ensures we have the right motivation for reading, then assuming the right point of view as we read is crucial for interpretation.
The most interesting part of these chapters to me is the audience Moses addresses. He addresses them a bunch of times in the second person as “you.” Who is included in the term you, though, is less obvious than it may seem at first.
Sometimes you refers narrowly to the generation of Israelites who were children (under 20) at the time of the Exodus. They did not experience God’s judgment because they were too young to know good from evil (Deuteronomy 1:39). God did miraculous things “before your eyes” so they would have reason to believe “there is no other besides him” (Deuteronomy 4:34-35). For these forty years, they have “held fast to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 4:4). Now they are the heads of tribes, officers, and elders of the nation (Deuteronomy 29:10). In this sense, the you to whom Moses speaks is distinct from the previous, unfaithful generation.
Sometimes, though, you includes the previous, faithless generation. When Moses summarizes the nation’s history from the Exodus to the present, he doesn’t say, “Your parents would not go up into the land” or “your parents murmured in their tents” or “your parents did not believe the LORD your God.” Remarkably, Moses attributes those unfaithful actions to the faithful generation. He says, “you would not go up” and “you murmured in your tents” and “you did not believe the LORD your God” (Deuteronomy 1:26, 27, 32). As a matter of historical fact, that’s not true. Moses’s audience didn’t do those things. The people who did those things are dead (Deuteronomy 2:14, 16). Is Moses a confused old man? I don’t think so.
Moses is making it impossible for this generation to dissociate from the sins of their parents. Even if this generation’s moral balance sheet is positive, they’ve had to pay the interest on their parents’ moral debts. Sure, they survived the desert; but they spent forty years there. Even if they are not guilty of their parents’ sins, they remain affected by them. And they carry the accounting of them forward into their own history. They have already, in their own lifetime, experienced both the blessings of obedience and the consequences of disobedience.
Moses here is promoting a sort of collective identity that is hard for those of us in the modern West to understand or accept. On the one hand, God has dealt with this generation according to their own faithfulness. On the other hand, Moeses wants them to engage the Law as though that history of unfaithfulness is their history and not someone else’s. He wants them to engage the Law as if they have broken it at some point in the past and are capable of breaking it again.
Finally, sometimes you includes everyone who reads this book! In the same way that the you in Deuteronomy stretches backward to include the previous generation, it also stretches forward to include future generations. Near the end of the book, Moses will say that this covenant is not only valid for the present generation but includes “whoever is not here with us today” (Deuteronomy 29:15). Of course he has future generations of Israelites in mind. But as people who have this book as part of our Holy Scriptures, he’s talking to us too.
Which is all to say that Moses doesn’t want us to approach Deuteronomy or the history it records or the obedience it demands from an objective point of view. He wants us to receive it from a posture of gratitude (as a gift for our good). And he wants us to read it from a particular point of view: as if we refused God’s grace in the wilderness after seeing him work miracles in Egypt. As if we saw God deliver kings Sihon and Og into our hands—our hands!—without any seasoned “men of war” to fight for us (Deuteronomy 2:26-3:17). Later in the book, we’ll be asked to read as if we had been slaves (Deuteronomy 6:21) and migrants (Deuteronomy 10:19). The reason for this is because reading from the point of view of lawbreakers, slaves, and migrants produces the pathos necessary for obedience. Deuteronomy is not a dead law for a dead people. It remains “living and active” and sharp enough to excise the “thoughts and intentions of the heart,” if we read it from the right posture and point of view (Hebrews 4:12).
At the very least, that’s how I’m experiencing it. If you’re reading along too, I’d love to hear your thoughts.