Whole-Body Discipleship in Deuteronomy

Some tardy reflections on the rhythms of grace in a book about the Law

In what can only be described now as a spasm of uncharacteristic optimism, I made grand plans back in January to write regularly as I read through Deuteronomy. Here it is March. I finished reading Deuteronomy some weeks ago. I’ve written exactly once. 

So much for grand plans.

The thing is, I’ve got all these notes jotted down here and there. Some of them may be worth brushing up and sharing, though I admit I’m not always the best judge of which ones you will find interesting and which ones you won’t. It’s a risk we’ll have to take, as my new plan is to brush up some of these notes and share them here. Don’t worry: this is a small plan. I’ve learned my lesson.

Here goes: 

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A major concern in the book of Deuteronomy is remembering. Moses exhorts the people to remember something—God’s mighty acts in history, their own past lives as slaves in Egypt, the covenant, the commandments, and more—at least 15 times. He warns them of the danger of forgetting another 10 times. Moses worries the people will forget the wondrous deeds they witnessed or the covenant they share with God or even God himself. 

Remembering isn’t simply a matter of retaining information in your head. Remembering affects how we understand our very identity. It affects our ethics. In Deuteronomy, the goal is that remembering will produce a motivation for righteous living, prompting generosity and justice. Remembering begets faithfulness. Forgetting has the opposite effects. Forgetting results in unrighteousness, anxiousness, and injustice. Forgetting begets idolatry. 

Deuteronomy doesn’t use the word “discipleship.” But I think it’s fair to say that remembering—and the rhythms and practices that facilitate remembering—form the core of Deuteronomy’s vision of discipleship. All the above being the case, Deuteronomy prescribes a set of rhythms and routines that promote what we might call whole-body remembering—the kind that leads to demonstrable faithfulness in real life. Those rhythms and routines include:

• Public reading of the Law (Deut 31:10-12)

• Discussing the Law everyday in mundane circumstances (Deut 6:7) 

• Rehearsing the nation’s experiences with God (Deut 1-4, 15-16) 

• Eating and joyful festivities (Deut 5:12-15; 15-16)

• Doing the Law (Deut 8:11; Exodus 12)

Public reading of the Law

Once every seven years, the people were expected to gather to hear the law read aloud in its entirety (Deut 31:10-11). It’s not clear to me if the average Israelite would hear the whole Law more frequently than once every seven years. Surely they did. What is clear is that private, personal Bible reading was impossible. Only the priests and king had their own copies (17:18-19). So when an Israelite heard the contents of the Law, however often, they heard it in public. That means everyone, regardless of status or income or age or gender, heard the requirements of the Law in each other’s presence. One’s neighbor became one’s witness to hold them accountable.

We could use more of that, in my opinion. 

It’s worth noting that reading the Law was a less prominent feature of Israel’s discipleship than reading Scripture is for Christians today. For us, private daily Bible reading is the irreducible core of faithfulness; everything else is sort of extra. This way of doing it simply wasn’t possible for the Israelites. (It wasn’t possible for most Christians in most places for most of time, until the invention of moveable type.) The lion's share of discipleship was done by other means.

Discussing the Law Everyday in Mundane Circumstances

Even though it was impossible (technologically speaking) for the Israelites to read or hear the text of the Law on a daily basis, they were nevertheless encouraged to talk about the Law everyday. It would be easy for us to contort this expectation of daily conversation into something like a modern quiet time, but Deuteronomy won’t let us. Because Deuteronomy doesn’t imagine these conversations about the Law happening in a still moment free of other distractions. It imagines them happening in the mundane details of ordinary life. 

Deuteronomy 6:6-7 says parents should rehearse the Law “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.” That is, when you repair a leaky roof, talk about why it’s important to build a parapet so your visitors are safe in your home. When you buy or sell produce in the market, talk about how Israel’s just God desires honest scales. When you gather your harvest, talk about how you leave some fruit behind for the stranger, the orphan, and the widow to collect.

To paint with a broad brush, it seems like American evangelical discipleship puts the emphasis not on rehearsing God’s good law in mundane circumstances but on having the right position on abstract social issues. Instead of reminding ourselves and our neighbors about God’s desire for justice day-to-day, we appeal to worldview philosophy to distinguish “biblical justice” from “worldly justice” and then leave the actual work of justice undone. To take a random example. While there’s almost certainly a place for our approach, it tends to keep faithfulness in our heads and fails to work it down into our bones. Daily discussion in quotidian activities helps drive the Law into the bones. As does the next item:

Rehearsing the nation’s experiences with God

Again and again the people are invited to rehearse the story of their experiences with God. Those experiences include major historical events, such as their parents’ deliverance from Egyptian slavery. They include long-distant events, such as creation and the institution of the Sabbath. Indeed, the primary mode of communication in Deuteronomy is storytelling, which is a form of rehearsal. There are lots of laws and commandments, to be sure. But even these are embedded in stories and case studies so that the commandments function almost like scripts. “When you encounter a scenario like the following,” the text seems to say, “these are your stage directions: say these things, behave in these ways, prioritize these outcomes.” And very often a person’s script is based on God’s behavior in the past. You are to show kindness to the poor, the widow, the stranger because God showed kindness to you when you were a stranger. 

Reflection on your experience of God’s kindness in the past prepares you to show kindness in the future, much the same way visualizing your golf swing helps you in your next round on the course. The more you reflect on what God has done, the more likely you’ll be to act the right way when the time comes.

In addition to retelling the past—and perhaps more important—the people reenact those experiences. They remember God’s creation and rest (Exodus 20:11), as well as his deliverance from Egypt (Deut 5:15) every seven days, on the Sabbath. Seven times per year, they observe festivals that reenact other important moments in their history. Every 49 years (seven sevens) they observe a year of Jubilee, which works like a historical reset button. This rhythm of sevens becomes a Sabbath logic that reminds the people over and over that God is known by what he does. It gives them hope that the God who saved yesterday will be mighty to save today and tomorrow.

This is, perhaps, the most challenging ancient practice to incorporate in modern times. We order our lives around the same major events as everyone else: back-to-school, election cycles, tax season, birthdays, national holidays, gender reveal parties, etc. It’s hard to maintain a sacred identity when the majority of our rhythms reenact “secular” events.

Eating and Joyful Celebrations

The focal point of many of Israel’s celebrations is food. Even Israel's tithes and offerings are envisioned as meals before the Lord. This is because food is a blessing you can taste—the sunshine and rain God sends on the righteous and unrighteous alike takes shape as fruit and flocks. Eating the fruit of your labor in the presence of God reminds you that God is the Founder of the Feast. And feasts are inherently joyful affairs. Deuteronomy doesn’t imagine sad and dour obedience. More than a dozen times, these festivities are described with words like "rejoice" and “joyful.” It’s hard to be sad when you have a full tummy and good company. 

Festivities do more than instruct. They are where strangers become kin. Heads of household were reminded to include at their Sabbath and Passover celebrations the orphan and widow and sojourner who is “at your gate.” That means their celebrations were to include not only the people they liked the best, but whomever was nearby and had nowhere to go. If I'm reading it right, the goal was that over time, as they are included into the worship and celebration of a family, the orphan and widow and stranger cease to be those things. Through eating together they become kin. 

Doing the Law

The purpose of the Law is that Israel will know how to walk in God’s way while they live in God’s land. So in a sense, "doing" the Law is an outcome. But doing the Law is also a means by which the Law moves out of your head to be imprinted "on your heart." Doing habituates the Law. 

It’s tempting to think that we will treat things as sacred after we consider them sacred. But it actually works the other way around. We regard things as sacred after or because we treat them as sacred. The Sabbath becomes a holy day by being kept. The orphan, the widow, and the stranger become kin after or because we treat them as kin. God’s Law is beautiful and good to us when we treat it as beautiful and good. 

American evangelicals are often so paranoid about legalism that we want our obedience to flow spontaneously from a heart that only wants to be obedient. Behind this concern is some misunderstanding about the relationship of grace and works. Also behind it is a cultural idol of authenticity. But the heart, like any other muscle, has to be exercised. If we want to want to be obedient, we have to be obedient first.

This sort of whole-body remembering is a lot of work. It affects every aspect of life, every day. But that’s where the appeal lies, too. A part of me longs to be swept up in an all-encompassing community of faith like this—one that activates my whole self in the journey to faithfulness.