Deuteronomy Part1 (Unlocking the Bible Series)
David Pawson
Have you ever get the opportunity to go to a synagogue, look around to a very large covered at one side usually covered by a curtain or veiled, this is tiny model of one, and if you are allowed to and you open the covered, you’ll find inside some scrolls wrapped up usually and beautifully embroidered clasp. And these little scrolls will be the Law of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, what the Jews call the Torah or the instruction. And here are I got it all beautifully printed out, see Hebrew tiny, tiny print.
But each scroll was named after the first words of the scroll because that is how they identify them. When they pull the scroll out of the covered, they would unroll just the first little bit and see which one it was. So that for example the book of Genesis or what we call Genesis is call ‘In the Beginning’. And the book of Deuteronomy is simply called "the words" because the first phrase in the Hebrew is these are the words and the first noun is words. So it was called the Words. That is what the rabbi will call it "the word" but we call it the book of Deuteronomy.
When the Hebrew Old testament was translated into Greek, they have to think of a new name for this book. They made up this name "Deuteronomy" from two words in the Greek language. one is the word "Deutro" which means ‘second’ and the other word is the word "Nomos" which means ‘law’ so that from then on this fifth book in the Bible was called Deuteronomy, "second law". If you’ll read it through then you will notice that the first most striking things about it is the Ten Commandments appear in this book as well as the book of Exodus. The law comes twice in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5. You've got the Ten Commandments and that is where the book gets its name, "the second law".
Now why should these Ten Commandments be repeated a second time? And not just the ten but there are all together 613 laws of Moses which he gave to the people of Israel. And they are repeated in Exodus and Deuteronomy. Why? Well the clue lies in the book of Numbers which tells you that the book of Deuteronomy was written 40 years after the book of Exodus and during that those 40 years an entire generation died. All the adults who came out of Egypt and cross the Red sea and come to Sinai and heard the Ten Commandments the first time were all dead. Because they broke that law so quickly that God said, “You will never get into the Promised Land. You got to wander around the wilderness for the next 40 years until all of you were dead”. And so an entire generation has disappeared and the new generation were only kids, they were only little children when they crossed the Red Sea and when they camped on Sinai. Many of them would hardly even remember what happened when their fathers came out of Egypt.
◑And so now a new generation has to hear this law all over again.
A new generation must enter into the covenant with God and this happens to us too. Our children must enter into the covenant we have with God for themselves because God has no grandchildren and you can’t inherit these things, you have to enter into God’s promises yourself. Your parents may have been in the covenant, you grandparent, you may trace the family tree right back but that does not bring you in. And so Moses had to go through it all again.
▶And There were actually three people and only three still surviving from the Exodus days, Joshua, Caleb and Moses himself. Joshua was now 80 and Moses was a 120. So he is facing the need of an entirely new generation who did not make that covenant with God, who did not say, “We will”. It was a marriage service at Sinai and they said, “We will” to God. God told them the conditions under which He wanted them to live, how He wanted them to live and they said "we will" but they did not. So they forfeited the whole thing.
Now there is another crisis too. It is not only the next generation but they have moved in spaces all this time and they are now camped on the east side of the Jordan River. And so there are about to go into the Promised Land and this is a second crisis because they have been in their own in the wilderness now they are facing a land that is already occupied by enemies and this produces the crises. And above all Moses is not going to go in with them. He also has forfeited his right to go in, he is a 120 and he knows he has got one more week to live. God assured him that that he is going to die in just another week. He got a one week left with this new generation of the children of the people he brought out of Egypt and he is going to tell them the whole thing all over again.
Furthermore they are going to see the miracle of parting the water all over again. Not the Red sea this time but the Jordan. It is almost as God is saying, “I’m going to start all over again. I’m going to have to show you my mighty hand in dividing a river so that you can go into the land and this is how you are to live once you get in.”
I have done a little a very rough sketch to show the kind of geographical situation. That greenly blue is the Jordan River surrounded by trees, that is called the Jordan jungle where the lions and the bears lived in the Old Testament time. And the end of river Jordan is Dead Sea. This valley here is the deepest crack in the earth’s surface it goes right down through Africa, the Great Riff Valley, but it starts in the Promised Land. And this part of it is about thousand feet below sea level, you can actually get a pilot license if you can borrow a plane and you fly down there. (You can fly under the sea level.) But here it is the deep crack under mountain either side. on this side the mountains of Moab, and mount Nebo here is where Moses will die and he will die sitting against a rock sitting on top of Mount Nebo looking across this valley to the hills of the Promised Land but he would never get in. Here is the camp of Israel when Deuteronomy was spoken and written with the tabernacle in the middle. And just over the river from the first city that they have to conquer, Jericho. That's in the valley too. Further up in the hills is Ai, Shiloh and Bethel. But on this side of the hills of Judea they will only see wilderness, they’ll only see desert because it is in the rain shadow and it is really is barren and empty. All the rain drops on the other side of the hills on the Mediterranean side, and that (seashore area) is green. You can just see a little bit of green on the top. But from there down to Jericho is just barren wilderness and desert.
There is a valley going up toward Jerusalem. I have walked right down to Jerusalem down to Jericho one day through that valley. It was a weird, so quiet, deserted. At the top of the valley is mount Olive and Jerusalem is just in the other side. The other thing that you have to notice is just on the horizon further north are two picks, Mount Ebal on the north side and Mount Garizim on the south side. They are going to have to gather at those two sides of the mountains and repeat the covenant of God. And Moses tells them when they get in they must stand, the people must stand between the two mountains and then some must stand on one of the other and must shout the blessings and the curses of the covenant.
▶Now the significance of this is that God brought them through the Red Sea first and then made the covenant at Sinai. He did not tell them how to live till he saved them, he redeemed first and set them free first and then He said, “Now this is how you are going to live.” That is the pattern of the whole Bible. God first of all showed us His grace by saving us and then He says, “Now in gratitude this is how you should be living.” So this new generation, we are going to see God rescued them and take them through the Jordan which in that time of year was flood and impossible but what would happen would be that the Meandering river in flood further up the valley would undercut a bank, and the bank will fall in and temporary dam the river for few hours. That is how God would do it. And to get them across that is what God must have done further up that river so the bank caved in and dam the river for a few hour to enable them to get across. Having seen that miracle they must then go on to their equivalent to Mount Sinai and repeat the blessings and the curses of the law. Once again we see that God acts first and then He tells us how to respond to what he has done for us.
So it was like a kind of repeat performance of the end of 40 years for an entirely new generation. Do you follow me? That is the background of Deuteronomy and it is written and it is spoken in this camp here, this side of the Jordan while Moses is still alive and still with them.
▶There are certain phrases in the book of Deuteronomy which occur nearly 40 times. one is ‘the land the Lord your God gives you’. Time and time again they are reminded that this land they are going into is a gift, an undeserved gift because the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness there of it.
If you going to London to the royal exchange building, you’ll find that written in stone above the Royal Exchange, “The earth is the Lords and the fullness there are”. When we argue about who owns this spit of land, we should start by saying God does and HE gives it to whom He ever wishes. Paul said this is Acts 17 on mount Helene said, “It is God who decides how much space and how much time a nation has on this earth. The earth is the Lord’s and it is His right to give it to anyone He chooses”. And this is one phrase all the way through Deuteronomy, “The land your God gives you”.
But the other phrase that occurs in the same number of time says, “Go in and possess the land”. There is a profound lesson here, “Everything you receive from God is a gift but you got to go and take it otherwise you won’t get it”.
Years ago I was preaching and I put a bar of chocolate on the pulpit. I said that is for the first child in the congregation who comes up and get it. From then on the children aren’t listening to me till their eyes are glued to this bar of chocolate and none of them moved. And finally a chicky little boy run up and he grabbed the chocolate and he tore the paper off the floor in front of the pulpit and he was chewing at it and he came out of the pulpit steps and every other child hated him. They were so jealous of him. They were angry with him but they could have had it. You see salvation is a free gift from God but you have to go and possess it. There is cooperation in here. God does not force it on you. He says, “Here is the land I’m giving to you now go and take it”. In possessing it is going to be a costly thing, you have to fight for it. You have to struggle for it.
So even though God gives everything to us, we have to make an effort to take it. That is how both the Old and New Testament work and we need to emphasize both. God freely offers you this but you have to reach out and grab it. It is yours if you’ll take it freely. And that is the lesson I was trying to make with that bar of chocolate.
◑ Now what is this land they are going to keep? That is a very important question. If you read Deuteronomy carefully you come to two conclusions. Number one is what I call unconditional ownership and number two I call conditional occupation. That is still the case even for Israel today and we need to hold both those two’s.
Unconditional ownership, God says, “I’m going to give it to you forever”. But that does not mean you can occupy it forever, the occupation of it is conditional. Now if you got that that is a very important distinction. It is yours unconditionally, you can own it forever but whether you can live in it and enjoy it depends on how you live in it. And we are going to see that Deuteronomy message is very simple, “You can keep the land as long as you keep my law but if you don’t keep it, even though you own it, I have given it to you, you will not be free to live in it and enjoy it”.
Do you understand the difference then between unconditional ownership and conditional occupation? The land could be taken from them even though they own it forever because they are not living right in it. That is a very important distinction which the prophets of the Old Testament is constantly reminding them about. The prophets say you own this land but you are not going to be able to go in and enjoy it if you are going on living this way. The covenant linked the land and the law of God. And still to this day, the promises of God are conditional. They are gifts to you but how you live in those promises determines whether you can enjoy them.
◑"Suzerain Treaty"
Now one of the most interesting things about Deuteronomy is this, I hope you are not put off by all those big words. I'm sure that’s the first word you have never heard of. It is in the oxford English dictionary and it is a well-known term from ancient history. Whenever a king expanded his empire and took in other countries he would make a treaty with the countries conquered and the treaty was called the "Suzerain Treaty". (If you have ever been to the island of Sark of the Channel Island, you will know that the family that governs that island is called Suzerain. same word) And the Suzerain treaty was made between a king and the country that was now become subject to him. And roughly speaking the treaty would be an agreement that if they behave themselves he will protect them and provide for them. But they misbehave and did not live the way he wanted them to then he would punish them. And there are many, many examples that archeology had uncovered from ancient world, particularly Egypt. When Egypt conquered another country the pharaoh would make a Suzerain treaty with them, an agreement that they could still live with relative in autonomy and freedom but they have to live his way. And there is a pattern in these treaties which is very clear. At the end of these is when you look at this treaties from the ancient world, a king who now have a new people subject to him is exactly the same outline as the book of Deuteronomy.
Moses when he was trained in the University of Egypt must have seen some of these treaties and studied them. And here is Moses now presenting the covenant of the people of Israel in the form of a treaty. As much say the Lord is now your king and you are now subject to Him and this is the treaty He is making with you, this is how you are to behave. And the pattern of the treaty in the olden days was exactly as we have it at the board here.
-There was a bit of a preamble. 1:1~5
This is a treaty between pharaoh and between the Hittites or whatever.
-And then there would be historical prologues that summarize on how this king and this people came to be related to each other. 1:6~4:49
-And after that little bit of history, there would be a declaration of the basic principles on which the whole treaty would be based. 5:~11:
-After that they will be detail laws(legislation) on the treaty as to how they are to behave. 12:~26:
-And then came the sanctions, meaning rewards or punishments. What the king would do if they did behave properly and what they would do if they did not. 27:~28:
-And then after that they usually had a invocation of witness to sign it but they would call on the gods to witness the treaty. Usually it is divine witnesses that were called. They would call on the gods on their ceremony to witness the treaty. 31:~34:
-And finally, called for provision for continuity, what would happen if the king died and a successor would be named to whom the people would still be subject. 31:~34:
-Finally all that would be settled in the ceremony where all this things should be written down and signed and agreed between the king and his new subjects.
▶Now isn’t that fascinating that all this treaties they dug out are exactly the same shape as Deuteronomy so that Moses with his university training in Egyptian history was presenting the covenant in the form that would be easily recognized by these people. They would know God is now our king, this is how now we are to behave and if we behave ourselves according to His laws everything will be fine which raises the interesting question .“What would God do if they did not behave themselves”, the sanctions. By the way the basic principles in Deuteronomy are the Ten Commandments’ then we have a whole lot of detail legislations. But what about this sanctions? What would God do to them if they did not live the way He told them to?
There were two things that God would do. one is natural on the other human. The natural sanction was if you do not behave properly you will get no rain. Now the land they were going in to was between the Mediterranean Sea and the Arabian Desert and God controls the weather. And when the wind came from the west it would pick up rain from the Mediterranean and drop it on the Promised land but if the wind came from the east it will be the dry hot desert wind which even today is called the Hamseen and when the Hamseen comes it just dries up everything and turns the land into a desert. God said now that is one of my sanctions that will be that first one I will use, when you are misbehaving, no rain.
If you remember during Elijah’s days it did not rain for 3 and a half year because things were getting bad. That was the simple way that God rewarding them and punishing them. But if that failed He would move on to something a little fiercer, he would use human agents to attack them. And what some of you may not have noticed in your Bible is this that when God brought the children of Israel across the Jordan into the Promised Land from the east. He brought another people at the same time in to the same land from the west and he brought them from the Island of Crete and they were called Philistines. Read your Bible carefully.
God says through Amos in Amos chapter 9, did I not bring you out of Egypt and the Philistines from Crete? And so God actually brought a people who have proved to be the greatest enemy of Israel into the same land at the same time. But he settled Israel in the mountains or the hills and He settles the Philistines down in the coastal plain. What is now the Gaza strip, an incidentally Palestinian claimed to be descendant of Philistines.
And so God brought two people into the same place and He said if you behave yourself, there will be peace but if you misbehave I will tell the Philistines to come and deal with you. It is as simple as that and it is all there in the Old Testament.
Now that is a strange thing. Some of you might be quite surprised to know that God brought two nations to live in the same little corridor and one would punish the other.
Well there would be immediate proof that God could bring enemies against people living on the Promised Land because He was going to have to drive out people already living there. The Promised Land was unoccupied, it was not empty. It is full of all kinds of people, mainly Amorites and Canaanites and they were already there and God told the Israelites, “You are going to have to drive them out to possess the land.
◑Canaanites were slaughtered, why?
▶Now it is at this point that we are going to deal with an objection to the Bible which is one of the common objections. Somebody recently said that the church should ditch the Old Testaments because it presents too many problems for Christians. That is we would ditch the Old Testament and stick to the new, most peoples objections to our faith would go because most people’s objections to what we believe center on the Old Testament. You don’t so believe the world is made in six days, do you? You know what that means? That is what people talk. As soon as you say you are Christian they go straight to a problem in the Old Testament and one of the most common problems they go to is this, “How can you believe in a God who told a Jews to slaughter all the people living in the Promised Land?” It is immoral, it is unjust, it is not right, it is not fair. And this is a very real problem too many people God brought the Jews in and He said go in kill everybody in it. Clear the mouth and take their land. Now is that a lovingly Heavenly Father? But there is a answer to it and we have to tell the people the real answer. The answer is the people living in that land deserve that. And God have told Abraham an amazing thing. We will read about it in Genesis chapter 15. God said, “Abraham I am going to keep your family and their descendants in a foreign country for 400 years until the wickedness of the Amorites is complete”.
Now they got their moral answer to the immoral charge that people make against God. It was God waited 400 years for the people to get so bad that they did not deserve to live there and that they did not deserve to live anywhere is His earth. Let us put it this way, God’s earth is for good people and He’s holy land is for holy people. That is the message of the Bible and sooner or later God does not allow wicked people to go on occupying His earth. He was very patient with them. He waited a long, long, time. But He had to wait until the wickedness of the Amorites was total and only then did He say, “now I can bring you out of Egypt and tell you to go on kill them off”.
An archeology has revealed just how wicked they had become, and the more you know about the Amorite society before the Jews got in there, the more you’ll realize they did not deserve to live, that it wasn’t safe to allow them to live. If I just tell you that we now know that sexually transmitted diseases were everywhere in Canaan when they went in. It wasn’t safe.
Can you imagine going to live in a land where everybody has Aids? That is the kind of situation that they were facing us they look across Jordan.
In fact let me read just a verse or two from Deuteronomy to you. "After the Lord your God has driven them out before you, do not say to yourself the Lord has brought me here to take possession of this land because of my righteousness. No it is on account of this wickedness of this nation that the Lord is going to drive them out before you. It is not because of your righteousness or your integrity that you are going into take possession of that land? but on account of the wickedness of this nation. The Lord your God will use you to drag them out."
You know Winston Churchill in world war one became a lord of the admiralty. That night he was very pleased with himself and he got rather bigamous thinking, I’m going to drive the Germans out. And he had the same feeling in the 2nd World War but it is interesting he stayed that night in a large country house in England and there was a Gideon Bible or a Bible by his bedside and he picked it up and he read the verses I just read to you. God said Winston Churchill. You are not going to drive the Germans out because you are better than them but because they are wicked. That change Winston’s churches attitude, it humbled him and it put him in his place and he never forgot that verse in Deuteronomy that he read in the Bible.
The Israelites foretold, you have to slaughter them, you have to drive them out and there again the question is why did not God destroys them first by Himself, why did He made them do it. The answer is very clear because it was the way He taught them that others will and do it to you if you live like they do. And what you have done to them, others will do to you. ★
◑ Mirror Image
Now let us just go back from that two. You realized therefore that when you are going to read Deuteronomy you are reading a kind of mirror image of life in Canaan. Everything that God tells them not to do is what is actually happening. So when you read Deuteronomy carefully you can build up a picture of what was actually happening in the land before they got into it and I can summarize it in three words.
-Number one is immorality. There is so much in Deuteronomy about sexual immorality because that was exactly what is going on in the country they are entering. There was fornication, there was adultery, there was incest, there was homosexuality, there was transvestism, people changing clothes, there was beggaries, sex with animals, there was widespread divorce in a marriage and I have said already, diseases were everywhere. Now Deuteronomy is telling them not to get involved in that kind of thing.
-The second this I want to say is injustice, we know that the rich are getting richer and the poor is getting poorer. Pride and greed were there, selfishness was there, exploitation. And who were suffering? The blind and the deaf, people who could not get there share of wealth. And particularly widows and orphans were being very badly treated. Every mother is out for number one and God said you are not to do that. You are to look after of the deaf and the blind, you are actually after to look at the widow and the deaf and the blind. You are the look after on the widow and the orphan.
-And the third thing of the characteristic of Canaan was idolatry, occultism, superstition, astrology, spiritism, necromancer, this is consulting the dead and above all fertility codes. Horrible things that worship mother earth, mother nature and tried to produce fertility by sexual act of worship in the pagan temples in that land. There were male and female prostitutes and when you want to worship you went and you have sex with one of them. No wonder people crowded the temples. And all of the country where what the Bible calls Asherah poles which were simply phallic symbols standing out. And there is middle of basic stone an 8 foot high marble male penis and this was everywhere in Canaan. And so occultation, superstition, spiritism was ripe.
▶Now all this in Deuteronomy have defiled the land in God’s sight. It was His land and it is now totally corrupt. It was defiled, it was debased, it was disgraced and God could not let it go on.
When I read all this I just find myself thinking, “My, our whole world is going like this. What will God do?"
Well that is really the background to Deuteronomy. Don’t you go in and live like that or I’ll send somebody else to slaughter you as I am sending you to slaughter them. It is not because you are good and they are bad that I am doing this.
◑Now let us look at Moses for a moment.
He is facing a new generation. Their parents have failed. They forfeited the land promised to their forefathers. Now Moses looked at to their children then think, will they survive? Will they make it? Will they live right? Going in and facing all this? It is bad enough in the wilderness where temptations were very few and far between but now they are going in among it all. Will they clean it up? Will they be ruthless in get rid of all this or will they compromise? Moses now he could not go in with them, he is going to die in just a week and he is afraid for them. In one hand there is hard fighting to be done. It will be a struggle to get in and possess the land. on the other hand there will be strong temptations to overcome. Moses had led them all this way and now he’s got to say goodbye to them.
So in the last week of his life he spoke three times to them. The whole of Deuteronomy is made up of three long speeches which must have taken the best part of the day to give. But it is an interesting thing. The style of Deuteronomy is both spoken and written. The spoken style comes across because it’s personal and it is warm. Ih you read it, you got to read it aloud to get the flavor of it and when you read it aloud you realize Moses spoke all this to them. He is appealing to them. He is speaking like a father to his child, like a dying father to his children. Now sons remember when I’m gone… that is how he talks and it is very warm and expressive and emotional and yet it is very well written to.
Mow I don’t think it is fanciful to think that during the last six days of the last week of Moses life, he spoke and wrote alternate days. on day one, three, and five he gave one of these discourses but on day two and six he wrote it down. He probably spoke from note because he was well educated and could write and read so I believe we are looking at 3 days which is alternated with 3 days. Three days of speaking alternating with three days of writing. He would give a daylong speech or perhaps whole morning and he goes back to his tent and he would write it all for them and he would give his whole account of speeches to the priests and said keep that as long as the Arc of the Covenant. You must never forget what I said, you must not alter one word of it but you must keep it and read it every 7 years to the people of Israel.
And that is how the book of Deuteronomy came. We’ve got these 3 addresses he gave in the camp far side of the Jordan.
-The first is all about the past, looking back over the 40 years and beyond, looking back over what their father’s did.
-And then he comes into the present and he gave them the law all over again. He gave them first the basic principles in chapters 4-11 and then he spells it out in detail in chapters 12-26.
-Then the third and last time he spoke to them just before he died he provided for their future. Among other things he says, “I’ve appointed Joshua to take over for me. I brought you out of Egypt, Joshua will take you in. When you got in you must go to mount Ebal and mount Garizim and recite this law and take it upon yourself but God will bring you in.”
Well now that is the outline of Deuteronomy, it is a very simple outline. Each address has two parts, I have tried to indicate that by the subheadings here and we are going to go through these parts one by one. I just introduced you to the first where he looks back to the days where they came out of Egypt their fathers their parents. Then he looks back to what went wrong. He says, “Your fathers failed, don’t you fail”. In fact...
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