Where Are We?

These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on this side of the Jordan in the wilderness... It is eleven days' journey from Horeb by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. Now it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spoke to the children of Israel according to all that the Lord had given him as commandments to them, after he had killed Sihon king of the Amorites, who dwelt in Heshbon, and Og king of Bashan, who dwelt at Ashtaroth in Edrei. (Deuteronomy 1:1–4)

When the culture says you can't trust an ancient book, where exactly does that leave us—and where does Deuteronomy place us before God?

A Theo-Philosophical Approach to Scripture

As we begin a study in Deuteronomy, I want to offer an introductory caveat. Those who have been part of this church for any length of time know I tend to approach Scripture from what I'd call a theo-philosophical point of view. I come at the text with a strong theological basis, but I also believe those theological understandings should frame how we understand reality, see the world, and live within it. Theology should change our philosophy.

I teach this way because I'm convinced the Bible gives us the deepest and most important truths for life. Peter writes in 2 Peter 1:3 that God's divine power has given us everything that pertains to life and godliness through the knowledge of God. Everything we need to live this life in a godly, full way is contained in the Scriptures. And since these are deep truths, it takes much for us to wrap our minds around what the text says, what it means for us, and how it should change the way we think.

The Tension of Teaching in Our Culture

I feel a tension every time I prepare to teach, because we live in a culture constantly telling us that the things contained in Scripture are irrelevant for 21st-century thinking. Many would say people are uninterested in deeper things, that we lack the attention span to grapple with higher-level thought. As a result, over the last four decades most churches in the West have changed dramatically. The average sermon today is about twenty minutes, and we're told church needs to be more highly produced, more entertaining, and non-confrontational.

There's a temptation to aim at that target, but I can't do it. If you want to compete with the entertaining structures of our culture, you're going to lose. A couple of years ago my wife and I and some friends went to a Coldplay concert, and I thought, if the church wants to compete with this, forget it. Our goal is not to compete. Our aim is to make it possible for people to come into contact with the transcendent God who has revealed Himself in Scripture.

Interestingly, in the same forty years the church has lowered the bar, we've seen a steady decline in attendance—especially among those younger than me. There's a connection. But I don't believe people are dumb or lacking attention. People binge-watch forty hours of deeply intricate stories. The problem is that what's put forth as media is often dumb and numbing; people engage with it to escape rather than do the hard work of facing the realities of life that the Bible addresses.

Engaging the Text Yourself

We're now going into areas of Scripture that many churches never deal with. Most churches in the West spend nearly all their time in the New Testament. We're going to wrestle with challenging concepts. We may not be the most highly produced church—we're not Saturday Night Live or Hillsong—but we're trying to make it possible to lay hold of the reality of who God is.

It's always been my conviction that what we do together on Sunday is important, but it's more important for you to personally engage with the Bible on a daily basis. Many don't because they feel they can't understand it. I understand that. But we believe all Scripture is inspired by God and useful, and the same Spirit who inspired holy men of God to write these things can give us clarity, wisdom, and understanding as we study them. I know this from experience: for the better part of my first fifteen years of ministry I had no formal education, yet God by His Spirit enabled me to grasp and teach the Scriptures.

So sit with the text and ask, "God, would You give me wisdom and insight?" We've made Bible journals for Deuteronomy available—the text on one side, space for notes on the other. My encouragement is that you spend time in Deuteronomy prayerfully throughout the week, writing down thoughts and questions, asking what God might be speaking through the text.

What Deuteronomy Is

We practice systematic expositional Bible teaching here—verse by verse, chapter by chapter, book by book, letting the Scriptures set the agenda. Over the last twelve years we went systematically through the New Testament, using the book of Acts as our chronological guide, finishing last September with 1, 2, and 3 John. Now I wanted to turn to the Old Testament, and I kept coming back to Deuteronomy as a roadmap.

The name itself tells us what the book is. Deuteronomy is a compound of two Greek words meaning "second law." In German, where I once taught, they simply call it the fifth book of Moses. But why "second law"? In Exodus, God called Moses to bring Israel out of slavery in Egypt. They came to Mount Sinai—also called Horeb—and God gave Moses the law, which Moses preached to the people from Exodus 19 onward. That was the first giving of the law. This is the second giving, about forty years later.

That timeline shows up in the opening words. Verse 2 says it is "eleven days' journey from Horeb... to Kadesh Barnea." Then verse 3 says, "Now it came to pass in the fortieth year." The eleven-day journey took them forty years. Some of you have been on that path a while. Israel had wandered in the wilderness for forty years—the story of Numbers—and now they stand at the edge of the Promised Land, bordering blessing. Moses gives them the law again before he dies on Mount Nebo, looking across into the land he would not enter.

A Treaty Between God and Israel

Scholars tell us Deuteronomy is written in the exact format of a formal treaty from the mid-second millennium BC—roughly 3,400 years ago. It is an official document ratifying a formal relationship between the Lord God and Israel, a treaty written in what scholars call a suzerain-vassal treaty form. This matters for several reasons.

First, the very specific format indicates the time and place in which it was written. There were critical scholars, primarily out of 18th- and 19th-century Germany, known as higher critics, who argued these books weren't written by Moses or in his time. But the treaty format dates this book to about 3,400 years ago—precisely the era in which Moses is thought to have lived. That adds weight to the theory that Moses is the author.

Second, the format tells us something about the author. Moses was born a Hebrew during a time when Pharaoh, fearful of the Hebrews' growth, decreed that every male child be thrown into the Nile. Moses' mother placed him in an ark in the river, and by God's providence he was adopted into Pharaoh's household, raised there into his late thirties or early forties, and trained in all the wisdom of the Egyptians. He was politically trained in the ancient Near East, where he would have known the treaty formats of the day. We know these were the formats because archaeology has produced at least fifty actual treaties from that time following this same pattern.

Third, the format informs us about the relationship God designed to have with His people. This covenant gives insight into how God desires to relate to us—He wants a covenant relationship. Today the only covenant relationship we readily understand is marriage. Deuteronomy establishes this covenant between God and Israel and sets the stage for everything that follows in the Old Testament.

Why Deuteronomy First

This book sets up the rest of the Old Testament. Many people want to study the prophets—Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel, Ezekiel, Hosea, Malachi—but what the prophets are doing is applying the teaching of Moses in Deuteronomy. Isaiah, 2,700 years ago, looked at his world, saw the nation walking away from God, and warned, "If you don't repent, God is going to expel you from the land." Where did he get that? From Deuteronomy. God told Israel that obedience to His law brings blessing and disobedience brings curse and expulsion. The prophets simply applied this to their day, and when the people refused to change, exactly what God said would happen came to pass.

So Deuteronomy is a formal, official treaty—a covenant mediated by Moses about 3,400 years ago, just before Israel crossed into the land God promised their forefathers. Six hundred fifty years earlier, God called Abraham, promising to bless him, make him a great nation, and give him this land (Genesis 12, 15, 17). That promise passed to Isaac, to Jacob, and to Jacob's twelve sons, who became the twelve tribes. Now they stand at the border, and God lays out how He and His people will relate when they enter the land. Deuteronomy also establishes the importance and reason for the New Covenant—the New Testament.

Reason One: We Can Trust the Bible

So what does this 3,400-year-old story have to do with your life in the 21st century? At the very least, here is the first point: we have reason to trust the authenticity of the biblical message. This is important because many in our culture tell us we don't, which makes some of us uncomfortable sharing what we believe.

If you research Deuteronomy in January 2020, you'll likely start with Wikipedia. There, in the third paragraph, you'll read: "Virtually all modern scholars reject Deuteronomy's attribution to Moses," dating the book between the 7th and 5th centuries BC. Follow the footnote and you'll find it points to a PhD dissertation by a professor who doesn't even believe Jeremiah was a real historical person—a skeptic from the start.

I'd suggest that's editorializing, or fake news, whatever you'd like to call it. Yes, some scholars contest Mosaic authorship—but many others affirm strong support for a mid-second-millennium date around 1400 BC. You wouldn't know that from Wikipedia. So follow the references. Ask who is saying this and whether they have an agenda. We're being told not to trust the Bible by people who haven't trusted it for a long time, and many believers feel pressured to stay quiet—especially when their kids come home from college quoting a professor. The Bible will have little authority in your life if you don't think it's authentic, and that's exactly what we're witnessing in our day.

Reason Two: It Addresses Questions We Still Wrestle With

But it can be argued these events are factually based—so what does this book say to my life today? Point two: the biblical message addresses issues and answers questions we continue to wrestle with today.

This week I was listening to an audiobook on free will by an atheistic author who believes free will is illusory and that we live in a deterministic world. That worldview affects how you understand moral responsibility—and Deuteronomy deals heavily with moral responsibility, including a major theme we call the principle of retribution. The author writes, "I cannot hold you responsible for behaviors that you could not possibly control," arguing that with the same genes and circumstances you would do exactly what a Jeffrey Dahmer or a Manson did. Yet he still wants a justice system—how can you, if there's no moral responsibility?

Even that atheist, Sam Harris, has a theology, and it shapes how he lives. The point is, we have not progressed nearly as far as we like to think. Deuteronomy not only acknowledges the existence of evil; it addresses evil, sin, morality, holiness, justice, and retribution.

Reason Three: It Names Our Problem and God's Solution

Point three: the Bible identifies humanity's principal problem and provides God's perfect solution. As you prayerfully read the text, sit with commentaries, and ask your questions, you discover this. Spoiler alert: the principal problem is sin, and God's perfect solution is Jesus. Deuteronomy prepares us for that reality.

Reason Four: We Long for a Resolution

All thinking people will agree we face considerable problems in this world, and one of the biggest is suffering. Our problems fall into two categories: natural evils—fires, floods, earthquakes, tornadoes—and moral evils—theft, exploitation, murder, the things people do out of malevolence. We all see these, and here's the fascinating thing: we feel compelled to deal with them. We want to stop natural evils or at least ease the suffering they cause, and we're driven to confront moral evils. Even an atheist who denies free will is intensely concerned with morality.

Have you ever asked why we have that compulsion? Point four: we feel compelled to address the evils of this world because we desire and expect a resolution. This desire makes zero sense under evolutionary materialism. If we're just the highest animal, the product of random chance and mutation over billions of years, why this drive? When did you last see chimpanzees worried about other chimpanzees or trying to rescue a gazelle? Humans were created differently—in God's image—and there is something in us that remembers a world without suffering and longs for one.

This is the ultimate theo-philosophical worldview of the Christian. If pure natural selection is true, there shouldn't be the drive to rescue something as small as a baby bird fallen from the nest—the box, the towel, the heating pad, the syringe. Yet we feel compelled. People want to save the world, to fix climate change and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I understand the drive—but why do you have it? God planted it there, and the Bible addresses it. Under pure natural selection, you should look at another human suffering and say, "Nature selected them; might is right; eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die." These are two very different worldviews—one based on the Bible, the other on a supposed human rationality that flows from a fallen heart. We must judge these things according to Scripture.

Closing Prayer

Lord, I pray that You would give us wisdom as we think about these things. Give us a desire, each of us here, to think critically and deeply about Scripture, to consider what it has to say and what You desire to teach us from it. Lord, would You give us that desire, and continue to do a work of transformation by Your grace in us, that we would reflect Your nature in this world. We pray this in Jesus' name, and all those that agree said, "Amen."