It doesn't usually take people too long to find out how much I love
Deuteronomy. If I spend my life helping people to see the beauty and
benefit of God's law, it will be a life well spent. One of the things
that I keep trying to say is that there are many laws in Deuteronomy
that are immediately applicable to real issues in our day. While
some passages are more difficult and require a lot of work to extract
the principle and application, many are quite obvious, quite
challenging, and quite prone to step on our toes.
I spent about half an hour tonight scrolling through the Deuteronomic
statutes (that's scholar-speak for the legal code of Deuteronomy
12-25). And I came up with fourteen very straightforward issues to
which the laws of Deuteronomy speak. I'm sure I missed some. I wasn't
trying to be really thorough:
- Generous giving (Deut 14)
- Care for the poor (Deut 15)
- Including the disenfranchised in your family (Deut 16)
- Giving God only the best (Deut 17:1)
- Sufficiently supporting those in ministry (Deut 18:1-8)
- Creation care and sustainability (Deut 20:19-20; 22:6-7)
- Caring for neighbours (Deut 22:1-4)
- Adultery (Deut 22:22-24)
- Giving a rape victim the benefit of the doubt (Deut 22:25-27)
- Caring for refugees (Deut 23:15-16)
- Human trafficking (Deut 24:7)
- Ensuring justice for the disenfranchised (Deut 24:17-18)
- Proportionate justice (Deut 25:1-3)
- Honest business transactions (Deut 25:13-16)
I hope this will demonstrate some of the very immediately practical
aspects of a book as badly neglected as Deuteronomy. I hope that
Deuteronomy has been neglected only because it has a bad rap. I hope
that it's just that it's been seen for too long as scary and
unapproachable. I earnestly hope that it is not because of the
unpopular sentiments, that it's not because of the deep and
all-encompassing demands that scripture places on our lives. We are a
people of grace, without doubt. The law is an unspeakably gracious
gift from a loving God to his oft wayward people, who are called to
be as gracious as he has been to us. But with great grace comes great
responsibility, to live according to the ethics not of our world, or
our denomination, or our political party, but according to the ethics
of our good and great King Yahweh.
And if we preached Deuteronomy, we might just hear about it.
