Deuteronomy

Charles A. Clough

Series recorded November 1968- August 1970

Lesson 1

The Preamble of a Treaty – Deut. 1:1-5

[These notes were taken for personal Bible study and while very complete, are not transcribed word for word, however nothing has been left out that would change the message in any way. They have not been proofread so there may be errors. If something doesn’t seem right, always check the original recording.]

This book is very important because it is in this book that you gain all of the concepts that underlie the gospel. It is in this book where you will understand Old Testament spirituality. It is in this book where you understand the beginnings of the operation of the Holy Spirit in a historical context. It is in this book where we will understand issues that plague our society at this time in history such as crime and the problem of law enforcement, etc. It’s spelled out very clearly. As I’ve spent the better part of 2-3 months translating this book it’s been impressed upon me over and over and over again how relevant the material in this book is to our day.

This book is important for many reasons but I would say that probably the greatest thing that you have to remember about the book of Deuteronomy is that it, coupled with two other books in the Old Testament, is the object of liberal assault today in unprecedented form. If I were a student in high school or college, definitely if I was a student in college and I was a Christian, before I wasted all my time going around to various Christian fellowships and going to this party and the next party, I would get under my belt three books and I would know these three books and be able to defend them in the classroom because there are three books in the Old Testament, which if you get under your belt, you can withstand liberalism. Those three books are Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Daniel. Those three books more than anything else the liberals have picked out to tear to pieces. I don’t mean that they sit together in smoke-filled rooms and said let’s tear these books to pieces; I mean it’s the logical outworking of liberalism to assault these books.

Therefore, every believer who is going to live in the next generation is going to face this. For example, those of you who have young children, your children are going to be taught this in public schools. As a demand for religious courses increase who are they going to have teach religious courses? Unbelievers! Or Christians who don’t know any better and who are therefore going to borrow materials from liberalism. So if you are a student or parents of a child who is going to be subjected to this you ought to know what’s going to happen. This is why I make no apology as I go through this book; at times I will point to what we call apologetic material, because I’m interested that you be prepared. I’m interested that some of you parents who are going to be faced with this not only in high school but definitely in college. Many college campuses today will require your child to take a course in religions and they are going to be exposed to tremendous assaults. If they can at least defend themselves in these three books, Deuteronomy, Isaiah and Daniel, they can withstand any assault because it is in these areas where the assault is the greatest at the present time.

The book of Deuteronomy is the center of it all. It is worse, you might say, a more frequently visited target than either Isaiah or Daniel because the book of Deuteronomy historically always has been the hallmark of higher criticism of the Old Testament.

To get background for Deuteronomy turn to 2 Kings 22:8-10 and I will show you a classic passage in the Old Testament that the liberals use to discredit this book. Some of you who are looking for an entirely devotional approach to this book are going to be disappointed. There is tremendous devotional material in this book and we will cover it, but we are going to have to take time out every once in a while to review some liberal assaults. You say why bother with them? Because I have had parents and college students come to me and ask, what about so and so, I went to church all my life and the preacher never mentioned this and all of a sudden this comes up and I never learned that before. Since these things are being tape recorded at least I can be on record as having covered the material at one time and it absolves me from responsibility. I’m going to cover the material and if you don’t get it, that’s all right, I’ll be around to answer questions. But nevertheless, I want to at least give you a small smidgeon of what’s going on in this area of criticism and attack.

2 Kings 22:8-10 is the standard reference. Every course in religion in the college campus refers to this text. “Then Hilkiah the high priest said to Shaphan the scribe, ‘I have found the book of the law in the house of the LORD.’ And Hilkiah gave the book of Shaphan who read it. [9] And Shaphan the scribe came to the king and brought back word to the king and said, ‘Your servants have gathered the money that was found in the house, and have delivered it into the hand of the workmen who have the oversight of the house of the LORD.’ [10] Moreover, Shaphan the scribe told the king saying, ‘Hilkiah the priest has given me a book.’ And Shaphan read it in the presence of the king.”

We have these people “renting” their clothes; it must have been tough on clothing manufacturers of the day but this was the custom. The reason for this was that in this passage the liberal standard approach, and when I meal liberal approach I’m talking about 95% of the men who stand in pulpits, that’s who I’m talking about. I’m talking about every college campus religions course so I’m not talking about something you might encounter; I’m talking about something you will encounter. 2 Kings is their key passages, this is the heart of their whole approach.

The idea here is that the Law of Deuteronomy was found right here at this time, 2 Kings 22 and the situation—Israel was divided in half, the northern half, the ten tribes went this way and two tribes went south. These tribes were knocked out in 721 BC leaving the southern kingdom which we call Judah. This southern kingdom was at this time under the command of a man by the name of Joshua who was a tremendous believer. Joshua had a clod for a father and he had a clod for a son but he himself was a tremendous believer. And it was through this one man who rose to power, you might say he was put in office when the nation was about to fall apart. It was one man who had the guts to stand up for the Word of God when everybody else was denying the Word of God, and who used his political office for the Lord Jesus Christ in a way which honored Him.

Joshua, therefore, was a man who had a lot of discernment, realized that the basic problem of his society was not the rampant crime, was not the prostitution, was not everything else but was spiritual. The basic problem was that Judah had rejected God’s Word. In 2 Kings 22 the account is given of this discovery of the book of the Law. What is the book of the Law? Liberals say that at this time Joshua got together, some of them vary this and I’m just generalizing it, but Joshua got together with a couple of his priests and said look, we’ve got to do something about this nation, it’s falling apart, so let’s get together and we will write a book and pretend we’ve discovered. We’ll call this book the book of the Law and therefore it is known in history, the history of higher criticism as “D,” D for Deuteronomy and this is what they call the D source for the Old Testament.

By the way, here’s another place where you’re going to get this, in Life Magazine. About 3 years ago Life Magazine ran a whole series like they do and everybody bought it, oh boy, here’s Life Magazine, it’s going to have a whole issue on the Bible, isn’t that wonderful. So all these dumb Christians went out and bought Life Magazine for their children, and so their children read Life Magazine and what does it say? It presents liberalism, it presents the whole critique. It was so sad that it presented old liberalism; it wasn’t even up to date liberalism. And the woman who wrote that series and she had the amazing preparation of about six months and that made her an expert on the Bible. Life Magazine had this lady reporter and she said will you run this story on the Bible and the editor got this lady and she ran around the libraries and dug, she didn’t know what she was digging into and she came up with this article that was splattered all over Life Magazine.

Now that comes into your home; what are you going to do about it? Say it’s all poppycock; there are some things in that Life Magazine article that might get your children thinking about some things and they may be disturbed about some of the things they teach and we have to come up with some answers to this. There are answers by the way. Liberals are the ones that are always raising the question; they’re the ones that never have any answers. But we’re the ones that have some answers on this question and this D source, you’ll see this, it’s just simply called D.

The book of the Law, Deuteronomy, which is our book of Deuteronomy, they claim was made up either by Joshua or by people in his generation to solve the problems of the day and this little cute story you read here from verses 8ff, is just some sort of a cover up. These guys had a little operation going on over in the Temple, and when the book reached the time to hit the press they suddenly said oh, look what we found, the janitor was sweeping the closet out and look what he discovered in the book. Look at that, isn’t that amazing, a book of the Law, we just happened to discover this thing. So they say that this is just a cover-up story for the discovery of the book of Deuteronomy.

What’s the real truth? The real truth is that the book of the Law includes far more than Deuteronomy. It includes Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, etc. and parts of these books which were kept on file in the Temple. And out of the rubble in the Temple these men did discover the book of the Law but it was a genuine bona fide discovery. Israel depended in part upon the prophetic line, they had live prophets. This is always the problem when you have living prophets, men who are able, for example, to stand before you as I am this evening and unlike what I am doing they are able to say to you I have just received this from God. And they are able to declare to you the Word of God. This would be a living gift of prophecy. This is a gift of prophecy which means the Holy Spirit is actively transmitting the Word of God through an individual, actually in history. And while these men who received the Holy Spirit’s gift of prophecy were operating there was a tendency to downgrade written Scripture. It always has been this way.

For example, in the early church what was their Bible? We know what their Bible was, it was the Old Testament. The early Christians didn’t gather round and have a Bible study in Ephesians; there wasn’t any epistle of Ephesians until many, many years later. So while you have the living apostles and living prophets there is always a tendency to disregard Scripture. Do you realize that the New Testament was written as a last resort? It was written because some of the saints got together and said look, these apostles are dying off, what are we going to do when these apostles die? After these apostles die that’s going to be it and when they die what are we going to use for source material? What are we going to use to satisfy our theology? What are we going to use to get doctrine to live the Christian life? When these questions started coming up they said hey Paul, come on, let’s get some of this in writing; come on Matthew, let’s go. Later on, just before these men died, did they actually write down our New Testament.

So Moses, although he wrote the Law and wrote many of these things it wasn’t appreciated because Israel had a line of living prophets and if you wanted Bible class it was far more exciting to just refer to a guy that had the gift; just say hey, give me some hot scoop from God and let’s stop reading all this stuff about the Law. In the first place, half the people couldn’t read anyway. If you saw Hebrew you’d understand why they couldn’t read and if you saw some of the scrolls you’d really understand. Some of those scrolls are thirty feet long. If you came into a Bible class you’d have to sit one on one end of a pew, one on another so you could unroll the scroll as the guy preached so it was a little inconvenient. Many factors combine to downgrade written Scripture.

At this time in the kingdom some of these living prophets were no longer living they were being killed off almost as fast as they came on the scene by the Holy Spirit. So people began to be concerned: is there a written authority? Of course there was, there was the Mosaic Law but it was hidden back in the Temple archives. This man, Hilkiah, who was a priest, notice verse 8, a “high priest,” had charge of the archives of the Temple and out of these archives he discovered the Law of Moses, which shows you that for generations it had not been consulted. The prophets evidently had consulted it but most of the nation’s leaders had not.

Two things to remember about this discovery: number one, it is a bona fide discovery. Josiah and the priests haven’t just made this thing up and dropped it down and said oh, look what we found. It’s not like that. Aaron had the same idea; Moses, what do you mean I made a golden statute of a bull, why, I just dropped all these gold rings in the fire and look what happened, it just happened. People always say this. It’s not that kind of an operation. It was a written book, it was on file, it was a legitimate thing so 1 Kings 22 cannot be appealed to as proof that the book of Deuteronomy was written at this time in history. If it was we have great problems. Do you know why? Some Christians don’t even know why; let me tell you why? The Lord Jesus Christ said and quoted from Deuteronomy, He quoted from the Old Testament and said “Moses said.”

If you would like some verses, Matt. 19:8, Jesus settled a divorce question not on the basic of the rabbinic principles of the time but He said and He referred back to Genesis 2 and He used that as authoritative and He referred it to Moses. In John 5:46 Jesus again says Moses wrote, etc. Again in John 7:19 Jesus said Moses wrote this and He quotes out of the Law. Again, Acts 3:22 quotes from the book of Deuteronomy and says Moses wrote. In Rom. 10:5 Paul does the same thing, he quotes from the book of the Law and says Moses wrote. So you’ve got to come to one of two things and liberals have; they have said okay, we can prove scientifically that Moses never wrote the Pentateuch, it was just developed from pieces on down through history and so what Jesus was doing… you have two kinds of liberals, you have the honest ones and the dishonest ones. The honest ones are the people who are just blatant unbelievers and these people are really much fairer with Christ to deal with because they simply say Jesus was wrong, that’s all, Jesus was wrong, so let’s forget about it, Jesus said that but Jesus didn’t know any better. When Jesus said Jesus wrote this He didn’t really mean Moses went this, He just went along with the day. Well if Jesus went along with His day what about all the message of salvation; what about the gospel? Jesus said that too, maybe that’s just going along with the day and maybe this whole salvation bit is just a lot of psychological stuff that has gone on down through history. It destroys the whole character of Christ, it destroys the apostles.

In other words, this whole thing interlocks. You can’t play fast and loose with the Old Testament without at once destroying the character of Jesus Christ. Some people don’t see this. I was talking to a minister in Houston, Texas one time and we were talking about this, the fellow is a well-known minister, well-known denomination and he said what does it matter who wrote the book, we just read it as the Word of God. I said Jesus evidently was concerned that Moses wrote it. To me this is kind of sloppy thinking; really it’s not thinking at all. Here we have a person, Jesus Christ who says clearly who wrote it. This man says well Jesus is wrong.

Now we have the sophisticated kind of liberal. This kind of liberal is hired by some well-known church and he doesn’t want to lose his job and if he really told you what he believed he’d lose his job. So he covers up his liberalism. He says well, now Jesus really wasn’t wrong, you see, Jesus was infallible but what the problem was is that He was just accommodating Himself to the time. Jesus didn’t want to make waves. Jesus didn’t want to make waves—He made quite a few waves. But Jesus didn’t want to make waves and therefore what He did was He realized these people were wrong in ascribing this book to Moses but there were so many other things wrong He decided just to forget it, we’ll play along with the game. So they have an accommodation theory. This accommodation theory was worked out originally by an Anglican, S. R. Driver who was a cannon in the Christ’s Church of Oxford England and it was through this man’s influence that this whole thing came to America.

So we have the honest and the dishonest liberals and it behooves you in this generation, I’m warning you because a lot of Christians don’t realize this, that in this generation you cannot judge a minister or an organization by what they say. You should question what they say, what do they mean by this, this and this. Too many Christians are financing and going along with rank liberalism and they don’t know it. And it is a tragedy. This goes on all over this country. If liberalism is going to be credited with the destruction of our country Christians are going to be credited with helping them do it because Christians are so stupid at times not to see liberalism for what it is. Just because a minister gets up and says oh, I believe the Scriptures are authoritative, that doesn’t mean a thing. When I was in an ordination exam a week ago we didn’t say do you believe the Scriptures are authoritative; we asked this young man do you believe the Scriptures are authoritative and inerrant everywhere they contact history, that every historical fact recorded in Scripture is perfectly correct. That’s the way to ask a person’s authority of Scripture. Never mind just these big words that people hide behind, oh I believe the Scriptures are authoritative. Buddha believed a lot of things were authoritative too, but that doesn’t save him. So this business of authority doesn’t mean a thing.

Always question and before you get involved in any Christian organization it would behoove you to investigate. This is why in our missionary committee we are compiling a questionnaire. This doesn’t mean we suspect all missionaries of being liberal; it’s just to protect us from the future. Before a missionary gets supported by this church he’s going to be interrogated and we are going to find out what he believes on this issue and that issue and some other issue because if we are utilizing congregational funds we have a right to utilize these scripturally as unto the Lord. It’s a very sloppy age in which we live and I’m just warning you, watch where you’re spending your time and examine the doctrinal statement of the organization. These things come up in our time and it sounds nasty to go over this again and again but unfortunately that is the blunt fact and you just have to be careful, no matter what organization comes to you in whatever name, beware.

Now we come to one further point of introduction and this is a basically a discussion of the whole problem of higher criticism. I want to give this to you so you’ll have at least a broad outline of understanding what’s going on. What is my child going to receive in way of his education? What are the colleges teaching today? If there is a course on religion in the public school system what is 90% of the material going to be based on? Let me give you a brief rundown on this.

We have to analyze this problem in the light of the fall of man; when Adam fell his whole personality fell, including something called the intellect. Every person since Adam has received a sin nature; that does not mean the person can’t think. That’s not what we mean when we say the sin nature has affected the intellect. What we are saying is that from this point on man intellectually has the tendency to start here; he starts with himself and works out, and he uses himself as a point of reference. Remember Descartes’ dictum, “I think, therefore I am.” This is an epitome of what we call autonomous unbelief. Autonomy is the word to remember. This expresses the sinful effect on man’s mind, that mind wants truth on his terms and he doesn’t want to rely on any authority for his truth. He wants to figure it out for himself; that is the expression of the fall of man intellectually. That is the expression of the fall of man on the intellect of the soul.

Man begins from himself and he develops various systems which we will call human viewpoint as opposed to divine viewpoint. Human viewpoint is systems of thought that are based on the autonomous principle of man starting out from himself and moving out into the realms of philosophy, etc. and utilizing his own brain power, you might say, going it alone without any external authority. We call that human viewpoint systems and in college young people are going to study various human viewpoint systems. The divine viewpoint system (singular) is given in Scripture. They both encompass every problem of life but unbelieving man has evolved many types of human viewpoint systems.

To make a long story short, the human viewpoint system works this way in the Bible. You can take any Bible text and separate two elements out of it, the historical and the theological or the doctrinal. Let me show you some references and I’ll demonstrate the effect of this. The effect of the fall of man on the intellect is to make every person try to seek the answers on his own steam, under his own power, utilizing his own intellect. We call this autonomy. What this does to the Scripture is it separates every verse of Scripture into two parts, the doctrinal content of that Scripture and the historical facts. I’ll use Gen. 12:1 as an illustration because I think it will make it clear. “Now the LORD said to Abram, ‘Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto a land that I will show thee.”

Watch what the liberal does to it; I’m going to do to this verse exactly what is done. I’ll take Gen. 12:1 and I’ll start operating on it. First I’ll say if you notice there in verse 1 the Lord says unto Abram; Abram lived in time and space, he was a historical figure and we have a historical incident, in verse 4, “So Abram departed, as the LORD had spoken unto him.” Now the history is Abraham or Abram departed, that is a fact of history, that’s an observation of history, “Abram departed.” A liberal who accepted historicity, some of them don’t on this point, but a liberal could be perfectly comfortable accepting this fact, no problem at all. But, and here’s the big “but,” he would reject the analysis also in verse 4 “as the LORD had spoken unto him.” He would say no, what happened was Abraham had a religious experience and he saw stars in the closet one night or he had too much to eat and had a bad dream, or something happened and he had this religious experience and he interpreted that experience on his own. They believe that Abraham’s operating just like they would if they had an experience like this and they say Abraham has this experience and he thinks the Lord spoke to him. This is all subjective and therefore since it’s just Abraham’s opinion that God spoke to him it is not authoritative truth. You don’t have any doctrine any more.

Do you see what’s happened? The truth here is given in verse 1, “the LORD said to Abram,” the following thing. That’s the doctrine, that’s the teaching, the Scriptural teaching. Now that’s gone, when liberalism gets in here they say this doctrinal stuff is just subjective, it’s just Abraham’s thinking, he thought God spoke to him. We say he thought God spoke to him too; it just happens he thought right. But there’s a world of difference on this thing.

To catch the difference even more graphically turn to Deut. 5:22 and I’ll give you one example that is I think a key passage that some of you who are going to be involved in this kind of activity ought to remember this passage. If you will remember this one verse you can use it as a test, you can use this as a thermometer and if you ever have any doubt about some system or some person ask them to explain Deut. 5:22. This is a very good tool, a very good yardstick to test. “The words,” do you know what “these words” are in Deut. 5:22? The Ten Commandments. “These words the LORD spoke unto all your assembly in the mount out of the midst of the fire, of the cloud, and of the thick darkness, with a great voice; and he added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto me.”

Notice the first part of verse 22, the LORD spoke to the whole assembly. This means God spoke in audible Hebrew to the whole congregation. That congregation heard God speak. This is why they said in Exodus, Moses we can’t stand this, this is God speaking, let Him get away from us because these people were sinful so they said we can’t stand it, we demand a mediator. That’s why God cut it off and all the rest of the Law after the Ten Commandments is given through Moses, it’s given by private dictation through Moses. It’s not given by a public declaration. The Ten Commandments however were spoken to an assembly of at least two million people, mothers, fathers, children and babies sat there and heard God speak to them in their own language.

That is something that liberalism cannot swallow; [they’ll say] the wind may have been blowing and they thought they heard God on the sound of the wind or something like that. But they do not believe that God can literally speak in history. You want to remember this. This is their assumption, this is not a scientific result, this is an assumption. If you wonder why we get different answers it is because we start in a different place. If you start saying 2 + 2 is 4 and I start building a mathematical system on 2 + 2 is 5 we shouldn’t be surprised that the books don’t fit and that your set of figures don’t tabulate with mine. The reason is not that we committed an error; no, you didn’t commit an error in your bookkeeping, I didn’t commit an error in my bookkeeping. It’s not a bookkeeping error, it’s not a reasoning area, it’s a starting error. You started in the wrong place and liberalism starts in the wrong place by saying any doctrine that you will find in Scripture is a subjective interpretation by the author of what he thinks is the truth. This is very crucial.

You can practice, just remember doctrine over history and you can go through any passage of Scripture and you can tell what a liberal is going to say about it. Just remember the passage, divide it up and you’ll get it. That’s exactly the way religion courses are taught. These people utilize various gimmicks such as divine names criteria and various criteria they use to divide the Old Testament up into various sources. However this has resulted in one liberal system being shattered upon another liberal system and failure after failure until Professor H. F. Hahn in his book called Old Testament in Modern Research comes to this exciting conclusion after years of liberal study of the Bible. (Quote) “This review of activity in the field of Old Testament criticism during the last quarter century has created a chaos of conflicting trends ending in contradictory results which create an impression of ineffectiveness in this type of research.” A very gracious analysis. “The conclusion seems unavoidable that the higher criticism has long since passed the age of constructive achievement.”

They’ve started off at the wrong place and they wonder why one man will create some system of analysis of the Bible and he falls down. An example is the guy in a Methodist seminary in the south that started saying God is dead. Time Magazine needed a few pages for its religious section and they ran it along with some other people, reporters need some stories like this so this was broadcast all over the place. You don’t hear much about it any more, it’s just a fad, it just blows away. That’s what all this is, just a fad, just a waste of time of even bothering with it. This is why in some sense I almost have to apologize for having to go through all this junk; that’s all it is, it’s junk. But I want you to be aware that it’s going on so that if you do encounter it you will at least recognize, oh yeah, I heard about that junk some place. At least you’ll recognize it for what it is; it’s junk and it’s a waste of time fiddling with it.

Let’s go to something more encouraging, let’s get started with Deut. 1. Deut. 6:5 is the key verse for the whole book, “And thou shalt love the LORD thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might.” Those two elements, we’ll forget about the word “might” for a moment, “heart” and “soul” involved in loving God is the key verse for this Scripture. And this will produce a balance in your Christian life because loving God with all our heart and all our soul is a balanced statement. We will exegete this verse in detail later but just to give you a preview to understand the key nature of this verse, loving God with all your heart means that you love God with all of that which is on the inside, i.e. your mind, your volition and your emotions. “Heart” puts emphasis upon what goes on on the inside, specifically what goes on in your mind. We have this dichotomy and in preparing for this I traced the word “heart” down, all 600 times and this word “heart” as it occurs in Scripture does not mean something that is not mental. We use the expression, you hear it and I’ve used it wrongly, heart and mind, “we’ve got a head knowledge but not a heart knowledge.” Unfortunately as a study of the vocabulary of the Old Testament and New Testament shows, there is no such distinction ever made in Scripture. No distinction! That many come as a shock but there is no distinction made that way.

“Heart” includes the mind. And the proof of this is that when the Greeks went to translate the Old Testament what did they use to translate the Hebrew word? nouj (nous) or mind. When they went to translate the Hebrew they actually used a Greek word which means intellect or mind to translate heart. And it shows you to them they didn’t see this dichotomy. I know what people mean by this and it’s a bona fide observation. There is a distinction between people who just passively sit around and people who are actively involved but it’s a wrong use of those two words. There is no difference in the Bible between heart knowledge and mind knowledge.

This element, “loving the Lord with all our heart” includes our mind. You might say this is on the inside, this focuses on the inside, and “loving God with all our soul” although we may think of the word “soul” as something that denotes a life principle in us, I’ll show you later as the word “soul” is used in this book it refers not only to you but it refers to your personal life; it refers to your children, there is a passage on kidnapping in this book. Do you know what it says? If you steal the nephesh or soul of a person you will die. In other words the soul of a man was conceived not only to extend to himself but to his children, to his job. There’s another passage on financial policies of loaning money and Moses says you will never take for pledge the man’s tools that he makes his bread with because a man should never indebt himself to the point where he can never eat or take care of himself. And in Deuteronomy it says “thou shalt not deprive this man of his soul.” It’s not talking about the inner soul as we conceive the term; the soul here as it’s used has a wider context than we normally use that word, so it’s going to create a little problem.

In the Old Testament “soul” has a wider meaning than in the New Testament and the wider meaning looks upon your circle, we’ll say the circle of your life, the outside, and this is a very valid statement, loving God with all our heart and with all our soul refers to the inner mental attitude as well as the details on the outside. This has two repercussions. Deuteronomy chapters 5-11 deals with the first part, loving God with all our heart. Deuteronomy 12-26 deals all the details of the outside, so you have a whole comprehensive statement. Notice the order; you love God first on the inside but the normal result of loving God on the inside will result in a behavior pattern in every area and this is why when we get into the details of 12-26 you will see every area of human life covered. You will see banking covered, financial life covered, sex life covered, home life covered, you will see every conceivable area of life covered because Moses wants to spell out in complete detail what it means to love God with all our life, in the circle of all our life’s activities. That’s why Deut. 6:5 is crucial. This is presenting, this book, the spirituality of the Old Testament saint: loving God on the inside and on the outside.

Now a word about the outline of the book. We’re only going to give a rough outline, no details but I want to give you a rough outline of Deuteronomy so you’ll get the sweep of the book. How are we going to go about outlining a book like this? We’ve been helped. Fortunately, very recently men have confirmed what the conservatives have been saying for years. We’ve been saying, if you have an old version of the Scofield Bible the outline that you have there is one that has been in existence for ages. Scofield just didn’t make that up. Many men over the years have come to that same conclusion and that’s the same outline we’re using. But it’s sort of exciting to realize that in our day that outline has been confirmed by archeology. Let me give you the details of this in a moment. By the way, some books if you’re interested; one is Meredith Kline, Treaty of the Great King. It is a small book, only 149 pages but if you are a college student or have someone who is a college student and having trouble in this area this book is without parallel.

The man who wrote this does not believe exactly the way we do and you have to watch him in certain areas of prophecy, but the overall structure of the book is tremendous and Kline takes this book and relates it to the temporary findings of archeology in a fashion which is very, very good. So I recommend that book. He combines a lot of the source material which I will be using throughout this presentation of Deuteronomy.

I’m going to fill you in on a little appreciation of this book. Back in the 1930s archeologists were playing around in Eastern Turkey and they discovered the remains of an empire called the Hittite Empire. This was a bomb shell in the scholarly world because the Bible had spoken of Hittites for generations and people said oh, Hittites, who knows about the Hittites, that’s some little name that the Bible created; nobody knows about Hittites, Hittites never existed. All of a sudden this non-existent empire was very much in existence because archeologists began to dig up all sorts of things. And lo and behold, guess what? The Bible was right and the Bible knew what it was talking about when it was talking about Hittites. And out of these archeological excavations a man discovered what they call international treaty texts. In other words, they had a very active state department in this empire, the Hittite Empire and they made treaties with surrounding nations. You might call it mutual aid pacts.

These treaties all had a certain legal form and the idea of this treaty would look somewhat like this: here’s the Hittite Empire, the great king, he was called “the great king” in the text. That’s why Meredith Kline’s book is called The Treaty of the Great King. The great king was the one who was the head of the Hittite Empire; he would be equivalent in our day to the President of the United States. Then they’d enter into an agreement with a vassal, we don’t have vassals, it operates the other way in our country. But in this arrangement the great king was the great king. Suppose he made a treaty with the King of Moab; say he made a treaty with the King of Ammon. Suppose he made a treaty with Aram, and another treaty with Tyre, hypothetically. Here are four kingdoms, each one of these has a king. But the treaty sets up an agreement.

Let’s forget all these treaties for a moment and look at the king between this great king and the King of Moab. He enters into a relationship with this king; it’s a legal relationship and as a legal relationship it has a form. When you buy a house you have to fill out a certain form, there’s a legal form to it. These treaties have this legal form and the form specifies certain things. Here are the elements that are specified in this treaty, and this is from which we get out outline of Deuteronomy, for reasons which I’ll show you.

The first element is what is called a preamble. This is the first element in all of these treaties; they have a preamble which is an introduction to the nature and character of the great king. Then we have what is called a historical prologue which describes all of the work the great king did for this vassal. He’s trying to make him feel humble; he says do you know what I did for you? Fifty years ago I came to your aid when you were having trouble down there in Moab I sent two units of my forces down to help you out, etc. And all the good works that he did toward this thing are recorded in the prologue. The third element of this is the stipulations and this is the center of it all, the stipulations. The stipulations outline all of the requirements placed upon the vassal king. You might say these are the legal specifications. Then the fourth thing, there was always provision for a deposit of copies of the law and this provision for deposit had two very interesting aspects. There was always to be a copy deposited at the great king’s headquarters and always a copy deposited at the vassal king’s headquarters. When the secretary sat down and typed this whole thing out she had a carbon copy and one guy got the carbon copy and the other guy got the original. So you always had two copies of the law and another thing very interesting about this is that the nations had to get together and read this thing about every three or four years.

Wouldn’t it be great if our country had a provision where every citizen of the United States had to read the constitution once a year? People might suddenly realize where we have been going. But they had provisions to protect this in the Old Testament. They had to read the entire treaty publicly. The fifth element of this thing is that they had witnesses. You have a notary public when you sign something and you get that stamp on there and that’s a witness. They had the same thing; they had sort of a notary public in the Old Testament and in these treaty times. The witnesses they called upon were the gods. We’ll get into what Moses called upon because he couldn’t call upon gods; Moses called upon the angelic council and the council of the angels is given in Deut. 32 and they are the witnesses to the Law. And those angels are going to give Israel a hard time on down through history because they are the jury. The angelic council is the fifth element.

Finally the sixth element is the cursings and the blessings. These are always given because the great king said if you play ball with me we’ll get along fine, but if you start messing around you are going to be in trouble. That’s basically what the blessings and the cursings are.

These are the elements found in these treaties and Meredith Kline was one of the few scholars who put two and two together. For years they had these two sets of evidences; this outline that you see in your Scofield Bible and all this archeological material and people sort of looked at it and said isn’t that interesting. Then all of a sudden Meredith Kline took a very close look and said wait a minute, look at that outline that we’ve been giving for Deuteronomy and look at this archeological material and do you notice something—the two are the same! From that we come to the exciting discovery in our time that the book of Deuteronomy is written in a legal form. It is not only a law but the outline of the book is in a legal form that depicts a relationship between Jehovah, which I will call Yahweh here, the Lord if you want to translate it in English, the Lord and the vassals. Now who are the vassals? The vassals are the twelve tribes. So you have your twelve tribes and Yahweh is specifying His legal relationship with these twelve tribes.

Isn’t it interesting, Moses uses the format of his time to depict this? This tells you gobs of things about the Law. For one thing it tells you that Moses must have written it because this particular type of format was phased out after the 13^th century, so this book could never have been written late like the liberals have been telling us. It could never have been written in the time of 2 Kings because by the time of 2 Kings it was so late in history that people had forgotten this form. So the very proof of the form of the book shows that it must have been written exactly when the Bible says it was written. This is why it’s so important for us.

Let’s pass on to the outline of Deuteronomy and see if we can get at least into verse 1. From 1:1-1:5 is the preamble; it’s the introduction to the book. From 1:6-4:49 is the prologue. From 5:1-26:49 are the stipulations, that’s the Law. From 27:1-30:20 are the ratification procedures. This is how the covenant is put into effect. Finally, verses 31:1-34:12 you have the provision for continuity, in other words, what’s going to happen after Moses dies. That’s the outline of the book of Deuteronomy. And that include the thrust of the argument. It’s a legal document, you have your preamble which we’ll study briefly, you have the prologue, the stipulations, the ratification and the continuity provision. That basically gives you an outline of the book. It’s meaningless to go into all the details of the outline; just get the broad sweep of it. This is the broad sweep of the book.

One further note before we hit verse 1; the situation, the historical situation. This is at the end of forty years. Moses has been leader for forty years and he’s about to die but before he dies he wants one thing clear and that is that he made a covenant back at Mt. Sinai and Deuteronomy is actually a reinstatement of the first covenant. The first covenant is Exodus 21-23, it was given at Mt. Sinai but now Moses wants a re-ratification; before he dies he wants it clear to the generation that’s been living that His children are to operate under the same covenant, that’s all. So Deuteronomy has been given for that purpose.

Let’s get to the preamble of the book. I want to briefly go into the preamble of this section, verses 1:1-1:5. “These are the words which Moses spoke until all Israel on this side of the Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea, between Paran, and Tophel, and Laban, and Hazeroth, and Dizahab.” This first verse, the key part of this verse, the thing that tips you off that this is a preamble are the first two words, “These be the words,” and that is the legal form of a preamble.

For example we have a treaty written between King Mursilis, who was the king at one time of the Hittite Empire and a vassal king, Duppi Tessub that’s a sweet little name but that’s what this fellow was known as, and the treaty began this way, just to give you a feeling for how these treaties began. “These are the words of…” and then he went on and developed his preamble. So “These are the words” is a technical introduction and it marks this off as a preamble; it’s not just an author, this is a technical expression in verse 1. “These are the words” and this automatically tells us that this whole first section is a preamble to a treaty.

“These are the words which Moses spoke … in the wilderness.” I want you to notice there are all sorts of names after the word “wilderness.” He “spoke unto Israel on this side Jordan” and there should be a comma after “Jordan,” then you have “in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea and over in all these different places that are listed. What does this say? By the way the book of Deuteronomy was not given, the presentation we have in this book was given in only one place, “on this side Jordan.” This book only covers one presentation, “this side Jordan.”

You say wait a minute, doesn’t say “in the wilderness, in the plain,” these are all different places, all over the place. That’s actually the route, here’s the eastern end of the Mediterranean and Moses and the troops are just north of the Dead Sea; they’ve come swinging in from the east and they’ve come down from here. Here’s Mt. Sinai, they went up here to make a penetration straight forward and hit Kadesh-Barnea and they got repulsed because of lack of faith and they wandered around all over the place and now they’re coming back after forty years and trying to make a penetration from the east. These names review this whole journey. What’s he’s saying is that these words that you are about to read are the same words that Moses has been teaching them over and over and over and over and over again for forty years.

And to rub it in a little bit more, the final compiler of this book in verse 2 says, “(There are eleven days journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir unto Kadesh-barnea).” In other words, from this point to this point it only would take them eleven days. He says hey troops, where’ve you been for forty years, it only takes eleven days, did you have a breakdown along the way somewhere, a flat tire, etc. This is the implication of verse 2; it’s a sarcastic jab at these people. Here they are, Moses has been speaking to them all this time and they had an eleven day journey to make… an eleven day journey!

By the way, this book begins looking back. This book begins looking back at their failures and it winds up in Deut. 34 looking ahead because the last scene you see in this book is Moses up on the mountain looking forward and God says do you see that land over there, that’s where your sons and daughters are going. That’s where this nation is going to head. And the whole book of Deuteronomy is given as Moses switches his viewpoint from looking back to looking forward; he’s doing an about face and turning forward and the story of that is the book of Deuteronomy. Therefore this makes this book a very realistic book because Moses has watched these people operate in forty years and he’s learned a lot of things about human nature. He’s watched people fail and fail and fail and fail as believers.

In verse 3 it emphasizes it again, “And it came to pass in the fortieth year, in the eleventh month, on the first day of the month, that Moses spoke unto the children of Israel, according unto all that God had commanded him.”

Verse 5 is the point we want to conclude on and maybe we can finish up this preamble. “On this side of the Jordan,” this is the final speaking, “in the land of Moab, began Moses to declare this law, saying,” and the word “began” is important because Moses is saying look, I am going to do this once more, I have done this for forty years, I have taught you people the Word of God and before I die I am going to do it once again. The glorious death of these prophets is that they die teaching the Word of God. Moses said I’m going to make the last act of my life a teaching of the Word of God. We’ve had a modern illustration of that, V. Raymond Edman, Chancellor Wheaton College dropped dead in the middle of chapel teaching God’s Word. It’s a glorious way for a saint of God to go. He was called to the ministry and he died in the act of ministering the Word of God. Moses is going to do the same and he says before I die I’m going to have one more time around.

The word “began” is a very interesting word because it is the word for determined, it means to sit down and be determined that he’s going to have this thing and do it over again. In other words, it takes an act of a decision on his part to do this. He’s watched these people sleep in his Bible class for forty years. He has watched this go on for forty years; every possible thing to distract other people from the Word of God has gone on in his class. So he comes down to this point and he says now I am going to do this once more, and that’s the emphasis on the word “began.” It means to undertake with a purpose of determination.

Notice something else, after forty years of heresy, forty years of failure Moses doesn’t say hey boys, you know we failed along the line, what we need is a CE director, our church is falling apart and what we need to get is a hot program. We have to have some sort of game room and we’ll get ping pong and volleyball and all the rest and maybe if we do this we’ll develop some interest around here, develop some spirit, etc. We’ll make up some little program because for forty years I’ve taught the Word of God and it doesn’t seem to do anything. So let’s just change leadership and change the program, teaching the Bible doesn’t count, people are tired, it bores people so therefore I’m going to change my…. He did not, and you notice the last dying act, and it’s very significant, this man is operating against a career of failure and still he insists that the last thing before he dies he’s going to sock it to them again. This is the attitude of Moses.

Moses began “to declare this law,” and the word “declare” is also another word loaded with meaning and it comes from a Hebrew word which is ba’ar and ba’ar means to dig a well. You wonder, wait a minute, what does explaining the word have to do with digging a well. This word originally meant to dig a well and then it came to mean to take a slab of clay and press into that clay what your message was, and to press it in good and solid in big letters so everyone could see it. For an example of how this word is used hold the place and turn to Hab. 2:2, this is a perfect illustration of this word ba’ar, I just can’t avoid giving this because it really gives the flavor of the word. “And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tablets, that he may run that reads it.” The sense of this verse is cut it so deeply into that clay tablet so that a person running by can read it. The Lord is saying you take the Word of God and make a billboard poster out of it and you make it so big that a person can see that thing; he can have his chariot running by at thirty miles an hour and still read it. The word “make plain” is ba’ar. That’s the verb. Now do you see the context? It means to cut something and make it so obvious that anybody can see it.

Now going back to Deuteronomy; you get some of the flavor of what is meant here. “On this side Jordan, in the land of Moab,” Moses took it upon himself to make plain this law. In other words he has been so exasperated over forty years of believers who have rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected and he is saying okay, I am going to explain this thing in its totality and I’m going to do it in a series of Bible classes. Moses held a Bible conference here just before he died and every night the people got together and he went through this. It took him about four or five nights; talk about long sermons (I know some of you are thinking about that right now), you think of this book and you read through this book. This book is only about two or three sermons all tied together; thirty-four chapters. You don’t have to tell me how long it is, I just got through translating the Hebrew. It’s a very long book to work with and this is a sermon that Moses gave, it’s a Bible class. And it says Moses undertook to make plain this law.

I think the greatest conclusion we can come to from this preamble tonight is that if the Word of God doesn’t do it, nothing will. And that is a vital lesson to remember. If the Word of God is not going to change people, nothing will. You can devise all the sweet little programs and you can have all the nice organization you want but that isn’t going to do anything; if those people have rejected the Word of God you’re wasting your time. The highest priority of a ministry is to teach the Word of God and not run a gimmicks program and not do all the rest of the things that most ministers do. The chief duty of a pastor is to teach. If you could have been where I was yesterday and saw what I saw yesterday you would realize why this is so necessary. I saw a group of college students who are new believers, who were so ill prepared to live the Christian life, some of them, that it was pathetic. These people were getting their college degrees and I don’t think there’s one person in my teenage class that couldn’t run circles around any one of them. Why? Because they have never been taught the Word of God, they’ve been fed this line ever since they became a Christian, all you have to do to live the Christian life is to get together and pray and you just sit there and you pray; instead of studying the Bible all you do is open it up in the morning, Lord what’s it going to be today. You just plop your Bible open, oh, “Judas hanged himself.” Well how am I going to apply that today? It’s this kind of thing divine guidance by roulette wheel. That’s not the way God intended you to live the Christian life, He intended for you to use your mind. I filled them in on how to study the Bible; that you have to reason through things, there are difficult problems in here and you might just, you have to be careful but sometimes you might just have to think. Now that is tragic but sometimes you just have to think a little bit in the Christian life. One of these students after I spoke was flabbergasted, she’d never heard of this, thinking in the Christian life? I thought it was feeling, I thought I just sort of groped around in the dark. This is the way it goes, it’s mysticism. And it results because pastors don’t teach the Word of God systematically. This girl said well when I sit down with the Bible I just sort of open it and say God, will you show me something out of here? Sure He’s showing you something out of there, black and white, all you have to do is read it.

Another thing some of these kids didn’t understand is you can’t pray unless you know the Word of God. What are you going to pray for? You can pray for all sorts of things like you can pray Oh God, oh God, would you forgive me? Well if you make that prayer you haven’t studied the New Testament. You never pray for forgiveness; it’s not a bona fide prayer in the New Testament. Christians waste all their time praying for things that they don’t have to pray for.

The third thing that’s wrong is where are you going to get your divine guidance? How are you possibly going to meet the problems that we face as believers today? Go in a voting booth and say well, let’s see, heads or tails. This is the way Christians operate. The only way you can live the Christian life is to understand something and when the Word of God says you worship God it doesn’t mean you turn off a little switch and short out your brain and put it in the closet and you worship God with your feelings, your volition, your emotions, etc, but somehow your brains are left behind. This is the most tragic thing. These kids have emotional depression, they have guilt, they have every possible problem that you could possibly face.

And do you know what is the worst tragedy and here’s where it hits me the hardest is that when these kids get in a problem and come to you to get straightened out, how are you going to straighten them out. You can’t straighten out a person that’s in a mess if he hasn’t taken in some doctrine to begin with, because when a person gets in a mess they are so upset by that thing that the only thing a counselor can do is draw upon something that’s already in there.

If a Christian has not taken time to systematically take in the Word of God it’s just a human viewpoint situation and you just have to apply normal counseling techniques and treat the person as an unbeliever. You can’t work with a Christian who has not taken in doctrine. He just comes to you so ill prepared, so emotionally upset that you just can’t do anything. That’s what hurts because you see people and you can’t help them because in times when they were not upset, times before the crisis hit they have not taken the time to feed on God’s Word.