📜We treat the Old Testament as a dry list of rules. Discovering Deuteronomy as the "Heart" of God’s love and provision.

00:00:01
Speaker 1: The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need Thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm doctor James Spencer, and through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now onto today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone, welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I am joined today again by Renee Duffy and Rebecca Jilsperger, and we're going to be talking about the Book of Deuteronomy.

00:00:40
Speaker 2: Now.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Rebecca and Becky or I'm sorry. Renee and Becky are hosts of the Bible Unbranded podcast, and so this is kind of a joint effort between my podcast and theirs. But it's kind of nice because while I've studied Deuteronomy, I would not call myself a Deuteronomy expert. I've probably done more focused tech like the Sabbath Command and Deuteronomy six and even Deuteronomy four. Jumped in a little bit on the Instructions to the King and Deuteronomy seventeen here in some recent works, but the book of Deuteronomy as a whole is one of Becky's favorites, and so I'm excited to start this out. One of not even one of it is the favorite, and I think for good reason, right, because Deuteronomy is in a lot of ways sort of the backbone of the Pentituke. Right, You're getting this sort of overarching summary of a lot of the theological themes that the rest of the Pentituke discusses in Deuteronomy, but then it's also echoed throughout the rest of the Old Testament. And so maybe we can start out and just talk a little bit about your perspective of what this book actually is. So when you approach Deuteronomy, how would you describe what Deuteronomy is and what it's doing.

00:01:56
Speaker 3: I'm renee, do you want to do? Am I just doing this? Okay?

00:02:03
Speaker 2: Well, well we'll get to everybody.

00:02:06
Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel like you can frame this out for us and then we can we.

00:02:12
Speaker 2: Can kind of hang off that.

00:02:14
Speaker 3: Okay, I am. I'm a I am zealously passionate about this book. It's almost embarrassing. But when you hear why, I think everyone kind of can get on board. It feels like what you said is one correct. It's kind of this theological backbone of the Pentituke and therefore kind of the scriptures. And when I think of a theological backbone kind of book like Isaiah or like Paul's writings in the New Testament, I personally get a little intimidated because I prefer narratival kind of like give me a good story and I can sort of get into it, like don't keep something way up here. It's not that I'm not smart. I can get things that are way up here. But as a believer, I sometimes feel like I'm scared to try to unravel all the complicated pieces to get meaning, because what if I do it wrong and distort the text somehow? This is just part of my deep, deep conservative roots and my own personality. What I've discovered with Deuteronomy is that it's incredibly simple in some ways, like that doesn't mean that if you read it, and it's difficult at first to figure out what's going on there. It's very removed from us in culture, and we're not used to looking at things the way that Deuteronomy is presenting them. But it is it is an invitation you asked to over a view. It's an invitation to know God deeply, like at an experiential level, and to celebrate his attributes or his characteristics. And the way that is done. And this makes sense considering the context that we're given. The way this is done is it's for a new generation of Israelites, because we're told in the text that all the last generation, unless they were really really little and are name to Moses or Caleb, all of the rest have died in the wilderness. So they know their history. But we know as human beings that history dies really fast, like you can know it, but until you experience something, it can be kind of mysterious or lost on us. So and they're about to go in the Promised Land instead of teaching warfare combat or you know, I always picture like a scene in Ulan where they're like doing all the training and stuff. You know that I can't remember the name of the song, but they're learning warfare because they're going to go into battle. They don't need any of those tactics. The things they have to be able to do are walk with God because he's going there and he's bringing them and he's going to do all the fighting and make sure they win because he's giving this land to them, So they have to know him enough to follow him. And you know, that's on a very simple level, but it's not so simple when you can't like see the figure of God walking with you. You have to understand who he is. So to these new generation of Israelites, he's teaching in a style, a couple of styles actually, that they're very familiar with who he is and that they can trust him. And I'm going to say the examples and the teachings he's given are at about an elementary school level. They're meant to be incredibly painable. And I'm not just saying that because Moses says that at the end of the book. I'm saying that of how they would have understood these and read them. And I'll be honest, there's only like maybe I'm going a guest, there used to be seven. Now there's probably fifteen that I feel like are attainable to me because from cultural gaps and I don't quite know what's going on with some of the stuff. And they're not just attainable and understandable to the population. They're all so something you learn. You're supposed to learn about the attributes of God through practice and experiencing them, much the way that we would teach our children. So when we're trying to teach our children something, our young children, even I have an eighteen year old right now, and even I don't usually sit down and explain it, although with my older ones I try that at some point. But you let them walk through it, you let them learn. Sometimes we talk about them learning the hard way or you can learn the easy way, and that's exactly what all these instructions in Deuteronomy are about. And we then, as New Testament Christians, impose something on them that make them feel incredibly scary, Like I, you know, I'll ask a lot of students what they understand about the law and about Deuteronomy, and they'll say, like, I'm so glad we don't have to live under the law, because the idea of law is that if you get it wrong, you're outside of God's favor, and if you get it right, all these good things are going to happen. And we tangle it all up with sin, which the text says all those things, but it's really about training people in who God is by them practicing a number of his attributes in very real, broken, real world situations, and if the cool thing, there's so many cool things, but if they get them wrong, it's learning the hard way. They can still learn who God is. And if they get them right, eventually it clicks in like, oh, yeah, that's God is to me anyway, so that it's not it's so cool.

00:08:31
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean that that framing of the law is really interesting. One of the texts that I've been thinking about an awful lot is Genesis twenty six y five, where Abraham is described as one who has kept all of God's laws and commandments and statutes. And you sort of sit back and you say, well, you know, if you if you eliminate sort of the text critical and the historical critical, like was this a later, you know, written thing, like why are they describing Abraham like this?

00:08:58
Speaker 2: But to me, that gets at the spirit of the law.

00:09:02
Speaker 1: You've read all of the life of Abraham where he's not done everything right, he's he's never really condemned, Like you don't get the sense in the Abraham narrative, and Renee, I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, Like you don't get the sense in the Abraham narrative that God is continually disciplining Abraham along the way, right, you know, you go down to Egypt, you say your wife is your sister, and you come out of there with rewards. This is not punitive to Abraham, probably, but he learns something. And so there's this this trajectory where Abraham is learning to walk with the Lord, and eventually that becomes this description, this summary description of in Genesis twenty sixty five of he's kept the whole of the law and the commandments. Well, obviously he hasn't in a you know, you know sense of he's never made a mistake, but he has in the sense that his whole life now has been a traje doctory toward this notion. And he is the prototypical or paradigmatic sort of person that we should look back to and say, oh, this is how Abraham did it, this is how I should do it. So I don't know, Renee any thoughts on that, as we kind of.

00:10:18
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, the Genesis narratives are frustratingly silent on morality, very very very often for a lot of people, and something that I currently like, like right now working in Jacob. Something that is really apparent to me that sometimes gets lost when we treat these individuals the way that you're describing with Abraham as someone to copy, is that in these narratives like the will of God is a determining factor and not a controlling one, and so it determines the outcome in the end, but it doesn't control the individuals in the meantime, and so they're allowed to be the people that they are, and that is.

00:11:01
Speaker 3: Okay with God. We go question mark, is that okay, yeah, we're.

00:11:06
Speaker 4: We're allowed to be the people that we are, and so were they and so exactly the experience you're describing happens to us every time we read, and that we read and we go, gosh, was he really supposed to do that? M Maybe it's not not really, not really the point. But when we get to Deuteronomy, then, since Deuteronomy is bringing this grand summary to the people so that it becomes theirs and they carry it on, what he's pointing out throughout it all is not who did what right, but who God is, And what's going to happen is they move forward because of the will of God.

00:11:43
Speaker 1: Yeah, would you say Becky, like some of that with the law and some of this struggle that we have maybe with you know, Abraham obviously did things wrong, but he's not, you know, ever really condemned in these narratives, like there is a moral silence and a lot of places and its particularly Genesis. But in my mind, I've always sort of equated that to you know, the later prophetic calls like I desired.

00:12:06
Speaker 2: Mercy, not sacrifice.

00:12:07
Speaker 1: This idea that there is a pathos to keeping the law that transcends almost all of the jots and tittles. And maybe I'm not saying that correctly, but do you do you get the drift there?

00:12:23
Speaker 3: This first struck me really solidly, well it was. It was the second time it struck me. In my dissertation, I picked like five passages that dealt with family members. I was looking at the role of the father within his little household. And I won't go into all the details of that, but I had to restrict it further because family household is defined differently in Israel. But so I settled on these five passages and they were really disturbing settings. Like I was looking to see how righteousness, how a father would walk righteously in obedience a law. And they were like, just really disturbing. If a man has two wives and he loves one and hates the other, and I was like, yes, how do you fix that? And then it doesn't talks about how he's to treat his children, okay. Or if you have a stubborn and rebellious son. Or if you marry a woman and find something the nakedness of a thing iovat da var you don't like about her and you divorce her, you can't marry her again, okay, Like these are just disturbing settings. And then and I'm like, wait, if this is where we're supposed to get our morality and our sense of morality, I don't understand. And the indications of what they were supposed to do, don't go back and fix that setting. They're dealing with something else. And I want like the setting fixed. I want divorce fixed. I wanted slavery fixed. I want to polygamy fixed. I wanted disobedience fixed. And it's just the setting. And then when I started teaching, of course I was obsessed with a low I think about it all the time. I can't tell you how many times I've been teaching in one book, and then I start talking about Deuteronomy, like not because that's where I'm going. I've just renamed the book We're working on Deuteronomy, and so I get a little obsessed. I think about it a lot. But because of that, it was in Samuel and Kings that I noticed the pattern that you guys are talking about in Genesis. When I was reading Genesis, I kind of had a lot of tropes and narratives of what I was taught in my head. So I was like, Okay, this was good and this was bad, and we know this. I didn't know why. I just had been taught that. But when I got to first and Second Samuel and first and second Kings, I realized it's almost completely silent. It's not quite you know, it does call murder an adultery, wrong, shoot, but only one time, like all the rest of this. Yeah, it's not looking at things through the lens that I was looking at it through, which was did this person's sin or didn't this person sin? Was this person wicked or righteous? And who should? Deep down inside the question was who am I supposed to emulate here? How do I like be righteous? Because I love God and I want to do the right thing, and I think what And this is sort of my way of saying, I can answer your question, but I don't think about it in those terms anymore, because I just don't think that's what the text is about. The text is walk with me and know me. And it's not about well, I speak in hyperboles sometimes and my brain runs in a lot of different directions at the same time. But it's not about get it right, although it is about get it right. I mean, he wants you to do these things, but it's about practice who I am, so that you really understand who he is. Because when he tells us a definition of himself an Exodus, for example, when he's and I haven't memorized, but my brain banks out every time I go to look at Exodus thirty four or thirty two, thirty two, yeah, yeah, or yeah one of those about he's patent and you know, loving kind, blah blah blah ah, those good attributes. We hear those, but we can hardly fathom them, We can hardly identify them. In the behaviors of our family members. What might look like patients is actually, you know, just a disrespectful You just keep talking and I'm going to stand here politely. What trouble with concepts of love? What is love? What does it look like to be loving towards your child? Are you supposed to discipline them or have grace in this setting? And it's these are really difficult things to grasp. And in setting these scenarios in the middle of places where Israel is living in their culture, whether the culture is healthy or not healthy, God is inviting his people to respond in a way that demonstrates in the extreme cases. In other words, like He's going to ask them to demonstrate maintaining human dignity to the law breaker, the criminal, or maintaining a level of respect when a marriage is not even near the marriage partners aren't even near one another. In so Stratus, you've got a conquering warrior and a captive non Israelite woman and he's like, no, no, but this is what marriage is. You're the same or you know, all these these dignity, these respect, this proper use of authority, sacred sanctity of marriage, all these kinds of pieces that when you practice them, it clicks with you. I mean, he tells us in Deuteronomy ten, love the widow and alien because you were aliens, and because this is what I did for you. So as you kind of do that, you realize, oh, that's who he is toward me. Now I get it.

00:18:51
Speaker 1: So anyway, no, it's helpful. So I think one of the things that I've chased down over the last couple of years, which is interesting, is Andy Stanley wrote a book called Irresistible. I don't know you've ever read it, but in it he essentially argues this won't be a direct quote, but it would be a close paraphrase. He essentially suggests that Israel is to obey.

00:19:19
Speaker 2: God for their own good.

00:19:21
Speaker 1: So, in other words, it's a quid pro quo sort of relationship. I'm going to barter with you, and I'm going to be obedient so that I can get good stuff. Now you reference that at the beginning when you're talking a little bit about the law. I think that's a drastically unfortunate way to read Deuteronomy, just drastically unfortunate. And you know, framing God is a genie in a bottle that you rub the right way with obedience and then you get blessing is the absolutely wrong way to understand what we're reading.

00:19:53
Speaker 2: In the Old Testament.

00:19:55
Speaker 1: I think that there are two things that we're really holding intention as we think about keeping the Covenant, the Israelites keeping the Covenant, this is obviously going to involve action, and I think what you're getting at is that learned action. I see this in Deuteronomy seventeen, where the Israelite king is to write a copy of the law, have it approved by the priests, and then needs to read it, you know, constantly, so that he learns to fear the Lord. Okay, So that's this embodied moment where he's deeply, you know, imbibing of the law such that he now understands who God is and can walk alongside him with an appropriate degree of attention, so that as he's ruling, he's doing so in response to who God is. Right, that's not a quid pro quo relationship. This is an immersive experience. Right obedience is a recognition that we are subject to God, subject to what God claims, and that we're going to be loyal to Him regardless of what that seems like it's going to work out for us or not. Right, And so the way I usually think about it is like when I read Deuteronomy, and I get to let's say Deuteronomy thirty right, choose life. The Lord is your life and the length of your days. Like what I see in obedience is it's living along the grain of reality that God has established.

00:21:19
Speaker 2: You're you're getting in the flow.

00:21:21
Speaker 1: And when you're in that flow, because we're in sort of a world where things have become disordered through sin, we're not always going to experience that reality as prosperity and health and goodness and wonderful like you know, it's not all going to be puppies and rainbows, right. There are going to be fits and starts. So that's one side of this equation. The other side of the equation is like something that I see in Ezekiel thirty six, twenty six and twenty seven, right, that in the New Covenant, part of what's being fixed is our inability to keep the law. And so there's a sense in which, yes, there's a keeping. The Covenant is intended to be something we do constantly with all we are and have. Right, there's no remainder there, and so that needs to be fixed. But in the interim before it's fixed, God gives a lot of grace and He recognizes the people who really are trying to have soft hearts, who are trying to keep this law, who are truly faithful to him. And so we can read things like we read about Abraham, or we read about you know whomever in the Old Testament, these sort of faithful people. Right, you go to Hebrews eleven and you see all these faithful people, and you're like, I could think of a number of ways those people weren't faithful, but.

00:22:41
Speaker 2: They're they're living faithfully.

00:22:43
Speaker 1: And I think there's this sort of tension that we need to just reckon with of no, you can be faithful and still sin and still be waiting for all of this to be fixed.

00:22:54
Speaker 2: That's sort of part of where we are.

00:22:57
Speaker 3: So I don't know, I always that different for us to day though, that it's that difference, and I'm like, that sounds like my life.

00:23:05
Speaker 1: I think the only difference is that now we have the spirit.

00:23:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, we've.

00:23:10
Speaker 1: Been given that sort of way of we're no longer slaves to sin. You know, I would take that to like Romans five and six, Right, we're no longer slaves to sin. We have the opportunity to live in a new way and so we should be taking that we have a different sort of empowerment than usually we see in the Old Testament. And but I don't think it's different.

00:23:30
Speaker 2: I don't.

00:23:30
Speaker 1: I think there's a deep continuity. I think it's Dan Blockhaws. You know, the Old Testament is all about faith, so is the New Testament. Right, it's there's this deep continuity that runs across both testaments. And so I think to get Deuteronomy right, we do have to understand what it means to keep the Covenant, to remember the Covenant, and and part of that is understanding who God is and what it means to walk alongside him exactly.

00:23:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I.

00:24:02
Speaker 3: Uh that keeping and remembering and walking alongside there's a piece that we read sometimes that we're not alone. You mentioned Andy Stanley. I'm trying to sorry solidate Elvis in my head. You mentioned Andy Stanley and the you know, the idea that if you do good things, good things will happen. And I understand where people get that from the Old Testament. From Deuteronomy especially, it sounds like that, and I think I know why Deuteronomy is framed that way, and it's because Moses is breaking it down as simply and as pastorally as one possibly could. And yet and I'll talk about that again in another second, but you'll see that that concept of I thought it was going to be this way I'm misunderstanding is all the way through the rest of scriptures. I mean, that's what Ecclesiastes is about. That's all the way through, even when you know, is it Tobacco that's crying out to the Lord and is like, hey, do your thing, and he's like, I'm gonna do my thing, but you're not, like it's the way that God works. Isn't this tip for tat thing that we think we're having set up in Deuteronomy and the people are you know, you mentioned at the beginning of the prophets, like this is the fasting that I desire, And then he mentions taking care of widows and orphans, and you're like, that has nothing to do with food. Am I supposed to starve myself? So that like what? And he's saying, these aren't the things you're missing them. These are symbols of the things. And I think one of the reasons that that's so easy to misunderstand from Deuteronomy is that there's this very pastoral hard that runs through the entire text. And this is where for me, if I imagine this is what actually when you understand this, it starts making it simple. If you imagine Moses is literally not just a generation but like we're talking like seventy years forty years older than these people. He's like the lies gruu on the mountain that you go to, like it really difficult, it's intense. And he's looking at these dingbats that like have not seen the miracles that he has seen. I mean, not until Joshua. Are they going to watch watch waters part again? And they were born and food fell out of the sky. This is just what food was Like. They're just not well, they're not wise from age, and they haven't experienced all the things. And he's trying, I'm so hard to get them to understand the urgency of things, and he's making it very simple. I love Deuteronomy for you mentioned that that's probably my favorite biblical passage. I just love it. But he starts in Deuteronomy four by saying, remember what happened when your parents disobeyed. Don't disobey like them because they were all killed, Like, don't disobey God, or you will literally die. And then he does this really cool like parental thing, unlike you who you did it right, You did it right, like you've got it one time, you can do it again.

00:27:39
Speaker 2: Come on, I've got this.

00:27:42
Speaker 3: And then he gives a very clear like cause and effect, you will literally die. And I often think of myself with my son right now, who's just turned eighteen, scariest birthday of them all, because oh, that means freedom, and he does he just doesn't understand the perils of this world. And like when he leaves the house, I'm literally, son, if the boy you're driving with is going one hundred and twenty miles an hour, get out of the situation and don't choose that time to hang out the car window, Like, do you not understand you could? Yah, I'm not worried about you getting arrested. I'll I'll get you the next gast.

00:28:25
Speaker 2: Case scenario in that situation.

00:28:27
Speaker 3: Yeah, but you could die. And that's the kind of thing and so and he's also saying, if you do these things, you will live the most blessed life ever. And I do think one thing that I didn't hear in your description, But I don't think we would differ on this is that there are specific promises to the Israelite people for this time where he's like, yeah, that land, that land is your land. I'm I'm going there, I'm conquering it, I'm handing it to you.

00:29:07
Speaker 2: That's right.

00:29:07
Speaker 3: The stories at the end of the Book of Judges that are so gruesome and disgusting about you know, getting raping women and cutting bodies apart and grabbing women out of the like they're disgusting. Those kinds of things are happening at the beginning of one of those tribal settlements. They're not like, way, way, way later, this is what they're going to enact, and God tells them ahead of time, doesn't matter, I'm giving you the land. We can have theological problems with that because they didn't really deserve it or all that, but he says, I'm going there. If you come with me, you will also get it. And that's the piece that we fail to make the link because the text isn't as explicit every time. Moses kind of like leaves that part out because he puts the carrot so close the carrot and the stick so close to the bea behavior.

00:30:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, if that makes sense, No, there's no gap in between there, So you're anticipating that. It's like this instant moment, like it's going to happen, and you did this and now you get it there.

00:30:15
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's saying that crucial. Yeah, But what he's really saying is not it's going to take longer. That's not the gap I'm talking about. It's the reason. The reason is if you do this, you'll be walking with me and I'm going this way, and you will get all these things understood.

00:30:32
Speaker 2: Got it.

00:30:32
Speaker 3: Oh, it's not a for tech, it's I'm going to do them. Do you want to be part of them? No?

00:30:38
Speaker 1: It's a really interesting point because I think in this you notice I keep going back to Genesis, which is I'm glad, yees sad, I guess.

00:30:46
Speaker 3: But no.

00:30:49
Speaker 1: Genesis fifteen sixteen, Genesis fifteen six which is the one everybody knows. Genesis fifteen sixteen. The iniquity of the Amrites is not yet complete. So he's telling Abram that his descendants will live in a land as slaves or foreign deers Egypt because the iniquities and the Amni Amriits are not yet complete. That's when they'll leave the land and I think we totally miss that, missed the import of what's going on there. You have this, Yes, this is the Nahala. This is going to be the inheritance of the people of Israel, and this is God's inheritance. But there's someone else there right now. And so what God is really saying is, look, you know, to the extent that these people keep My covenant when they walk in there, this is to your point, where I'm going, this group is going to be displaced. But He's being patient with that group right now. Right they haven't yet reached the level where there I'm done now, like this nation hasn't had its time and space just yet. But when they do, that's when we're all going to go in there, like that's when I'm going to appear there. And I do think we miss some of the theological import of that. I don't know, Renee, if you have anything else to add on that aspect of it, because I know this is kind of interesting even when we look at the progression between Abraham Jacob and then on into the conquest.

00:32:14
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, what I keep thinking of is this another element of this tit for tat we keep calling it this like what looks almost like they're being promised a genie in a bottle. Is also the theme and the reminder that they need that. I think that this pairs well with is that they are going to need him. They can't actually do this on their own. So all of these good things that they want, because people want that, they're going to have to get that from him. And the way that those things come, like you're saying, is to be with him. So I think some of that, some of that tit for tat and that like get what you want by obedience, is also serving this purpose of letting them know that just because you're going to move into it, like right now you're in the wilderness, you feel your need very presently, and when you move into the land, you're going to feel it less. But actually it's just as strong. Everything you get has got to come from me. So instead of it being when we look at it from our western abundance place, it looks different like, oh I want more. If I want, that's how I get it. But for them it was like, you're going to every need that you have is going to have to come from me. And so I think that's one of what Becky saying, He's making it very simple, right, because he's handing him this playbook to live by and to extrapolate on for the rest of their time. And so he's making it very simple in this way that like everything, everything is from me. If it's good, then it came from me. And obedience to me just keeps you in that space where you want to be.

00:34:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I just said.

00:34:04
Speaker 3: I just wanted to add too that that whole thing about the time of the their sin has not yet come. We're talking about it on a positive which is really nice, like hey, look at all this grace, but there is a very clear from Israelite perspective like one, yeah, uh, this is what happens, like as you're getting your promise, you are being reminded, like the prophets will tell them later that the judgment is every bit as certain as the blessing if they live a certain way. So it's this double edged anyway, Please keep going with what you were going to say, Jane, No.

00:34:44
Speaker 2: You even have that.

00:34:45
Speaker 1: It's really interesting because you know you have these you know, the land needs its Sabbath sort of narrative within the prophetic tradition, and so you you sit back and you're kind of like, Israel's not really being treated that differently from the rest of the nations. But what the theological difference is is that they belong to God as a special possession, that they have a notion of what it means to walk with God because they've been made privy to it through the revelation that God has given them, and now they're rejecting that and not doing what they're told, and so the implication is not it's okay, Israel, let me pat you on the head and we'll just keep going.

00:35:25
Speaker 2: It'll be all fine, No, no, no.

00:35:28
Speaker 1: What they get is they get the discipline and then the regathering right, and that's different than the other nations. There's an element of grace and restoration there because God is going to be faithful to the Covenant, regardless of whether Israel is faithful to the Covenant. But the implications are still meeted out. It's not like they get off scot free, and so none of this is just sort of like, well, Israel gets it. It doesn't really matter what Israel does. There's maybe a sort of a distorted sense in which that's true, but they don't get it as if, like we've been talking about this quid pro quo. It's not a barter, it's not a trade. It's going to come through immense suffering and a recognition of sin, a disciplining and refining. And I think that that does some interesting things for we don't necessarily have to talk about now, but like this understanding of suffering an ongoing dependence on the Lord. You know, I'm thinking Deuteronomy eight, Right, be careful when you go into the land and you're living in houses you didn't build, you're drinking from cisterns that you didn't dig, you're eating in fields you didn't plant, that you not forget the Lord, right, because he's the one who gave you.

00:36:43
Speaker 2: The power and the strength. Right.

00:36:45
Speaker 1: So there's this ongoing dependence that they're supposed to remember that he's still there. And I think that's that's sort of the quintessential kernel that we have to keep before us as we're reading through some of these what seem like those quid pro quot kind of passages.

00:37:01
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, that just I think Renee was saying about they're still gonna desperately need him, And we see the cycle all through the scriptures, Judges as a prime example, but where you think start going okay and you kind of forget your dependence. And just a side thought, I was in teaching a class last Friday or the friday before, and as we were praying at the beginning of class, a student was praying and he just mentioned, you know, help us not just to remember you when we need you, Lord, but help us to remember to praise you for things too. And I was like, yeah, yes, yes, yes, and that is totally in line with what we're talking about right now. But we have this notion underneath all of that that God wants our praises and he doesn't want to be just like the answer man. And yet he's utter dependence, he knows prevented on him, and he's so okay with that. He's so like, it's so contrary to our Western culture.

00:38:14
Speaker 1: But no, I mean it circles back to a lot of things we've talked about before. And I think, you know, even when we talked about the image of God and the sort of dual notion of yes, it confers dignity, but it also involves obligation. You know, you can't you can't be the image of God without having God present. And so even just that relation finds a dependence. I'm sorry, I think I cut you off her name maybe today, Oh okay, okay, I thought it was how you start.

00:38:41
Speaker 3: But this we've moved on from this just a little bit. But a minute ago we were talking about the presence of God and their deep, deep meat from Him. Maybe we haven't really moved on from that. But if it's okay, I want to take just a second to talk about one of the specific laws, and it's we call it. I call it the teenage boy law because it's it feels like like, really we're talking about this in the Bible, but it's one of my very favorites, so in Deuteronomy three, and I'm just going to go ahead and read it. And yeah, it's a little bit more explicit than we expect our Bibles to be. But whatever. When you're in camped against your enemies, so this is when they're out at war, keep away from everything impure. If one of your men is unclean because of a nocturnal emission, he's to go outside the camp and stay there. As evening approaches, he 's to wash himself, and at sunset he may return to the camp. Designate a place outside the camp where you can go to relieve yourself as part of your equipment, have something to dig with, and when you relieve yourself, dig a hole and cover up your experiment. Where the Lord, your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies from you. Your camp must be holy so that he will not see among you anything indecent and turn away from you. And so many of us I think, I mean, that's not a standard kind of law. You think of a lot of other ones. But we come to that and it's just weird. I don't I don't even I don't even know how to if I need to explain how weird it is. But there's this idea. You could look at it as like, why does God care about where you go to the bathroom. You could look at it as, you know, why does he put so much pressure when you're out at war and at camp? Why are his standards so high? You can do all kinds of things theologically with it, But if you kind of peel back all the complicated pieces and let yourself just look at it as a like I said, if I was going to teach my son when he was in elementary school, something this would be a phenomenal way to teach it. So he's telling them when you go out to war, which they only do a few times before this, and then they're going to do like for the rest of their lives as they go into the conquest. Your area, your tent, your encampment needs to be handled almost like it's a tabernacle. You know, it doesn't go into all the details and we don't have E. Fodds and all this kind of stuff, but like, literally, don't leave your pooper around the tent area because God is walking in it with you. And I love how I shared this story, and it probably came back to bite me because when students came over to my house for the last class, that's all they talked about. And I was like, oh, I was a little too vulnerable. But I had someone over at the beginning of this year and I was giving her a little tour of my house because I love my house. And we walked downstairs and I have three dogs and they're very housebroken, but this particular day, one of my dogs was not. And I open up to my long family game room that we haven't decorated, but it's still this great space. I opened the door, and there's a pile on my carpet, and I was like, Oh, we're just gonna show. I didn't even know what to do. Just shut the door and literally literally not the figurative word use of this word, but literally, that is what it's talking about here, because that's how horrifying, if not more, it would be if you knew that God was walking in your camp and you had piles everywhere, so you take them outside the camp. And so what you're supposed to remember is as you're in this camp with all the fellow soldiers and you're going out against this enemy that's you're not really equipped or meeting up to. I don't care how big you are, and you're word about what's going on. Every time you even go to the bathroom, you're reminded that you're not really even going to be the ones fighting because God is with you in your camp. When you wake up in the morning, when you go to do your business, it doesn't matter. When you're reminded that your encampment, the last place in the world that you would think would be holy because soldiers and men and lots of them, is where God is residing at that point with his people and it's just And that's what I'm talking about about these laws being like teaching techniques and like anything else. You can take a teaching technique and strip it of all its meaning and just do the rudimentary stuff.

00:43:50
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:43:52
Speaker 3: But on the other hand, you can kind of be like, hey, why are we doing this? Listen, here's why you do it, because, yeah, God is here.

00:44:00
Speaker 4: And at the same time, if you were to do it all, it would shape you into something like like you're saying, you know, like it's it would be it would be impossible not to be shaped internally by the process. So you do it even if you don't know why and you don't know how it's all going to work out. It's a necessity.

00:44:21
Speaker 3: Yeah. I just think that's so beautiful, so beautiful.

00:44:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you think about the oddities and inconveniences that that raises, right, Oh yeah, because that's what it is. It's that's really inconvenient, right, Like in old.

00:44:42
Speaker 2: Ways, it's just.

00:44:45
Speaker 1: I'm supposed to be I'm supposed to be fighting a war and now I can't because I had a nocturnal emission.

00:44:50
Speaker 2: And I got to stay out I think seven days or whatever. It's like it wasn't even my fault.

00:44:55
Speaker 1: It's like, fault has nothing to do with it being ostracized. No, right, we're protecting something that needs to be protected, and we're recognizing that as essential as you may be to our community, and as important as you may be to our community, you're not the secret sauce that's going to win the battle. And so you just hang out over here. It's okay, We're cool. It's a whole different sort of cadence of life. You're you're creating there, and in that cadence, I think a point renee, it's like it's going to form you.

00:45:31
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the reason for it is the thing that I mean, and the scripture tells you because God moves about in your camp and you're like, okay, yeah. I think sometimes we don't realize that that's telling us the whole reason they're doing it, even though yeah, anyway, I just I find the simplicity of that message just.

00:45:52
Speaker 1: I think it's something maybe we'll close up on this because I think this is an important aspect of the law that I've been kind of playing around with, and you know, I look at but I think part of what we often miss when we're dealing with the law is that it's not always prescribing the ideal. A lot of times it's restraining the inideal. And so when we look at some of these things, and you talked about this earlier, Becky, like I wanted to solve the you know, I want it to solve the multiple lives problem. I wanted to solve the divorce prom I wanted to solve the adultry problem. Like, but that's not what it's always doing. Sometimes. What it's doing is it's saying, when these things occur, not these things should occur, and this is how you should execute on these it's when these things occur, there's now another boundary that we're going to set so that this doesn't get any crazier than it already is. Like, there's a way for you to go the nth degree on this. So if you marry a slave from a conquered nation, there's a way for you to do that.

00:46:58
Speaker 2: That's really abhorrent it we're not going to allow that.

00:47:02
Speaker 1: So we're going to set boundaries on this, and this is how you're going to do that. So it's not an authorization to say, hey, just go do it, but it's a wrestling with the reality of when this occurs. That's these are the these are the constraints around that practice.

00:47:21
Speaker 3: Is that.

00:47:23
Speaker 4: So?

00:47:23
Speaker 1: I mean I get that out of like Jesus's statement on divorce, Like the Pharisees are asking him, why did Moses commanders to give a certificate or a divorce and Jesus says he did it because of the hardness of your heart. But that then he references Genesis one and says, but the two are to become one flesh.

00:47:43
Speaker 2: That's the ideal.

00:47:45
Speaker 1: The certificate of divorce is sort of a mediating structure where he's saying, no, we we kind of anticipated you'd be jerks about this, and so we had to.

00:47:55
Speaker 2: Put a fence up, right.

00:47:57
Speaker 4: Is that?

00:48:00
Speaker 2: Is that how you think about it?

00:48:02
Speaker 4: Like?

00:48:02
Speaker 3: Not anyone, not anymore. Although I'm not saying that that's incorrect. There's a different paradigm and there are a lot of notions and we don't have time to go into all of them that I've had to kind of deconstruct. I'll listom, but I won't deconstruct like do we have to obey the law? That becomes an irrelevant question for me once I understand what law is are these things just to make us healthy because they're good for us? That's part of it. But I don't think that's the that's the offshoot, that's not the reason. Is he putting boundaries on these circumstances? Or another way to say that is like, is are all these laws reflective of the way that Israel's set up by God is better than surrounding nations? Not necessarily? Sometimes sometimes know, if I don't understand a law, is it probably related to some cultic practice in the ancient and eris world? And I can explain it that way? Not necessary. So these are all the things I've had to kind of deconstruct. It doesn't mean none of them are true. What I have The paradigm I've come to see instead is that that just replaces those those still take they have relevance, they're just secondary. To understand the difference between prescriptive and descriptive, so things that God is telling you to do and things that are the setting. That was the first important part for me. And we think of all these laws, if you da da da da da, then d D as pretty scriptive because they're telling you what to do. But in each one of them, except for things like the Ten Commandments, where it says, don't that the things that have a setting that's descriptive. It's describing a picture like a selfie of society, and that's your setting for the thing he wants to teach you. And then the part that follows is how you're supposed to behave and the reason you're supposed to behave that way, and that's the prescriptive part, and trying to find a link between the two of them. I don't think it always works. It sometimes works to say in this setting, the prescriptive part puts boundaries around that. Instead what I'm but that said, I think most of what the law is doing is speaking to those in authority and telling them to use their authority better or someone else, or don't use it if you've already broken it. But instead what I think is happening, and I can use Paul's example here in the New Testament because it'll just be clearer and more comfortable to Christians because Paul did it, and Paul was an awesome rabbi. He talks about he talks about one of the pieces of the law a couple times, and he talks about the oxen that are threshing grain. Ye, And it's not about animals. His law is not about animals. He's if an oxen is threshing grain, he should be allowed to like nibble while he eats, because he should be allowed to profit from that in some way. And then his conclusion, his application and the reason he's even citing that law is for pastors. So should pastors be recompensed for their work? Should they just do it for free? Because it's ministry. No, even an oxen gets some compensation for their work. And so looking at that and then looking at a bunch of these, I don't know if this is one hundred percent the rule, but it fits better so far as a paradigm. Is that the settings are explaining kind of a more extreme example so that you can extrapolate backwards from all of those. So it's actually about recompense for work, which is what Paul says, right, and the reason it's picking oxen, I believe, and this also comes from studying lots of ancient and Eastern laws. They do not look that different than Israelite laws in the way they're laid out, and a lot of their themes and everything. There are significant differences, but they're not. You can you can understand why the way it does. But it's saying if an oxen can, if oxen can eat while they're working, then could a child? Sure? Could a slave? Yeah? Could a woman? Of course. It doesn't matter where you go on the social stratus, you're going to find something above.

00:52:53
Speaker 2: It, above an oxen, above an oxen.

00:52:56
Speaker 3: And I think that's one of the reasons this passage about dignity, where someone only gets lashes and you're like, forty lashes. I think you'd be dead at forty lash. I would be dead at fortylaes. I do know some cultures still do that today, Korean culture. I was just talking to a student in my class and he's like, yeah, that's our rule. But the text tells us that if someone has broken God's law and they are deemed worthy of punishment, so it's not just man's law, it's God's law. They're an offender of God, they can't be given more than forty lashes, which sounds too much to me. So we all get distracted. But then the text tells us, because that would degrade him, humiliate him. You can't strip a person's dignity if you can't strip the dignity of a criminal. Can you strip the dignity of a child? Can you strip the dignity of a woman? Can you strip the dignity of a handmaid? Can you strip the dignity of a concubine? Can you know? And so oftentimes the paradigm that works a little better for me is trying to figure out what's being instructed, like Paul did, what's this thing actually talking about? And instead of looking at these laws on the surface as very topical, they still would apply in that setting. I'm not saying they're just symbolic. If an oxen's eating, I'm sure it gets to working. I'm sure it gets to eat, right, But you're looking at extreme examples. So, because remember these laws are told, We're told in Deuteronomy, these laws are given so that the judges can judge. Yeah, these settings are you know, oftentimes the thing that is too hard and so for the judge and so he'll have to ask a higher judge will sometimes believe and get taken up to Moses. They are things that are tricky. But if you're looking at like human dignity, you now have a snapshot of what human dignity looks like, we actually have a lot of those in scripture, a lot of snaps what authority looks like, a lot of snapshots of what equality and marriage would look like, a lot of snapshots. And so you can extrapolate that from those because they're in pretty extreme settings and they're usually, like you said, talking and this is a big thing with Dan Block. He's where I learned so much of this front. But they're usually addressing those in authority and telling them how you exercise that authority. Really well, it's not always what the topic is.

00:55:36
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's really helpful. And I get that.

00:55:40
Speaker 1: And the ox the oxen treading grain, you know, like I don't have I don't ever muscle my oxen while it's treading daring, so I don't have that problem. But you get the sense that we're from us, right, I mean, so many of us don't have oxen. But we through that exegesis that Paul provides, we do now understand that there's a something bigger at play. I'd be interested and maybe we can get into this in the next episode. But like, how do we read these commands with a theological register? So I'm not out of time, so we might we probably should carry this over the next episode, but I'd be interested to start here.

00:56:20
Speaker 2: Maybe next time is kind of talk about that.

00:56:24
Speaker 1: So when we look at the mussling of Oxen while they're trying to grain, one of the things that we could sort of think about is what does that say about the way we think about God's provision?

00:56:36
Speaker 2: That's right, and.

00:56:38
Speaker 1: So you you sort of okay, yeah, so I think you drop it down.

00:56:42
Speaker 3: Slaming them isn't cool unless you get to what in the world does this mean about? What does God try to show me about himself so that I can I don't know. I would say fall in love with him more sometimes maybe that love has a little bit of fear in it, all of those things, but it's sure it's a pretty reel like when you see it.

00:57:03
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, And I think that that carries through even beyond those if then commands like the ones with the situation into something like the Ten Commandments, and it really does transform the way we read those. So I think that'll be an interesting topic of conversation. We'll have to dive into it next time, though.

00:57:22
Speaker 4: So.

00:57:25
Speaker 1: Really appreciate this conversation. This is super helpful. I think, you know, diving into the Book of Deuteronomy, like, this is going to be fun. So thank you Renee and Becky for being here. Thank you everybody for listening. Come back next time. We're going to talk a little bit about the law and extrapolating theology out of the law, like what does this mean?

00:57:44
Speaker 2: Who is God?

00:57:45
Speaker 1: Out of the Book of Deuteronomy, which is going to be fascinating. So join us next time and we'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian Take Care. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to life audio dot com, you'll find dozens of other faith centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more.