revmarple

Last time we finished the stipulations of the covenant treaty between God as the powerful sovereign and Israel as his servant vassal.  In such treaties you will find the main elements that we are going to see today.  The main difference is that Deuteronomy sees beyond this covenant to a new covenant after the blessings and curses of the covenant made at Horeb have fallen upon Israel.

Another example from chapter 16 before we move to the next: 

We have already seen that the Israelites were to destroy the wooden Asherah poles and pillars.  And now the text says, "You shall not plant any tree as an Asherah beside the altar of YHWH your God that you shall make.  And you shall not set up a pillar, which YHWH your God hates" (Deuteronomy 16:21-22).  The point here is that the central worship place will not include any of the trappings of Canaanite religion.  Not only will they remove the existing religious idols but they were not to make any new ones for the new worship center.  And Deuteronomy 17:1, the next verse, continues the worship theme by prohibiting the sacrifice of a blemished or defective ox or sheep as "an abomination to YHWH your God." 

The laws of Deuteronomy fit into a larger scheme of the laws of the Torah. We have discussed the relationship of the laws from other angles in other posts. Here we will simply compare the similar regulations in Deuteronomy to other books in the Torah to show that what Deuteronomy does is to make explicit what was only implicit in earlier works and to give more examples wherever the earlier texts did not and just to otherwise clarify what might be unclear if we only had those earlier books. In short, the second telling of these regulations is in many respects an effort to explain the Torah (cf. Deut 1:5). The other main reason for all this is to retell many regulations from the perspective of having only one altar for sacrificial worship in the land. Thus Deuteronomy further explains the Torah in light of the change made (in light of incidents like the Golden Calf and goat idol episodes) regarding building altars in the land.

Deuteronomy is one of the gospels, just from the Old Testament.  Here Moses continues to sound themes that Jesus will discuss at length, themes that are the very reason Jesus came.  Jesus spoke a lot about the heart.  Even when He did not mention the heart, He often was still saying something about it.  For example, when Jesus said that if your eye causes you to stumble then you need to pluck it out (Mark 9:47), it was an example of understatement (not overstatement as many have argued).  What he meant was that you needed something far more drastic and far more serious than plucking out your eye.  Simply removing the eye does not get rid of where lust, for example, comes from.  What was needed was heart surgery -- a heart circumcision.  Everyone who has not already had one, needs this surgery in order to live eternally.  Of course, you realize that we are not talking about the physical heart of a person.