Lecture 7: Deuteronomy, the Circumcised Heart, and the Gift of the Land

The lecture, section by section

1. The story so far

   Schreiner gathers the threads. The story is the kingdom: God, always King, reestablishing his rule over the earth through the offspring of the woman. The flood showed that the serpent's offspring never finally triumph. The promise narrowed to Abraham: land, offspring, and, easy to underplay, universal blessing, for God's intention was always the world. Genesis labors over getting the children; Exodus redeems them from the serpent-king; Sinai binds them in a conditional covenant whose blessings answer obedience and whose curses climax in exile; Leviticus keeps the presence; Numbers buries a faithless generation and raises a new one. Now Deuteronomy: the people stand on the cusp of a land like a new Eden.

2. Grace precedes demand

   Deuteronomy 7 gives the covenant's deepest logic: the LORD set his heart on you not because you were many, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because he loved you, keeping the oath he swore to your fathers. He loved you because he loved you: the reason terminates in God himself. The prophets indicate Israel was estranged from the LORD even in Egypt; deliverance was pure grace. This people is the apple of his eye, carried like an eagle carries its young, named Jeshurun, which the old Greek translation renders beloved. The old song has it right, taken rightly: there is no reason in us.

3. The LORD who fights and gives

   Through Deuteronomy's opening chapters, as Gary Millar observes, it is the LORD who disposes territory and determines the outcome of battles. The land will be gift before it is ever conquest.

4. The vocabulary of belonging

   Deuteronomy piles up its words: keep, do, serve, worship, listen, love, hold fast. The word for holding fast, dabaq, to cling, is the marriage word, a husband and wife cleaving to one another; Israel is to cling to the LORD himself. And the commands come under every name, statutes, rules, testimonies, ways, torah, instruction. To be the people of God is to live gladly under his covenant lordship, and that is still what it means to believe.

5. Justice for the vulnerable

   The book returns again and again to justice, to the poor, and, strikingly, to wives, who in the ancient world were particularly exposed to injustice. God's law speaks his unchanging will into a particular culture. The pastor's calling, Schreiner adds, is to preach the obligation itself, justice, generosity, protection of the weak, while the policy questions of how a society best does these things are matters on which Christians may legitimately differ.

6. Herem inside, peace outside

   Inside the land, total destruction was commanded; outside it, peace was to be offered to peoples who would submit. Against recent writers who conclude Israel sinned in the conquest, Schreiner is plain: the text clearly presents these commands as God's own. God writes over every human life; he decides when people live and when they die. The commands are hard, and they are his.

7. The place the LORD chooses: worship regulated

   Deuteronomy 12 fixes worship at the place the LORD will choose, deliberately unnamed: Shiloh first, Jerusalem later, for the place can move. What cannot move is the principle: worship is not left to Israel's creativity but regulated by God's word. Schreiner owns the regulative principle, with common sense, and offers a modern test: Scripture explicitly commands the public reading of Scripture, yet many churches now scarcely read the Bible or pray in their services, against the practice of the whole Christian centuries. Worship is fundamentally about faithfulness, not creativity.

8. The failure foretold

   At the book's end Moses tells Israel plainly that they will disobey and go into exile. Deuteronomy 29 says something stranger still: you saw the signs and wonders, yet to this day the LORD has not given you a heart to understand, eyes to see, ears to hear. God has not given it, and they are guilty for lacking it: sovereignty and responsibility, side by side once more.

9. The circumcised heart

   Then, past the exile, the promise: the LORD your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, and you will love him with all your heart and soul, and live. Schreiner reads it as regeneration itself, the only soil in which the great commandment can grow, for no one loves God with the whole heart until God has changed the heart. A remnant in every generation knew that circumcision, Moses and Joshua among them; Deuteronomy 30 looks to the day the whole people will, and that day is the new covenant.

10. Joshua: the second leg of the promise

    Joshua is a huge step forward: Israel enters the land. Count the years from Abraham, on any dating of the exodus, and the promise took hundreds of years to reach this day. God is not in a hurry, Schreiner confesses, though he himself is; God works out his purposes in his own time, and his people learn patience under the promise. And the land entered is itself an anticipation of paradise.

11. A book made of land

    Joshua's very vocabulary is soil: land over a hundred times, boundary and border dozens more, inheritance everywhere, so that when the New Testament says inheritance, Joshua should ring in the ears. The book's shape: chapters 1 to 5, Israel enters the land; 6 to 11, takes it; 12 to 22, divides it; 23 to 24, serves the LORD in it. The boundary lists where modern eyes glaze are recorded in loving, meticulous detail, what Stephen Dempster calls a kind of geographical overkill, precisely because it is their land, and place matters to embodied people. Dempster's Dominion and Dynasty, Schreiner adds, is the best Old Testament theology he knows, and mercifully short.

1. He loved you because he loved you. When you explain to your children why God loves your family, how close do you stay to that answer, and what quietly creeps in to replace it?

2. Worship, Deuteronomy says, is about faithfulness before creativity. Walk through an ordinary Sunday at your church: where is the word read, prayed, sung, and preached, and is anything commanded being crowded out?

3. Moses told Israel plainly that only God's circumcising of the heart would make them love him. Where are you working on behavior, in yourself or your children, in a place only a new heart can reach, and what does that turn your prayers into?