Dr. Keith Essex · The Master's Seminary · 71 minutes
Lecture by Dr. Keith Essex, from The Master's Seminary's public channel. Study notes below from Medina Community Church.
The course reaches the Torah's culmination: the final speeches of Moses. Dr. Essex explains why the last two generations of scholarship have crowned Deuteronomy the most important book in the Old Testament, corrects its mistranslated title, and opens its great themes: the God who chooses, the character that demands a response, and the heart that must be circumcised. Listen for the difference between a lecture and a sermon, and for the one clear February day when a man on the heights of Moab can see all the way to the sea.
Jewish tradition honored Deuteronomy as the last words of its greatest prophet, yet always ranked it behind Leviticus; Christian tradition gravitated to Genesis. Then, over the last fifty or sixty years, Deuteronomy moved to the center: it is now widely treated as the most important part of the Torah and arguably of the whole Old Testament, its influence traced through Joshua to the end of the canon. Sam Schultz of Wheaton made the bold claim in the seventies, even reordering his survey to begin with Deuteronomy; Essex begins with the Torah whole, but grants the case: without Deuteronomy, the rest of the Old Testament will not make sense. And evangelical scholarship has reaffirmed the old conviction: in this book you are hearing Moses preach.
Deuteronomy means second law, and there never was a second law. The name descends from the Septuagint's mistranslation of chapter 17:18, where the king is to write for himself a copy of this Torah, the whole instruction from Genesis to Deuteronomy, to read and meditate on all his days; the Greek rendered copy as second law, and the title stuck. The Hebrew title is truer: These Are the Words, the words which Moses spoke to all Israel, exposition, explanation, and exhortation built on everything the Torah has said.
The speeches were delivered in the eleventh month of the fortieth year, late winter of 1406 BC, roughly our February. Moses preached, wrote, and died; Israel mourned a month; and in the first month of the new year they crossed into the land, keeping the Passover Joshua 5 records. The whole book is one month of preaching under the shadow of the preacher's death.
The book's first great theme is Yahweh's choice of Israel, and its grammar carries it: some two hundred eighty times, spread evenly through the speeches, Moses says Yahweh your God; twenty-four times, where he stood with them in the history, Yahweh our God; and repeatedly the God of your fathers, the basis of it all. The opening of the first speech already echoes Abraham: Yahweh your God has multiplied you, and you are this day as the stars of heaven for multitude, may he increase you a thousand times more. Election rests on the oath to the fathers, and Deuteronomy never lets Israel forget whose they are.
Deuteronomy states the election outright: because he loved your fathers, he chose their descendants after them; not because you were many, for you were the fewest, but because Yahweh loved you and kept his oath. And the choosing God keeps choosing: he will choose a place for his name to dwell, which the prophets will reveal as Jerusalem; he has chosen Levi and Aaron's line for the priesthood; and in chapter 17 he requires that Israel set over themselves only the king whom Yahweh your God chooses, a verse to carry into 1 Samuel 8, where Israel demands a king with no thought of it. Priest, place, and king: none is Israel's to select, because election belongs to Yahweh.
Moses spoke to all Israel, and Deuteronomy is precise with its assemblies: all the men of Israel means the men twenty and older who appear three times a year; all Israel means everyone, men, women, children, and the sojourner, as chapter 31's sabbatical reading commands, down to the nursing mother with her child. The words of this book were never for a religious class; they were for the whole covenant people, to the youngest ear that could hear.
Three parts of the Old Testament carry the preeminent revelation of Yahweh's attributes, Deuteronomy, the Psalms, and Isaiah, and they are, not coincidentally, the Old Testament's three most quoted books in the New. Deuteronomy shows Yahweh unique, hear, O Israel: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one; jealous, a consuming fire who will share his worship with no rival; faithful; loving, gracious, and compassionate; and judging. The Psalter will sing these same attributes back; they were first preached here.
Deuteronomy never gives a theology lesson for its own sake. The Shema moves in one breath from who God is to what his people must do: Yahweh is one, and you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. Chapter 10 gathers the response whole: what does Yahweh your God require of you but to fear him, to walk in all his ways, to love him, to serve him with all your heart and soul, and to keep his commandments for your good, and the requirement flows straight out of the character: the God of gods and Lord of lords who executes justice for the orphan and loves the alien, therefore you shall love the alien. The more Israel knows who their God is, the more commensurate the response must be. The Essex paraphrase of 6:5: love him with everything you have.
Moses presses past behavior to the organ of obedience: circumcise then your heart, the heart being the Old Testament's seat of thought, emotion, and will. Israel would be circumcised in flesh at Gilgal; Deuteronomy demands the deeper cutting, because obedience that does not come from the heart is not obedience. And Moses already knows how it will go: in chapter 31 he will tell this very congregation that after his death they will act corruptly. The heart problem Deuteronomy names is the problem the rest of the Old Testament narrates.
The land fills nearly every chapter, and over it falls a shadow: the preacher is not going. Three times Moses recalls pleading with Yahweh to cross over, and Yahweh's refusal, God was angry with me on your account, he tells them, your rebellion led to mine, a fact stated, not blame shifted. Each time, the answer stands beside the wound: Joshua, whom God has raised up. And one mercy remains: Moses will see the land. Essex adds the geography: to this day, on the rare clear days of late winter, a man on the heights of Moab can see with the naked eye across the sixty miles to the Mediterranean, and it was in exactly that season, at a hundred twenty years with eye undimmed and vigor unabated, that Moses climbed and saw.
A student asks why Deuteronomy retells events already narrated, and Essex names the difference: Genesis through Numbers gives the account; Deuteronomy gives the proclamation, personal, intimate, inside the events, always driving from what Yahweh has done to how Israel must respond. From Genesis 1 to Numbers 36 you have a lecture; in Deuteronomy you have preaching. Moses is the Bible's first great expository preacher, and Paul, whose letters move from fact to therefore in exactly this shape, learned the structure from him.
The closing questions draw fine distinctions. The covenant of Horeb, Moses insists, was made not with our fathers, the patriarchs, but with us, with all national Israel, and with every generation that hears the Torah read, standing again, as it were, at the mountain; it was external, made with believer and unbeliever alike, which is precisely how it differs from the new covenant of Jeremiah 31, made only with the changed of heart. And on the generations: Scripture holds both truths without contradiction, each person bears his own sin, no son condemned for his father, and yet the consequences of a father's pattern visit the children who walk in it, little mimics of the sins they watched. The warning is for fathers; the way of escape, repentance, is open to sons.
Each opens the chapter in your ESV app or on esv.org.
Tap an answer. A wrong guess points you back to the outline; when all fourteen are right, the lecture is marked complete on this device.
1. What has changed in the study of Deuteronomy over the last two generations?
2. Why is the name Deuteronomy a misnomer?
3. What was the king of Deuteronomy 17 actually commanded to write?
4. When were the speeches of Deuteronomy delivered?
5. What phrase carries the theme of election through the book?
6. On what basis did God choose Israel, per Deuteronomy 4 and 7?
7. Which three choices does the choosing God reserve to himself?
8. Who was included when all Israel gathered to hear the Torah?
9. Which three Old Testament books carry the preeminent revelation of Yahweh's attributes?
10. What does Deuteronomy never do with theology?
11. What does circumcise your heart demand?
12. What mercy accompanied the refusal of Moses' plea to enter the land?
13. What is Essex's one-line description of the difference between Genesis through Numbers and Deuteronomy?
14. With whom was the covenant of Horeb made?
All fourteen correct. Lecture 22 is complete.
Deuteronomy is theology that always ends in therefore. When you learn something true about God, what would it look like to let it demand a commensurate response the way Moses' preaching does?
Love him with everything you have: heart, soul, might. Which of the three comes hardest for you, your thinking, your affections, or your energy, and what would wholehearted look like there this week?
Every generation hearing the Torah stood, as it were, at Horeb again. How does gathered worship, the word read and preached, place you inside the story of God's people rather than outside it?
The Shema of Deuteronomy 6: hear, O Israel, Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one; and you shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
The lecture's own trail: Samuel Schultz's The Gospel of Moses, the book that first argued Deuteronomy is the key to all of Scripture; the introductions in Craigie's and Merrill's Deuteronomy commentaries on the book's move to the center of Old Testament study; and Deuteronomy 10:12 through 22 read aloud, the passage where character and requirement intertwine.