Lecture 24: The Shema, the Shape of the Statutes, and What the Law Means for Christians

The lecture, section by section

1. Four words to hearken to

   Hear, O Israel: in Hebrew the confession is just four words, Yahweh our God Yahweh one, and the interpreter must decide where the verb to be belongs. The Septuagint, the earliest translation, made two coordinate statements: Yahweh is our God, Yahweh is one. Merrill defends the numerical sense, there is one Yahweh only; others hear uniqueness, Yahweh our God, Yahweh alone; Craigie heard wholeness, Yahweh undivided. Essex leans to uniqueness in this context without dogmatism, and tells of the student writing his exegetical paper on the verse who groaned, you're no help at all. The essence is not in doubt: you have one God, Yahweh is that God, embrace him with your total being.

2. Love him, and teach your sons

   The response to the confession comes in the singular: you, individual Israelite, shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart and soul and might, a wholehearted inner decision that then governs every area of thought and conduct. These words are to be on the heart, taught diligently to the sons, spoken of when sitting in the house and walking on the way, lying down and rising up, bound on the hand, before the eyes, written on the doorposts and the gates: directing the home and the town alike. The chapter then warns, when God gives you all these good things, watch lest you forget him; fear Yahweh only, for he is a jealous God; and your obedience will one day give you the answer when your son asks what these statutes mean.

3. Are chapters 12 to 25 a jumble?

   After chapters 5 to 11, some of the most preached material in the whole Old Testament, the reader hits the long lists of statutes and wonders whether Moses has become a stream of consciousness, one law after another with no order. Many scholars say exactly that: a disparate collection without structure or unity. Essex answers that the restatement of the ten words in chapter 5 was not decoration; it is preparatory. The commandments of the Decalogue dictate the arrangement of everything that follows.

4. The Decalogue as table of contents

   Trace it with the chart. The first and second commandments govern worship: chapter 12, one Yahweh, one chosen place. The third, the name: chapter 13's ban on joining Yahweh's name to any other god, and the supremacy of the name into chapter 14. The fourth, the Sabbath principle: the feasts and appointed gatherings from the end of 14 through the middle of 16. The fifth, honor of parents, expands to every God-given authority: judges in 16, the king in 17, prophets and priests in 18. Commandments on life and the death penalty run from 19 into 22; sexual ethics and the guarding of marriage through 23; theft and false witness into 24; and in chapter 25, the checking of the heart's desires. Merrill's commentary traces the progression in full.

5. Law inside a covenant

   For the Christian question Essex commends Richard Averbeck's chapter in Cracking Old Testament Codes. Its foundation: a covenant is a means of establishing and defining a relationship, and the Mosaic law is embedded within the Mosaic covenant the way a picture sits within a frame. At Sinai the relationship already stood, grounded in the Abrahamic promises: I am Yahweh who brought you out of the house of slavery comes before a single commandment. The law therefore is not the relationship; it serves the relationship, and it has relevance only as part of the covenant that surrounds it.

6. The spirit of the law

   Averbeck states the spirit of the whole: God expects the people he has redeemed to take their covenant commitment to him seriously, because he takes his covenant commitment to them seriously. Yahweh is a covenant-keeping God, faithful to Abraham in bringing his seed to himself, and Israel shows the same loyalty by obedience to stipulations that reflect Yahweh's own character. The law itself comes in two kinds, exactly as Deuteronomy 12:1 says: statutes, the divine decrees, and judgments, the judicial rulings that stand as precedents.

7. One law, not three

   The familiar division of the law into moral, ceremonial, and civil comes from the Calvinist tradition, not from the text; no passage of the Old Testament sorts its laws into those bins. The scheme has its uses, the ceremonial pointing to Christ the final priest and sacrifice, the civil raising the intramural debate over whether Old Testament civil law should govern modern states. But those who hold the threefold division cannot agree among themselves on what still binds Christians, and the categories have been placed upon the law rather than found in it.

8. The Sabbath test case

   Ask the Sabbath which bin it belongs in. Religious? Certainly: a day of holy convocation. Civil? Certainly: no work, on pain of civil penalty. Moral? It stands inside the ten words themselves. The one command overflows every category, which is the point: the Old Testament law is a unified whole that stands together and concludes together. And Exodus 31 names the Sabbath the sign of the Mosaic covenant, so of all the laws, it is the one you would most expect to lapse if that covenant came to an end.

9. Change of covenant, change of law

   Deuteronomy itself foresees the end. Yahweh sighs at 5:29, oh that they had such a heart; 10:16 commands, circumcise your heart; the former prophets will narrate the disobedience Moses predicted, and the latter prophets will make explicit what was implicit: the Mosaic covenant will be replaced by another, the covenant Jeremiah 31 calls new. That covenant has Torah too, written on the heart, for there is nothing wrong with a covenant carrying law. But a change of covenants by definition means a change of law: not under law means not under the Mosaic prescriptions, while believers stand under the law of Christ, the mediator of the new covenant, whose imperatives fill every letter of the New Testament.

10. Educational, not legislative

    So what is the Christian's relationship to the Mosaic law? As direct prescription to obey: zero. As instruction in how God calls a covenant people to a standard reflecting his own character: a great deal. The Mosaic standards now have an educational role rather than a legislative one; some are relaxed in the New Testament, some intensified, as the divorce laws show. And under either covenant the commandments cannot be kept without a changed heart and the enabling Spirit, which is precisely what Israel lacked and what new covenant believers have been given.

11. Two commands that sum up both laws

    When Jesus named the greatest commandments, love the Lord with the totality of your being and love your neighbor as yourself, he was summarizing the Mosaic legislation; and the same two commands, Paul says in Romans 13, sum up everything required of believers. Every imperative given to the church falls under one of the two. Those who say the only command of Christ is love have not escaped law; they have named its headings, and Hebrews 10's charge not to forsake the assembly shows how concrete loving your neighbor gets.

12. Whom to confront with which law

    A closing exchange sharpens evangelism. Essex does not use the Mosaic law to hold Gentile unbelievers accountable: the Gentile's sin, per Romans 1, is suppressing the truth of the Creator and turning to idols, and the stipulations that bind all flesh belong to the covenant with Noah in Genesis 9. A Jewish unbeliever is different: confront him with the ten words his fathers pledged to keep, and with the sacrifice he can no longer offer, and then tell him of the Lamb God has provided in the Messiah he rejected. Romans 2:15 remains a debated text, Murray and Cranfield reading it differently, and the standing counsel is to know the Old Testament before studying Romans at all.

1. The Shema moves from who God is to total love in a single breath, and commands parents to keep the words in the ordinary hours: sitting, walking, lying down, rising. Which ordinary hour of your week could carry that kind of speech, and what stops it now?

2. The law sits inside the covenant like a picture in a frame: relationship first, stipulations serving it. Where are you tempted to reverse the order, treating obedience as the way into God's favor rather than the loyalty that flows from it?

3. Educational, not legislative: the Mosaic law teaches believers who God is and what covenant loyalty looks like, without binding them as prescription. Pick one Old Testament law that has puzzled you and ask what it teaches about the character of the God who gave it.