The Bible in a Year – 4 March


If this is your first viewing, please see my Introduction before reading this.

4 March. Deuteronomy chapters 14-16.

We move now into specific regulations, most of which are a repeat of what was given at Sinai or during the desert wanderings.  For it is one thing to have a load of instructions given to you, another to remember them, especially without practice (and many of these instructions, such as sacrificing at the central shrine or appointing circuit judges, would not make sense or start to be practised, until battles had been won and towns settled).  If the tribes arrayed before Moses by the Jordan can be compared with students, this is the revision crammer before the exam.

 

The exam would take the form of a very extended practical experiment – in theory, says Moses, if you can keep all these laws precisely, and avoid all the distractions of other faiths and cultures, then you will have a peaceful and harmonious society.  But it would take a real effort for the people to follow these laws.  It does not come naturally to any of us to forgive our debtors (15:1-3), to follow strict dietary rules (14:3-21), to keep money from sale of our possessions “secure in hand” (14:25) in order to travel to a central shrine and purchase  replacements for sacrificial offering, to share our food with people of other cultures (14:29), or as a slave about to be freed to offer oneself voluntarily and out of love as a permanent employee of the master’s household (15:16-17).

 

It’s no wonder that some of these laws were probably never kept in practice, and that many times in the coming centuries God’s people would have to be reminded of them.  Which is why people of all faiths gather regularly together to hear their sacred scriptures read aloud to them, or to study them in groups. The Bible is the ‘word of God’ – although exactly what we mean by that may differ – but we need to constantly be reminded of its counter-cultural truths.