SOME SCHOLARS CALL THE book of Deuteronomy “The Gospel According to Moses.” Others, instead of comparing Moses to a gospel writer, compare him to Paul, the great New Testament theoretician. Daniel Block, in this wonderfully written commentary on Deuteronomy, uses both these ascriptions and more to describe the incredible theological value of this Old Testament book. At one point he claims it is “the most systematic presentation of theological truth” in the entire Bible, rivaled perhaps only by Paul’s Romans.
Deuteronomy? you may be wondering. Isn’t it just an Old Testament book? How can it be “gospel” without Jesus? Doesn’t it predate Jesus by at least a millennium? Isn’t this kind of reliance on Old Testament law just what Paul warns us against?
Listen! If you have even an ounce of such nomo-phobia, start reading this commentary. You will find your prejudices quickly taking flight. As Professor Block shows us, what Moses did was gospel. It was good news to the Israelites who heard it on the Plains of Moab. And in the hands of this excellent biblical exegete, it becomes gospel for us today.
This may sound surprising to you, and it is true that there are surprises awaiting you when you study this book. First, you will be surprised at who Moses is. Second, you will probably be surprised with what Moses asks Israel to do in his speeches, not because of what he says, but with how much sense it makes to you as a non-Israelite some three thousand-plus years after the fact.
Moses can be summed up in this statement: Moses is more of a pastor than a lawgiver. Admittedly this goes against the grain of what we think we know about him. One of our most enduring images of Moses is his Olympian moment of anger, smashing two stone tablets of law on the rocks when he saw the golden calf. At first glance this seems to be all about law. God has given the law, Moses is bringing the law, the children of God are breaking the law. Can’t be much more law-filled than that, right? And wasn’t that really who Moses was?
But consider the occasion presented to us in Deuteronomy. The Israelites are poised to enter the Promised Land. It is a moment of hope. But hope, by its very nature, always has an element of uncertainty, and thus anxiety always accompanies hope. Things could go wrong. What if . . . ? Or what if . . . ? They need the reassurance of a pastor’s hand, not the remonstrances of an authority figure. Moses supplies that.
The second surprise is that what Moses tells the Israelites makes so much sense to us today. He tells them they need to be in a covenant relationship with God, that God wants them to be his people. Moses challenges the Israelites to respond by declaring that Yahweh alone is their God, and then by doing what God asks them to do.
Several years ago my wife and I taught abroad for a year and offered our home to a Jewish couple from Israel who were teaching in the United States. They asked if they could affix a mezuzah to our doorpost, a metal tube with the Shema in it, a passage from Deuteronomy 6 in Hebrew on a piece of paper (it also includes a similar passage from Deuteronomy 11). The Shema in just a few short verses captures so much of what Moses taught and counseled, beginning with the well-known phrase, “Hear, O Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one.” After the briefest of considerations, we couldn’t think of anything more appropriate to be on our doorpost. That is what we want to be constantly reminded of—the one Lord and our allegiance to him. And that is what we want to say to the world about who we are, and whose we are. The mezuzah is still on our doorpost.
Since then, the verses from Deuteronomy 6:4–9 have become one of my favorite biblical passages:
Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength. And these words which I command you today shall be in your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, and when you rise up. You shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be a frontlet between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
One does not have to be an Old Testament Israelite to fully embrace the identity that this passage describes and to live it to the full. Jesus in his teaching ministry realized the spiritual goldmine of this passage and others like it that Deuteronomy represents. In his teaching he quotes more often from Deuteronomy than from any other biblical book. And this rich resource is as available to us—perhaps even more so—as it was to Jesus.
Terry C. Muck