Today’s Passage: An Overview of the Whole Book
Numbers left Israel on the plains of Moab, across the Jordan from the land, a whole generation dead in the wilderness and their children now grown and ready to cross. Deuteronomy opens right there, and it is Moses standing before that new generation to speak. He is old now, and he will not go over the river with them, and he knows it. So the book is his farewell, a long and tender series of addresses given at the border of everything the LORD had promised, about forty years after the fire came down on Sinai. Moses gathers up the whole journey, all the mercy and all the failure, and he sets it before the young in a plea that never loses its warmth: remember what the LORD has done, love Him with everything you have, keep His words, and choose life. This is not new law so much as the old covenant spoken again, in a father’s voice, to children who must now carry it in.
As you read, hold this: Love the LORD your God with all your heart, remember His covenant, and choose life.
The English title comes to us through the Greek and means “second law,” which is a fair enough name for a re-giving of the covenant to the next generation. But the Hebrew title, as with each book of Moses, is the book’s own opening words: דְּבָרִים (devarim), pronounced deh-vah-REEM, which simply means “words.” The book begins, “These are the words Moses spoke to all Israel,” and that is exactly what it is. Words. The last words of the man who led them out, poured out at the threshold of the land, so that the covenant would live in the hearts of those about to inherit it.
The name and what it means
Deuteronomy is the fifth book of Moses, and it stands like a doorway between the wilderness behind and the land ahead. Its register is not the register of a mountain wrapped in smoke, nor of a marching camp counting its ranks. It is the register of a farewell sermon: earnest, unhurried, pressing the same great truth from every side, the way a father who knows his time is short will say the one thing that matters more than once, so that it cannot be missed.
The Lord Jesus loved this book. When He was led into the wilderness to be tested, and the tempter came at Him again and again, it was from Deuteronomy that He answered every time, drawing the sword He wielded straight from these words.
Matthew 4:4 (BSB) — “But Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.’””
That line He quoted is Deuteronomy’s own, and it tells you what kind of book this is. It is a book about living by the word of God, every word, all the way in.
The world of the book
The whole of Deuteronomy happens in one place and very nearly in one moment. Israel is encamped on the plains of Moab, east of the Jordan, within sight of the hills of Canaan, waiting to cross. Behind them lie Egypt and the sea, Sinai and its law, the long forty years and the graves of their fathers. Before them lies the land, and Jericho, and a life they have never lived, settled and planted and at rest. Moses stands between the two, and he speaks.
It is a world poised on an edge. These are people who were children when the spies came back afraid, who grew up on manna and cloud and fire, who have known God only in the desert and are about to know Him in a good land of wheat and vineyards and cities they did not build. Moses knows the danger of that good land as clearly as he knows its blessing. So he warns them, in the same breath in which he blesses them, not to forget the God who fed them in the waste, and not to bow to the idols of the nations they are going in to displace.
The shape of the book
Deuteronomy moves as a series of great addresses, and you can hear Moses turn from one to the next.
- Deuteronomy 1–4. Looking back. Moses retells the journey from Sinai to this very spot, the sending of the spies, the years of wandering, the mercy that carried them, and he presses the lesson of it all: hold fast to the LORD, and do not forget what your eyes have seen.
- Deuteronomy 5–26. The heart of the covenant. Moses restates the Ten Commandments, and then, in chapter 6, gives the great call to love the LORD with all the heart, soul, and strength, the words Israel would recite morning and evening ever after. From there he lays out how a redeemed people is to live in the land, in worship, justice, and mercy.
- Deuteronomy 27–30. Blessing and curse. Moses sets before them life and death, the good that follows faithfulness and the ruin that follows turning away, and he pleads with them, plainly, to choose life.
- Deuteronomy 31–34. The passing of the torch. Moses commissions Joshua, writes down the law, sings his song, blesses the tribes, and climbs Mount Nebo, where the LORD shows him the whole land. He sees it from the height. He does not enter it. And there Moses dies, and the book, and the books of Moses with it, come to their close.
Our walk begins at the beginning, with Moses looking back over the journey in the opening chapters. You are welcome to sit with more than one chapter at a time. Only keep them in order, because the great call to love in chapter 6 lands with its full weight only after you have heard, in the chapters before it, all that the LORD has done to earn such love.
The one thread to carry
If you take one thing from this book, take the words Israel carried on their lips for the rest of their history, the words the Lord Jesus called the greatest commandment of all. They come in chapter 6, and they are the heart from which everything else in Deuteronomy beats.
Deuteronomy 6:4–5 (BSB) — “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is One. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”
This is the Shema, named for its first Hebrew word, “Hear.” Everything Moses asks of them flows from it. To remember is to love. To obey is to love. To choose life is to love the One who is Life. And lest they think the choice is small, Moses sets it before them as plainly as it can be set.
Deuteronomy 30:19 (BSB) — “I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing. Therefore choose life, so that you and your descendants may live,”
Then Moses went up the mountain, and saw the land he had longed for across the years, and did not go in.
Deuteronomy 34:4 (BSB) — “And the LORD said to him, “This is the land that I swore to give Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob when I said, ‘I will give it to your descendants.’ I have let you see it with your own eyes, but you will not cross into it.””
A leader who spent himself for a people, a covenant handed on to the young, and a land still ahead, held out by the promise of God. That is Deuteronomy, and that is why we start here. Love the LORD your God with all your heart, remember His covenant, and choose life.