Bible Commentaries
Deuteronomy 4

Verse 9

LEST THOU FORGET!

‘Only take heed to thyself, and keep thy soul diligently, lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen, and lest they depart from thy heart all the days of thy life.’

Deuteronomy 4:9

In the business of life there are three parties concerned, three parties of whose existence it behoves us to be equally and intensely conscious. These three are God on the one hand, and our own individual souls on the other, and the one Mediator, Jesus Christ, who alone can join the two into one.

I. There is all the difference in the world between saying, Bear yourselves in mind, and saying, Bear in mind always the three, God and Christ and yourselves, whom Christ unites to God.—For then there is no risk of selfishness, nor of idolatry, whether of ourselves or of anything else; we do but desire to keep alive and vigorous, not any false or evil life in us, but our true and most precious life, the life of God in and through His Son. But what we see happen very often is just the opposite to this. The life in ourselves, of which we are keenly conscious, never for an instant forgetting it, is but the life of our appetites and passions, and this life is quite distinct from God and from Christ. But while this life is very vigorous, our better life slumbers; we have our own desires, and they are evil, but we take our neighbour’s knowledge and faith and call them our own, and we live and believe according to our neighbour’s notions; so our nobler life shrinks up to nothing, and our sense of truth perishes from want of exercise.

II. In combining a keen sense of our own soul’s life with the sense of God and of Christ there is no room for pride or presumption, but the very contrary. We hold our knowledge and our faith but as God’s gifts, and are sure of them only so far as His power and wisdom and goodness are our warrant. Our knowledge, in fact, is but faith; we have no grounds for knowing as of ourselves, but great grounds for believing that God’s appointed evidence is true, and that in believing it we are trusting Him.

Dr. Thos. Arnold.

Illustration

(1) ‘This is part of God’s counsel to Israel, through His servant Moses, just before he was parted from them on Mount Nebo. It is a counsel which, when spoken by worldly lips, has in it often a very selfish meaning: a maxim on which is built many an earthly policy; a philosophy of selfishness which is incarnated in many a wretched, earthly life. And the world’s “look out for number one” is a policy which, whatever semblance of succcess it may bring, has in it elements of recoil which inevitably lead to true impoverishment. For even a Divine precept, if it be taken and twisted by worldly hearts and degraded to a selfish purpose, may be made a minister of sin and death rather than of righteousness and life.

But whatever may be said of this counsel, as misinterpreted and misapplied by the worldly heart, it is, as God gave it through Moses, an important and salutary one.’

(2) ‘The writer is showing how much more favoured are God’s peculiar people than are any of the nations. As the Revised text gives it, “For what great nation is there, that hath a god so nigh unto them, as the Lord our God is whensoever we call upon Him?” As if Moses would say, “Did God ever treat any set of heathen as he has treated his people Israel?” ’

(3) ‘How true is the description of ourselves in verse 20! An iron furnace is one for smelting iron. In such a position were we once, in an Egypt of misery. Now God looks for joy and comfort out of us, as a man from his property. God takes us out of the furnace of our foes; but He does not spare us the fire. He is Himself that. Those who will not yield are exposed to His judgments; whilst others are cleansed by contact with His holy nature, which is fire to their bonds, though it does not singe one hair of their heads. Let us beware of the “jealousy” of God’s love, which will not consent to a divided heart, nor permit His “glory” to be given to graven images.’

Verses 25-26

THE LAW OF RIGHTEOUSNESS

‘When ye … shall corrupt yourselves.… Ye shall soon utterly perish from off the land.’

Deuteronomy 4:25-26

Over and over again in Scripture we are taught, and for the most part are taught in vain, that righteousness is the one end of life, that righteousness delivereth from death; that circumcision is nothing, and uncircumcision is nothing, but to keep the Commandments of God. If we would enter into life we are told as the one indispensable requisite we must keep the Commandments. Our opinions may be all wrong, our ignorance is certainly limitless; it will matter nothing if our heart be right. Unto man God saith, ‘Behold, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom, and to depart from evil is understanding.’ One whole book of the Bible centres round the conclusion that this is the end of the whole matter: ‘Fear God,’ which is the lesson of the first table, ‘and keep His Commandments,’ which is the lesson of the second, ‘for this is the whole duty of man.’

I. Now Moses himself, by a most profound symbol, indicated that the entire Levitic system consisted, as St. Paul dared long afterwards to say, of ‘weak and beggarly elements,’ except so far as it served as a hedge of the moral law.—The symbol was this; In the middle of the camp stood the Tabernacle, the witness, the sign of God’s presence in the midst of His people. In the centre of the Tabernacle was its inmost shrine, the Holy of Holies: its one treasure was the Ark of God. The Tabernacle was splendid as those poor exiles in the wilderness could make it; it was hung with purple curtains, it was overlaid with fine gold; its courts were filled with the smoke of incense, and its inner chamber with the fragrancy of the sacrifice. But to teach Israel that to secure moral faithfulness was the one object of God’s revelation, the sacredness of the whole shrine was concentrated round the tables of the moral law. All ceremonial regulations were but insignificant satellites round that great Sun. This Tabernacle was the most sacred thing in the encampment; the Holiest was the most sacred part of the Tabernacle; the Ark was the most sacred object in the Holiest, and yet the Ark itself had no sanctity apart from the sacred thing which it enshrined, and those two tables of the moral law. The awful Ark of the Covenant was just nothing but the box of the law. When on the great day of atonement the High Priest entered as it were the very audience chamber of the Almighty, he stood before no sculptured image, he gazed on no visible manifestation. When, fifteen centuries later, Pompey, the Roman general, burst into the inmost shrine of the Temple after the Ark had been lost in the Captivity, he saw to his amazement nothing—an empty space. There was total silence; no silver lamp shed its radiance there; no ray of sunlight ever penetrated into the holiest place; no whisper save of the incommunicable Name ever thrilled its silence, but by the gleam of its own golden thurible and the smoke of the incense the priest saw the glimmering outline of the golden chest beneath the wings of the cherubim. Within the Ark, as its sole treasure, lay the two rough-hewn tables of venerable stone, shattered, alas, as Moses had indignantly shattered them on the mountain crag when he witnessed the idolatry of the golden calf; and thus those broken tables, that ark, that mercy-seat above on which he sprinkled the atoning blood, that awe-struck priest, those bending cherubim, were an emblem of law, of sin, of redemption, of forgiveness. They represented guilty man before the merciful God, whose law he had not kept. They proclaimed aloud: ‘Thou hast given us a law which shall not be broken. Alas, we have all broken it! We perish, we all perish; but there is forgiveness with Thee, therefore shalt Thou be feared.’ This, then, was to Israel a symbol that the one end of all religion is righteousness, which man forfeits, which God restores. Could there be a profounder emblem of all creation up to its most celestial hierarchies bending over the mystery of God’s most holy law, contemplating as the basis of man’s spiritual existence the Ten Words of God, and as the sole sources of his hope after transgression, the blood of atonement, the voice of prayer?

Here, then, was one most significant and central lesson of the Mosaic system; and, further, what profound conceptions are involved by the designation of the Ten Commandments as the Covenant of Jehovah!

For they were a covenant. There have been but two main covenants between God and man, the Mosaic and the Christian, the Law and the Gospel. We talk habitually of the Old and New Testaments. The Hebrew word Berith, the Greek word διαθήκη , rendered ‘testament,’ did not mean a testament but a covenant, a compact or agreement. Among the Jews the use of wills or testaments was wholly unknown till they came in contact with the Romans, not long before the era of Christ. We only borrow the word ‘testament’ from testamentum, which is the Vulgate rendering, a mistaken rendering, and the Greek word διαθήκη . Neither the Law nor the Gospel can with any real meaning be called a will. The grandeur of early testaments lies in the fact that they are an agreement; they imply a conception full of blessedness, and alien to every form of false religion, the conception of reciprocity between God and man. God the Infinite, the Eternal, the Compassionate, deigns to enter into relationship with men; He delights in their services, He heals their backslidings, He seeks their love. The very name ‘covenant’ repudiates the notion of tyranny in God. If man is clay, he is not clay to be dashed about by the potter, for he is sentient clay. If a man be but as a reed by the river he may not yet, as in the poem, be slashed and hewn and trampled down anyhow by the great god Pan. As Pascal says, if he be a reed, he is a thinking reed. The more God is revealed by God Himself, the more do we see the strange condescension, infinite love, of the Covenant of Reciprocity, the Covenant of Fatherhood on the part of God, and of duty on the part of men.

II. But next, this fruitful and blessed lesson and revelation of reciprocity between God and man, as set forth in the Ten Commandments, is deepened by the revelation of God’s new name.—It is the Covenant of Jehovah. Up till the days of Moses God had been called El—the powerful; Elohe, and Elohim—He that is feared; El-Shaddai—the omnipotent; Adonai—the Lord. To Moses He revealed Himself by the new name of four letters—J-H-V-H. We do not even know, and for more than a thousand years the Jews have forgotten, how it is pronounced. It was certainly not pronounced as we pronounce it—Jehovah. The Jews regarded it with such trembling superstition that they did not dare to pronounce it except with the vowels of the other name of God—Elohe. The true pronunciation was probably Jahveh. More important by far is its meaning than the mere sound of the articulated breath and air. It is almost certainly derived from the Hebrew verb haya; in this respect it may be compared with inspiration; i.e. Thou art—the truly sublime monosyllable engraved over the entrance to the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It implied the eternity and invisibility of God. The text of Malachi, ‘I am Jehovah and change not,’ the text of the Revelation, ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty, which is, and which was, and which is to come,’ probably express its inmost significance. The names of the gods of the heathen indicated arbitrary power and man’s abject dependence; but in this covenant the Eternal revealed Himself as the God of Help and the God of Love; not as a despot over slaves, but as the Father of dear sons. The name Jehovah meant to set forth the awfulness of God as enhancing the Covenant of Reciprocity, that God had stooped to reveal His will to man, and that that will is the moral law.

III. The Ten Commandments were carved in the briefest possible form, without the appendices with which we now read them, in two ‘pentads’ on two tables of stone.—‘God spake these words and said.’ What words? Very few! Men multiplied indefinitely the necessaries which God had not made many. The first table said, ‘Worship one God’; the second table said, ‘Love your fellow-man.’ The whole duty of the first table is piety; of the second, probity.

Dean Farrar.

Illustration

‘There is an important question as to how far it is now true that obedience brings material blessings. It was true for Israel, as many a sad experience was to show in the future, that it was a bitter as well as an evil thing to forsake Jehovah. But though the connection between well doing and material gain is not so clear now, it is by no means abrogated, either for nations or for individuals. Moral and religious law has social and economic consequences, and though the perplexed distribution of earthly good and ill often bewilders faith and emboldens scepticism, there still is visible in human affairs a drift towards recompensing in the world the righteous and the wicked.

But with our Christian consciousness, “life” means more than living, and “He is our life” in a deeper and more blessed sense than that our physical existence is sustained by His continual energy. The love of God and consequent union with Him give us the only true life. Jesus is “our Life,” and He enters the spirit which opens to Him by faith, and communicates to it a spark of His own immortal life. He that is joined to Jesus lives; he that is separated from Him “is dead while he liveth.” ’

Verses 39-40

THE ONLY GOD

‘Know therefore this day, and consider it in thine heart, that the Lord He is God in heaven above, and upon the earth beneath; there is none else,’ etc.

Deuteronomy 4:39-40

Moses promised the Jews that if they trusted in God, they would be a strong, happy, and prosperous people. On the other hand, he warned them that if they forgot the Lord their God, poverty, misery, and ruin would surely fall upon them.

That this last was no empty threat is proved by the plain facts of the sacred history. For they did forget God, and worshipped Baalim, the sun, moon, and stars; and ruin of every kind did come upon them, till they were carried away captive to Babylon.

I. The thought that the God whom they worshipped was the one true God must have made His worship a very different, a much holier and deeper matter to the Jews than the miserable, selfish thing which is miscalled religion by too many people nowadays, by which a man hopes to creep out of this world into heaven all by himself, without any real care or love for his fellow-creatures or those he leaves behind him.

An old Jew’s faith in God and obedience to God was part of his family life, part of his politics, part of his patriotism. The duty he owed to God was not merely a duty which he owed his own conscience or his own soul; it was a duty which he owed to his family, to his kindred, to his country. It was not merely an opinion that there was one God, and not two; it was a belief that the one and only true God was protecting him, teaching him, inspiring him and all his nation.

II. God’s purpose has come to pass.—The little nation of the Jews, without seaport towns and commerce, without colonies or conquests, has taught the whole civilised world, has influenced all the good and all the wise unto this day so enormously, that the world has actually gone beyond them and become Christian by fully understanding their teaching and their Bible, while they have remained mere Jews by not understanding it. God’s revelation to the Jews was His boundless message, and not any narrow message of man’s invention.

—Canon Kingsley.

Illustration

(1) ‘Who has a God like my God? I will exult in Him, as Moses exulted. Verily, He is high and lifted up! I will rejoice in His power. I will comfort me in His wisdom. His love shall overshadow me in the heat. Oh, who has a God like my God?’

(2) ‘An idol is any visible thing which takes the place of the unseen and eternal realities, veiling them from view. Let us beware of God’s jealousy, but ask Him as a consuming fire to burn out our sins, so that He may have no reason to cast us finally away. And yet if these words should meet the eye of any who feel that they are among the scattered and banished ones, let such remember that if, in these latter days and in this far country, they seek Him, He will be found of them, if they seek Him with all the heart and with all the soul, for He is merciful; He cannot forget the covenant. Let us teach these things more diligently to the children, after the old fashion; young hearts are soft to take impressions, but they soon become rock in their power to retain them.’

(3) ‘ “He.” Not merely the truth about Him. Not merely a place in the ranks of His people. Not merely the commandments He bids me keep. But Him Himself. God in Jesus Christ. God dying and living for me. God to be my Wisdom and Righteousness and Sanctification and Redemption.’