(Deuteronomy 11:1-9)
1. Therefore thou shalt love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his command-ments, alway.
2. And know ye this day: for I speak not with your children which have not known, and which have not seen the chastise-ment of the LORD your God, his greatness, his mighty hand, and his stretched out arm,
3. And his miracles, and his acts, which he did in the midst of Egypt unto Pharaoh the king of Egypt, and unto all his land;
4. And what he did unto the army of Egypt, unto their horses, and to their chariots; how he made the water of the Red sea to overflow them as they pursued after you, and how the LORD hath destroyed them unto this day;
5. And what he did unto you in the wilderness, until ye came into this place;
6. And what he did unto Dathan and Abiram, the sons of Eliab, the son of Reuben: how the earth opened her mouth, and swal-lowed them up, and their households, and their tents, and all the substance that was in their possession, in the midst of all Is-rael:
7. But your eyes have seen all the great acts of the LORD which he did.
8. Therefore shall ye keep all the commandments which I com-mand you this day, that ye may be strong, and go in and possess the land, whither ye go to possess it;
9. And that ye may prolong your days in the land, which the LORD sware unto your fathers to give unto them and to their seed, a land that floweth with milk and honey.
(Deuteronomy 11:1-9)
During my seminary days, Old Testament pentateuchal studies were dominated by two names, Karl Heinrich Graf and Julius Well-hausen, two nineteenth-century critics who headed a school of thought holding that the books of Moses were the works of four di-verse schools of editors and redactors, JEDP: Jahvist, Elohist, Deu-teronomist, and Priestly. Using two premises mainly, first, an evolutionary perspective which rated things in terms of an evolu-tionary development, and, second, a hostility to the supernatural, this school reduced the Pentateuch to nothing, and it replaced reve-lation with a mishmash of “random” documents. On one occasion,
I raised a question in class which did my standing no good. Since we know that Shakespeare’s plays often represented collaboration (as did more than a few Elizabethan plays), why is it that we cannot sep-arate the Shakespearean lines when a single sentence in the Pen-tateuch is supposedly drawn from four sources, none of which are known to exist? Of course, the answer is that the Graf-Wellhausen documentary hypothesis, and also its successors, represents a hostil-ity to biblical revelation. In the case of Deuteronomy, and the bibli-cal historibibli-cal books, the animosity is towards the very apparent philosophy of history. It is held that there cannot be a God govern-ing history, unless, like Hegel’s god, he is a spirit from within histo-ry and working through men. Only a humanistic philosophy of history is tolerated, and, with each generation, that version is in-creasingly in tatters.
The text has a strong emphasis on historical memory. Moses states that he is not speaking to the younger generation which has no per-sonal knowledge and memory of the events from Egypt to Jordan.
He makes no effort to teach the young; that is the responsibility of their parents. He speaks to those who experienced God’s judgments and deliverances. Therefore, he tells them, they are to remember God, to love and obey Him always. The purpose of memory is to guide and govern action. It is also to remind them that God’s judg-ments prevail in time as well as in eternity.
This raises an important question. Meaning is essential to life, and, much as men fight shy of it, it confronts them everywhere. Numer-ous books have been written by humanistic scholars, beginning with Edward Gibbon, on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Their central question is, Why did Rome fall? That question is the wrong one. Given their own collections of data, the proper question would be, Why not sooner? Why did Rome hang on so long?
Moreover, by assuming in the name Rome all the qualities that may have marked it in the pre-Christian era, we warp radically our ability to assess Rome in AD 300, or a century earlier. No person or culture stands still. Renewal is possible, but so too is radical degen-eration and collapse.
Morecraft is very much on target in pointing out that Moses here stresses the relationship of obedience to memory.1 The memory of our
1. Joseph C. Morecraft III, A Christian Manual of Law: An Application of Deuter-onomy (Atlanta, GA: Atlanta Christian Training Center, n.d.), 50.
Judgment in History (Deuteronomy 11:1-9) 169 sins is a great incentive to obedience if we are redeemed. David, in Psalm 51:1, prays that God blot out his transgressions and remember them no more. In eternity, God does that, after the Last Judgment, but, in time, God records David’s sins for all of us to know and to learn thereby. In Jeremiah 18:23, the prophet prays that God neither forgive, forget, nor blot out the sins of his enemies. In history, in time, God requires the memory of our sins, not for self-torture, but as an incentive to obedience.
Again, in vv. 8-12, as Morecraft points out, there is a stress that fol-lows the emphasis on memory and obedience: such an obedience leads to hope. If we do not remember our sins, we are not stirred to obedience, and without this obedience, there is no hope.
Moses, in requiring historical memory, cites things Israel would prefer to forget. The evils of Egypt are cited but also the rebellion of Dathan and Abiram, and God’s total judgment against them (vv. 2-7).
Contrary to popular thinking then and ever since, it was more than Egypt versus Israel. Since Israel left Egypt “a mixed multitude” of He-brews and aliens (Ex. 12:38), the line of division from the beginning was between the redeemed and the unredeemed. This is still true. We cannot say the line today is between the institutional church and the world, because it cannot be institutionalized. It is between Christ’s new humanity and the fallen old humanity. The parable of judgment in Matthew 25:31-46 tells of the great Shepherd-King dividing His own flock, to get rid of those who are not His own.
There is another aspect to this requirement of memory as the premise of obedience. J. A. Thompson has pointed out that vv. 7-9 stress the relation of obedience to blessing.2 Memory prompts obe-dience, because the memory of our sins brings, in the redeemed, an incentive to faithfulness, to obedience. The end result is that we are made strong, and we are enabled to become conquerors. This also leads to a general health and a longevity.
In everyday education, memory plays a central and essential part.
The memory of our sins and waywardness is used by God to teach us.
As P. C. Craigie summed it up, “The discipline of God is thus the ed-ucation of God.”3 Wherever education or discipline, whether within
2. J. A. Thompson, Deuteronomy (Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, [1974] 1978), 151.
3. P. C. Craigie, The Book of Deuteronomy (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1976), 208.
the school, the church, or the family, abandons memory it performs a lobotomy on the minds of its students. According to Hoppe, re-membering the past “is an education into the ways of God.”4
The first verse of this text is very commonly the subject of ser-mons when the rest are forgotten. This is because of its emphasis on loving God. Even then, this love is essentially linked to obedience to the law of God, for we read:
Therefore thou shalt love the LORD thy God, and keep his charge, and his statutes, and his judgments, and his command-ments alway.
If we stop here, we miss the point. It is followed by the insistence that we remember our sins, not to grieve or mourn endlessly over them, but in order to be prompt in our obedience. Man prefers to forget his sins, but God says, remember and obey; then you will be blessed.
There is a very rare mental condition known as amnesia, the total loss of memory. If it occurs, it renders a person into a virtual non-person, a zombie of sorts. The tragic fact is that in our time individ-uals and peoples are seeking amnesia. They want to separate them-selves from the past, and this is done by miseducation and by a deliberate choice by individuals. Both are forms of suicide.
Judgment in history comes most rapidly to those individuals and societies who suppress their memories of the past instead of growing in terms of them. Amnesia is a first step towards defeat and death.
4. Leslie J. Hoppe, O.F.M., Deuteronomy (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1985), 38.
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