40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 155 (Deuteronomy 1:1-23)

Episode Date: March 7, 2019

Chad and Daniel begin the journey through Deuteronomy. After some introduction to the book, we see Moses start addressing the second generation of Israel and take a shot at those who came before them for the journey taking so long. Why is the Holy Land Holy? Who does it belong to? Why does Moses appoint Judges? Why is showing partiality so frequently spoken against? All this and more is discussed in this first episode in Deuteronomy. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network 1517 Academy CHF City Events Become A Supporter

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 podcast network podcast. That means you can go to 1517.org slash podcast. Check out all the things we've got going on over there. And while you're over there, there's probably something you need to sign up for. Maybe you like the Reformation. I mean, I like it. Chad likes it.

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well i guess i was too busy getting ready for my own class i guess that's the only excuse i could come up with but chad's not taking the class but even chad knows the class is good oh yeah yeah i mean really uh i'll tell you from someone who experienced being on the the other side of the camera i mean they are done with with such excellence that it just it amazes me i mean the people behind the scenes who are doing these they know what they're doing i mean this is professional quality stuff so i i got to uh see some previews of some of the other material that's coming out and just really it's amazing work yeah sign up you'll enjoy it yeah join the over 5,000 students that have went through the academy classes that's a lot of students and uh

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We're about to head off and do a new book. It's an exciting day. It is an exciting day. Yeah, we're crossing the threshold from Numbers to Deuteronomy. Yeah, it's exciting. I've been thinking about this a lot. the last couple of weeks and, uh, getting my thoughts in order and, uh, just super excited about, uh, jumping into the fifth book of the Torah. So it's going to be some good stuff. It's

a, it's a little bit different kind of book than what we've encountered so far. Its approach is different. Its language is different. Some of its themes are different. Uh, but of course it's, it's all overlapping with what we've, what we've covered before. So it's just a little bit different genre than we've encountered so far, but I think we're going to, I think we're going enjoy it uh it's really uh it's one of these it's one of these books that uh is extremely influential throughout the rest of the old testament as well as the new testament it's quoted several times uh in in the gospels and in paul's epistles so it's uh it's foundational not only for uh for the rest of the old testament for the but for the new as well so it's going to

be it's going to be a good exciting journey yeah you know and so in one way uh deuteronomy is the last book right uh yeah it is i mean it's uh actually i talked about this in my uh in those lectures that we were just discussing with with 1517 academy about how the torah is the is the foundation of the rest of the scriptures and in many ways once you get past deuteronomy everything after that is uh just inspired commentary on what's already been written so uh luther often talks about moses being the the fountain of the rest of the scriptures to the well from which all the prophets and apostles and even jesus himself drew their own uh their own writings and he's got this uh great image uh it's in his lectures on deuteronomy where he talks

about the uh the footprints of the prophets are all over the book of deuteronomy you know they're traveling back and forth all over it so yeah once i mean once you get past genesis through deuteronomy once you get past the torah everything else is going to be an expansion of an application of an extrapolation of a fulfillment of what we read in the torah so the torah is like the the bible within the bible and everything else after that is going to be built upon upon this foundation yeah i mean so when uh you know we hear jesus use this language you hear the apostles use this language of the law and the prophets well after we finish this book we will have completed what they're talking about when they say the law yeah and in the jewish mind when they say the law

uh this these they are speaking of genesis through deuteronomy yeah moses or sometimes called moses uh he's kind of the personification of the law or the law itself yeah and and as i uh have frequently pointed out uh unfortunately we're kind of stuck with that word law even though in the Hebrew, it's called Torah, which doesn't mean law. It means teaching. So when you hear the word law, just do an automatic retranslation in your head, Torah or teaching, and that's going to help out because, of course, there's all kinds of teaching in the Torah. You got law, you got gospel, you got poetry, you got narrative, you got prophecy, you got all sorts of teachings in in the torah itself and certainly part of that is law but there there's just it's a collection

of all different approaches that god takes to communicating his word to us and uh we when we see those various approaches in the torah then uh applied in all sorts of different situations in the rest of the scriptures yeah so like when david says i love your law he's saying i love your your teachings and he's specifically talking about uh in the narrow sense he's talking about these five books and so uh yeah in in some ways we're i mean obviously we're not done with the podcast don't worry after deuteronomy but there is sort of a there it is a it is a finishing of something uh deuteronomy is the end of um what the what the uh the characters that you know of in in scripture mean when they say the law or the teaching and so it's it's kind of a it's kind of a

cool thing that that uh and jesus himself says that when he says the law and the prophets uh speak of him uh these are this is also what he is talking about is uh these these books uh that we've been going through so yeah i'm excited to start it and and sort of also excited to have completed a a sort of uh commentary walkthrough of these books and then we will be on to a whole bunch of narrative and then into prophets and all this sort of stuff but uh so So there is a sort of ending with this book, but in a good way. It's good. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty cool. It's hard to believe we've covered as much material as we have.

I know we've been at it for a long time, but still, it's a sizable amount of material, of Scripture, to actually walk through verse by verse, chapter by chapter, through whatever, however many episodes that we have. And it's super exciting, too, that we have some people that have been walking with us, many of them from day one. So we've covered a lot of territory together, saw a lot of things, learned a lot of things, and we got a whole lot of more territory to cover. So it's going to be good. All right, let's just jump into Moses' sermon. Yeah, let's do it. So I want to say a couple of things just by way of preface concerning the name itself. I don't know that we've always

dealt with this with some of the other biblical books, but as everyone probably realizes, just like the chapter and verse divisions were added later, they weren't, of course, in the original. So also, the names of the particular biblical books were not in the original. Of course, we title books today, but none of the biblical books were titled. That just wasn't a thing back then. So there's a couple of different ways that these books are named. I guess just in general you could say there's a a christian naming of these books and there is a jewish naming of these books and sometimes there's overlap uh between between these two but especially in the torah the uh the names differ so uh in this case in the case of deuteronomy

there's a there's a definite uh divergence between the way these books are titled in Christian circles and then in, in Jewish circles, typically, well, not exactly, but typically when the, when the Jewish tradition named these, these five books of the Torah, what they did is they chose words often from the very opening of the book. And that's what they, that's what they did in the case of Deuteronomy. So in, in the Jewish tradition, this book is not called Deuteronomy. It's called Eile Hadavrim, which is nothing more than the opening couple of words from Deuteronomy. These are the words. So that's their name for Deuteronomy.

These are the words, Eile Hadavrim. We get Deuteronomy, this is kind of a, I don't know if it's funny to everyone, but it is kind of a funny and a geeky sort of way to me. We get the word Deuteronomy actually from a mistranslation, which is, I don't know, I find that pretty humorous. So Deuteronomy comes to us by way of, well, the Latin translation, which is Deuteronomium, but the Latin translation got it from the Greek translation. So this comes from chapter 17, verse 18, which I want to talk about in just a second. but it's a translation of the Hebrew, which is the copy of the Torah. Basically, if you look at Deuteronomy 17, verse 18,

it's in a section which is talking about the king of Israel, which, of course, they didn't have a king yet, but Moses is saying, hey, in the future, when you have a king, here's what the king is supposed to do. he is supposed to make sit down get a scroll and make a copy of this torah which is probably references to deuteronomy itself so it's one of the things that the king was supposed to do he's going to get he's going to make a copy of the torah write out the book and then he's supposed to study it every day the rest of his life so this phrase the copy of the torah well that got

mistranslated in into the greek as the deuteronium tuto so it's like this repetition of the law something like that which uh was misunderstood as like this second giving of the law which is what deuteronomy means like a second law so that particular translation mistranslation in the greek got taken into the Vulgate, the Latin of the Vulgate, which got taken into our English translations. And so we end up with a biblical book that's named after a mistranslation. Yeah, well, this is not the only time throughout church history where we have mistranslated Latin.

There's other times we've mistranslated Latin with much worse results than just having a book named something that maybe isn't quite accurate. Yeah, yeah, this is true. Such as due penance, right? Exactly. Is that what you're thinking of? Yeah. Speaking of the Reformation, you can probably go learn about that at 1517 Academy.

But yeah, there's certain mistranslations of things in Latin that can have some real negative consequences. Yeah, and that's why, again, speaking of the Reformation, that's why Luther was constantly urging his own students to return to the original languages. I mean, that's why Hebrew and Greek was so significant to him, because especially those who are pastors or teachers who are scholars, you know, they one of their one of their responsibilities is to is to delve into to the original so that they're able to be assured that what they're what they're writing or teaching or preaching is is is fitting with the with the original. So, I mean, yeah, this is one of those cases where just a misunderstanding of the original language led to a mistranslation, which then ended up with us having a kind of a strange name for one of the biblical books. But we're stuck with it because it's been around for a long time. So we will call it Deuteronomy. But as we do, you can kind of keep in the back of your mind, this isn't a second law.

It's not like Moses decided that the first one wasn't enough, wasn't sufficient. So I'm going to give him a second law. It's not the case. This is more or less him summing up the law, applying it, and giving some encouragement, exhortation, and promises along the way. All right, well, with that as the introduction, let's just jump right into the text itself. So these first almost four chapters are going to be a bit of a recap with a few unexpected twists and turns along the way of what we have been covering this far in the Torah. So he's going to go over a lot of Israel's history leading up to their entrance into into the promised land or their almost entrance into the promised land because they're still sitting in the transjordan right now listening to Moses preach. So these first almost four chapters are going to be familiar territory for us. Although, as we will see already in this first chapter, there is a little bit different take on some of the earlier incidents in the life of Israel.

So the first five verses are kind of setting the scene. Starts out, these are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel across the Jordan in the wilderness, in the Arabah, opposite Suf, between Paran and Tophel and Lavan and Hazarot and Dezahav. So he's just basically telling us, okay, this is where we're at. This is where Moses has erected his pulpit, as it were, from which he's going to preach to the people of Israel. And keep in mind that the people to whom he's preaching is the second generation, if you will. So the first generation of those who came out of Egypt, they're all dead, with the exception of Moses and Joshua and Caleb at this point. So those three alone are left of that original generation.

Everybody else is new. So it's a relatively young nation that is about to enter into the promised land. And so part of what Moses is doing is he's, it's kind of like, you know, when you tell young people about things that happened with their parents to their grandparents. This is the way you're passing along their family stories, their heritage, the good, the bad, and the ugly. Well, this is Moses speaking to this younger generation saying, hey, I'm going to remind you of exactly what happened to us. Some of you weren't there. Some of you were. If you were very young, you might remember, you might not. But this is Moses' way

of reminding them of their past and then going on after he does that to encourage them as they get ready to do what their parents were unwilling to do because of unbelief. So he starts out with kind of a, it's an implicit jab at what happened to the first generation. Verse 2 and verse 3 say this. Now it's an 11 days journey from Horeb, that's Sinai, that's another name for Mount Sinai. In Deuteronomy, usually it says Horeb instead of Sinai for whatever reason, but same place. So it's an 11 days journey from Horeb or Sinai by way of Mount Seir to Kadesh Barnea. Then verse three, and it came about in the 40th year. And on the first day of the 11th month that Moses spoke to all the children of Israel.

So the implicit jab here is that, hey, it's only 11 days walking on foot from Mount Sinai to Kadesh Barnea. And you know how long it took us to get to where we are now? Well, it took us 40 years to get to where we are now. so this is this is like one of those sort of inside jokes or implicit uh or between the lines kind of indictments against israel you know it took us a little bit longer than it should have to get to where we are now it was 11 days and this is like 40 years later and this is where we're now at and the reason is as he's going to go on and make explicit in the rest of the chapter and the reason is your parents and your grandparents they didn't trust in god to

deliver on the promises which he had sworn to them and to their forefathers. They acted on unbelief. They trusted in their own strength. They gave in to fear instead of relying on faith. So that's why here we are, 11 days journey, 40 years later at the spot that we're now at. Yeah, I mean, as a representation of the law, Moses becomes a bad navigator, too. Yeah. I mean, people might be trying to tell you that the law is some tremendous guide. 11 days turned into 40 years, you know, it's not the greatest navigation tool. And as you said, well, it's the reason for this, because they didn't trust in God.

It's not strictly because, like, well, they were a bunch of wretched sinners. The root of this, the root of this taking an insanely longer time than it should have is just unbelief. It's lack of trust in God. It's not clinging to his promises. It's wanting to do your own thing. It's wanting to go back to Egypt. It's all this mess. That's a not-so-subtle jab.

Yeah, yeah. You know, the law can point you in the right direction, but it can't get you there, right? That's right. Yeah. I mean, so all you got to do is, yeah, this law. All you got to do is follow exactly what you're supposed to do, and everything's going to be great. But it can't get you there. In fact, what happens is when you put together the law and a sinner, 11 days turns into 40 years.

That's what happens. Talk about getting lost. Yeah. Do this and you shall live. Sounds easy enough. Four years later, everyone's dead. Yeah. Be ye perfect.

That's all you got to do, and everything will be fine. Good luck with that. So we have the illustration of Israel, an illustration that never gets old, because this is exactly what continues to happen in the life of every single person, especially the more that we rely on the law to attain righteousness. Our 11 days become 40 years. So here they are. Verse four and five just is a little reminder about some victories that God has given them. It says, hey, we've defeated Sihon, king of the Amorites, and Og, king of Bashan. We kicked the butt of both those kings and their kingdoms.

God gave us the victory. And so here we are. We're across the Jordan in the land of Moab. And so there it says, Moses undertook to expound et hatara hazot, this Torah. So this is the Torah, the teaching, the divine word that he is about to expound. So we start here in verse 6 with kind of going back to Horeb. Verse 6 has God speaking. It says, all right, you have stayed long enough at this mountain.

If you remember, if you were with us way back in Exodus, they stayed a long time at Mount Sinai, over a year. So they got there pretty quickly, but then they stayed there a long time. You had the giving of the Ten Commandments. You had the rebellion of the golden calf. You had a plague. You had the establishment of the priesthood and the Levitical service and the construction of the tabernacle. There was a lot that happened at the foot of Mount Sinai.

But verse 6 says that God finally said, okay, you've been here long enough. It's time to pull up stakes, literally, get your tents packed up because we're on the move. so they went on their journey and uh verse 7 and verse 8 is a reminder of the land that god was promising to give them he says you know you're going to go to the hill country the emirates and to all their neighbors in the araba which is the southern part the araba is the the southern arid region of israel the hill country the lowland and the negev and by the sea coast the land of the canaanites and lebanon as far as the great river the river euphrates so this is kind of a picture of the boundaries of the promised land.

In verse 8, God says, look, I have placed the land before you. We're going to hear this phrase again in the latter part of the chapter. Verse 21. But here he says, look, I have placed the land before you. Go in and possess the land which the Lord swore to give to your fathers, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, to them and their descendants after them. So this is Moses reminding this young generation that it's not like they escaped from Egypt and they wondered a while and they were like, you know what, we need to settle down. Let's find some land and just take it for ourselves.

I mean, with enough planning and ingenuity and skill in warfare and a good amount of just luck, with all that, we'll be able to kick everybody out of this land and take it for our own. That's not the way it works. Instead, God has basically already given them the land. I mean, he remains the owner of the land. So the land, the Holy Land, it's the Holy Land because it belongs to God. That's why it's called the Holy Land. It's his possession. And so Israel, when they possess it, they're they're never going to own the land. They remain as tenants on the land. So they settle there. God lets them settle there.

But just like, you know, say you owned a section of land and you let some of your friends build a house there or hunt there or farm there, raise a few cattle there. Well, maybe you're going to charge them some rent or maybe you're just going to do it out of the goodness of your heart. whatever the reason is just because they're there doesn't mean they own the land just because they work there doesn't mean they own you own the land and you just let them settle there or work there or hunt there well that's like it is in the holy land too it's god's land it always remains his possession and so israel is just allowed to be tenants there to settle there to work there so all this land he says i place before you it's going to be my land as a gift to you and all you have to do is go in and basically settle there possess it that's so i've done all the work for

you in other words it's a gift it's laid out there for you it's not like something that you have to work for go in possess the land that i have already given to you as a gift so we're going to come back to that in a second but uh first of all he has a couple of other things he needs to say so verse 9 and following it's kind of i don't quite completely understand why moses chooses this particular incident to record here although i might have an idea but what he what he chooses to record of all the things he could have chosen to talk about from the past he talks about in verses 9 and following that the situation was that israel had multiplied they were no longer a tiny nation. They were a large nation. He says that they had multiplied like the stars of heaven.

So they're a big nation, a whole lot of people. And Moses says, look, I'm glad that this is the case and may God continue to give you growth and may Israel continue to expand, but it's too much for me. He says in verse nine, I am not able to bear the burden of you alone because God has blessed you so much and so what i want to do is i'm going to choose some wise and discerning and experienced men from your tribes and they're going to be appointed as leaders and judges so you know if you have a dispute you go to them they take care of it if it's too difficult they come to me and i will will help out with that and then he goes on to say that these judges when people bring their situations their lawsuits to these judges that they are not to show partiality in judgment

That's a major theme, of course, to the rest of the Old Testament. Mishpat in Hebrew is a word for justice. And that is a it's a recurring theme, especially through the prophets, because there was no mishpat. There was no justice. Instead, there was there was injustice. So Moses is saying here, when the when the people bring their problems to you, then don't show any partiality. You shall hear the small and the great alike. It doesn't matter if they're poor, rich, if they have no power, if they have a whole lot of power. You shall not fear man, he says, for the judgment is God's. So he and he alone, through the dictates of his word, is going to be the one who guides you in your decision-making process.

In the Old Testament and in the New Testament, you do see this come up over and over and over again. Apparently, showing partiality is a very human problem. Because this is not something that God says once. this happens over and over and over again it comes up over and over again it comes up in the New Testament it comes up when talking about the church we have this tendency

to show favoritism show partiality to honor certain status and so he does equate then this sort of idea of justice with impartiality

in other words where there is partiality like there can't be justice can't really thrive there uh the partiality is like the fertile ground of for uh for injustice to grow in yeah it you could say the same about love too you know where there's partiality then not only justice but love suffers and you mean we could come up with example after example of this in the life of the church as well as our our individual lives you know if a if a if a famous person walks into your church then he or she is going to be treated differently than if an anonymous person just chooses to visit your church one Sunday. Or a homeless person.

Yeah, or a homeless person. Yeah, yeah. So there is this built-in tendency that we have to attribute some sort of almost divine status to people who, for whatever reason, are rich or powerful or something like that. It is a symptom of our fatherly condition where when we see people, within a split second we automatically make judgments about them and that then translates into how we how we treat them whether it's good or bad or or somewhere somewhere in between that so that's the reason there is this ongoing warning throughout the old and new testament not to show partiality because if there is a human trait that is almost that is that is universal and that raises its ugly head all the time it it is that showing of showing a partiality i mean i

i do it uh all sinners do it i mean it's just something that we have to constantly battle against and it's not and it's not uh and it works both ways i mean it doesn't matter if you if you show favoritism to the rich or show favoritism to the poor if you show favoritism the powerful or the powerless either way i mean that the drunk man walking down the road can fall into either ditch. I mean, we can go either way. What we're striving for is equity and basically looking at every person and seeing in their face the image of God and treating them in a way that reflects that reality, not looking at them and seeing what color skin they are or how well they're dressed or whether they're a man or woman or anything like that, seeing in them the reflection

in the image of God, and then acting accordingly by treating them with love and justice and equity. But because of these snap judgments that we make based upon all sorts of assumptions that we have, we hardly ever treat people in that way, and so there's this repeated warning against that through Scripture. Yeah, and part of the reason that this is brought up over and over again, I think, is because non-partiality is at the heart of the gospel because we actually will see paul talk about this uh numerous times where he'll say in in regard to salvation that god shows no partiality

this is to say that that righteousness is zero sum game in other words that you are either righteous or you are not like there's you know there's not degrees here uh like this person's a little bit righteous and this person's you know not so much righteous no it's it's like pregnancy. You either are or you're not. And guess what? You're not. So this puts us all in the same boat. So God shows no partiality when looking at sinners. He sees them all the same, but he shows no partiality in his dying, where he dies for the world. And so for this reason, then the gospel and the good news of what God has done for sinners in Christ is also a universal message. And we're not to show any partiality to anyone based on who they are, what they've done, whatever it is, that we know that God is for them.

And so as we go around, then, the reason we are instructed over and over and over again to not show partiality when dealing in matters of justice is that's not how God has dealt with us. That's not how God has dealt with humanity. Yeah, so the gospel ultimately determines our, I guess you could say, our anthropology. The gospel determines how we look at other people, right? How we look at ourselves. And it provides that necessary lens through which we understand who we are in Christ and thus how we are to interact in love and justice toward each other. And that traces its way all the way back to Deuteronomy and even before then.

So it was a concern, an ongoing concern in the life of Israel, just as an ongoing concern in the life of God's church today. And so Moses warns the judges of his day to beware of this tendency and instead to not fear man, but instead to fear God and to judge according to his word and not to the dictates of their own human hearts. so that's that ends with uh verse 18 that first uh that first section from verse 19 through uh basically the rest of the chapter uh he's he's going to go back to what happened when that first generation had left horeb and were on the verge of entering into into the land of promise so we'll get started with this i'm sure we'll have to uh have to finish it up in the next episode But verse 19 says, we set out from Horeb, we went through that great and terrible wilderness, which you saw on the way to the hill country, the Amorites, just as the Lord our God had commanded us.

And then we came to Kadesh Barnea. And Moses says, this is verse 20, all right, you've come to the hill country, the Amorites, which the Lord our God is about to give us. There's that language of gift once more. See, the Lord your God has placed the land before you. go up, take possession as the Lord, the God of your fathers has spoken. Do not fear or be dismayed. So this is Moses setting everything up. Here we are. I mean, look at what we've come through. We were slaves in Egypt. God brought us out of slavery. We were trapped at the Red Sea. God brought us through the waters. We camped at Sinai where he gave us his law. He gave us the priesthood.

He gave us the tabernacle. He's brought us through the great and terrible wilderness. And here we are at the brink of the promised land this is the land that god has just laid out there before us he promised this to our fathers and so go take possession of it and don't fear and don't be dismayed and what's the response the people verse 22 moses says then all of you approached me and said, let's send men before us that they may search out the land and bring back word to us of the way by which we should go up and the cities which we shall enter. There's a couple of different accounts here. We talked about a couple of different reasons given for why this happened. So when we covered Numbers 13 and 14, which is the first time this incident is recorded,

there in numbers it uh it presents this idea of sending spies as if it were god's idea he says send okay send send some guys into the promised land here we have a little bit different retelling of that story here moses says that it was the people's idea so which is it i was uh i was thinking about the connection between these two and uh and we'll see we'll see some other examples like this later in Deuteronomy 2, where there's a little bit different focus on the story itself. And I think there's no contradiction here. I think the best way to understand these two parallel retellings is that the people themselves were hesitant. They were, Moses said, don't be fearful or dismayed, and yet they were fearful and dismayed. And so they wanted

to, you know, kind of put their toe in the water. Let's go see what it's like. Let's just send some spies ahead and let them kind of scout out the land and bring back a report to us of yeah what it's going to be like how we should go how we should plan and then as a response to that god was like okay uh i will yield to your weakness uh god often does that in the scriptures so go ahead and send these spies ahead to scout out the land so i don't think there's any kind of contradiction between these these two stories just like there's not a contradiction in the in the in the tellings the various tellings of of jesus miracles and parables and the gospels it's just a little bit different way of approaching the story and i suspect given what happened that that's this

is actually what transpired the people were hesitant god yielded and said all right out of out of concern for your own weakness then that's what we will that's what we will do we'll sense the spies ahead so that's what they did um verse 23 says this thing pleased me this is moses talking And so he took 12 men and they each went up, they spied out the land, they brought back some of the fruit of the land and they brought it back down to us. And they brought back the report of the land and they said, it's a good land, which the Lord our God is about to give us. Yet you were not willing to go up, but rebelled against the command of the Lord, your God. Now, I don't want to end on a negative note, but that's kind of where the text has brought us. I think that what we need to talk about next time is how doubt gives way to unbelief, and then unbelief continues to grow until it grows to the point of what we're going to see in verse 27, where they actually attribute false motives to God for bringing them out of the land of Egypt to begin with.

So we'll flesh that out more in the next episode. But this is going to be a classic case of how doubt proceeds to unbelief, and unbelief proceeds even further. We're going to see that the issue was not so much the people's immorality or the people's disobedience with regard to certain commands, but the issue was unbelief. That becomes the fountainhead of all particular sins and iniquities. And so we'll see how all that transpires in the next episode.

Yeah, something that's cool about Deuteronomy is in a lot of ways you sort of have Moses exegeting the people's history of the last 40 years. Like, let me explain to you what was going on here in truth. Here's what was really going on. So we know this story because we've already talked about it in numbers. But now Moses is telling you what was really going on in all of this stuff. So it is a different perspective. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the things that Deuteronomy makes very clear, is that this sermon is basically taking the history of the people of Israel,

and it is theologizing. It's making explicit what was implicit in the narrative before. So we'll see plenty of that as we proceed. All right. It's good to get started. Absolutely. Guys, if you're in Texas and you're listening to this, Me and Chad will be in Austin this weekend.

We'd love to see you. If not, hey, we'll see you next week. Chad, I'm going to see you this weekend, and then I'll see you next week again. Looking forward to it. All right. See you then. We'll see you next time.