This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
Lesson 4: “To Love The Lord Your God”
COLLEEN TINKER
The main problems with this lesson are:
- Ignoring the context and the first audience of Deuteronomy and applying it to Adventism/the church.
- Insisting that the Mosaic law was part of an eternal covenant instead of a temporary, conditional covenant with the nation Israel.
- Ignoring that Deuteronomy promised that one like Moses was coming, and the people should listen to HIM.
This week’s lesson attempts to apply Moses’ reiteration of the law to the wilderness generation to today’s Seventh-day Adventists. In fact, the author would probably say the arguments he uses apply to all Christians.
The problem with this lesson, however, is that it is taken OUT of context, and passages from Deuteronomy are put together to attempt to make the case that Christians today are supposed to keep the Ten Commandments in order to show love for God, and this commandment-keeping is to include keeping the seventh day holy. In fact, the author goes to almost confusing lengths to attempt to paste together the biblical commands (both in and out of Deuteronomy) to love God with Moses’ reminders that God expected Israel to keep His statues and commandments.
But CONTEXT—
First Audience
The book of Deuteronomy recorded Moses’ restatement of the Mosaic Covenant to the generation of Israelites that had grown up in the wilderness after their parents’ were not allowed to enter the land of Canaan because of their unbelief. Moses was an old man, and he was about to die in Moab where God buried him and turned the leadership of Israel over to Joshua. Joshua, you will remember, was one of the two faithful spies who had come back from Canaan 40 years before and said that with God, Israel could take the land.
Now Joshua was about to take command, but before he left them, Moses instructed this new generation who had not been alive at Sinai in the details of the covenant God made with Israel. This detail is of foundational significance: Moses is not telling this wilderness generation the terms of an UNCONDITIONAL covenant nor of an ETERNAL covenant.
No! Moses is restating—down to the exchange of Blessings for Obedience and Curses for Disobedience uttered by the tribes to each other—the terms of God’s two-way covenant with ISRAEL.
Four hundred thirty years before Sinai, God had made an UNCONDITIONAL covenant with Abraham in which He put Abraham into a deep sleep, preventing him from making any human, fallible promises, and God Himself in the forms of a smoking furnace and blazing torch moved among the pieces of the sacrificial covenant animals (Genesis 15). This covenant God made with Abraham was unconditional because God made UNILATERAL promises. God’s word cannot fail, and His promises WILL come true.
When God met Moses on Sinai, however, the covenant He made was not unconditional nor was it a new addition to the Abrahamic covenant. Rather, it was a unique covenant with His nation, mediated by Moses, and it involved two-way promises between God and Israel.
This covenant was conditional and was intended from the beginning to be temporary and to operate parallel to the Abrahamic covenant, not as a blended covenant. (See Gal. 3:17-21). It was temporary and conditional because it included HUMAN promises which are never perfect or certain. Human promises WILL be broken. (See Hebrews 8:6–13.) We are broken, and our promises are flawed by our sin.
The covenant restated in Deuteronomy was not intended to be eternal and applicable to the church. It was given TO ISRAEL, and it defined all the conditions and foundations for God’s blessings and curses.
Moreover, this covenant was dependent upon the levitical priesthood and the levitical system of worship. In fact, this detail, which Adventism never explains, is stated clearly in Hebrews 7:11—14
Now if perfection had been attainable through the Levitical priesthood (for under it the people received the law), what further need would there have been for another priest to arise after the order of Melchizedek, rather than one named after the order of Aaron? For when there is a change in the priesthood, there is necessarily a change in the law as well. For the one of whom these things are spoken belonged to another tribe, from which no one has ever served at the altar. For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah, and in connection with that tribe Moses said nothing about priests. (ESV)
Notice that with a change in the priesthood there is, OF NECESSITY, a change of law also. Adventists are quick to argue that the Law is eternal and never changes, but the Bible clearly states that the law DID change! When the levitical priesthood passed off the scene, the law also changed.
So, in terms of context, the book of Deuteronomy was written to a specific generation of Israelites. It did not give them a new covenant but reminded them of the covenant God had made with the nation at Sinai—a covenant they had forgotten. Furthermore, Deuteronomy gave the directions for the future of the nation, including instructions for how they and their future kings were to remember and copy this book of the law so they would know and remember its terms (Deuteronomy 17:18–20). This was not a covenant for the church but specifically for the nation of Israel.
We cannot take this covenant and apply it to ourselves without specific instructions and permission to do so any more than we can take the correspondence from a father to his son concerning the family business and apply those instructions to a different family. This book reveals truth about God and His relationship to Israel, and it reveals truths about God Himself. Those realities do not change.
Nevertheless, promises and instructions made to one group of people specifically, with the foundational context of their constitution and system of worship that supported all the commands and rituals contained in that covenant, cannot be applied to a different group of people. This book must be read in context understanding the first audience. Its principles cannot be applied to US, living under a new covenant, in the same ways they were applied to Israel.
A prophet like me
This lesson utterly ignores the fact that Deuteronomy included promises that God would provide a future prophetic voice—and it further ignores that the New Testament applies that promise to the Lord Jesus. Notice these texts:
“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you, from your brothers—it is to him you shall listen—just as you desired of the LORD your God at Horeb on the day of the assembly, when you said, ‘Let me not hear again the voice of the LORD my God or see this great fire any more, lest I die.’ And the LORD said to me, ‘They are right in what they have spoken. I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. And I will put my words in his mouth, and he shall speak to them all that I command him. And whoever will not listen to my words that he shall speak in my name, I myself will require it of him (Deuteronomy 18:15–19).
There we have Moses’ prophecy that God would send a prophet like himself from among the Israelites, and God would require of them that they would listen to His words. Then, in Acts 3, we find Peter, shortly after Pentecost, explaining that God had sent Israel prophets and that the promise given through Moses was fulfilled in the Messiah who came to Israel first:
“And now, brothers, I know that you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. But what God foretold by the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer, he thus fulfilled. Repent therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out, that times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord, and that he may send the Christ appointed for you, Jesus, whom heaven must receive until the time for restoring all the things about which God spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets long ago. Moses said, ‘The Lord God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers. You shall listen to him in whatever he tells you. And it shall be that every soul who does not listen to that prophet shall be destroyed from the people.’ And all the prophets who have spoken, from Samuel and those who came after him, also proclaimed these days. You are the sons of the prophets and of the covenant that God made with your fathers, saying to Abraham, ‘And in your offspring shall all the families of the earth be blessed.’ God, having raised up his servant, sent him to you first, to bless you by turning every one of you from your wickedness.” (Acts 3:17–26).
In Acts 7 we find Stephen preaching to the Jews their own history—a history and declaration of the fulfillment of God’s promises that caused the unbelieving Jews to stone Stephen as the first Christian martyr. Look at these words:
“This Moses, whom they rejected, saying, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’—this man God sent as both ruler and redeemer by the hand of the angel who appeared to him in the bush. This man led them out, performing wonders and signs in Egypt and at the Red Sea and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up for you a prophet like me from your brothers.’ This is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our fathers. He received living oracles to give to us…
“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it” (Acts 7:35–38, 51–53).
Jesus clearly revealed Himself to the Jews at the One who fulfilled Moses’ prophecy. In fact, in John 6, after Jesus had fed the 5,000 with miraculous bread and fish, causing the Jews to wonder if He was the One who was promised, Jesus made this indicting statement to them—a statement which applies in so many ways to Adventists who believe they have the Bible on their side and who think they know God’s will for them because they revere the Ten Commandments:
And the Father who sent me has himself borne witness about me. His voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. I have come in my Father’s name, and you do not receive me. If another comes in his own name, you will receive him. How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you to the Father. There is one who accuses you: Moses, on whom you have set your hope. For if you believed Moses, you would believe me; for he wrote of me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” (John 5:37–47).
And there it is: Jesus said that if the Jews had “believed Moses”, they would believe Him, because he wrote about JESUS! He made it clear that their not believing HIM meant they did not believe Moses!
In the next chapter of John we find that Jesus clearly identifies God’s work to the Jews alive during His day—and to all people who would follow. In verses 27 and 28 we find this amazing statement:
Then they said to him, “What must we do, to be doing the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” (ESV)
Dear reader, in this short sentence Jesus clearly stated ALL that is required of those who honor God: that we believe in the Son, the One whom He has sent!
In fact, this command echoes the seminal statement in Genesis 15:6 where Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.
NEVER has salvation been dependent upon behavior; it has always been dependent upon belief in God and in His word. Moses gave Israel the commandments that God delivered through him, but those commandments never stood alone. They always were rooted in the levitical priesthood, in the system of sacrifices and rituals and holiness that God gave Israel to prefigure the work of the Messiah and to keep the Israelite gene pool free from the corruption of Canaanite blood and to keep His people separated from idolatry.
The Ten Commandments were for a time, a time defined by the levitical system of ritualized worship. When the levitical system ceased, a new High Priest according to a different order—Melchizedek—was established, and now we have a new law: the Law of Christ. This law does not contain any of the levitical holy days—including the seventh-day Sabbath—because they were all shadows of Christ and fulfilled in Him (Col. 2:16-17; Heb. 10:1).
Summary
In short, this next week’s lesson is confusing because it is illegitimately attempting to apply the principles of the Mosaic covenant given to Israel to people living in the administration of the New Covenant. One cannot appropriate the terms of an obsolete covenant (Heb. 8:13) and apply it to a new covenant without making a mockery of both.
In fact, Paul told the Galatians, who were being Judaized by false teachers, that if they returned to the Law after having been “known by God” they were turning back “to the weak and worthless elemental things, to which you desire to be enslaved all over again” (Gal. 4:9). In other words, turning back to the Ten Commandments and the Mosaic Law (which is all one complete, indivisible covenant) is the same as returning to paganism now that the Lord Jesus has fulfilled the law!
One like Moses has come, and now, instead of listening to Moses, we are to listen to Him! He tells us the exact way to be counted righteous believe in Him. If we turn back to Moses, a veil lies over our hearts and our minds are hardened. But when we turn to Christ, the veil is removed, and we move from the condemnation of the law to the freedom of the Spirit covenant—the New Covenant in which Jesus is Lord and the Holy Spirit gives us new life and new hearts (2 Cor. 3:12–18).
Look to JESUS, and live! †
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