Will Vaus

  Listen for God’s word to you from Galatians 3:1-14… You foolish   Galatians!   Who has bewitched you?   Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.   I would like to learn just one thing from you: Did you receive the Spirit   by the works of the law,   or by believing what you heard?   Are you so foolish? After beginning by means of the Spirit, are you now trying to finish by means of the flesh?   Have you experienced   so much in vain—if it really was in vain?   So again I ask, does God give you his Spirit and work miracles   among you by the works of the law, or by your believing what you heard?   So also Abraham “believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.” Understand, then, that those who have faith   are children of Abraham.   Scripture foresaw that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, and announced the gospel in advance to Abraham: “All nations will be blessed...

After some strange laws, and some harsh ones, and more curses than blessings, Deuteronomy concludes with Moses blessing the Israelites from the slopes of Mount Pisgah. Happy are you, O Israel! Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord, the shield of your help, and the sword of your triumph! Your enemies shall come fawning to you, and you shall tread on their backs. (Deuteronomy 33:29) These are the last words the Israelites hear from the mouth of Moses, and they are encouraging words. The Israelites are going to face many enemies in the days to come, and so they need these uplifting words. Perhaps this is a reminder to us to always leave others with encouraging words—life-lifters. Deuteronomy 34 recounts the death of Moses on Mount Pisgah. He gets to see the Promised Land, but not enter it. Perhaps this is a picture of each of our lives. None of our lives will end complete. The completion only comes in the vision of God, when we stand before God...

Deuteronomy 29:4 says, “But to this day the Lord has not given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear.” Have the Israelites really not understood their experience up to this point? Friedman answers: I understand this to mean just that. Moses has just finished the long speech that takes up nearly all of Deuteronomy. Now he is beginning a much shorter speech, and he is telling them that he is about to reveal to them, in his last message to them, the key to understanding what their experience means. What follows is a speech like no other he has ever made in the Torah. Until now he has focused on facts: points of history, specific laws. But, starting in a few verses, he will turn philosophical, moral, and spiritual—and his message is formulated in some of the most beautiful words in the Torah. [1] Moses says, “And you shall observe the words of this covenant and do them so that you’ll understand all that you’ll do.” In the coming chapters, t...

Deuteronomy 25 continues the strange mix of laws somewhat humane and others definitely peculiar to our modern sensibility. In the first few verses we have the allowance for torture as punishment for crime: forty lashes with a whip. However, there is a limit to the torture: it is to be no more than forty lashes otherwise “your neighbor will be degraded in your sight.” Then in the middle portion of the chapter we have what seems to us the strange practice of Levirate marriage where a dead man’s brother is required to marry his dead brother’s wife and propagate children through her to carry on the dead brother’s name. In verses eleven and twelve, we have the situation of a wife attempting to help her husband in a fight with another man. If she tries to help by grasping the other man’s genitals, her hand is to be cut off in punishment. This penalty seems rather severe. One would think a wife should be praised for trying to protect her husband’s life in a fight. I...

In Leviticus 23, we have the laws related to various religious festivals. Friedman comments: The laws of the holidays as expressed in Leviticus reflect a concern with order and arrangement as well. YHWH tells Moses to tell the people what the nation’s holidays are to be, specifically: Sabbath, the holiday of unleavened bread ( massot ), an unnamed holiday related to firstfruits, an unnamed holiday involving horn blowing (known subsequently in Judaism, but not biblically, as the New Year [Rosh Hashanah]), the Day of Atonement, and the holiday of booths ( sukkot ). [1] In Leviticus 24:10-23, we once again have a narrative in the midst of the giving of the law. As Friedman says, the story is “interesting in parallel with the only other narrative in Leviticus, the story of the consecration of the priesthood. Like that other story, which culminates in the deaths of Aaron’s sons, the account of the blasphemy expresses what is at stake in the people’s young relationsh...