Reader's Version
- Scandalous Scripture, Part Eight: Every Letter of the Law
- The Bible We Don’t Read in Church
- Reader’s Version — Sermon by Gene Simco
- Last week we talked about driving, anger, Jesus fish, and Christian bumper stickers. I joked that, based on the way some Christians drive, I might need to go into the parking lot and start removing the Jesus fish from people’s cars.
- Well, apparently I need a bumper sticker of my own. My truck is twenty years old now, so I have decided the bumper sticker should probably say, “Honk if you love Jesus. Tow me if you love your neighbor.”
- I wanted to check whether American Express gives us roadside towing benefits as members. If not, I knew that my wife, Heather, was already on her father’s AAA plan. I was in a hurry, I was not talking to her directly, and I knew I would completely forget about it, so I typed myself a very quick reminder without reading every word carefully.
- Later, I looked at the note. It said,
- “Check whether AMEX has towing. If not, have Heather sign you up for AA.”
- Funny—but think about what happened. One missing letter completely changed the instruction. Fortunately, confusing AA with AAA can be funny. Changing, confusing, adding to, or taking away from what God actually said is something much more serious.
- And that brings us to Deuteronomy.
- What Is Deuteronomy?
- Last week we finished Numbers. Israel has now spent almost forty years in the wilderness. The generation that came out of Egypt has largely died, a new generation has been counted, and Moses stands with them on the edge of the Promised Land. But because Moses misrepresented the LORD at Meribah, he will not enter the land with them.
- In Deuteronomy 3:24–27, Moses recalls pleading with God to allow him to cross the Jordan and see the good land on the other side. He wants to see the beautiful hill country and Lebanon, but God refuses. Moses is told that the matter is settled. He may go up to Pisgah, look over the land in every direction, and see it with his own eyes, but he will not cross the Jordan.
- That makes Deuteronomy, in many ways, Moses’ final great sermon to Israel. He looks backward so they will remember where they came from, and he looks forward so they will understand where they are going. Most importantly, he reminds them exactly what God said.
- The name Deuteronomy comes to us through the Greek Septuagint, which we have repeatedly seen reflected in the traditional English names of the books of the Torah. The Greek title is Δευτερονόμιον — Deuteronomion. It is commonly explained as “second law,” but we should not imagine that God is handing Israel a completely different Torah. Moses is restating, reviewing, and applying the covenant instructions to the generation preparing to enter the land.
- The Hebrew tradition calls the book Devarim, “Words,” from its opening words. That title works well too, because Moses is essentially saying, Remember these words. Before Israel moves forward, Moses must make sure they know exactly what God actually said.
- Do Not Add. Do Not Take Away.
- That brings us to one of the important themes of the book.
- In Deuteronomy 4:1–2, Moses tells Israel to listen carefully to the instructions and regulations he is about to teach them. They are to obey these words so that they may live, enter the land, and possess what the LORD, the God of their ancestors, is giving them. Then comes the warning: they are not to add to the commands, and they are not to subtract from them. They are simply to obey what God has given.
- The warning appears very early in the book, and it is not a one-time statement. Deuteronomy 12:32 says essentially the same thing again: carefully obey the commands God gives; do not add anything to them, and do not take anything away from them.
- The principle is straightforward. Do what God commanded. Obey. Do not add. Do not subtract.
- God does not tell Israel, “Get the general idea and then improve it.” He does not tell them, “Take what works for you and your culture and rewrite the rest.” He tells them to preserve and obey what He actually said.
- Jesus later uses similarly strong language concerning the Law in Matthew 5:17–18. He warns His listeners not to misunderstand why He came. He did not come to abolish the Law of Moses or the Prophets, but to fulfill them—to accomplish what they were pointing toward. He then says that not even the smallest letter or the smallest stroke will simply disappear until the purpose of the Law is accomplished.
- The NLT’s wording here is particularly helpful because it renders Jesus’ statement in terms of accomplishing the purpose of the Law. That protects us from misunderstanding fulfillment as though Jesus simply threw the Law away. We will return to that later, because it becomes extremely important when Paul begins explaining where the Law was actually heading.
- For now, notice the connection with our opening illustration. We sometimes use the phrase “every letter of the law.” My roadside note lost one letter and completely changed the instruction.
- The stakes are considerably higher when we do the same thing with Scripture.
- Why Are We Talking About the Constitution in Church?
- Today we are going to talk about constitutional law as well, which raises an obvious question: Why are we talking about the Constitution in church? Especially if you know me, because I generally do not like bringing politics into the pulpit.
- The reason is that claims about the Bible and the Constitution are regularly made in Christian teaching and discussion. Once somebody appeals to Scripture to support a historical claim, however, the biblical part of that claim becomes something we can examine—and something we should examine. If someone says that Deuteronomy was used as the governmental blueprint for the United States Constitution, we can do something remarkably simple: read Deuteronomy, read the Constitution, and compare what the documents actually say.
- To be clear, this is not an attack on America. I love living here. Correcting or testing a historical claim about America is not the same thing as attacking America. And when that claim involves Scripture, biblical accuracy matters. This is not about diminishing America; it is about refusing to diminish Scripture by making it say something it does not say.
- Christianity clearly influenced American culture. The Bible clearly influenced many people in the founding generation, and biblical language and ideas appear frequently throughout founding-era religious and political literature. So we should make the distinction carefully. Influence? Absolutely. Similarities? Certainly. Deuteronomy as the governmental blueprint for the Constitution? That requires much stronger evidence.
- Once we make a claim like that, we ought to check the documents.
- Why does the distinction matter? Because a historical claim can eventually become a biblical interpretation. If America is treated as though it occupies Israel’s covenant position, it becomes very easy to move from Israel’s covenant to America’s covenant, and then from Israel’s blessings to America’s blessings and Israel’s curses to America’s curses.
- That is particularly important because Deuteronomy 28 is exactly where we are headed. Those blessings and curses belong to a covenant God actually made with ancient biblical Israel. I do not want to take America and make it the main character in somebody else’s covenant.
- There is also a larger Christian concern. Christianity is not American. Jesus is not American. The Gospel is not American. Christians have lived under many nations, kingdoms, empires, and governments throughout history. No earthly nation gets to define Jesus for the rest of the world.
- There is something liberating about recognizing that distinction. America’s sins are not Christ’s sins. America’s failures do not have to be defended in order to defend Christianity. Jesus’ reputation does not depend upon America’s record. The distinction therefore works in both directions: it keeps us from placing America inside promises specifically made to biblical Israel, and it keeps the Gospel from being identified with everything an earthly nation does.
- Related Reading: What the Bible Says About Israel
- For a fuller treatment of the distinction between biblical Israel as a covenant people and the modern political State of Israel, see “What The Bible Says About Israel” at BibleBelievingChristian.org. The article follows Israel’s identity through the biblical covenants and into the New Testament, while distinguishing those theological categories from the modern nation-state.
- What The Bible Says About Israel
- What Kind of Government Does the Bible Describe?
- Before comparing individual details, there is a much larger structural difference to recognize.
- Biblical Israel begins as a theocracy in the most literal sense: God is Israel’s King. Israel does not begin with “We the people.” Its covenant authority does not originate with popular sovereignty. God rescues the nation, establishes the covenant, gives the Law, appoints its priesthood, and governs His people.
- That makes what happens later in 1 Samuel 8 especially important.
- When Israel demands a human king “like all the nations,” God tells Samuel that the people have not ultimately rejected Samuel; they have rejected God from being King over them. The monarchy is therefore introduced as a concession within the covenant story. God will work through it, and the Davidic kingship will eventually become enormously important to the messianic promise, but Israel’s original demand for a king arises from its rejection of God’s direct rule.
- The book of Judges shows another kind of failure. Its repeated statement that “everyone did what was right in his own eyes” is not an endorsement of popular government. It describes the breakdown of covenant faithfulness and ordered leadership. Israel is not flourishing because everybody finally gets a vote. The nation is disintegrating because everybody has made himself the final authority.
- So we should distinguish categories carefully. The biblical story we have been following presents direct divine rule over covenant Israel, followed by monarchy after Israel demands a human king. Then the New Testament gives us the Church—a New Covenant people under the kingship of Christ.
- The Church, of course, is not a civil government in the constitutional sense. That distinction matters. What we can say is that Scripture’s covenant structures are fundamentally different from the governmental structure established by the United States Constitution.
- The Constitution does not establish direct theocracy.
- It does not establish a Davidic monarchy.
- And it does not establish the Church as the civil government.
- It establishes a different kind of political order.
- That is where our comparison needs to begin, because before we start looking for individual verses that resemble individual constitutional provisions, we should first ask whether the two documents are even trying to create the same kind of society.
- They are not.
- Reading the Constitution Like a Copyright Detector
- So I finally sat down and read the Constitution from beginning to end. In my world, I would call that fairly light reading. I approached it almost like a copyright detector. If the framers had lifted their governmental system from Deuteronomy, believe me, I was looking for it. I have read Deuteronomy countless times. If substantial portions of one document had been drawn from the other, I wanted to see where.
- What struck me most was not how similar the documents were, but how different they actually are.
- Before looking at those differences, however, we should be fair to the claim and examine the similarities people commonly point to. The Constitution contains roughly 4,500 words arranged in seven articles, while Deuteronomy contains thirty-four chapters and hundreds of covenant commands. Yet the argument that the Constitution was modeled on Deuteronomy tends to return to about three major proposed parallels. None of them is a direct quotation from Deuteronomy, but some are genuine similarities and deserve to be considered honestly.
- Two Witnesses
- The first and probably strongest comparison concerns witnesses.
- Deuteronomy 17:6 prohibits putting someone to death on the testimony of a single witness; two or three witnesses are required. Deuteronomy 19:15 repeats the broader principle that a criminal accusation cannot be established by one witness alone.
- Article III of the Constitution contains a strikingly similar rule concerning treason: conviction requires the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, unless the accused confesses in open court. That resemblance is real.
- But resemblance by itself does not establish literary dependence. The American Treason Clause also arose against the background of English treason law and concerns about the historic abuse of treason prosecutions. So the careful conclusion is not that there is no similarity. There clearly is. The question is whether the similarity proves that Article III was taken directly from Deuteronomy, and that requires more evidence.
- Divided Authority
- The second common comparison concerns divided governmental authority. Deuteronomy 16 through 18 discusses judges, priests, the king, and prophets, and these distinct forms of leadership are sometimes compared with the American legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
- At the broadest level, both systems recognize that authority can be distributed among different offices. But Israel’s judges, priests, king, and prophets are not equivalents of Congress, the presidency, and the federal judiciary.
- James Madison gives us unusually helpful historical evidence here. Madison—the future fourth President of the United States and one of the principal architects of the Constitution—discussed the separation of legislative, executive, and judicial powers directly in Federalist No. 47. When explaining the principle, he did not appeal to Moses or Deuteronomy. He called Montesquieu the political authority most commonly consulted on the subject and examined Montesquieu’s understanding of the British constitutional system.
- So again, there is a broad resemblance. Different kinds of authority exist in both systems. But the historical evidence that America’s three branches were copied from Deuteronomy is much harder to establish.
- A Ruler From Among the People
- The third comparison comes from Deuteronomy 17:14–15. Moses tells Israel that if they eventually demand a king like the surrounding nations, the king must be one of their own people rather than a foreigner.
- That gets compared with Article II’s requirement that the President of the United States be a natural-born citizen. The resemblance is interesting. Again, however, resemblance does not necessarily demonstrate derivation. The Constitution creates the office of president rather than a monarchy, and the similarities become much thinner when we continue reading Deuteronomy 17. The Constitution does indeed require the president to be a natural-born citizen and at least thirty-five years old.
- So let’s keep reading.
- If This Is the Presidency, Keep Reading
- Deuteronomy 17 goes far beyond requiring Israel’s ruler to come from among his own people. The king must not accumulate large numbers of horses or send Israel back toward Egypt to acquire them. He must not multiply wives, because they can turn his heart away from God. He must not accumulate excessive silver and gold for himself.
- Then the requirements become explicitly covenantal. The king must have a copy of the Torah prepared for him in connection with the Levitical priests. He must keep it with him, read it throughout his life, learn to fear the LORD, obey the covenant, and refuse to exalt himself above his fellow Israelites.
- So if someone says, “Look, Deuteronomy 17 is essentially the American presidency,” the simplest response is to keep reading.
- The Constitution does not require the President of the United States to be a Torah-observant Israelite. It does not prohibit the president from possessing substantial personal wealth. It does not require him to carry and read Torah throughout his life, nor does it make obedience to the Mosaic covenant a qualification for office.
- The offices are doing different things because the documents are doing different things.
- Put the Documents Side by Side
- That became even clearer when I read the Constitution straight through.
- The Constitution begins with the famous words “We the People.” Its Preamble describes the purposes of the document: forming a more perfect union, establishing justice, ensuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the “Blessings of Liberty” for the people and their descendants.
- Notice what is not there. The Preamble does not mention God. It does not mention Jesus. It does not mention Christianity. It does not mention Torah or covenant.
- The word blessings does appear, but the phrase is “Blessings of Liberty.” That is a civil objective of the Constitution, not a reference to the covenant blessings of Deuteronomy.
- And even the word liberty deserves some thought from a biblical perspective. Constitutional liberty is a civil and political concept. Biblical freedom is not simply the unrestricted ability to do whatever we want. Scripture repeatedly treats genuine freedom as something ordered toward righteousness, responsibility, and service to God. So simply seeing the word blessings in the Preamble does not make the constitutional phrase equivalent to Deuteronomy’s covenant blessings.
- The structures that follow make the difference even clearer.
- Article I establishes a bicameral Congress: a House of Representatives and a Senate. That two-house legislature is fundamental to the American system. Deuteronomy establishes no comparable pair of elected legislative houses. The Constitution explicitly places legislative power in a Congress consisting of those two chambers.
- There is one numerical coincidence worth mentioning, especially because we recently came through Numbers. A member of the House of Representatives must be at least twenty-five years old. Numbers 8:24–25 also uses age twenty-five as the beginning point for Levitical service and fifty as the point at which that regular service ends.
- That is interesting—but it does not get us very far. Members of Congress do not retire at fifty, and Representatives are obviously not Levites serving at the Tabernacle. Numbers 4, incidentally, counts Levites from thirty to fifty for the demanding work associated with transporting the Tabernacle, while Numbers 8 begins service at twenty-five; many interpreters understand the earlier years as preparation or less strenuous service before the full transport duties. Either way, a shared number is not the same thing as a shared governmental structure.
- Elections provide another obvious difference. The Constitution builds selection by election into the governmental system. The House is elected by the people, and the constitutional system establishes methods for selecting senators and the president. Deuteronomy does not create comparable popular elections for Israel’s king, priests, or prophets. Israel’s covenant offices arise from very different sources of authority and appointment. Article I explicitly describes members of the House as being chosen by the people.
- The Constitution also creates both a president and a vice president. There is no corresponding pair of offices in Deuteronomy. Israel has kings, priests, judges, and prophets, but not a constitutional president and vice president.
- The impeachment system is likewise distinct. The House possesses the power of impeachment, while the Senate tries impeachments, and the Constitution provides for the removal of the president, vice president, and other civil officers upon impeachment and conviction for specified offenses. Deuteronomy contains no comparable constitutional procedure for impeaching Israel’s king.
- Perhaps one of the most significant differences concerns the very purpose of a legislature. The Constitution gives legislative power to Congress. Congress exists, in part, to enact laws.
- Israel’s relationship to Torah is fundamentally different. Israel does not elect legislators to rewrite God’s covenant. God gives the commands, and Israel is repeatedly warned not to add to them or subtract from them.
- The American constitutional system deliberately creates a lawmaking government.
- Deuteronomy gives a covenant people laws received from God.
- Those are different arrangements.
- The difference becomes even more obvious in Article V. The Constitution contains a formal mechanism for amending itself. With the required congressional or convention action and ratification by the states, the Constitution can be changed. That ability is built into the document.
- Compare that with the warning we have already seen repeatedly in Deuteronomy:
- Do not add.
- Do not subtract.
- Israel has no equivalent of Article V allowing a supermajority to amend Torah.
- There are other contrasts as well. The Constitution expressly prohibits federal titles of nobility. Biblical Israel, on the other hand, has a king and hereditary priestly offices. We should not force that comparison too far because an Israelite priesthood and European legal titles of nobility are not the same thing, but once again the social structures are clearly different.
- The judicial systems also require some care. The Constitution establishes a federal judiciary and permits the creation of inferior courts. Deuteronomy certainly contains judges and procedures for difficult cases to be brought before higher authority. So the simple existence of different judicial levels proves very little. Most developed legal systems need some mechanism for dealing with difficult cases and appeals.
- Jury trials provide a clearer difference. The Constitution explicitly provides that criminal trials, except impeachment cases, are to be conducted by jury. The later Bill of Rights expands jury protections further. Deuteronomy does not establish an American-style jury system.
- Slavery gives us another comparison that must be handled carefully. Torah permits and regulates forms of slavery. But the original Constitution did not abolish slavery either. The compromises surrounding the Constitution accommodated slavery, including the continuation of the international slave trade until 1808 and the representation compromise involving enslaved people. The National Archives describes slavery as one of the major disputes that threatened the Convention.
- Slavery was abolished nationally much later through the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865.
- And that actually brings us back to one of the largest differences between the documents.
- The Constitution can be amended.
- Torah is not rewritten by Israel through a constitutional amendment process.
- The point is not that the documents have no similarities. They do. We have already identified some. The point is that when the entire documents are placed side by side, the differences in their structures, offices, sources of authority, legislative processes, and legal systems are substantial.
- If Deuteronomy truly functioned as the direct governmental blueprint for the Constitution, we would expect those similarities to dominate the comparison.
- Instead, the more closely we read both documents, the more apparent it becomes that they were created to govern very different kinds of communities.
- Different Laws, Different Penalties
- Deuteronomy contains some legal material that sounds startling to modern ears. In Deuteronomy 25:11–12, two men are fighting when the wife of one intervenes and grabs the other man by the genitals. The prescribed penalty is explicit: her hand is to be cut off, and Israel is told to show no pity.
- The Septuagint is equally direct: ἀποκόψεις τὴν χεῖρα — apokopseis tēn cheira, “you shall cut off the hand.”
- To modern American ears, that sounds severe and certainly unusual. The American constitutional system, by contrast, eventually adopted the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments.” We should be careful not to take a modern American constitutional category and simply use it to judge an ancient Israelite covenant penalty. That would be anachronistic. But the contrast itself is useful: these are different legal systems operating with different penal frameworks.
- If Deuteronomy were actually the constitutional blueprint, we would expect much greater continuity not merely in vague principles but in the actual way law and punishment function.
- What Happens When We Read the Whole Thing?
- That brings us to the larger point. If Deuteronomy were the governmental blueprint for the Constitution, we would expect the resemblance to dominate once the two documents were placed side by side.
- Instead, the structural differences dominate. The Constitution creates a two-house legislature, popular elections, a president and vice president, impeachment, a lawmaking Congress, a formal amendment process, jury trials, and a federal judiciary. It also expressly prohibits religious tests for public office. That is a structure of civil government very different from the covenant system described in Deuteronomy.
- That does not mean biblical influence was absent.
- It means influence and identity are not the same thing.
- What Does the Constitution Actually Say About Religion?
- A common claim and counterclaim usually appear at this point. Some people say, “The Constitution says there must be separation of church and state.”
- Technically, it does not use that phrase.
- What it does say is significant.
- Article VI, Clause 3 states that “no religious Test shall ever be required” as a qualification for office or public trust under the United States. The First Amendment then says Congress may make no law “respecting an establishment of religion,” while also protecting the free exercise of religion.
- Those provisions do not literally declare, “The United States cannot be a Christian country.” That would go beyond the wording of the document. What they do show is that the federal constitutional order does not establish Christianity as a national covenant religion, does not require adherence to Christianity as a qualification for federal office, and does not establish the kind of religious covenant structure we have been reading about in Deuteronomy.
- That is a much narrower claim, but it is also a much stronger one because it is what the text actually says.
- The contrast with Deuteronomy is obvious. Israel’s covenant identity is explicitly religious. Its king is required to know and obey Torah. Its priests are established by covenant lineage. Its national life is ordered around YHWH’s revealed commands. The Constitution, by comparison, expressly refuses to make a religious test a qualification for public office.
- Again, these are different kinds of documents.
- Jefferson and the “Wall of Separation”
- Thomas Jefferson gives us an interesting historical window into how the First Amendment was understood by at least one major figure of the founding generation.
- One qualification is important: Jefferson did not write the Constitution. He was serving in France during the Constitutional Convention. But while serving as President in 1802, he responded to the Danbury Baptist Association and described religion as a matter between a person and God. Referring directly to the First Amendment, he used the famous phrase “a wall of separation between Church & State.”
- That phrase itself does not appear in the Constitution. It is Jefferson’s description of what he believed the First Amendment accomplished. The exact modern implications of his metaphor have been argued over ever since, and historians continue to debate precisely how broadly Jefferson intended the phrase to apply.
- So Jefferson’s letter should not be treated as though it single-handedly settles every modern church-state question.
- But Jefferson certainly was not describing the United States as a new covenant Israel governed by Torah.
- And someone might reasonably respond, “Fine, but Jefferson did not write the Constitution.”
- Correct.
- So let’s go back to James Madison.
- James Madison: A Stronger Historical Witness
- James Madison was not the sole author of the Constitution; the document was the collaborative product of the Constitutional Convention. But Madison was one of its principal architects and later became the fourth President of the United States. The Virginia Plan, written primarily by Madison and presented by Edmund Randolph, supplied broad outlines for the national government that eventually emerged, including legislative, executive, and judicial branches.
- Madison also became one of the central figures behind the Bill of Rights, which makes his views on religious liberty especially important.
- Before the Constitutional Convention, Madison opposed a Virginia proposal that would have provided government financial support for teachers of Christianity. In his Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments, he argued that religious conviction could not properly be produced through governmental force. His position was not that religion was unimportant, but that religious allegiance and conscience stood in a different relationship to civil authority.
- Then, on June 8, 1789, Madison proposed constitutional language saying that civil rights should not be abridged because of religious belief or worship and that “nor shall any national religion be established.” He also proposed explicit protection for the rights of conscience.
- When the religious-language amendment was debated later that summer, Madison explained the principle even more clearly. He understood it to mean that Congress should not establish a religion, enforce its legal observance, or compel people to worship God contrary to conscience.
- That is enormously important for our comparison.
- Jefferson later supplied the memorable phrase about a wall between church and state. Madison brings us closer to the actual constitutional process and makes the governmental principle underneath it clear: religious liberty, liberty of conscience, and no federally established national religion.
- Again, this does not mean the Founders were all secularists. They were not. It does not mean Christianity had no influence. It clearly did. It does not mean biblical morality has nothing to say to civil government.
- It shows something much narrower:
- The Constitution did not establish the United States as a Deuteronomic covenant nation.
- Two Different Documents
- That brings us to the heart of the comparison.
- The Constitution establishes a civil government.
- Deuteronomy governs a covenant people.
- That distinction changes everything.
- God actually did establish a covenant nation in the biblical story. It was not America. It was ancient Israel. Because Israel genuinely stood in covenant with God, Deuteronomy contains something the Constitution does not contain in the same sense: covenant blessings and covenant curses.
- And that is where our study now needs to go.
- The Road to the Blessings and Curses
- Before we arrive there, it helps to step back and see the movement of the book.
- Deuteronomy 1 through 3 looks backward and remembers Israel’s wilderness journey. Chapter 4 calls the people to listen and obey without adding to or subtracting from God’s commands. Chapter 5 restates the Ten Commandments, and chapter 6 gives us the Shema, the great confession calling Israel to love the LORD with the whole person—a prayer that remains central in Jewish life to this day.
- Chapters 7 through 11 repeatedly warn Israel to remember the God who rescued them and not forget Him when they enter the land. Chapters 12 through 16 deal with worship and community life, including generosity, festivals, and justice. Chapters 17 and 18 address leadership through judges, kings, priests, and prophets. Chapters 19 through 26 apply the covenant to justice, family life, warfare, economics, and responsibility toward one’s neighbor.
- Then we reach chapters 27 and 28.
- Blessing.
- And curse.
- Chapters 29 and 30 renew the covenant and place life and death before Israel. The final chapters then move toward Moses’ song, his blessing of the tribes, his death, and the transition to Joshua.
- The entire book has been preparing Israel to live as God’s covenant people in the land.
- And now that preparation brings us to two mountains.
- Two Mountains: Blessing and Curse
- When we reach Deuteronomy 27, Israel is preparing for a public covenant ceremony that will take place after they cross the Jordan. Moses divides the tribes between two mountains. Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, Joseph, and Benjamin are to stand on Mount Gerizim, associated with blessing, while Reuben, Gad, Asher, Zebulun, Dan, and Naphtali are to stand on Mount Ebal, associated with the curse.
- Deuteronomy 27:11–26 then gives us the public covenant declarations. The Levites announce a series of covenant violations before the whole nation. Idolatry is condemned. So is dishonoring father and mother, moving a neighbor’s boundary marker, misleading the blind, denying justice to foreigners, orphans, and widows, sexual immorality, secret violence, and accepting payment to murder an innocent person.
- After every declaration, the people respond with the same word:
- Amen.
- Again and again:
- Amen.
- Amen.
- Amen.
- The people know what they are agreeing to. This is not God saying, “Try to be nice and maybe everything will work out.” This is covenant. The people are publicly acknowledging the terms and agreeing that covenant rebellion has consequences.
- Then the chapter closes with the broadest statement of all: cursed is anyone who does not affirm and obey the terms of these instructions.
- That takes us directly back to where we began this chapter. What God actually said matters. Israel is not being asked to approve the portions of the covenant it finds attractive. The people publicly affirm the covenant as a whole.
- The Blessings
- Then we move into Deuteronomy 28:1–14 and the covenant blessings.
- This is a passage that has often been pulled out of its setting, particularly within prosperity-gospel teaching, as though it were a general promise that faithful Christians should expect wealth, health, success, and material abundance. But that interpretation ignores the covenant standing behind the passage and, remarkably, often ignores the rest of the chapter.
- If someone wants to claim the blessings of Deuteronomy 28 as a direct personal promise, the curses sitting immediately beside them become rather difficult to explain. Both belong to the same Mosaic covenant.
- For a fuller examination of that issue, see the BibleBelievingChristian.org article “Prosperity Gospel: The Faithless Gospel.” It contrasts the prosperity message of visible health, wealth, and earthly reward with the New Testament’s emphasis on faith that remains faithful through suffering and fixes its hope upon what is eternal rather than merely temporal.
- Read “Prosperity Gospel: The Faithless Gospel”
- In its actual setting, Deuteronomy 28 promises that if Israel carefully obeys God and keeps His covenant commands, blessing will touch virtually every part of Israel’s national life: children, crops, livestock, food, work, rain, land, security, and victory over enemies.
- Notice what these blessings are. They are not generic promises made to every individual Christian or every political nation that uses religious language. They are covenant promises made to Israel under the Mosaic covenant.
- And they are surrounded by covenant warnings.
- That distinction matters enormously, as we are about to see.
- The Danger of Blessing
- Before returning to the curses, however, Deuteronomy gives us another warning that will become important when we reach application.
- In Deuteronomy 8:10–18, Moses tells Israel that when they have eaten their fill, they should praise the LORD for the good land He has given them. But then comes the warning. When they become full and prosperous, build fine houses, watch their herds increase, and see their silver and gold multiply, they must be especially careful not to become proud and forget the God who rescued them from slavery.
- Israel’s spiritual danger is not only suffering.
- It is success.
- That is worth thinking about.
- Sometimes hardship tests whether we trust God.
- Prosperity tests whether we still think we need Him.
- Something can genuinely begin as a blessing and still become spiritually destructive if receiving it teaches us to forget the One who gave it.
- Hold onto that thought. We will return to it later.
- Then Come the Curses
- Deuteronomy 28 does not end with prosperity.
- If Israel refuses to listen to God and abandons the covenant, the blessings begin reversing. Disease replaces health. Agricultural abundance gives way to collapse. Victory becomes defeat. Security becomes oppression. Prosperity gives way to economic devastation. Foreign nations dominate them, and eventually the trajectory leads toward exile.
- Then the chapter becomes darker still.
- Eventually it reaches something almost unimaginable.
- This is truly Scandalous Scripture.
- We encountered similar language briefly in the covenant curses of Leviticus 26, but we deliberately did not give it a full treatment there because the theme becomes especially important as we reach Deuteronomy.
- Parents Eating Their Children
- Deuteronomy 28:52–57 describes an enemy surrounding Israel’s cities and destroying the fortified walls in which the people had trusted. The siege becomes so severe and the starvation so desperate that the people begin eating the flesh of their own sons and daughters.
- The passage deliberately emphasizes how far ordinary human affection will collapse. The most tenderhearted man will become unwilling to share even with his closest family because there is nothing left to eat. The most delicate woman imaginable will secretly consume the afterbirth and even the child she has borne because starvation has reduced the city to unimaginable desperation.
- This is horrific.
- This is the Bible we do not usually read in church.
- But the language is not gruesome merely for the sake of shock. The curse is reversing the blessing.
- Under the blessing, children flourish. Food is abundant. The land produces. Israel lives securely.
- Under the curse, enemies surround the cities. Food disappears. Civil order collapses. Eventually even the most basic bonds of human affection are crushed beneath starvation.
- Parents eat their children.
- That is how far the curse goes.
- And tragically, Israel’s later history shows that this warning was not empty rhetoric.
- God Already Knew Israel Would Rebel
- Before Moses dies, God explicitly tells him that Israel will eventually break the covenant.
- In Deuteronomy 31:16–18, the LORD tells Moses that after his death the people will turn after other gods, abandon Him, and break the covenant He has made with them. The consequences described throughout Deuteronomy are therefore not merely abstract possibilities. God already knows the direction Israel will eventually take.
- Deuteronomy 31 does not itself describe the later cannibalism, but it predicts the covenant rebellion that will ultimately bring the curses into Israel’s history.
- And eventually, the unimaginable actually happens.
- During the siege of Samaria, 2 Kings 6:24–30 records two women discussing the eating of their own children during the famine.
- Later, after Jerusalem is devastated, Jeremiah’s laments sound almost like Deuteronomy’s curse being read back to us from inside the catastrophe.
- In Lamentations 2:20, the prophet cries out to God over the horror and asks whether women should be eating the children they once cared for.
- Then Lamentations 4:9–10 makes the connection even more graphic. Those killed by the sword are described as better off than those slowly dying from hunger, and compassionate women are said to have cooked their own children for food during Jerusalem’s destruction.
- Deuteronomy warned about it.
- Israel broke the covenant.
- And Lamentations describes the horror from inside the ruins.
- The covenant warning became historical reality.
- God was not playing games about Israel’s covenant rebellion.
- Why the Curse Matters
- This matters because we cannot casually take Deuteronomy 28 and turn it into a generic promise—or a generic threat—for some other nation.
- This is covenant language.
- God established ancient Israel as His covenant nation. He gave Israel covenant commands. He promised Israel covenant blessings. He warned Israel of covenant curses.
- Eventually, Israel experiences the consequences.
- The northern kingdom falls to Assyria.
- Judah falls to Babylon.
- Jerusalem is devastated.
- The Temple is destroyed.
- The people are carried into exile.
- The biblical story itself demonstrates that Deuteronomy’s warnings were real.
- But now we have a much larger theological problem.
- If the covenant places under a curse the one who does not continue in what God has commanded—
- Who escapes?
- The New Testament Reads Deuteronomy
- So how does the New Testament interpret all of this? Paul answers that question by going directly back to Deuteronomy.
- Remember where we were last week in Galatians. We looked at the fruit of the Spirit, but the larger argument of the letter is that Gentile believers are not required to become Jews and place themselves under the Mosaic covenant in order to belong to Christ. That controversy appears almost immediately. In Galatians 1, Paul warns that anyone proclaiming a different gospel is ἀνάθεμα — anathema, accursed. By Galatians 2, the issue becomes concrete: Titus, a Gentile believer, is not compelled to be circumcised. This reflects the same larger controversy we see addressed in Acts 15, where some believers insisted that Gentile converts had to be circumcised and keep the Law of Moses. The apostles reject that requirement. Gentiles are not brought into Christ by first being placed under Israel’s Mosaic covenant.
- That background makes Galatians 2:21 especially important. Paul says that he refuses to treat the grace of God as meaningless, because if righteousness could come through keeping the Law, then Christ died for nothing.
- Paul is not condemning people because they want to obey God. His argument is about the basis of righteousness. If we rely upon works of the Law to establish our standing before God, then we inherit the standard the Law itself gives us.
- That is exactly where Galatians 3:10–14 takes us. Paul says that those who depend upon the Law to make them right with God are under its curse, and then he quotes the very section of Deuteronomy we have just been reading: cursed is the one who does not continue in everything written in the book of the Law in order to do it.
- Notice the word that matters.
- Everything.
- The Law does not say, “Keep the parts you like.” It does not say, “Do better than your neighbor.” It does not say, “Get eighty percent and God will curve the grade.” If Law-keeping is the basis of righteousness, then the standard is the Law itself.
- And here the Septuagint becomes especially important. Paul’s wording in Galatians closely follows the Greek form of Deuteronomy 27:26. The emphasis falls upon continuing in all the things written in the book of the Law and doing them. Paul is reading the Greek Scriptures familiar to the early Church and drawing his argument directly from Deuteronomy.
- James makes essentially the same point from another angle. In James 2:10–11, he says that whoever keeps the whole Law yet stumbles at one point has become guilty with respect to the whole. James immediately illustrates the point with adultery and murder: the same God gave both commands, so we do not get to pick one command, congratulate ourselves for keeping it, and pretend the rest no longer matter.
- All means all.
- And there is our opening theme again.
- Every word matters.
- If my standing before God depends upon my performance under the Law, then I am responsible for what the Law actually demands. All of it. Not simply the Ten Commandments we like putting on plaques. The same Torah also includes the sacrifices, purity laws, covenant penalties, food regulations, priesthood, festivals, and even the disturbing law we just read about cutting off a woman’s hand.
- You do not get to claim the Mosaic covenant selectively.
- That means the curse is not merely somebody else’s problem.
- Paul then says something remarkable in Galatians 3:14. Through Christ, the blessing of Abraham comes to the Gentiles, and believers receive the promised Spirit through faith. That takes us back even earlier than Moses.
- Genesis 12 is often quoted as though the Abrahamic blessing simply means that God will materially bless anyone who politically or financially supports the modern State of Israel. But that skips over Paul’s own explanation of the promise in Galatians 3. Paul says the promise ultimately reaches its fulfillment in Christ, the promised seed, and through Him the blessing goes out to the nations.
- For a fuller treatment of that issue, see “Who Is Blessed in Abraham? A Critical Exegesis of Genesis 12:1–3 and the Israel Question” at BibleBelievingChristian.org. The article follows the promise from Abraham through Jacob and into the New Testament, showing why the popular slogan “bless Israel and you’ll be blessed” does not adequately represent the biblical argument.
- Read “Who Is Blessed in Abraham?”
- The point is that Paul does not take us backward into Moses as though Christ had merely added another layer onto the old covenant. He takes the Law seriously, recognizes its purpose, and then takes us forward into Christ.
- We saw this at the beginning of the message when Jesus said He did not come to abolish the Law and the Prophets, but to fulfill them. Jesus does not arrive and announce that God’s Word never mattered. Quite the opposite. He accomplishes what the Law was pointing toward.
- Paul says essentially the same thing in Romans 10:1–4. He speaks with deep concern for Israel, saying that they possess zeal for God, but that their zeal is misdirected because they are trying to establish righteousness in their own way rather than receiving God’s way of making people right. Then Paul gives us the remarkable statement that Christ is the τέλος — telos of the Law.
- Most literally, telos can mean the end, but the word can also carry the sense of goal, completion, culmination, or destination. That is why the NLT’s wording—Christ has accomplished the purpose for which the Law was given—is so helpful in this context.
- Christ is where the Law was heading.
- He is not Plan B after Israel failed.
- He is the goal toward which the Law was pointing.
- And part of the Law’s purpose was to expose sin. Paul says elsewhere in Romans that through the Law comes the knowledge of sin, while Galatians describes the Law as serving a temporary disciplinary role until Christ. The Law reveals God’s holiness, exposes our failure, and shows us why righteousness cannot finally rest upon our ability to perform perfectly.
- That gives us an important caution whenever Deuteronomy is pulled into modern Christian political arguments. We need to distinguish between learning moral wisdom from Scripture and placing another people or nation under Israel’s Mosaic covenant. The New Testament consistently resists the latter move. Paul spent enormous energy opposing the claim that Gentile believers needed to come under the Mosaic Law in order to belong fully to God. So when any modern Christian argument effectively takes Gentiles backward and treats Israel’s covenant code as though it were their binding covenant system, we should at least recognize the theological direction in which we are moving.
- That does not mean biblical morality has nothing to say to public life. It means the Mosaic covenant must be interpreted through Christ and the New Covenant rather than simply transferred wholesale onto another nation.
- And Paul proves that point by going back to Deuteronomy yet again.
- Near the end of Deuteronomy, Moses tells Israel in Deuteronomy 30:11–14 that God’s command is not impossibly distant. They do not need someone to ascend into heaven to retrieve it. They do not need someone to cross the sea to bring it back. The word is already near them—in their mouth and in their heart.
- Then, in Romans 10:6–10, Paul picks up Moses’ language almost word for word and rereads it through Christ. He asks who will ascend into heaven and connects that with bringing Christ down. He asks who will descend into the depths and connects that with bringing Christ up from the dead. Then he repeats Moses’ language: the word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart.
- But now Paul identifies that word with the message of faith being proclaimed about Jesus.
- That is astonishing.
- Paul reads Deuteronomy and sees Christ.
- He reads Moses and sees the Gospel.
- He does not treat Deuteronomy as merely an ancient legal curiosity, nor does he transport its covenant structure into another earthly nation. He reads it as part of the redemptive story that reaches its goal in Jesus.
- The word Moses said was near finds its Gospel proclamation in Christ.
- And then Paul returns to the curse.
- Galatians 3:13 says that Christ redeemed us from the curse of the Law by becoming a curse for us. Once again, Paul reaches directly back into Deuteronomy, this time to Deuteronomy 21:22–23, where a person hung upon a tree bears the imagery of covenant curse.
- Paul looks at the cross and says: there it is.
- The curse.
- Jesus fulfills the Law and then bears the curse of the Law on behalf of those who could never fulfill it perfectly themselves.
- So the trajectory of the biblical story is not:
- Deuteronomy → Israel → America.
- It is:
- Deuteronomy → Israel → covenant failure → curse → exile → promise → Christ → New Covenant.
- That is where Deuteronomy is going.
- If we make another earthly nation the fulfillment of Deuteronomy, we risk missing where Deuteronomy itself is pointing.
- The answer to Deuteronomy’s curse is not an earthly governmental system.
- The answer is Christ.
- Where Is Our Citizenship?
- That leaves us with another important question: if America is not covenant Israel, where does that leave Christians? Do we simply belong nowhere?
- The New Testament gives us a very clear answer. Our ultimate citizenship is somewhere else.
- In Philippians 3:17–21, Paul tells believers to pattern their lives after faithful examples. He then contrasts them with people whose conduct demonstrates hostility toward the cross of Christ. Their god is their appetite, they glory in things of which they should be ashamed, and their minds are fixed upon earthly things. Then Paul draws the contrast: “But we are citizens of heaven.”
- That is a remarkable statement.
- Paul does not mean that earthly citizenship is unreal or irrelevant. Paul himself possessed Roman citizenship, and on several occasions in Acts he made use of the legal rights that came with it. But Roman citizenship never became Paul’s ultimate identity. He could use it without worshiping it. He could benefit from it without confusing Rome with the Kingdom of God.
- That distinction matters for us as well.
- Paul’s language in Philippians is especially powerful because Philippi was a Roman colony whose citizens were very conscious of their privileged relationship to Rome. Yet Paul reminds Christians living there that their deepest political identity does not ultimately come from Rome at all. Their πολίτευμα — politeuma, their commonwealth or citizenship, is in heaven, and from there they eagerly await their Savior and Lord, Jesus Christ.
- Paul’s contrast is sobering. He describes people whose minds are consumed with the things of this earth and then immediately says, “But our citizenship is in heaven.” The Christian may possess earthly citizenship, appreciate it, and responsibly participate in the society in which God has placed him, but it cannot become the identity that defines him.
- Hebrews 11 makes essentially the same point while looking backward at the people of faith. Hebrews 11:13–16 says that Abraham and the others died in faith without receiving everything God had promised. They confessed that they were strangers and foreigners on the earth. The writer says that people who speak that way are looking for a country of their own, but not merely the earthly country they had left. If that had been what they wanted, they could have gone back.
- Instead, they desired a better country—a heavenly one.
- That is an extraordinary description of biblical faith. Abraham had a real homeland. He lived in real places. He had earthly relationships and responsibilities. Yet Hebrews says his ultimate hope remained somewhere beyond all of them. God had prepared a city for His people.
- Peter uses the same language. In 1 Peter 2:11, he addresses Christians as temporary residents, foreigners, or sojourners and warns them to resist the worldly desires that wage war against their souls. That language fits what we saw last week when we talked about representing Christ before the watching world. Christians live within earthly societies, but we are never supposed to become so absorbed into the surrounding culture that it defines who we are.
- And Jesus Himself makes the distinction unmistakable when He stands before Pilate.
- In John 18, Pilate asks Jesus whether He is the King of the Jews. Jesus eventually answers in John 18:36, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The Greek is ἡ βασιλεία ἡ ἐμὴ οὐκ ἔστιν ἐκ τοῦ κόσμου τούτου — hē basileia hē emē ouk estin ek tou kosmou toutou. The important word is ἐκ — ek, “from” or “out of.” Jesus is speaking about the source and character of His Kingdom. His Kingdom does not originate from the systems of this world. If it did, He says, His servants would be fighting to prevent His arrest.
- Pilate is standing in front of a King.
- He simply does not understand the kind of Kingdom that King rules.
- That gives us the biblical answer. We really do belong to a Kingdom. We really do possess a citizenship that transcends every earthly border. But that Kingdom is not created by a constitution. It is not defined by national geography. It does not rise and fall with an election, an empire, or an earthly government.
- Our King is Christ.
- We can therefore be responsible citizens of an earthly country without mistaking it for our eternal country.
- Bringing Deuteronomy Home
- So what do we do with all of this?
- The first application is simple: get God’s Word right.
- Read what it actually says. Do not add to it. Do not subtract from it. Do not recruit Scripture to prove something simply because it fits your culture, your denomination, your favorite teacher, your social-media feed, a politician, a television program, or a historical story you have heard repeated often enough that everyone assumes it must be true.
- Ask the simple question:
- Does the Bible actually say that?
- That one question could save Christians from an enormous amount of bad theology.
- My roadside note changed AAA into AA because I lost one letter. That was funny. But when we change the words of Scripture—or make them say something they never said—we can change an entire theology.
- Get the instructions right.
- Then we need to keep the kingdoms straight.
- Christians can appreciate the earthly country in which they live without confusing that country with biblical Israel. Scripture instructs Christians to honor legitimate authority, even when those authorities are not Christian. Peter writes to believers living under a pagan Roman government and still tells them to conduct themselves honorably and respect governing authority. Paul tells Christians to pray for kings and others in positions of authority.
- Earthly citizenship is real.
- It simply is not ultimate.
- A country can contain enormous biblical influence without becoming Israel. A civil government can adopt moral principles consistent with Scripture without becoming the covenant people of Deuteronomy. And because our deepest identity rests in Christ, we do not have to pretend that any earthly nation is perfect.
- America’s sins are not Christ’s sins.
- America’s failures do not require us to defend them in order to defend Christianity.
- America’s success is not necessary for the Gospel to succeed.
- Jesus’ reputation does not rise or fall with the reputation of an earthly nation.
- Our King is Jesus.
- Keep the kingdoms straight.
- Then we need to ask a more personal question: Where are we looking for blessing?
- Bring Deuteronomy 8 back into the room.
- Where are we expecting blessing to come from? Money? Security? Career success? Influence? Political stability? A relationship? A larger house? A growing ministry? A full church?
- None of those things is automatically evil. Some of them may genuinely be gifts from God.
- But Deuteronomy gives us a dangerous possibility:
- What if what I call a blessing teaches me to forget God?
- Israel’s danger was not merely famine. It was abundance.
- Not merely defeat. Success.
- Not merely poverty. Prosperity.
- God warned Israel that when they ate their fill, built beautiful homes, watched their livestock increase, and saw their silver and gold multiply, that was precisely when they needed to be careful. Prosperity could create the illusion that they no longer needed the God who gave it.
- So ask yourself another question:
- What blessing might become a curse in disguise?
- If money makes me less generous, what did it become?
- If success makes me proud, what did it become?
- If influence convinces me that I am important, what did it become?
- If security teaches me that I no longer need God, what did it become?
- If a political victory convinces me that the Kingdom of God has finally arrived, what did it become?
- If church growth causes us to trust attendance, money, production, or momentum instead of God, what did it become?
- A thing can be good in itself and still become spiritually destructive when it teaches us to forget the Giver.
- Sometimes hardship tests whether we trust God.
- Prosperity tests whether we still think we need Him.
- That is why Deuteronomy constantly returns to three ideas:
- Hear.
- Remember.
- Obey.
- The danger for Israel was not merely that they had never heard God’s Word. They could hear it, possess it, enter into prosperity, and then forget it.
- Christians can do the same thing.
- Owning ten Bibles is not obedience.
- Knowing theology is not obedience.
- Winning an argument about Scripture is not obedience.
- Being able to demonstrate that somebody else interpreted a verse incorrectly is not obedience.
- God’s Word is meant to shape how we actually live.
- We are not earning salvation through Law-keeping. Paul has already made that unmistakably clear. But grace does not make obedience irrelevant. If Jesus is our King, then His people should increasingly live like people under His reign.
- Finally, do not leave this discussion of Deuteronomy thinking, I simply need to do a better job keeping all the rules so that I can earn the blessing.
- That misses the Gospel entirely.
- Deuteronomy shows us the seriousness of covenant obedience. Israel’s history shows us human failure. Paul explains the theological problem. And Christ becomes the answer.
- If I place my hope in establishing righteousness through the Law, the Law does not congratulate me because I tried hard. It tells me what righteousness requires.
- And I have failed.
- We are not standing before God boasting, “I kept every word perfectly.”
- Jesus did what we could not do.
- He fulfilled the Law.
- He is the goal toward which the Law was moving.
- He bore the curse upon the tree.
- He rose again.
- And He opened the way into the New Covenant.
- Grace does not mean the Law never mattered. Grace means Christ accomplished what the Law was pointing toward.
- Our confidence is therefore not in perfect performance.
- Our confidence is in Jesus.
- And that brings us all the way back to my twenty-year-old truck.
- I needed roadside assistance. One missing letter sent me to an entirely different organization. Fortunately, Heather knew what I meant.
- But Moses stands before an entire generation preparing to enter the Promised Land and gives them something much more serious than roadside instructions:
- Remember.
- Listen.
- Get the instructions right.
- Do not add.
- Do not take away.
- Do not substitute somebody else’s words for God’s Word.
- Israel needed to understand who they actually were.
- We need to understand who we actually are.
- America is not Israel.
- The Constitution is not Torah.
- Deuteronomy 28 is not America’s covenant.
- But the story does not leave us standing underneath the curse.
- Deuteronomy points forward.
- The Law points forward.
- The covenant points forward.
- Even the curse points forward.
- Moses says the word is near. Paul takes that language and points us to Christ. The Law exposes the problem. Christ fulfills its purpose. And hanging upon the tree stands the One who took the curse upon Himself.
- So get God’s Word right.
- Keep the kingdoms straight.
- Ask where you are looking for blessing.
- Do not let the blessing teach you to forget God.
- Hear His Word.
- Remember it.
- Obey Him.
- And trust the One who bore the curse for you.
- Because the final destination of Deuteronomy is not America.
- It is Jesus.
- Reader’s Note: Because we are close to the first anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, several people have asked me about him and his influence on Christianity and politics. Kirk was also a prominent advocate of the claim discussed in this chapter, stating that America’s form of government was “directly inspired by Deuteronomy.”
- For those interested in a fuller examination of his biblical and Christian claims, I previously addressed them here:
- https://c3naples.org/charlie-kirk/
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- ©️Copyright 2026 Gene Simco Most Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright ©1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved. Scriptures in brackets reflect the original Biblical languages.