I'm the sucker for medieval stuff, and that has not changed. I really liked it when I was a kid, you know, knights and shining armor and castles and even dragons and goofy fantasy stuff. I loved that when I was a kid, whether it be a book or a movie or a video game, and I still love that stuff. I don't think I'd want to live in the Middle Ages because all the dysentery and everything else. I think it was a very difficult time to be alive. And part of the reason it was a hard time to be alive was because things were so scattered. There had been a big central authority, the Roman Empire and everything, and then that faded and went away, and you had more local kings and chieftains and rulers in the Middle Ages. And I maybe part of what I love about the Middle Ages is the loyalty, the oaths that held the whole thing together for hundreds of years. Hundreds of years you kept it all together over there with just a bunch of promises. Like I promise that I shall give you my sword and one bale of barley every spring if you provide me with protection and adjudicate my complaints with my neighbor. It shall be so peon peasant, I accept your oath. And that worked. And then that guy who received the oath, maybe that's a knight, he would go and make an oath to like a count or a duke or something. And then a bunch of those guys would go and make an oath to a king. And then everybody would just keep their promises, everybody knowing exactly what the terms of the deals were, everybody would keep their promises, and it made the world go around for a while. Now, in the modern world, stuff's built all differently, but that worked for a long time. Isn't that crazy? The whole idea of oaths of loyalty and covenants being made wasn't new to the Middle Ages. It was sort of more resurrected in the Middle Ages after the era of the dominance of Rome and maybe even Alexander and Persia before that. But the Middle Ages are a lot like the super ancient world, like the Iron Age, Bronze Age, super old kind of stuff, where it really was just all held together by promises with very clear terms. If you uphold all the things we agreed to, this is what I'm going to do for you, and you can count on it. But if you do not uphold all the things we agreed to, you have this coming your way. So be ready. And Deuteronomy, which is a book that we've been talking about for the last few days because the Apostle Paul brings it up in Galatians chapter three. Deuteronomy sort of reads like one of those medieval or super ancient world odes where maybe one party would be kneeling, maybe the other party would have like a signet ring or something. I don't know exactly. I'm just imagining things here. But at the simplest level, it reads like somebody saying, All right, here are the terms. If you obey these terms, these are all the things I'm going to provide for you, like a good and reliable Lord. But if you disobey me and bring disrepute to my kingdom, here are the ways that I'm going to punish you and correct you, and you are agreeing to this and you are expected to uphold it. Now, if you're like me and you didn't really grow up with much, maybe your brain, when you think about that, goes right to a imagining a power dynamic where the one party is getting everything and the other party is giving everything. But truly, in these ancient world were medieval oaths of fealty, of loyalty. There were things that went both directions. The Lord would provide something. So there was an obligation on the part of the Lord, and then much more obviously, there's an obligation on the part of the servant, the person in the position of weakness making the arrangement. So in Deuteronomy, that is laid on even thicker than it is in the first four books of the Old Testament. It's very clear Moses wants the new generation of people right before they go in and attack the Holy Land and conquer it. He wants them to understand you own this covenant. The baton has been passed. Here is the law of God. This is what you are agreeing to. And more than once, Moses clearly is articulating to them this is the list of blessings and curses that go along with it. So we've been looking at the verse that Paul quotes in Galatians 3 10, a whole bunch. Paul says, All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, quote, and this is the part from Deuteronomy, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law. Now that's the last line of the public reading of the law that old man Moses with his failing final breaths is saying to the new generation of Israelites who are all eager to go and take the land. That's what he says to them at the end of that public reading. But then if you turn the page to chapter twenty-eight in Deuteronomy, God explains to Moses one more time, and you get the impression that somehow Moses disseminated this to all the people as well. God gave another clear articulation of that list of blessings and curses that would go along with any oath of fealty or loyalty from the Middle Ages or from the ancient world. And it's a pretty amazing list of blessings. And frankly, I would like to read it to you at this time. Deuteronomy 28.1. If you fully obey the Lord your God and carefully follow all his commands I give you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations on earth. All these blessings will come upon you and accompany you if you obey the Lord your God, colon. You will be blessed in the city and blessed in the country. The fruit of your womb will be blessed, and the crops of your land and the young of your livestock, the calves of your herds, the lambs of your flocks, your basket and your kneading through will be blessed. You will be blessed when you come in and blessed when you go out. The Lord will grant that the enemies who rise up against you will be defeated before you. They will come at you from one direction, but flee from you in seven. The Lord will send a blessing on your barns and on everything you put your hand to. The Lord your God will bless you in the land he is giving you. The Lord will establish you as his holy people. That is set apart. God is holy. He's saying that in a way they will be holy and set apart. He'll establish you as his holy people, as he promised you on oath. If you keep the commands of the Lord your God and walk in his ways, then all the people of the earth will see that you are called by the name of the Lord, and they will fear you. The Lord will grant you abundant prosperity in the fruit of your womb, the young of your livestock, and the crops of your ground, in the land he swore to your forefathers to give you. It's a really good list, and it goes on for quite a bit. But then later in Deuteronomy 28, we get back to the curses. In just a second here, I'm going to do a little investigation. The blessings were two columns. The curses are one, two, three, four, five, six. So I'm going to call it a three to one ratio in terms of the amount of emphasis placed on curses versus blessings. Basically, everything nice, it's on the blessing list. There's three times more covering specifically what the bad converse of that will be if you don't keep the vows, the covenant that you're making with God right here. So, I mean, this is great. It's a lot of disclosure. It's really being spelled out. Hey guys, really understand the covenant. This is exactly what the deal is. And this isn't all a quote of the law. This is Moses. He's the one choosing this ratio because now this is not him quoting God's law. This is him being like, guys, this is how it is. This is what the Lord has communicated to me. This is what's going to happen. This is kind of what's happened before. You really need to pay attention to this stuff. So then after the blessings and curses part, you're like, okay, that's gotta be it for Moses, and he's gotta be running on fumes here. But then at the very end of Deuteronomy, there's one more little addition to this covenant, to this deal, where God talks specifically about the deal with the land that he is about to give them. Yep, you're gonna take the land. This is gonna happen. Obey me and you're gonna keep it. Disobey me and you're going to lose it. And then the concluding remark here is one that Nehemiah, if you were here with me for that season, leaned into a bunch in his lifetime. This is something he really remembered and really held God to as being like, hey, God, you made a covenant with us, and part of the deal was what you said in Deuteronomy 30, which is, when all these blessings and curses I have set before you come upon you, and you take them to heart wherever the Lord your God disperses you among the nations, and when you and your children return to the Lord your God and obey him with all your heart and with all your soul according to everything I commanded you today, then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes, and have compassion on you, and gather you again from all the nations where he scattered you. Even if you've been banished to the most distant land under the heavens, from there the Lord your God will gather you and bring you back. And then after that, Moses goes up on a mountain and looks out over the land that he's never going to go into, and then dies and is buried up there. And somebody else writes that part of Deuteronomy. So in sum, Deuteronomy opens with finally this new generation of Israelites conquering the staging ground for their invasion, their taking of the land that God has promised them. But before they go, old man Moses is like, no, you guys gotta understand this is a covenant, this is a deal, it's an oath of loyalty, and there are terms and conditions to this, and you really need to get them. This is the law of the Lord that we're talking about. And this really matters for the blessings of you as a people and for the future of this nation. And also, you guys got to know that there's a lot of blessings if you obey, but there's a lot of curses if you disobey. Either way, everybody's gonna know that he's the one true God. So obey him, do the things he said. Now he's gonna give you this land as well. If you honor him, you get to keep it. If you disobey him and forget him, you don't get to keep it. But if at any point your descendants remember and turn back to God, he's going to restore them. You have his word. And now I need to go off and breathe my last. And that's the end of Deuteronomy, and then we enter into a whole new chapter, a whole new era of the Old Testament after that. Why have we spent all this time talking about the five books of the Bible that are collectively known as the Torah or the law? Well, because Paul took us there in the book of Galatians. We've been talking about the law a ton. We probably should have done this way sooner, frankly. But we've done it now. And what we've got here is something way more complex than naughty and nice religious behavior. Given what we just looked at over the last few days, there's no way we can now go back to Galatians and be like, okay, the contrast here is between believing in Jesus and naughty and nice religious behavior. No, the law is so much bigger, it has so much more baggage and casts such a larger shadow. The terms of it, what it does, the function of it is so different than what belief in Christ does. That given what we've just looked at over the last few days in the first five books of the Bible and looking closely at the law and why it's there and what it says and what it does, no, I think it's gonna help us understand the contrast in the book of Galatians that much better. This next thing I'm gonna say is the payoff from the last five days of work we put in together. The law was never meant to save. The law was never meant to once and for all finally give men and women right standing before God for eternity. The law was never meant to purge us of our sins and unholiness so that we would be presentable to God, pure and spotless, without any blemish. No, the law isn't built for that. It's like using a hammer to saw things. It isn't what the thing is for. And so in the book of Galatians, the mistaken people are the ones who are thinking, well, it's time to do some sawing. We better go get that hammer out of our Old Testament tool shed. Look, when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I'm using mixed metaphors here, but I think you see how they both apply. You and I can see from just four and a half days of looking at the Old Testament law that it doesn't do what the Judaizers, what the agitators, what the people who are wrong in the book of Galatians want it to do. They're two entirely different categories. This is like somebody saying, What's your favorite kind of automobile? And answering, uh garage. Huh? I mean, they're kind of related ideas, but those don't do the same thing. I think the work we just put in going and looking at the law that Paul specifically pointed us to is really going to pay off as we push forward in the coming week. Uh Matt, this is the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.