Anybody you meet who has devoted their life to an ideal, a truth, a beautiful, timeless thing, anybody you meet like that, they are gonna have thoughts at the end of their life of how they can possibly take one more swing at passing along this precious truth to the next generation. You can't help but think about that stuff as you get older. And in the book of Deuteronomy, we see Moses right at the end of his life running that same equation. He has been the custodian of the law of God and of God's chosen people, and really, in a way, the human custodian of God's whole redemptive plan. What an incredible amount of pressure he's been under. But it hasn't gone perfectly. He's in the book of Deuteronomy, he's on the back end of 40 years of wandering in the desert, but he has one more chance. He's got enough wind in his lungs to say the law in a way that will make sense one last time before he faces eternity with God. And so he gets everybody together and does just that. Why are we talking about Deuteronomy when we were doing a podcast season on Galatians? Well, we're talking about that because Paul quotes from Deuteronomy, and not just any quote, but a very important quote from Deuteronomy in Galatians 3 and verse 10, about 1,500 years after the events of Deuteronomy were recorded. This is what Paul says in the letter to the Galatian church. All who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, quote, this is the Deuteronomy part, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law, unquote. That's a quote from Deuteronomy 27, 26, which is pretty close to the end of the book of Deuteronomy. But Deuteronomy doesn't make sense in a vacuum. It makes sense as the final installment of the first five books of the Bible written by Moses, the Torah, the Pentateuch, whatever you want to call it. And yesterday we did a lightning run through Genesis, Exodus, and Leviticus. And as we get to the end of Leviticus, things are kind of looking up for the Israelite people because God is so holy and he's living in their midst, but at the end of the book of Exodus, nobody can go anywhere near him, because he's too holy, and his people are too not holy. The holy, righteous, complete and total goodness and rightness of God is something that we just totally underestimate as human beings. We're not talking about when we talk about the God of the Bible, I am, the God of Abraham, the God of the Old Testament, the God of the New Testament. We're not talking about just an exaggerated version of you or me, like Thor or Thanos or something, somebody who kind of looks like us, but they're just more powerful. They can lift more things or live a little longer or know a few more things than you or I know. No, no, no, no, no. We're talking about something completely other. Sideways eight, infinitude, limitlessness. Nothing hinders or binds the God of Abraham, the God of the Bible. So of course there's going to be some friction when you take temporal beings who have problems and weird mixed motives and try to put them in relationship with a God who knows everything, including every single thought that those beings with mixed motives have, including the dirty ones. And you're like, oh, well, I'm going to be your king and you're going to be my people. Let's just live together in harmony. Well, that's a problem. And the problem isn't with God, the problem is with the people. But by the time we get to the end of Leviticus, we discover that through the law, there are ways that people can sort of assume a right posture before God and sort of approach God in a limited way. Ultimately, there's a divide. There's a divide of imperfection and sin between humanity and God, but God is making the effort to be with the people and to carry forward this redemptive plan. The law is one of the tools, it's a central tool that God is using to demonstrate his holiness and to make it so that there's some way to bridge this gap and have this flawed community of people in some way be in relationship with and even servant to God as their king. Well, then we turn the page to the book of Numbers, and this just sounds like it would be the most boring book in the whole Bible because it has such a dull name. But numbers isn't boring at all. It's dramatic and fun and interesting, packed with action. It's named Numbers for a couple reasons. It has a census at the beginning and it has a census at the end. More on the results of those two censuses in just a minute. The other reason that it's called Numbers is because you had to have enough of those in order to be a legitimate people group at this point in ancient history. The age of nomadism is coming to an end. If you're in 1400-ish BC and you don't live somewhere, you're not going to be around much longer. The people who were nomads at this time overwhelmingly are forgotten to history, absorbed into more powerful tribes. There's a pivot that's happening here as we're getting toward the end of the Bronze Age and toward the Iron Age. People are settling down. And if people groups don't find a place to live and settle down and defend and learn new techniques and cultivation and wall building and writing and like all the things that happen in Sid Meyer's civilization video games, if they don't figure that out, they're done for. So it's a very perilous situation here that you've got these huge numbers of Israelites who still don't have a home. They just left Egypt miraculously, but they're wandering around in the desert for years and years and years. You got these huge numbers of people, but also it's significant that there's enough numbers of people to say, dang, God has fulfilled his promise to Abraham. He's made him into a great nation. And further, God has blessed Abraham's descendants with enough numbers to go and conquer the bunch of little city-states and little mini-kingdoms that are scattered around the land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants, the land of Canaan. So Numbers sounds like a boring name, but it's actually a very interesting name. It's also kind of a sad book of the Bible because it opens with a census that gives us a count of 603,550 total men in Israel. It doesn't count the women and children. But then the census they take way later at the end of the book of Numbers is only 601,730. So all this time has passed, but they've kind of just spun their wheels out in the desert. And the numbers tell the story of numbers. God's kept his promise to Abraham. You got enough to go and conquer the land that God has promised to Abraham, but you're out here not believing God and not doing anything and just wandering around in the desert complaining, even if it is interesting and dramatic, complaining. And now all of these years are just squandered. Well, 40 years total, they wander around in the desert, not believing God and never making their way into the promised land. And eventually God makes it clear that that generation that came out of Egypt back in the day, they're all gonna die out in the desert. Even Moses. It's gonna be their kids who make their way into the promised land. It's gonna be the next generation. And this next generation has promising young leaders like Joshua and Caleb. And there's every reason to believe that now we're ready. It's going to work out. And so the book of Deuteronomy opens with Israel and this new generation conquering some of the land just on the outskirts, you know, outside of the Jordan River. They conquer Moab and an area called Transjordan. That's going to be their staging ground for the invasion of Canaan. This all sounds very bleak and militaristic, but in ancient world terms, I mean, the Bible doesn't mince words about this at all. It's celebratory of the fact that this victory is about to happen and that God is the one who is going to give it to his people. So those early conquests of the staging ground for the invasion that happens in the first four chapters of Deuteronomy, and now everything's ready. Nothing's in their way. It is time to cross the Jordan River and take what God has promised them, and in doing so, escape the fate of all of these other nomadic people groups who never had the one true God putting wind in their sails to allow them to conquer a land and put down roots and build walls and learn to cultivate and be a people. But the one true God, for whatever reason, he picked Abraham and his descendants, and he is going to bless them with this land, and they are going to survive the late Bronze Age purge that got almost every other nomadic group whose names we don't even know anymore. This is a huge deal. But before that happens, this is where the old man Moses passing along his wisdom thing occurs. Moses in chapter five, he looks at the situation. He's like, Yeah, we got to make sure that the covenant, the law of God is crystal clear to these kids before they go in. They got to know what they're fighting for, they got to know who they're fighting for, and they have to know the terms of this deal. Now, the deal God made with Abraham was unconditional. Abraham, even if you're an idiot, I'm still gonna do this. The deal God would later make with David was unconditional. David, even if you're an idiot, I'm still gonna give you an eternal throne, and there's gonna be one who's gonna come and reign on that throne forever. It's Jesus, by the way. And David totally takes him up on the even if you're an idiot paraphrases mine, and does a bunch of dumb stuff, and God still keeps the promise anyway. But the deal with Moses that he wants to relay to the youngsters before they go into the land is conditional. If you keep the law, you as a people will be blessed. If you disobey the law, you as a people will be cursed. Remember from our conversation yesterday, this law is multifaceted. It isn't just rules about naughty and nice or whatever. Some of it reads really strangely to us as modern readers now, because technology and culture have moved in different directions and we just don't feel these pressures. Other parts of the law that is recited for the second time here in Deuteronomy to this new generation, you read them and you're like, dang, that could have been written yesterday. It sounds like stuff that we still think about to this day. Huh. Either way, it's a complex, multifaceted law that the people have to know, have to obey, and have to agree to themselves. They need to re-up this covenant with God on their end. And it takes, you know, whatever, 22 chapters for Moses to go through it. The final line of this 22 chapter long thing that they are agreeing to says, Cursed is the man who does not uphold the words of this law by carrying them out. And that is what Paul is quoting from in Galatians 3 and verse 10. All the story that you and I just brushed up on from Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, all of that is in view when Paul is making that quote in Galatians 3 10. That is not just some rando quote from some backwoods corner of the Old Testament taken out of context. That is a pivotal verse that people would have known, people would have remembered, it's one that would have popped, like we the people, or when in the course of human events, or fourscore and seven years ago, or any of those phrases where if you're from my country, it's like, oh yeah, I know that one, I know that was from. This would have been one of those. And Paul, therefore, is drawing forward from the Old Testament into Galatians many, many, many layers of meaning here. And now I feel like we're a little bit better equipped to understand what those layers of meaning might be. And even if we're not, hey, we just got to spend time going through five books of the Bible in two days. And I really like the Bible, and I think it's really fun to do the big picture overview stuff. So double win! I've had fun either way. All right, more tomorrow. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.