I had the joy of talking to my college mentor, my college advisor, on probably his last week of his career. I just happened to stop by my school. I was in that neck of the woods in Chicago. And I went, I tracked him down. There he was. We had a great chat. He's a just a wonderful dude, somebody I really respect. I did a video with him at one point on my YouTube channel about the spiritual themes in the Lord of the Rings. Very talented guy. But he was emotional, understandably. He's at the end of his career and he was looking back. And one of the things that he said that stood out to me was, you know, I maybe tagged on a few extra years here. And part of the reason I did that is because I really, you know, Matt, I really want to pass along the story and the values of the West to this up and coming generation. I feel like they're missing it. And you know, I I sense that it was very difficult for him to walk away from that because he's a history guy, he's a philosophy guy, wants to relay this stuff. He thinks there's truth in it. Well, likewise, that's kind of what's going on in the Old Testament in the book of Deuteronomy. Moses is right at the end of his life, and he's got this beautiful thing, the law of God, which is kind of the entire cultural and religious heritage of his people, but it's more than that. It's the character of God, it's how you're able to approach God or even consider having even sort of right standing with God. It's the promise of God to bless his chosen people if they obey, or oh, punish them if they don't obey. And so Moses is looking back on his career and he has this one more chance at the end of his life to be like, I gotta stay in the game. Gather around all the young people, all this new generation who might not have heard this the first time we said the law out loud, and we're gonna read the law all over again because we I gotta make sure that they understand this and that they are able to carry it forward. That is the scene that we get in the Old Testament mouthful title book of Deuteronomy, which it's kind of a clumsy translation, but my understanding is that it's meant to mean second giving or second writing of the law. Now, the reason that you and I are talking about Deuteronomy right now, because I give if you just looked at your podcast app, it says Galatians. And you might be like, what the heck is going on? This isn't Galatians at all. It's Deuteronomy. It's like most of the Bible apart from Galatians. Well, the Apostle Paul in Galatians chapter 3 has quoted a very key verse from Deuteronomy at the end of this second reading of the law. The Apostle Paul, how far would this be? 1500 years after the events described in the book of Deuteronomy, has written to the Galatian church, and he says, Galatians 3:10, all who rely on observing the law are under a curse, for it is written, now this is a quote from Deuteronomy 27, 26, quote, cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the book of the law, unquote. And the part that's being quoted right there, that was said in Deuteronomy chapter 27 by none other than Moses, relaying the words of God to the Israelites. So Deuteronomy is the fifth book of Moses. It's the fifth book of the Bible, sometimes it's called the Torah or the Pentateuch. And the outline of these five huge books that open the Old Testament really isn't that difficult at all. In Genesis, you've got time before time is even counted. And back then you get the Tower of Babel and you get the story of Noah and creation, all of that kind of stuff. Then the story narrows in in the book of Genesis on Abraham and his family, somebody we've been talking about a lot here. God makes unconditional promises to Abraham. Abraham lives a somewhat up and down life, but he believes God, and that's credited to him as righteousness. And part of the promise that God makes to Abraham is that you're going to be a great nation. You're going to have a ton of descendants, and you're going to have a land that I'm going to give you, and all the nations are going to be blessed through you. It's an incredible promise that the whole redemptive story is going to run through Abraham's offspring. Well, one of his descendants, Joseph, ends up in Egypt, then his whole extended family, all the people of Abraham end up in Egypt at the end of Genesis. Seems like things are good. Turn the page to Exodus. Things aren't good anymore. Now they're in slavery. The authority figures who used to like them forgot about them. They're being tortured and punished. It's not going well there. God raises up a deliverer, a man named Moses. And Moses, by the power of God, leads them out of Egypt and defeats the Egyptians. And on their way out the door, God makes the Egyptians be nice to the Israelite slaves and they give them a bunch of gold. And in this way, the Israelites plunder the Egyptians on the way out the door. So they have money, they have provisions. So now they're out somewhere on the Sinai Peninsula with a whole bunch of gold and provisions and maybe a million people, who knows, former slaves, but they struggle out there. And right off the bat, they start to wobble in terms of their obedience to God, even though they've seen miracles. Moses goes up on Mount Sinai and God reveals to him the Ten Commandments, but also a bunch more of the law of God, something we've been talking about a lot in the book of Galatians. But when Moses comes back down, he discovers that the people have taken a bunch of the gold that God gave them from the Egyptians and they've melted it down into a golden cap and they're worshiping it. And God is literally like right there in that cloud with Moses, and they're down below being like, yeah, but you're taking too long. So we just made another God to see like if it would do anything, it isn't doing anything, but you know, maybe give it a minute. And of course, Moses and God are not real happy about that. And weirdly, it turns out that that generation who miraculously got out of slavery and crossed on dry ground through the Red Sea, that generation never does make it into the land that God promised Abraham way back when. Instead, they wander around in the desert for 40 years. But here's another thing that's crazy about this story. God is with them the whole time, even with physical manifestations. Like there's a cloud, a dark cloud of the presence of the Lord that goes out in front of the assembly when they're moving around in this desert wandering, and eventually they make a temporary dwelling place for God, a tabernacle, like a tent that's sort of like a portable temple. And God fills it and he's in there, and his holiness is in there. But nobody can go anywhere near that because God is so much more holy than people. I mean, God's perfect people, clearly. I mean, they built a golden calf. I mean, people are flawed. And so the book of Exodus ends with a big problem. God dwells in their midst, but nobody can go into that tent to be anywhere near him. Turn the page to Leviticus, one of the books that people sometimes mistakenly imagine to be the boringest of the books, is just a bunch of rules. Well, okay, yeah, you kind of have a point. It can be a tough read, but it's actually a story that just happens to have a bunch of rules in the story. Because the story of Leviticus is how God uses the gift of his law to make it possible for flawed people to kind of approach him and sort of be in his presence. If he is to be their God and they are to be his chosen people, they need to have, I guess, some kind of access, but it is not easy. It's very complicated. And so in the book of Exodus, second half of it, and in the book of Leviticus and some of Numbers, the next book, we get a whole bunch of material there that describes a very multifaceted law. Like when you and I hear the term law, we tend to think of rules, like maybe traffic rules or rules about illegal insider trading or don't murder people, stuff like that that the government enforces. But the law of the Old Testament had a lot of different levels of meaning to it. Some people divide it up into three categories, and like all the laws kind of fit into these three camps. One of the three types of law that we see is a moral law, like the kind of stuff you and I would think, like, hey, don't do this to other people, don't steal, don't kill, etc. You know, adultery, don't do that. Like I said, that's kind of the first one you would think of. It's kind of automatic. But additionally, there are civil laws, like governmental laws, like how to work out disputes and how to adjudicate disagreements and how to settle up with somebody if you wrong them. Stuff where maybe nobody is a criminal and they maybe haven't morally wronged someone else, but they do owe them something else. This is like the structure of society kind of laws. Now, if God's gonna make a people undo himself, and he's gonna be their basically their king, and live among them in this tent and eventually in a permanent structure, a temple, then they gotta get their rules from somewhere for the practical considerations. And so so much of what you get in Exodus and Leviticus that people might find tedious are actually laws that make a ton of sense for how to live in this super ancient time in that part of the world and keep a civilization together. So you got moral law, you got civil law, and then a lot of people would say that the third kind of law is ceremonial law. I think you can actually break that ceremonial law out even further and say that this idea of ceremonial law includes the clean and unclean laws, which sort of have moral implications, sort of have civil implications, and sort of have theological implications. Like this stuff's not clean and this stuff is clean. And if you're around stuff that's unclean, you can't come into the presence of God because God has set these boundaries up to remind us of his perfect cleanness and our uncleanness. It takes a lot to even get to presentable under the law to get anywhere near God. So you've got this clean and unclean thing, which some other societies might call taboo slash acceptable laws. But then you've also got ceremonial laws, which is kind of like a liturgy? No, it's more than a liturgy. It's a liturgy plus all the instructions for how to do all of the religious priestly activities surrounding the religious life of the community, what you wear, where you stand, when you pray, what you do, how you preside over sacrifices. And then the third part of this ceremonial law, I think, would be the sacrificial law. How do you sacrifice the right animals the right way at the right time for the right reasons? Is I mean, it's complicated in the Old Testament law. It takes up quite a bit of space, and God expects people to get that right and not take it flippantly. God's attitude seems to be, hey, don't complain about these sacrifices being difficult. The one who should be getting sacrificed is you, but this is a way to stay the righteous and just wrath of God, and this is what we're going to do right now, and you're going to do it right, and if you do it right, you will be blessed, and if you don't do it right, you will be punished, you will be cursed. So you get this multifaceted law that covers obvious stuff like basic morality, covers almost as obvious stuff like how to run a civilization, then covers maybe less immediately obvious and maybe sometimes very foreign-seeming stuff, like how do you do the religious life of the community, whether that has to do with clean and unclean rules, or whether that has to do with how you carry out the sacrifices properly and which ones you do and when you do them. There's a lot to this law. It is complicated, it takes some thinking and attentiveness, and it takes good leadership in order for even one individual, let alone an entire people group, to get this right before God. But the theme of all of the law is God is holy and you are not. And God in his mercy is providing this as a way to allow imperfect beings, people, to approach him in any way. Well, by the time you get to the end of Leviticus, the conundrum is solved. There's enough that's been revealed about the law for Moses to know how to approach God in certain ways and at certain times, and how people in the future are going to know how to do that as well. So that gets us up through the end of the first three books of the Bible as we're trying to frame up and make sense of Deuteronomy and why it is that Paul would be quoting from it here and what that would mean to the original audience. Well, I, for one, am pretty pleased with how far we got today. My goal was to take two days to do a quick rundown of the entire Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament, in order to understand why Paul is quoting from Deuteronomy and what all the layers of meaning might be there back over in Galatians. And we got more than halfway, 60% of the way done through the Pentateuch. That's pretty good. We'll hit numbers and Deuteronomy, manana, and I think we're going to have a lovely time. Thanks so much for hanging out with me. More on this tomorrow. I'm Matt, this is the 10-minute Bible hour podcast. Let's do this again soon.