Main news for 11 January 2020

King James Version (en)

Deuteronomy, Chapter 4, verse 31

³¹(For the LORD thy God is a merciful God;) he will not forsake thee, neither destroy thee, nor forget the covenant of thy fathers which he sware unto them.

NOTES

Who is God? What is important for us to know about Him? The God of heaven and earth, invisible and unimaginable, appearing in darkness and flame, gives people...

The Torah often says that God's covenant with His people remains unbreakable in any case, that God will never leave His people and will not forget the covenant once concluded, which, however, by no means guarantees the people of God against punishment in case of violating the Torah as the condition of this covenant. What is this: special treatment for favorites? Indulgence? And does such an attitude mean that God is ready to close His eyes to the sins of His people merely because they are His people? Surely not. The matter, as is evident, is different.

In what, then? Perhaps in the very essence of the covenant? Indeed, a covenant is not simply a contract, like those business agreements we make among ourselves in our fallen world, where everything is simple: you have concluded a contract, so keep it; if you cannot or do not want to, pay the penalty and you may forget about the contract. You have violated it and are no longer bound by it, and no one owes you anything anymore. For God, the covenant is not a formal contract, but a union presupposing deep and stable relationships. More than that: with this union God has connected an entire plan, presupposing both the coming of the Messiah and the salvation of all humanity, its liberation from the power of that evil into whose captivity the world fell after the fall.

And if one looks more broadly, one can see an even more grandiose plan: the complete transformation of all creation, a qualitative change in the nature of the universe with its own participation, in which the decisive role belongs to humanity. Then everything falls into place. Indeed, if God has connected so large-scale a plan with the covenant, He will of course do everything possible to preserve this covenant at any cost.

Of course, He will take measures to correct His people, and His measures can be very, very severe. But to destroy His people and break the union once concluded would mean the collapse of God's whole plan, and this, of course, God cannot and does not want to allow. Besides, the situation in the fallen world is such that even if God decided to stop carrying out His plan in its present form and begin everything anew, there are no guarantees that His new people would be better than the present one. To change the situation radically, the world would simply have to be recreated anew. But that would already be another story of another world and another humanity.

The Book of Deuteronomy did not receive its name by accident. To be fair, it should be noted that it was named this by the translators who translated the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch into Greek in the second century BC, but the name proved very successful: it is a matter of a second law, a new version of the Torah that appeared later than the first, earlier one that we find in the Book of Exodus. Biblical scholars speak of the late origin of the Book of Deuteronomy, while its author himself places his text in the time of Moses; but, whatever the case, it is at least understood that the laws we find in the Book of Deuteronomy appear later than those contained in the Book of Exodus.

Law develops: this is the main thing, and everything else is only historical detail that does not change the essence of the matter. If the Torah can change over time, it is no longer so important whether forty years or six centuries pass from one change to another; what matters is the very fact that the Torah changes, develops, and takes shape in the process of history. The Book of Deuteronomy, its first introductory chapters containing a historical survey of the path the people have traveled, bears witness precisely to this development of the Torah. Here the legislation is preceded by a description of the path that has been traveled, and it is on the basis of that path that the legislation is given.

The Torah changes in accordance with this path, and at the same time it defines the path, giving it meaning, without which the whole path traveled by the people would have been worth nothing. One could say that, in a certain sense, the Torah itself becomes the path: the path of the people before God, for which the external, geographical, and historical path proves to be the outward form. The path of the Torah cannot exist without that outward path, but the outward path itself, without the Torah as its spiritual core, remains only an empty shell. There is no history without the Torah, at least no history of the people of God precisely as the people of God.

Yet there is no Torah outside history either. For even if the Torah is viewed only as legislation or only as a moral code, it is unthinkable without the people who will fulfill it, outside the context of their history and their spiritual and life journey. The Torah is embodied in history, above all in the history of the people of God, and at the same time it becomes the power that gives history its spiritual form and quality, filling it with meaning: not passing human meanings, but God's meaning, eternal and unfading, the meaning that links earthly history with the Kingdom.

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