NOTES for Deu 4:5-9
What does a people need in order to be and always remain God’s people? First of all, in the words of the sacred author, they must remember those encounters with God without which there can be no question of being chosen by God. Experience is the foundation of everything in spiritual life, whether it concerns an individual or a whole people. But one encounter is not enough. Even many encounters are not enough if everything is limited to encounters alone. That is why God gives the Torah to those whom He wants to make His people: the commandments that form its core, and the laws based on the commandments.
Why should God not limit Himself to the commandments alone? They seem simple, clear, and in no need of explanation. But that is only how it appears at first glance. If only simple and unambiguous situations were involved, there would indeed be no problems in observing the commandments, at least as far as understanding them is concerned. But in real life everything is sometimes far from as simple as it is in theory. Even moral theology cannot foresee everything.
That is why God gives His people not moral theology but the Torah. He offers them not a theory but laws that prescribe conduct in the most typical, or as a cultural scholar would say, archetypal situations. Yet God does not limit Himself to laws alone. In addition to the laws themselves, He also offers the people judicial rulings, which the Synodal translation calls “ordinances.”
There is nothing surprising about this: all the legal systems of the ancient world were based on precedent, and the Torah is no exception. Judicial decisions really did serve as precedents here. But that is not all. A person follows the Torah not only when he occupies the place of a judge, nor is it possible to assign a judge or rabbi to everyone to guide a person and direct him along the right path. In concrete situations of life that require a choice and a decision, each person must be his own judge and rabbi. This is possible, but only if the Torah becomes for a person not merely history, but also a source of those very precedents on which right decisions can be based wherever we need to make them today.
Understood in this way, the Torah can truly become for us the source of an understanding that no other laws and rules, even the wisest and finest, can provide, for they were devised by people for people who lived in their own time. With the right approach, however, the Torah can become for us that instrument in God’s hands which the apostle Paul rightly calls a “tutor to bring us to Christ.” Then it will become for us not history but a genuine instrument of salvation.