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Other texts: Deuteronomy 4
In our society might find some of these rules very strange and most societies ignore these Torah precepts, even in Israel itself.
These laws and rules given by Moses in the book of Deuteronomy was given to the people under the glow of Moses’ face and the people were in awe of these rules and precepts. The same rules and precepts that believers in Yeshua now dismiss as “abolished” and no longer relevant for believers were of the utmost importance to the children of Israel.
Place yourself in Moses’s shoes. You are hearing the 10 commandments for the first time and you see the fear of the people. God tells you the people’s fear is good. You are called to go up to the mountain and stay there for 40 days. God carves the 10 commandments on tablets of stone but the communion with God is broken by God’s anger. You go down and see the rebellion of the people and break the tablets God carved Himself in anger.
You have to go back up for another 40 days but this time you have to carve the stones yourself.
During the second visit, you are privileged to see God’s backside and are given additional understanding of the Creator of Heaven and Earth. God speaks to you plainly without figurative language. When you come back down the mountain, you don’t see how brilliantly you are glowing from God’s presence but the children of Israel do and they fear God and fear you even more.
The first part of this chapter (Deut. 21:1–9) spells out what the people are supposed to do if they discover a murdered man out in the country outside of public view. The murderer is not known and in an age without forensic science, may never be known.
The Torah says that the investigators are supposed to go to the nearest town and notify the elders of the city of the death. The elders and judges of the city are to make atonement for the dead person’s blood. This atonement is done by killing a young heifer, a female cow that has never worked or given birth, and break its neck near a body of flowing water. The elders and judges of the city are wash their hands over the heifer and publicly disavow the person’s death and to ask God to forgive the death. “Forgive Your people Israel whom You have redeemed, O LORD, and do not place the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of Your people Israel.”
The heifer would have been one of the most valuable animal in a flock. This would have an expensive ritual and the people of that city would have a vested interest in absolving themselves of the innocent person’s death.
God will acknowledge the sacrifice and forgive the elders and the townspeople for whatever shortcoming they might have in any failure to find the murderer.
Laws on polygamy and the rights of children born from multiple wives may seen easy to glaze over and ignore since polygamy is illegal in America, but there’s still a lesson to learn from these in our non-polygamous society. Deut. 21:15-17 says that if there are two wives — one “loved” and one “unloved” — and the unloved wife gives birth to the firstborn son of the household, that son is to receive the double portion and the man is not allowed to favor the son of his “loved” wife.
The next text (Deut. 21:18-23) tells us what the children of Israel were to do if they had a son who was a “rebellious”, stubborn, drunken and gluttonous son. The parents were to take him to the elders of the city and have him stoned to death. Yeshua, our Messiah, was slandered by the Jewish leadership of His day with these exact accusations and they put him to death on a tree as a consequence. Yeshua was cursed by God and the reason we know of that Yeshua bore a curse for us goes back to this text.
The Torah finds us guilty, and only Yeshua can free us from the death penalty.
Reader: Jeff. Speaker: Richard. Summary: Tammy.
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