Lesson 44 – Deuteronomy 32

DEUTERONOMY

Lesson 44 – Chapter 32

Last week was essentially a preparation for what we’ll study today. We ended the lesson by briefly discussing the history of the means by which the Bible that is in use today came about including its progression from the beginning books of Moses (called the Torah) on up to what has been dubbed by Believers in Yeshua as the New Testament or B’rit Hadashah. The purpose of our preparation was to examine how best to approach Holy Scripture in the sense of prioritizing it (or even if we should do such a thing). We learned that early on the Hebrew Sages taught that it was necessary to carefully consider which of God’s laws and principles might carry more weight than others because inevitably there would be circumstances (as a regular course of living) when we’ll have to choose one over the other because both laws or principles cannot be obeyed simultaneously. The example I have used on a few occasions is the well-known WWII story of Corrie Ten-boom who hid Jews destined for the work camps and eventual extermination by the Nazis; but when asked if she knew the whereabouts of these missing Jewish fugitives she was hiding, she said she did not. By all that is holy she lied to her human governmental authorities; that is a sin and God never permits lying under any circumstances. Yet if she had not lied, those Jews that she was protecting would have been arrested and in time killed. She chose to save innocent human life and she was right to do so. God holds the principle of preserving human life higher than the principle of always being truthful. In the modern era it has become the general mode of the Western Church (and much of the Eastern Church) to locate the first cut at prioritizing Scriptures and Laws at the end of the Old Testament and beginning of the New. In other words we are to make the New Testament preeminent over the Old in virtually every instance. But even more the general mode is to say that the Old Testament must be read in light of the New. That in essence we are to make the New Testament the foundation of the Old. The simplest solution for that is to declare the Old Testament as irrelevant and abolished and therefore for the Believer our Bible IS the New Testament and nothing more. Here is a quote that confronts this challenging subject of the creation and position of the New Testament as addressed in the Catholic Encyclopedia: “The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the 1 / 11 beginning, that is from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council”.

As we found last week the early church (early meaning the first 200 years or so after Christ’s