People, Place, and Time

This is the law Moses set before the Israelites. These are the stipulations, decrees and laws Moses gave them when they came out of Egypt and were in the valley near Beth Peor east of the Jordan, in the land of Sihon king of the Amorites, who reigned in Heshbon and was defeated by Moses and the Israelites as they came out of Egypt. They took possession of his land and the land of Og king of Bashan, the two Amorite kings east of the Jordan. This land extended from Aroer on the rim of the Arnon Gorge to Mount Sirion (that is, Hermon), and included all the Arabah east of the Jordan, as far as the Dead Sea, below the slopes of Pisgah. (Deuteronomy 4:44-49)   It's a strange thing that such specific and lengthy details are given, again, about where the Israelites are when this great, long Deuteronomy speech of Moses is given.  The commentaries just skip over these verses, as if to say: we've already talked about all this, there's nothing new to see here.  And yet, it is here.  So, why? In reflecting on much of our present church conversations about ethics and law and righteous living, I wonder if maybe there's something more to this grounding in geographical space and time than meets the eye.  Jesus is the Word of God, made flesh in a real place and time amongst a particular people—as we've reflected on already in these opening chapters of Deuteronomy.  My sense is that the law, which is also the word of God, is always to be worked out and lived in just that same way.  That is: embodied—made flesh, lived—in a place and time, just as it is here in Deuteronomy.  The law does not necessarily come to us as an abstract, unalterable, eternal truth from time in memoriam.  It comes to us "when [the Israelites] came out of Egypt and were in the valley near Beth Peor east of the Jordan."  It comes to us in a real time and in a real place among a real people.  What do I mean to say by this?  Well, we have a tendency to work out the implications of legal and ethical questions of righteousness in theory—in the abstract—apart from any real human situation where the names, actions, and circumstances of real people are known to us.  When we then attempt to rigidly shoehorn the real, concrete lives of people into this perfect, but abstract Bible-based code we've made: people get squashed and cut up by the sharp edges. It brings death. Thankfully, this is not how the law of the Bible works.  Don't get me wrong: Paul is clear on this—the law still brings death.  But as Moses will often say: this law also offers grace and gives a context for life.  The law is to support and lead to the Shalom of a people in a place and time, not make them slaves again as in Egypt. As Jesus will later say of the Sabbath, this law is made for man, not man for it.  It's given to a particular people in a time and place.  But as the times and places of the people change, so must (and does) the law.  You can see this happen across the pages of the Bible.  Even some of the laws of Deuteronomy are already different than those same laws in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers.  And changes will continue to happen along the pages of scripture. The form that the law comes to us in then: as a law spoken to a particular people in a particular place and time—says something to us about the law itself.  It is particular, not abstract or universal.  And it is changeable: subjective—if you will—to the lives of the subjects it means to govern and support.  Principles like this inherent in the form of the law, mean that we must ever be vigilant to the ways that the Bible—God's living word—speaks anew in Spirit-fired ways to the ever-changing times, places, people, and yes—even culture—among whom it is spoken in each present moment.  It is no sin to be a "revisionist."  This is, in fact, what it means to be attentively faithful in the times we're given.  Said in more familiar language, this is one of the ways in which we are called to be "Reformed and ever Reforming."