The Expositor's Bible: The Book of DeuteronomyHarper, Andrew
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Harper, Andrew
Bible. Deuteronomy -- Commentaries
the old type suppressed crime as the infinitely more just and better
organised but milder British police organisations could not then
do. "Probably the success of barbarous methods of repressing crime
is best explained by their origin in and close connection with a
primitive state of society. Because punishments were inhuman, they
struck terror where no other motive would deter from crime."[75] In
other and Scriptural words, the hardness of men's hearts made such
harshness unavoidable.
[75] Tupper, _Our Indian Protectorate_, p. 248.
Taking the whole of this thirteenth chapter into consideration,
therefore, we see how high and severe were the demands which
Old Testament religion, as taught in Deuteronomy, made upon its
votaries. It presupposes on the part of the people an insight
into the fundamentally spiritual nature of their faith entirely
unobscured by ritual and sacrifice. They were expected to pass
beyond the teachings of accredited spiritual guides, beyond even the
evidence of supernatural power, and to test all by the moral and
spiritual truth, once delivered to them by prophet and by miracle,
and now a secure possession. Spiritual truth received and lived by
is thus set above everything else as the test and the judge of all.
Other things were merely ladders by which men had been brought to
the truth in religion. Once there, nothing should move them; and
any further guidance which purported to come from even the heavenly
places was to be tried and accepted, only if it corroborated the
fundamental truths already received and attested by experience in
actual life. Loyalty to ascertained truth, that is, is greater than
loyalty to teachers, or to that which seems to be supernatural; and
the chief power for which a prophet is to be reverenced is not that
by which he gives a true forecast of the future, but that which
impels him to speak the truth about God.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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