The Expositor's Bible: The Book of DeuteronomyHarper, Andrew
Religion
The Expositor's Bible: The Book of Deuteronomy
Harper, Andrew
Bible. Deuteronomy -- Commentaries
On one point only does the parallel seem questionable. If we
followed it alone as our guide, we should have to set down the
mediatorship of Moses, as a mere part of the method, as belonging
to the formal side only of the great revelation. In other words, we
should have to ask whether the statement we have in Deut. v. 22-30
is only an emotional and pictorial way of setting forth the fact
that, following and supplementing the elementary and Divinely given
Hebrew _fas_, there was also a Divinely given but humanly mediated
_jus_. But clearly it means much more than that. By the earlier
prophets, and generally in all earlier delineations of him, Moses
is regarded as a prophet who had more direct and continuous access
to the Divine presence than any other prophet of Israel. Moreover
he had always been represented from the earliest times as standing
between Yahweh and His people, holding on to the one and refusing
to let the other go. In the great scene, taken from the earliest
constituents of the Pentateuch and narrated in Exod. xxxii., we see
him anticipating by centuries the wonderful picture of the Servant
of God in Isa. liii., and by a still more amazing stretch of time,
that Divinest wish of St. Paul, that he himself might be accursed
even from Christ for his brethren's sake. He thus stood between
Yahweh and His people both as the organ of Revelation and as the
self-forgetting intercessor, who suffered for sins not his own, as
well as for sins which his connection with his nation had brought
upon him; who, instead of repining, was willing to be blotted out of
God's book if that could benefit his people.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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