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The Beginning of the End
and sensitivity, shall refuse, to the husband of her bosom ... her
children whom she bears; for she will eat them secretly for lack of
everything in the siege and desperate straits in which your enemy
shall distress you at all your gates.”
Moses closed with these impressive words: “I call heaven and
earth as witnesses this day against you, that I have set before you
life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both
you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord your
God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him,
for He is your life and the length of your days; and that you may
dwell in the land which the Lord swore to your fathers, to Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, to give them” (
Deuteronomy 30:19, 20
).
To impress these truths more deeply on all minds, the great leader
put them into sacred verse. The people were to commit this poetic
history to memory and teach it to their children and grandchildren,
so that it would never be forgotten.
In the future, when their children would ask, “What is the mean-
ing of the testimonies, the statutes, and the judgments which the
Lord our God has commanded you?” then the parents were to repeat
the history of God’s gracious dealings with them—how the Lord
had acted to deliver them so that they might obey His law: “The
Lord commanded us to observe all these statutes, to fear the Lord
our God, for our good always, that He might preserve us alive, as it
is at this day. Then it will be righteousness for us, if we are careful
to observe all these commandments before the Lord our God, as He
has commanded us.”
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