SERIES
Deuteronomy 8:2 – Remember that these forty years the LORD your God led you all the way in the wilderness, so that He might humble you and test you in order to know what was in your heart.
Why does the Law read differently when your own life has stopped being settled?
Not one word of the Law was given to a settled nation in a finished country. Sinai is in a desert. Leviticus is spoken at a tent. Numbers is named for a census taken on the move, and Deuteronomy is a sermon preached by a man who will not cross the river. Seven days reading the Torah as what it actually is — wilderness literature, issued to people between a rescue and an arrival. The week takes the hardest pages rather than the easiest: the fire that killed two priests eight days after the same fire made a nation cheer, and an ordinance about ashes in which everyone who handles the remedy is left unclean by it.