The basic concept is not so hard to grasp. God made us for better things, but we are fallen. The human race, consistent with its nature, chose to follow human reason instead of revelation. The only recovery from that fall is to restore the primacy of revelation. Revelation lays out a path of return to Eden; the path ends when the fleshly body is finally dead. So that path requires from the first step embracing self-death as the final destination.
The first generation outside the Garden of Eden knew how to get back inside. They understood the necessity of self-death. As generations passed and human numbers proliferated, the distance back to Eden increased. There were more and more variations on how to take other paths that led nowhere. At some point, precious few humans could find the way, so God came up with a plan to make it more obvious once again. He extended a call to Abraham and made some promises about restoring that clear path. That promise led to this moment when Israel camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, about to cross over and conquer the Promised Land.
All the way through the Exodus, as noted in previous chapters here, the people kept acting like the revelation was too demanding. It required changes from a people notorious for fighting all change, a people who frequently drifted back from any progress they had made. Yet nothing God commanded was so radically different from what any human ruler would have demanded, and a whole lot more generous than human ruler could have offered.
Moses proposes a very reasonable question: Just how hard is it to give your loyalty to someone who brought you out of slavery? How hard is it to serve someone who wants to make you the greatest nation on the earth?
So the focal passage begins with Moses noting that the covenant provisions are in writing, plain as day for anyone to read. It had been quoted to them enough times that they should have memorized it by now. No other deity had ever done this for any nation in human history, though a good many human rulers had done something like this. This divine revelation wasn’t murky and difficult to understand. It didn’t require entering some trance state where the spirit left the body and risked dying to glimpse it. The nation wasn’t required to travel across the sea in some brave quest (the Hebrews had not a single sailor at this point, so sea travel was by the far the most feared and poorly understood). Those kinds of action were common in the Ancient Near Eastern mythology as the ways people might gain access to divine revelation.
No, this covenant was in writing right here in their own language, in terms they already understood. They could speak it out loud and they could discern what it required of them. It wasn’t as challenging as they made it out to be. It’s really simple: Do you want to live on the earth long enough to find your way back to Eden? You most certainly do have the capacity to commit to Jehovah as your feudal master, and to treat Him as your new adoptive Father. All you have to do is act like you belong to His family. That was by no means a foreign concept to them.
The rewards were more than words could tell. But if you couldn’t bring yourself to be loyal to Him, then you should expect Him act like any earthly ruler would and remove all those covenant protections and abandon you to your fate outside His covering. Think about how quickly and easily the Israelis provoked hostility from others.
Moses called as witness every spirit being in the heavens, and every sentient soul on earth, and all Creation itself: Here it is folks, right in front of you. Cling to Jehovah as your Lord and Father, and everything you could possibly use will be yours.
