W. Robert Godfrey

of our God.

And then in one of those moves that sometimes surprises and confuses us, at the end of chapter 4, verses 41 through 43, we have a statement about the establishment of three cities of refuge on the east side of the Jordan for people who are guilty of manslaughter.

See, these are these head scratchers.

Why?

Why?

Well, I think part of the reason is that

Moses wants to make the point that we are all sinners, sometimes intentionally and sometimes unintentionally, and God makes a provision for sinners.

In the ancient world, there was in the Middle East and in many places a profound sense of blood feuds.

If you kill somebody in my family, I have to kill you.

And those blood feuds would go on through generations because, of course, when I kill somebody in your family, then you have to kill somebody in my family, and back and forth it goes forever.

And this provision says we want to end that in Israel, particularly in the cases where someone has accidentally killed someone else, not intentionally, not an act of murder.

But there needs to be a place of refuge for such a person so he won't be killed by the relatives and establish a back and forth blood feud in Israel.

So even these things make sense as we think about them as God wanting to establish a people of harmony and peace and love.

in the land that he is giving them.

So in Deuteronomy 4, we see a fair bit of law, but it's very much in the context of history.

And then as we move on to chapter 5, we're moving on to a section that we find in our step pyramid here, the beginning of the section that I've called warnings.

5 1⁄2 chapters, 5 through 10, verse 11, of various ways of warning Israel about the importance of keeping the law.

On one level, we could say these chapters are remarkably repetitive.

They say the same things in a lot of ways over and over again, but they come at them with slightly different angles.

Chapter 5 and chapters 9 and 10 are looking at the warnings from the perspective of Sinai.