Adult Sunday School

  The Book of Deuteronomy

     In January 2004, we began a study of the Book of Deuteronomy, the fifth book in the Bible and the last of the Pentateuch or Torah.  In Deuteronomy, Moses gathers the children of Israel in Moab and finds the voice he earlier claimed in Midian that he did not have.  In a series of three discourses, Moses reviews key pieces of the forty-year history from Sinai to the Promised Land, and equips his people with God’s ordinances for taking and living in the land long ago promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In Moab Moses speaks to a second generation of wilderness Israelites, the first generation having been condemned to die in the desert for cowardice at Kadesh-Barnea.  In a particularly poignant exchange, Moses as an old man is denied his request of God to enter the Promised Land.  In his last public speech before his assassination, Martin Luther King, Jr. told his audience that he had seen the Promised Land and that he might not make it there with them.  Within twenty-four hours he lay dead.