Greetings to all our listeners. Blessings in Christ. Today is our fourth talk in this series of twelve. This is also the second session on our coverage of the law in the Old Testament. In our last talk, we introduced the category of law and highlighted the major themes it covered, including God, creation, humankind, sin, salvation, Abraham, Israel and God's national covenant with Israel. We shall now outline the content of each of the books of the law. And these are Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. We shall go book by book.

Genesis is the first book of the Old Testament and the first book of the Bible. It holds a place of great significance as it gives us the first six out of the eight major themes of the law we presented in the last talk. These form the framework to understand both the Old Testament as a whole and the entire Bible. The six major themes covered in Genesis are God, creation, humankind, sin, salvation and Abraham. Do re-listen to our last talk, the third talk to review my explanation of these six themes.

Here, I summarize the content of Genesis in relation to these themes. Genesis reveals that there is only one God, the creator of all, who is transcendent and sovereign overall. Creation is dependent on Him for its existence and persistence. Its continuing existence is based on Him. Humankind is the crown of God's creation, because God made us in his likeness. And so gave us our worth and our place in creation. But humankind disobeyed God and sinned, which corrupted the world with decay, pain, suffering, evil and death. This would eventually destroy all existence. God in His mercy acted to save us all by finding the man who would respond to His call. The one who responded was Abraham. So He made a covenant with him that through his descendants, God would save all the families of the earth. Abraham’s descendants later became the nation of Israel. The book Genesis ends with Israel entering Egypt as a place of God's provision for them. Following which is Exodus, the second book of the Old Testament, which begins after Genesis ends with Israel entering and living in Egypt.

Over the hundreds of years covered in Exodus, Pharaoh and the Egyptians became fearful of the Israelites, who grew too great in numbers. They subjected them to increasingly harsher slavery so that the Israelites cried out to God for salvation. God answered their cry by choosing Moses to lead Israel out of Egypt to form their own nation. Pharaoh resisted this, so God punished Egypt with great plagues until Pharaoh relented. But when Israel left, Pharaoh changed his mind and sent his army to recapture them. God then saved Israel by opening the red sea for them to cross.

When the Egyptian army followed, they were drowned. God thus showed His power as God and kept His promise to save His people. God then made a national covenant with Israel at mount Sinai. And this national covenant is the center, or the main framework of the Old Testament.

Leviticus is the third book of the Old Testament. It recorded the laws that governed Israel’s worship through the priestly sacrificial system that God instituted through Moses for the forgiveness of sin. It gave them the laws to govern social and communal life, including a code of ethics and a penal code. It taught them what was right or wrong, good or bad in God's eyes. So in this way, beyond instructing Israel, it is a book that also instructs all who reads it of God's standards and perspectives  of right and wrong. 

Moving on, Numbers is the fourth book of the Old Testament. It records Israel's journey from Egypt towards the promised land of Canaan, that God had promised to Abraham for his descendants. It tracked whether Israel kept or broke its national covenant with God and their consequences; it tracked also the rewards of obedience and the punishments for disobedience.

In particular, it recorded Israel's disobedience to enter the promised land per God’s command. This was a major event in the book of Numbers. As a result of their refusal, the generation that left Egypt was banned from entering into the promised land, they were left to wander for forty years in the wilderness. The forty years were the time it took for the disobedient generation to die out in the wilderness because God barring them from entry due to their rebellion. Only Caleb and Joshua of that generation were allowed to enter Canaan because they believed that God would have given them the promised land.

The fifth book and the last book of the law is Deuteronomy. In this book, it recorded the reinstitution of the mount Sinai covenant that God made with Israel, with the new generation that was born or grew up in the forty years of wandering the wilderness. The book of Numbers began with the census of all those who were twenty and above, the generation that was not allowed to enter the promised land, and those below twenty and those who were born while Israel was walking in the wilderness. The book of Deuteronomy recorded the covenant with God, or more correctly, God's covenant with the members of Israel for the forty years. It was a covenant that God made or a reinstatement of the mount Sinai covenant which God made with Israel with this new generation. It was reframed as a suzerainty treaty, which is a form of treaty of that time where there is a major party and a minor party. So in the framework of Deuteronomy, God is the principal party and Israel is the dependent party. And this covenant was to guide the nation forward as to how it was to continue to walk with God. So that covers the five books of the Law that is the national covenant that God made with Israel. In our next talk, we will present history in the Old Testament. May the Lord bless you in hearing His word.

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