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Moses and the elders of Israel commanded the people: \u201cKeep all these commands that I give you today. When you have crossed the Jordan into the land the Lord your God is giving you, set up some large stones and coat them with plaster. Write on them all the words of this law when you have crossed over to enter the land the Lord your God is giving you, a land flowing with milk and honey, just as the Lord, the God of your ancestors, promised you (Deuteronomy 27:1-3).

As Moses prepares to take his leave of Israel (he will soon die), he stresses the covenant relationship between God and his people. He continually emphasizes that Israel must keep her side of the covenant: faithful living, obedience to Lord\u2019s law. Because we live post-resurrection and post-protestant reformation, I think it is valuable for us to pay particular attention to the end of the Book of Deuteronomy.

The resurrection of Jesus changed the dynamics of God\u2019s relationship with his people. Paul sums it up in Ephesians 2: \u201cFor it is by grace you have been saved, through faith\u2014and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God\u2014not by works, so that no one can boast\u201d (8-9). There is ample evidence of God\u2019s grace and capacity to forgive in the Old Testament, but in Christ God removed the barrier of sin that can stand between us and God. Paul writes, \u201cHe was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification\u201d (Romans 4:25).

The clarion call of the Protestant Reformation was that grace sustains and nourishes our relationship with God, removing all barriers between covenant partners. As we love to sing, \u201cwe stand forgiven at the cross.\u201d This is, of course, the great teaching of the New Testament which reverberated throughout Christendom during and after the reformation.

Yet, it is possible that the way in which we (preachers mostly) have communicated this wondrous truth has made Christians indifferent to faithful covenant partnership with God. It is possible that in rightly decrying \u2018works righteousness\u2019 Christians have developed a \u2018laissez faire\u2019 attitude towards God. Since God does all the work, why should we care about the way that we live? Why should we make an effort to respond to him?

Rarely, does anyone put it this bluntly, but the privilege of the devotion writer is to embellish. As we finish with Deuteronomy, we will encounter significant material dealing with blessings and curses. Moses is very concerned that Israel keeps the law. Under the guidance of the Spirit, he instructs Israel to create this stone monument to the law.

For us, such monuments are simply historical markers. But for Israel, it was meant to continually call her to keep covenant with God. Yet, here is the interesting thing. Moses instructs them to cover the stones in plaster and inscribe the law on the plaster. This was much easier that chiselling the law into the rocks and was easier to read. But the plaster would not last, it would fall off the rock. None of the writers I consulted knew why Israel was to inscribe the law on a surface that would disintegrate.

I wonder if it was so that Israel would need to re-establish the monument every few years. Was it in the hope that doing this would cause Israel to regularly renew her covenant with God? Joshua 8 records Israel setting up these stones and the writing of the law on them. After that, there is no record of Mount Ebal in the scriptures. There is no record that Israel ever put-up new plaster and rewrote the law. I wonder if we would have.