The book of Deuteronomy had been rediscovered during the reign of King Josiah, and it was under Josiah’s rule that Jeremiah began his ministry.

Especially clear in Nehemiah 9 is the theme of God as the Creator and the One who alone should be worshiped. He made everything, even “the heaven of heavens, with all their host” (Neh. 9:6, NKJV).

In the eighteenth year of Josiah's reign, something happened that, at least for a while, changed the history of God’s people.

Many times the later writers of the Old Testament, such as the prophets, referred back to the book of Deuteronomy, which played such a central role in the covenantal life of early Israel. This week we will focus on how the book was used by later writers. What parts of Deuteronomy did they use, and what points were they making that have relevance for us today?

Since when have wealth and material abundance fostered the Christian virtues of self-denial and self-sacrifice? In most cases, the opposite occurs: the more people have, the more self-sufficient they become, and the less they tend to depend upon God.

All through the Old Testament the Lord constantly brought the minds of the people back to the Exodus, their miraculous deliverance by God from Egypt. To this day, thousands of years later, practicing Jews keep the Passover celebration, a memorial to what the Lord has done for them. For the church today, the Passover is a symbol of the deliverance we have been offered in Christ.

Amid this prosperity, Moses tells them to remember that it was the Lord alone who had done this for them and not to be deceived by the material blessings that He had given them.

The Lord tells the people, each one individually, to guard themselves, lest they forget. This is not “forget” so much in the sense of memory loss (though over time and in new generations that could come), but more in the sense of being lax about their covenant obligations.

Moses points the people back through all history, even to the Creation itself, and asks them, rhetorically, if anything in all history had ever been done as was done for them. In fact, he tells them to ask; that is, to study for themselves and see if anything such as what they experienced had ever happened before.