Deuteronomy 30:17

30:15-20 What could be said more moving, and more likely to make deep and lasting impressions? Every man wishes to obtain life and good, and to escape death and evil; he desires happiness, and dreads misery. So great is the compassion of the Lord, that he has favoured men, by his word, with such a knowledge of good and evil as will make them for ever happy, if it be not their own fault. Let us hear the sum of the whole matter. If they and theirs would love God, and serve him, they should live and be happy. If they or theirs should turn from God, desert his service, and worship other gods, that would certainly be their ruin. There never was, since the fall of man, more than one way to heaven; which is marked out in both Testaments, though not with equal clearness. Moses meant that same way of acceptance, which Paul more plainly described; and Paul's words mean the same obedience, on which Moses more fully treated. In both Testaments the good and right way is brought near, and plainly revealed to us.

But if thine heart turn away,.... From the true God, and the right worship of him, and from his commands, statutes, and judgments: so that thou wilt not hear; the voice of the Lord and obey it, or hearken to his laws, and do them: but shalt be drawn away; by an evil heart, and by the ill examples of others: and worship other gods and serve them; the gods of the Gentiles, the idols of the people, besides the one living and true God, the God of Israel.

De 30:15-20. Death and Life Are Set before the Israelites. 15-20. See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil—the alternative of a good and happy, or a disobedient and miserable life. Love of God and compliance with His will are the only ways of securing the blessings and avoiding the evils described. The choice was left to them, and in urging upon them the inducements to a wise choice, Moses warmed as he proceeded into a tone of solemn and impressive earnestness similar to that of Paul to the elders of Ephesus (Ac 20:26, 27).

In conclusion, Moses sums up the contents of the whole of this preaching of the law in the words, "life and good, and death and evil," as he had already done at Deuteronomy 11:26-27 , in the first part of this address, to lay the people by a solemn adjuration under the obligation to be faithful to the Lord, and through this obligation to conclude the covenant afresh. He had set before them this day life and good ("good" equals prosperity and salvation), as well as death and evil (רע, adversity and destruction), by commanding them to love the Lord and walk in His ways. Love is placed first, as in Deuteronomy 6:5 , as being the essential principle of the fulfilment of the commandments. Expounding the law was setting before them life and death, salvation and destruction, because the law, as the word of God, was living and powerful, and proved itself in every man a power of life or of death, according to the attitude which he assumed towards it (vid., Deuteronomy 32:47 ). נדּח, to permit oneself to be torn away to idolatry (as in Deuteronomy 4:19 ).

The terms of the promise are strongly Deuteronomic: see Deuteronomy 6:2 ; Deuteronomy 25:15 , and (in the form ‘prolong days’) Deuteronomy 4:26 ; Deuteronomy 4:40 , Deuteronomy 5:33 , Deuteronomy 11:9 , Deuteronomy 17:20 , Deuteronomy 22:7 , Deuteronomy 30:18 , Deuteronomy 32:47 ; and, for the following clause, upon the land , &c., Deuteronomy 3:20 , Deuteronomy 11:17 ; Deuteronomy 11:31 , Deuteronomy 15:7 , Deuteronomy 16:20 , Deuteronomy 17:14 , Deuteronomy 18:9 , &c., and especially Deuteronomy 4:40 , Deuteronomy 25:15 . giveth ] is giving (i.e. is in the course of giving, is about to give); so in all the passages of Dt. just quoted (and in many similar ones in the same book besides). The standpoint of the Exodus is assumed. The land is not, as ‘giveth’ in itself might suggest, the possession of the individual Israelite, but Canaan.