Deuteronomy 1:9-18--Leaders Appointed

Deuteronomy 1:9-18
English Standard Version
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Leaders Appointed
9 “At that time I said to you, ‘I am not able to bear you by myself. 10 The LORD your God has multiplied you, and behold, you are today as numerous as the stars of heaven. 11 May the LORD, the God of your fathers, make you a thousand times as many as you are and bless you, as he has promised you! 12 How can I bear by myself the weight and burden of you and your strife? 13 Choose for your tribes wise, understanding, and experienced men, and I will appoint them as your heads.’ 14 And you answered me, ‘The thing that you have spoken is good for us to do.’ 15 So I took the heads of your tribes, wise and experienced men, and set them as heads over you, commanders of thousands, commanders of hundreds, commanders of fifties, commanders of tens, and officers, throughout your tribes. 16 And I charged your judges at that time, ‘Hear the cases between your brothers, and judge righteously between a man and his brother or the alien who is with him. 17 You shall not be partial in judgment. You shall hear the small and the great alike. You shall not be intimidated by anyone, for the judgment is God's. And the case that is too hard for you, you shall bring to me, and I will hear it.’ 18 And I commanded you at that time all the things that you should do.

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This is now Moses speaking to the people in his final sermon.  He knows that it is time for him to die and that he will see the Promised Land, but will not enter it (we saw that at the end of the Book of Numbers).  He speaks of the fact that he first said the people were too much for him during the first generation and God could have killed all of them then, but the LORD was faithful to bring the next generation to the Promised Land and Moses says how God has truly kept His covenant and they are now as uncountable as the stars in the heavens.  Moses then prays for the people to continue to be multiplied and continue to be blessed physically.

Moses recounts how the LORD taught him to delegate leadership and authority because it was too much for him to lead the people all on his own, so leaders from every tribe were appointed and we saw what I called the "Jehtro Principle" (a phrase I learned at Liberty University from Pastor Dwayne Carson) where men were put over tens, fifties, hundreds and thousands so that there were several layers of good, wise men to go through before things got to Moses at the top--he only had to deal with the most severe of issues that affected all the people.  (See Exodus 18, especially verses 24-26).

As we go through Deuteronomy, it will be a review of the history we've already seen in Exodus and Numbers (and maybe a bit from Leviticus too) as Moses passes on the history of the previous generation and tells them their identity of where they've come from, lessons they should learn to never repeat, lessons they should learn to emulate, things they can look back to in order to trust the LORD who has brought them through to this point, and things that will help them remain faithful to the identity that God has given them when they into the Land as "a prepared people for a prepared place."