We are still inside the Song of Moses, and we are now near its climax. Moses has named Israel's coming idolatry, named the lesser elohim they will chase, and named the judgment that will follow. Here, at last, the LORD speaks in his own voice. The audience is a people about to walk into a land crowded with gods who specialize — one for rain, one for war, one for fertility, one for the dead. The LORD's answer is not that he is the best of them. His answer is that he is the only one who is actually there.

From the writers we read together

John Lennox

Oxford mathematician, philosopher of science

Lennox has spent decades arguing, in lecture halls and against the New Atheists, that the God of Scripture is not a placeholder for what we do not yet understand. He is an agent. Deuteronomy 32:39 makes the same argument in older language. The LORD does not list his attributes; he lists his verbs. I kill. I make alive. I wound. I heal. A god who cannot do those things is, as Lennox likes to say, not worth disbelieving in — because no one ever believed in him to begin with.

What is bracing about this verse is that the same hand does all four things. We tend to want a God who only heals and only makes alive, and we file the wounding under "the problem of evil." Moses will not let us. The LORD claims the whole field. That is either the most terrifying sentence in the Old Testament or the most comforting one, depending on whether you trust the character of the one speaking. Lennox's life work is essentially an argument that you can.