This is Chad Harrison, and you're listening to hope alive, applying God's word to your daily life. Hi, this is Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and have been serving as a pastor for 25 years. I'm also a practicing attorney. This podcast is designed to help you study God's word and find God's will for your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open up his word to you and allow you to see him and to know him and to know his will, that you might glorify him and that you might walk in faith and power each and every day, especially today, in Jesus name.
Well, good morning. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We are in Leviticus, chapter 24. Leviticus, chapter 24. And starting with verse ten. And right here, you know, sometimes in the Bible, when you're reading scripture, when you're studying through the word of God and, you know, the Bible is laid out, I mean, there's a. There, there's, there's definitely. It's easy to read as far as understanding what you're expecting from a book of the Bible. If. I mean, if I'm reading. If I'm reading the Gospels, I understand that it's basically going to be a telling of the story of Jesus. Three of the Gospels are going to tell them in, in chronological order, and they're going to tell stories that the writer remembers from the life of Christ. And then you're going to find, you know, in John, you're going to find a lot of stories. They're not in order in his life, but they definitely lay out a story. You know, the theological books, Romans, Hebrews, you know, you're going to get on theological argument, you know, and Genesis is a story of the beginning of the war. Exodus is a story of God leading his children out of Egypt. You've got, you know, Joshua, which is a story of entering the promised land. Judges, you know, all those books of history give us understandings about things. It's just kind of easy to read. Now, that's true. And it's pretty much you can, you can figure out what's going on. And the books that we've been studying, Leviticus, the next book, deuteronomy, we're going to numbers. I mean, numbers and deuteronomy, the next two books, they're going to be read in the lab, but they're going to be a lot of stories, and they're going to be stories at your store sometimes. This, this story that we get in in chapter 24 is kind of out of, it's kind of out of tune. And when I say that it's out of tune, it just is a obscure story that's just thrown in here. And whenever that happens, you need to, your ears need to perk up and you need to kind of investigate and think about and ponder, because the story matters. God, if God's Holy Spirit's going to put that, if the Holy Spirit's going to put that in here, in kind of a place where it doesn't kind of flow, then, well, then you probably need to consider it. You need to think about it. You maybe need to remember it and allow it, to allow God to have time to reveal it to you, because it definitely is not in a place where we've been dealing with God telling Aaron and God telling the people of Israel how to do the feast, how to do, especially in the first part of this chapter, you know, how to take care of the lampstand, how to take care of the showbread. And then all of a sudden, boom, you have the story, and then you have God saying what were to do about people who do certain things, and it's not really in order. In fact, it seems to be, well, I mean, I hate to say it, it seems to be a little out of order. It seems to be something that just doesn't fit where we're at. It doesn't fit in how we do things. And by the way, the next chapter is going to move on into the year of Jubilee. And it's just in a strange place. And whenever that happens, I always think about, and I always ponder it and I go, what is happening here? Verse ten says, now the son of an israelite woman. So she's a jewish woman whose father was an Egyptian. So this young man had a jewish mother and an egyptian father, which would have been common. This would have been something that would have happened back then. He would have fled Egypt with his wife and his israelite son. He intermarried in a relationship, a interracial relationship, I guess, as it were. And they would not have been accepted in Egypt. His children were probably been enslaved. So he left with the Israelites. It doesn't say that. It doesn't give us any indication that he is not a worshiper of Yahweh, that he's not a believer in the jewish God. In fact, probably is a believer in the jewish God because he's seen the miracles that God has done. And so he's probably there. His son is there. And there was a fight and, boy, that always starts it out kind of strange, too, because, you know, really, in scripture, if you think about it, there's a lot of rulers, but there's not a lot of physical altercations, meaning actual, just physical fights that go on. And apparently there was a fight here. Now, if you read above verse ten in my translation, and I'm reading from the new King James, you have the Pellentu and blasphemy. And the word blasphemy, there is a, is a big word in christian circles or christian parlances. It's a place where we kind of think about it and we go, what is blasphemy? And oftentimes we say that taking the Lord's name in vain is blasphemy, or what is it? Well, you know, the truth is we're going to leave here maybe not knowing any better than when we started what blasphemy is because it says, and it says they fought with each other. And the Israelites woman, son blasphemed the name of the Lord and cursed. And so they brought him to Moses. So apparently he. Now, I won't tell you that this word blasphemy here, it is a. It's an interesting word. It's. It's naqab. I'm probably not pronouncing that exactly right. It's a word that, you know, it. It's only translated well, it's translated like 25 times in the, in the Old Testament, but it's only translated blissfully about three times. And two of them are in this passage, maybe all three in this passage. And it's not the common word for blasphemy. It's not. It's not the word for blasphemy. It actually means to. To pierce or to. To tear or to burn a hairline or to a point. And it means to kind of ***** off or take away or tear off it. It literally means to kind of remove from it, almost like, you know, when you, when you tear off the, you have a pine cone and you tear off the little things that stick out, or maybe you have a flower and you take a pedal and you tear it off. It means. It means to curse or to blasphemy. But we don't really know what that means because the word is, is used 25 times, but it's not used as blasphemy anywhere but basically here. And so I go, what is that? I don't really know. It's not the common word for blasphemy. He did something about the name of God. And that may have caused the fight, or it may be after the fight that had happened. But whatever happened, he perforated, tore off, picked apart the name of the Lord. Now, remember, the name of the Lord is God's character, his nature. It means. It is. It is an idea of. He said something. He attributed something about God. As far as his character and nature. That is not true. Now, none of you just say, well, he probably, you know, said something bad about God. He cursed God. But that's not what it says. That's not what the word means. And it's not the word blasphemy. In fact, when we're reading it in the context of what's going on here, we got the priest with taking care of the candles. Not the candles, but the lampstands. And he's taking care of the showbread, which is a picture of the Holy Spirit revealing God's word, which is really revealing the character of God. You've got that going on. And he apparently has said something or claimed something about God's name and character. That is not true as to how God had revealed himself to the Israelites. And so for me, as I'm reading this, I began to think, does he. Does he misstate the character of the name of God that God has clearly revealed to God's people? I wonder if that's what he did. I wonder if he maybe attributed some characteristic to God. Or maybe he perforated the way God had presented himself and began to present God in a different way, in his own way. Making God his own character, really making God in his own image. I wonder that. Because they brought him to Moses, and the mother was named was Shelamuth, and the daughter, she was daughter of debris from the tribe of Dan. Then they put them in custody, and that they may might that the mind of the Lord might be shown to them. And the Lord spoke to Moses, saying, take outside the camp he who was cursed then, meaning he's cursed from what he did then. Let all who heard him lay their hands on his head and let all the congregation stone him. Now, if you just, you know, blasphemed God, they would have. They would. They might have stoned you for that. Yeah, but what happened here, I think it may be more interesting than that. I think what he did was he took what God had said about himself, and he made his own ideas about God. He changed them. He perforated, he tore off what he didn't like about God and then presented God the way he wanted God to be. He presented God in his own likeness, in his own image, in his own way. And that caused a fight. And when once it was determined, what was the cause of the fight, God said, you can't do that. We're not, we're not going to allow you to take what the word that I have revealed to you, the revelation that I've given to you that's clear about myself, and let others come up with their own ideas about it. You're going to have to, you're going to have to deal with how I present myself. And the reason I think that is because it comes after the proofs, taking care of the lampstand, which is revealing God's word, or the showbread, the bread of life to us. And if it would been blasphemy in the purest form of the Old Testament, blasphemy, the word would have you been, the word used here would have been that word, but it wasn't. It says, then you shall speak to the children of Israel saying, whoever curses his God shall bear his sin. Meaning? Meaning if you alter God's revelation to you for your own purposes, if you say something that is clearly not what God has presented himself as, as if it's God, well, you bear the sin. And whoever blasphemes the name of the Lord shall surely be put to death. He says, all the congregations shall certainly stone him. And, and, and he says, the stranger as well as him who is born in the land. When he blasphemes the name of the Lord, he shall be put to death. And notice those three times that it's translated. Blasphemy is in this chapter. It's not, it's not translated blasphemy anywhere else in scripture. So what are we to get from this? Well, I think you could say that God said, don't curse his name. Don't, don't blasphemy. Blaspheme him. I think, I think it's not wrong to translate it that way, but I think there's something far deeper at work here, far more important to understand. And what, what I think that means is, is that, sure, you could say, you know, you could use some words or some language, and I don't even really know, we don't really know kind of how that works out. We don't know what that really means. But I do know that if you, if you misstate or mischaracterize or perforate or tear apart, how God has revealed himself in his word, which is his name, his names reveal his character and nature. King of kings, prince of peace. If you'll notice, all these things that we call God, these names that God has given himself throughout scripture, they speak to aspects of who he is. If you begin to try to tear those things off, that's not good. That's. That's something that God told his people. We're not going to have that happen. And then I have to always ask, because even last night in Wednesday night bible study, we, we, we discussed these things, and, and I have to always ask when, whenever something like this comes up, I don't say, well, he just. He deserved to die because he'd done bad. I always think, you know, how is this me? How am I doing this? Am I doing this? Is this me? Is this what I'm doing? Because God's not revealing this to us to tell us that we need to stone people to death today because we're not under the law anymore. We're not. We're not under the law, okay? We're not. We're not. We're not worshiping on Saturday. We're not eating the dietary foods. We're not under that anymore, okay? We're under being led by the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit can reveal to us these truths from the Old Testament that have depth and have meaning that it's far beyond. Sometimes what you can just see in reading it, you can begin to see how God exists and what he is saying about himself. And one of the things that I think he's saying about himself here is that when I reveal in myself my fullness to you, when I make revelation to you, especially from my word, don't try to tear off the parts that you like and get rid of the parts that you don't like. Okay? Don't. Don't try to parse me out so that you can be happy. Don't take what I reveal to you out of context. Hear what I say and do what I say, hear who I am and believe in me as I've presented myself, don't try to make for yourself a God that's kind of like me. And many of the cults and even false religions of the world have done that. They've taken Jesus in certain ways and have presented him, not has he presented himself in scripture, but the way they want him to be to fit in their narrative. And God doesn't want that. And by the way, there's nothing life changing or powerful about you doing that in your own life. Don't, don't say, well, God is love. Therefore, I can just continue to sin. Don't say God is this. Therefore, all these other passages that don't deal with God that way, that teach us a greater understanding of him aren't true. Because I just like this part of him and that's the part I'm going to take. God's not a buffet. He's a full course meal. And you've got to eat it all, okay? In order for you to really get the full benefit of it, you've got to eat the whole thing. You've got to. You've got to figure out who he is in his fullness and take him as that, because that's who he is. I pray that. That we'll do that. I find this passage more interesting today than I ever have before. And it is kind of exciting to kind of think through it. I look forward to maybe a couple years from now God revealing more about this to me because this. This story is kind of in a weird place, which means God screaming to me. He listened to us. Watch this. I'm trying to teach you something from this. And I'm sure he will. I'm sure he did the same. As you go today, I pray that.
The Lord will bless you and keep.
You, that he'll make his face to.
Shine upon you, and that he will give you hope and peace today. In Jesus name.
