Numbers 21:1-3 Bible Study | Episode 788

October 16, 2024

Hope Alive: Applying God’s Word to Your Daily Life

Numbers 21:1-3  Bible Study | Episode #788

I am Chad Harrison, and I am the teaching pastor of Lake Community Church and had 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. The purpose of studying scripture is that you might know the character of Jesus Christ, and that you might see the world from the Father's perspective. That you gain wisdom that changes your life. I pray in the name of Jesus right now that God would open His word to you and allow you to see Him and to know Him. To know His will, that you might glorify Him and that you might walk in faith and power each day, especially today. In Jesus name.

If you would like to revisit today’s Bible study, please visit our website at https://hopealive.buzzsprout.com/ to download the transcript. 

If this podcast ministered to you, please subscribe, and leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Reviews help us reach more people and spread the wisdom of God. 

Please follow us:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/hopealivewithgod/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/hopealiveministry/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LakeComChurch/ -Lake Community Church

Transcript

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 numbers after 21. We've made it all the way to numbers, chapter 21, and we are dealing with, beginning to interact with the people who are living in what is the promised land. Now, there's going to be a lot of things happen between obviously now and when Joshua enters. And the way we know that, well, there's about a third of numbers and good Rodney left, so we're going to have to deal with a lot of other issues and we're going to talk about a lot of things and learn a lot of things about, about God and about the picture of Jesus Christ, which is found just throughout Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers in Deuteronomy, the thrillers of Christ, the pictures of Christ that are found throughout Moses writing the Pentateuch, the five books of the Old Testament that begin the Old Testament. And so we found one here. Well, this one is one of those things that, you know, sometimes happens when you're studying through the Bible. Something that you're reading in the Bible seems so, well, it seems like you're just reading something that might be in the news today and you figure out that God and humanity have not changed a whole lot. And I, the people of the earth, even though we feel like we have progressed so greatly, the truth is that we have not progressed. We are utterly sinful and we remain utterly sinful. I need to lay out for you an important fact, and it is the most important fact about the people who live in the promised land, the people who've come in and populated the promised land throughout the years, where the Israelites are in Egypt now, the Israelites weren't a great people or a great nation when they went into, when they went into Egypt. In fact, they were just a big family, a family of twelve sons who had wives and children and servants. And they were a large, important family. In fact, Abraham defeat some kings when he was alive. So they are an important family, but they're by no means the whole population of Canaan. God has promised that land to them, but they are by no means the population of Canaan. And just like most of human history, the tribes and nations that existed at that time come and go. Just because when the Israelites leave the promised land to go into Egypt, just like any other place in the world, you have waves of nations come and go and intermingle and destroy each other. And that's what's going on. That's what's been going on for the last three 4000 years. And it's what's going on today. Now, we think, well, that's not true. We have nations today. Well, yeah, we do have nations today. Our nation is 250 years old, which is not even the time period that the Israelites were in Egypt. We have not existed as a nation back when General Washington was able to secure a victory and the declaration of independence was written and then the constitution several years later were written, that happened less than 250 years ago. And we need to understand that we still have 150 years of history to undergo just to cover the time period that the Israelites were in Egypt. Actually, it's more 190 years that we have to undergo before we even reach the age that the Israelites were before they left Egypt. And so understanding that is having some perspective about that is important. 250 years ago, the nations of Europe that you think of today did not exist exactly the way you think of them today. Let me. Let me give you some examples. Italy was not a single nation 250 years ago. In fact, it was several states. That was in Italy, France. In its modern form, it existed, but not in the way you think of it today. England, sure, it was a great empire. It existed. Spain, yes, but it was also a great empire. Portugal, sure. But then as you head east, I mean, yeah, as you head east, Germany, Poland, Denmark, all these nations that we think about in their present form are not the same. You had the Prussians and did you have polish people? Sure. But were they a nation like they are today 250 years ago? Not exactly the same. The swedish people were actually one of the most powerful nations in the world. And Russia, Russia was really a backwards country back then. Not even hardly anything. And then you had a giant empire right in the central part of Europe called the Ottoman Empire. And that empire doesn't exist at all. And so why am I telling you that? Well, because even in the period of two or 300 years that we've existed as a nation. Europe is not even close to the same continent. It's not even close to the same people. Africa, the nations of Africa are not even. No resemblance to what they were 250 years ago, much less Pakistan and Afghanistan and India and Nepal and all those areas. They don't exist in the same form or function as they do today. And many of their peoples are totally different. And so when you kind of think through these things, you realize that nations rise and fall, and God is the one who brings about nationhood. God is the one who decides who is going to come to power and who he's going to ultimately destroy. And he even says of pharaoh that he's raised. Who knows? He's raised him up for this purpose, for him to glorify himself in pharaoh's. Well, in pharaoh's intransigence, his unwillingness to listen to God. Now, the canaanite people. And I'm gonna have to. I'm gonna have to kind of spend some time making sure you understand the Amorites are different than the Canaanites. They're going to be several other tribes that come from some kind of tangential family relationship with Abraham, Isaac or Jacob. But there are tribes in Canaan called the Canaanites. The Milabites are not Canaanites, but they do live in the Canaan area. The Canaanites were a special people. They probably draw their history back to a group of people who began to worship the pagan gods that were brought about by Nimrod. They have a special religion. And their main God is a God called Moloch or Molech. And they WoRshiP him just like the incas. They worship him by human sacrifice. They sacrifice people to their gods. And the worst part about that is their human sacrifice is mostly that. It's mostly children, in fact, newborn babies. And God cannot allow that to remain in Israel and mix with his people. He's not going to allow that culture and THAt religion. He's not multicultural. I don't know if you know it or nothing. He is not going to allow that culture and that religion to remain in the same area as his PEoPle. Now, he's going to deal with that in a couple of books pretty heavily. But we see this happen in numbers, chapter 21. And it reads very much like today. It says, the king of ared, the Canaanite who dwelt in the south, heard that Israel was coming on the road to Etherim. Then he fought against Israel and took some of them prisoners. So he sent out a raiding party, and he took. He took some of the people that were Israelites prisoners, okay? Some of them military, some of them fighting men, but some of them just regular people. And you know, this is the Canaanites doing that. One of the. One of the canaanite tribes, the king of arid, which has been mentioned before in scripture. So Israel made a vow to the Lord and said, if you will indeed deliver the people into my hand, then I will utter, utterly destroy their cities. Hmm. Israel made a vow and said, if you'll deliver these people into our hands, we'll utterly destroy their cities, which means we'll wipe them out. We'll get rid of them. We'll. We'll. We'll end this crippling. That's a vow that the Israelites made. If you'll let us win, we'll get rid of them. Because when you have a group of people that all their whole existence is based off of you not existing, you not being able to make it. And by the way, that was common in this time, that nations would rise to totally destroy other nations and anybody that was left alive sell into slavery so that that nation would cease to exist. I don't know if you know or not, but that's happened in the last 200 years. Around the world. We have utterly destroyed nations and even as recent as 200 years ago, sold whole populations into slavery. When I say we, I'm talking about the human race. People have done that. That is. That has gone on multiple times in the last 200 years. So don't. We shouldn't act shocked. And in fact, it's a. It's. It's a, uh. It's a poor view and a poor understanding, a poor, uh, relationship with history, uh, to. To see it as any other way. These things. These things have gone on and these things are continuing to go on in many ways and in many parts of the world, they continue to go on today. And so for us to act like they don't happen and for us to act like we're not dealing with peoples who have this mindset, this is the more historical common mindset than the one that we have today as a nation. Here in the United States, the Israelites faced a group of people here that wanted their utter annihilation. The. This happened, uh, 1400 years before Christ, 1300 years before Christ. And we find ourselves 3300 years later, and there's still a group of people that. That want that. That desire that in the same place. So, uh, even though times they are changing, the more they change, the more they remain the same. And, uh, so what does Israel say, well, if they're going to attack us, if they're going to try to utterly destroy us, if they're going to take captive, take into captivity our people, we will take them. And so the Lord listened to the voice of Israel and delivered up the Canaanites and they utterly destroyed them in their cities. So the name of the place is called Horma, which means utter destruction. They totally destroyed their cities. They totally got rid of the tribe or the canaanite people that was led by the king of Arod. Now you go, well, how many kings were there in Canaan? Well, there were a lot. There were a lot of kings and there were a lot of canaanite tribes. But this tribe and this people, God utterly destroys before he ever, they ever even enter into what we call the promised land in its fullness. Now, the promised land stretches a lot farther than the present borders of Israel. And likely that that will be the case down the road, that Israel will be larger than it is today. But the same thing that is going on even in Israel at this moment has happened. And it's happened not decades ago, not hundreds of years ago, not, not in this last millennia, but it has been going on for thousands of years. And so when Israel is attacked and their people are taken captive, even though they have not been provocative or aggressive in any way toward the Canaanites, when that happens, God gives them strength and the power to destroy the Canaanites. And he does, and they do. And so they're going to ultimately wipe out the Canaanites. They're going to wipe out the people of this religion, and yet they're going to leave a few left. They're going to get rid of most of the Canaanites, but they're going to leave a few. And within several generations, some of the israelite people are going to be worshipping the gods that they worship and practicing the same practices that the Canaanites had. And they're going to sacrifice their own children on the altar of Molech. And so the reason why God wanted to get rid of the Canaanites is going to find its fruition in the people of Israel later on in the Old Testament. We're going to find it in the histories and we're going to see it in, in the kings and chronicles, that the Israelites are going to go to those gods and begin to worship them, even though God has delivered them the promised land and destroyed those who were the original worshipers. And you go, well, how that, how can that happen? Well, because those things that they worship are not just physical idols. They're. They're fallen angels and demonstration and they worship them. And that's why those fallen angels and demons demand that they have human sacrifice, because the destruction of humanity is the business of Satan. And so coming into chapter 21, we begin to deal with the stark circumstances that the Israelites face. They are besieged and surrounded by tribes, tribes that are related to them and peoples that they do not know. Tribes that worship other gods other than the God Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And peoples that worship. Well, they worship demons and fallen angels and they practice their religion in such a way that God abhors it and cannot stand it. And so when we get to these issues, many people bring their modern ideas which have not been really measured up in human history. They bring these ideas and understandings and say, well, it shouldn't be that way. Well, you know, it shouldn't be that man is utterly sinful, but he is. And God's plan for redemption of humanity involves him dealing with that utter sinfulness that is humanity. And we need to understand that. And we need to come to a conclusion in our own hearts that God is bringing about ultimately, his glory, his power and his kingdom, and not our way of seeing things, which in many ways is just a mirage. And so I would say to you today that I stand behind Israel even in this moment. I believe that God handed the Canaanites over to them 1300 years ago at Hormah. And I believe that God is sustaining the people of Israel even today as they exist in the land that God promised to them almost 3500 years ago, maybe even more close to 4000 years ago. It is their land and it is theirs to live.

Music 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.