Numbers 29:7-11 Bible Study | Episode 815

November 22, 2024

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

Numbers 29:7-11   Bible Study | Episode #815

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.

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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, and welcome to Lake Community church's morning Bible study. And we would. We. We are in the book of numbers, and we're going through where. We're going through the offerings that are being made during the different festivals, during the different time periods. And we. We've made it to the day of atonement. It's also Yom Kippur. It's, uh, it takes place on October 11 and 12th. I think this year it is, uh, it's a. It's a celebration that takes place, uh, because it's on the lunar calendar. It's not always the same at the same time, but. But it is. It is. When I say the same time is generally in the. What we. I guess what we'd call the early fall period in boom of September, early October, usually early October. And it is. It has always been a fun. Well, it's always been my favorite, I guess, of the jewish holidays. And you go, well, why is it your favorite? Well, it's my favorite because of my experience. I'm an Alabama boy. I didn't grow up really identifying anybody. Well, no, what we call hasidic or ultra orthodox jewish people. Where I lived, where I grew up in Montgomery, Alabama, and there was a jewish temple, temple bethor. It's in the old Cloverdale area. And there were a lot of jewish people that lived in that area. And I went junior high school in that area. My junior high school would have been maybe two or three blocks from temple Beth, or. And one of the things that I really remember most about that is that I thought it was neat. And you know how kids think about things, especially junior high boys. The girl that I knew that was jewish, that went to that temple was called Bethe. And so I just associated. That's temple. That's best temple. Anyway, it was always a, you know, something unique, different. I didn't grow up with any. In any way ever, really even ever hearing anything that was anti semitic or even a desire to be anti semitic. In fact, I grew up in a house that. Where, you know, my dad and mom were heavily Israel supporters, and so I tended to have an affinity toward the Old Testament and jewish people and the whole nine yards. And so even though I didn't have a lot of. A lot of contact or experience with jewish people, I did have an affinity for them. And then when I went to Princeton, the first time that I really, really had an opportunity to engage in what I would call a jewish community was at Yom Kippur. And it's such a strange story. I was walking home, walking back to my, you know, my, I guess, apartment. It wasn't an apartment. It was dorm. I was walking back to my dorm after football practice and then after. After eating dinner, and it was. It was. It was a weekend game day weekend, and so it was a Friday night, and I was headed back to the dorm. Game was going to be, you know, normally they played the game right around noon. So I was going back, and it was, you know, dark, but not. Not been dark for super long. And there was just a huge. A lot of noise, a lot of music, and it wasn't, you know, the modern pop culture music. It was. It was. You could tell it was a religious type music in the sense that it was. It was, you know, not music that you would hear anywhere else. And it was coming from a building, one of the prominent buildings there near Nassau hall, and. And I just kind of eased my way over there to see what was going on. Turned out it was. It was. It was the jewish community there on the campus, and they were celebrating Yom Kippur, and, well, I just thought that was so neat, and I don't even know why I thought it was neat. I thought it was just absolutely the neatest thing I'd ever seen. And at that moment, it was not the neatest thing I'd ever seen, but it was really. It was. It was neat. It was. It was cool to see that going on. And me having just a little bit of knowledge of the Old Testament. I mean, you know, I was a young man, but I knew when. When I ran into someone who was jewish who was heading that way, asked him what was going on, and they said, it's Yom Kippur. I knew what Yom Kippur was if not for the Yom Kippur war that had been fought between the Jews and the Muslims in the 1960s and seventies. Anyway, I knew what Yom Kippur was. I knew it was about the atonement of Christ. And I thought it was so neat that they were celebrating and they were singing and dancing. And by the way, that is an important part of all these feasts and all these festivals and all these times together. The interesting part about this passage is on the 10th day of the 7th month, you shall have a holy convocation. That's normal. I'm going to skip this next little phrase. You shall do, no, you shall not do any work. That's normal. You shall present a birth burnt offering. And they tell them to present a burnt offering. Notice it's one young bull. Again, this is the second time. It's just one young bull, which would tend to indicate it's just about your flesh. All right? And then, and we're going to see why this is just about your flesh, because it's not really just about your flesh. The, the sacrifices to take care of your flesh is really dealing with your soul in this one lamb, seven lambs in the first year. Make sure they're without blemish. It's just like the other ones. The grain offering shall be a fine flower with oil. So you've got the, you've got the sacrifice, then you've got the offering of the bread offering, and then you've got three tenths of an ephah for the bull and two tenths for the one ram and one 10th for each of the seven lambs. Also, one kid of the goats has a sin offering besides the sin offering for atonement, the regular burn offerings with grain offerings and the drink offerings. So you got all the offerings that are normal. And you have only one bull, as in, well as in the feast of trumpets. And then you have this verse that is unique to this passage. And it is, it is the only time this is said for any of this, any of these feasts. You have in verse seven, you have this phrase, you shall afflict your soul. So when you read verse seven in its entirety, it says, on the 10th day of the 7th month, you shall have a holy convocation. You shall afflict your souls, you shall not do any work. The word afflict. And now the word for soul here is a common word. It's the word nepez, which, I'm probably mispronouncing that, but it's nepez, which is the common word in the Old Testament for your soul, which is really the seat of your, who you are, your personality in the New Testament, where you come to understand it's really your heart and your mind. And then they use this phraseology, which is of great importance. He says, you shall afflict your soul. Now, that means that you, not God, you shall come and consider your soul. You shall. The word afflict means to bruise or to press down or to humble. Okay? And so when we're, when you're thinking about what this means, it means to humble yourself before God, realizing that you know who he is and who you're not, then you're to press down on your soul, consider you who you are and how you've lived your life, and consider what you're doing. Now. Interestingly, this idea is the idea that Paul gives us in first corinthians when he's talking about how we ought to, ought to properly take the Lord's supper, take communion. He talks about humbling yourself and judging your own self, making you know, so that, so there'll be no judgment upon you. He, what he's saying is, consider your life. Consider how you're living your life. Afflict yourself, not afflict your flesh. Notice the bull takes care of the flesh. We don't have to take whips and beat ourselves. Beat our flesh. You can't beat your flesh into submission. You just beat your flesh to death. That's all you can do to get rid of your fleshly desires. You can't beat it. You can't beat it out of it. You can run from those, that, those things that stimulate it, but you can't beat it out of you. It will never happen. You'll just begin to move toward other, deeper and uglier and darker motivations of your flesh. That's what will happen. The more you try to beat it out of you, the more deep you go into it. So what does the Bible say to do about your flesh? Well, it says to run. But what does the Bible say to do about our soul? Well, our souls have to be humbled. And by the way, we have to choose that. That's an active choice of faith. In fact, we press ourselves down. We humble ourselves before God such that it is almost, it almost is painful. It's bruising. It is bruising, and it does bruise us. It bruises our ego. It bruises how we want to hold ourselves up as something important or something good or something wonderful. And by the way, we want to do that in every possible way. Nobody wants to think that you're innately bad. You're innately evil. You're innately not God, you're innately sinful. No one wants to believe that we want to believe that babies are born sinless. Now, they're precious, and they're innocent blood. The Bible says they're innocent blood. And why are they innocent blood? Because they're not innocent because they're without sin. They're innocent because they're without. They're not committing sin by a willful act. Their sin is in their flesh. And then as they get older and they, they come to a knowledge of right and wrong, which is very young in life, and, and they choose not to do right over wrong, well, then they have. Then that's a sin of their soul. And that begins to manifest. It begins to manifest itself in there, in the way they act out in their lives. But. But we don't want to think that we have, were born with sin, with sin nature, but we are. We are through one man sin enter the world, and that is Adam. And it carried out to all men. That's what Hebrews teaches us. We. We are, we are sinful, and we. That sin pervades every aspect of our lives. It's. It's. It's. The heart of man is replete with wickedness, meaning your heart is completely wicked. And so understanding that really it's a healthy place to be in when you realize, oh, that's how I am, because it, it pushes you toward God. It makes you realize that you, you know, you've got to, you've got to have an atoning sacrifice. You've got to have a redeemer. And, you know, Jesus is that redeemer. And so having that redeemer, and it puts you in a great position, because now I can trust in not my own flesh and not my own will, but I can trust in the redemptive power of God to handle the sin of my flesh. And I can trust in the redemption of Jesus Christ and his making me into his image and likeness. That's salvation. That's the process of salvation. And my soul is beginning to be changed. And that's why I can literally, now that I've been atoned for and redeemed, which is the whole point of the day of atonement, I can now actually, by my own will, because God's given me the gift of faith, I can buy my own will, afflict my soul. I can press it down. I can place it in a vice grip and say, God, this is my sacrifice to you, holy and pleasing to you. I'm giving you my soul. I'm giving you my heart. I'm pushing it into a position where you can make me a new heart. Oh, God, make me a right spirit. You can do that to me. And that's what he says here, for the day of atonement, because the atonement is for the pain, for the sin of your flesh and the salvation of your soul, paying for the sin of your flesh and the salvation of your soul. And Jesus paid, provided that in the atoning sacrifice he made on the cross. And then obviously, your eternal life is provided you by the resurrection. When Jesus overcame death and sin and raised himself into his eternal life, and he provides that for us, too. And so when we have, when we have all those together, we have our flesh handled, the issues of our flesh handled in the sense of the eternal issues of our flesh, we have our soul now capable of chasing after God and knowing God. And then ultimately, we have our spirit, which is the good deposit of eternal life that God's given us. And so once we have all those things, we have life. And so when you kind of studying through this, I always want to find the things whenever God's doing the same, the same thing over and over and over again. And then all of a sudden he says something different. We want to look at it because he's signaling something here. And what he's saying is, in the day, I atone for you. You now have a unique ability to change. You can. And by the way, it's not just me changing you, it's you activating your faith and you joining me in the work of making you new. Now, remember, we don't pay, we don't do anything for our relationship with God. But once, once we have that relationship, we do join him by faith, by walking in the way he wants us to walk in his path. And when we do that, we flicked our will, we press our will down, we bruise our will, our ego. We don't, we don't, we don't allow it to have its way. We give our will and our ego to God, and he gives us life. What a beautiful picture it is. What a fun night that was for me to see that. I went home in wonder. You know, obviously, I couldn't go in and be a part of it. I knew that, but I was a part of it in a very spiritual sense. And I went home in a little bit of a wonderful about how, how neat it is to actually see God doing his work, not in just the people that I've known and the traditions that I had and the life that I'd lived. But he's working all over the place, all around the world, and especially among the jewish people. He's been doing it for 3500 years. He's awesome. God. He's a good God. And I. I still to this day, remember that night.

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.