Numbers 31:12-20 Bible Study | Episode 820

November 29, 2024

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

Numbers 31:12-20  Bible Study | Episode #820

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. Welcome to Lake Community Church's morning Bible study. We are in numbers, chapter 31. Numbers, chapter 31. And we are starting with verse twelve and going through verse 21 of the most difficult passages in scripture. It has to be, we have to spend some time understanding certain aspects of how God deals with things. But the main thing is we just need to dive into it and then take a perspective look on what God's doing and what's happening here. It says, then they brought the captives, the booty and the spoil to Moses, to Eleazar the priest, and to the congregation of the children of Israel, to the camp in the plains of Moab by the Jordan across from Jericho. And this is after they had attacked the Midianites and destroyed them. And Moses, Eleazar the priest, and all the leaders of the congregation went to meet them outside the camp. But Moses was angry with officers of the army, with the captains over the thousands, and the captains over the hundreds who had come from the battle. And Moses said to them, have you kept all the women alive? Look, these women caused the children of Israel, through the council of Balaam, to trespass against the Lord in an incident, in the incident of peor. And there was a plague among the congregation of the Lord. Now, therefore, kill every man male among the little ones, and kill every woman who has known. Who has known a man intimately. But keep alive for yourselves all the young girls who have not known a man intimately. And as for you, remain outside the camp seven days. Whoever has killed any person and whoever's touched any slain, purify yourselves and your captives on the third day, and on the 7th day, purify every garment, every. Everything made of leather, everything woven of goats hair, and everything made of wood. Now, what is happening here is Moses is angry, because when they came back, they brought back captives. They had killed all the kings, and they killed all the Mendez, battle age but they brought back the women and the boys, and Moses ordered that they be killed, that they be left. And this is, for many, many people, problematic in our modern culture. People take this to be, I guess, what you call genocide. And they, if you look it up, this is probably the preeminent passage that they would use to say that God is not a just God. The problem is that our modern culture fails to realize that in the last century, we have utterly destroyed, we have ourselves in order to stop a culture that is utterly wicked. We have firebombed cities. We firebombed the german cities. We firebombed the japanese cities. And they were wicked cultures. They had captured, raped, murdered, and killed millions of people throughout Europe and throughout Asia. And we dropped two atomic bombs on the Japanese. We fire bombed the city of Tokyo. We firebombed Dresden and killed hundreds of thousands of people. It is not uncommon in modern culture for us to recognize that a culture is so wicked and corrupt that it is deserving of being destroyed so that we can rid the leadership and the people who are involved in that from the earth. We, even more recently than that, the Khmer rouge of Cambodia, they took all the adults. They basically brainwashed the children. They took all the adults, especially the educated adults, and killed them in their cities, destroyed their cities, emptied their cities out and destroyed them. This. If you want to know more about the cambodian situation that happened around the time of the Vietnam war, just after the Vietnam war, read the book the killing fields, or watch the movie the killing fields. And the societies around them, the countries around them, including Vietnam, had to. They became so dangerous and so terrible, so awful a civilization that they had to go in and basically wipe them out. And when they were wiping them out, they were wiping children out because the children were the ones in charge. I mean, the 20 to 25 year olds were leading the army of the 13 and 14 year olds who had killed all the adult in their society. It is a horrific story, and it happened within my lifetime. It happened in the last 50 years. And so we know in society, in our society, even though our society judges God and his judgments, we know that in the world we live in, nobody would say it was wrong for the Khmer Rouge to be destroyed. Nobody would say it was wrong for the **** regime in Germany to be destroyed and the people of Germany to suffer greatly, including women and children. Nobody would say it was wrong for the Japanese to be destroyed. And if you do say it's wrong for the Japanese to be destroyed, you don't really understand what the Japanese did. To the people that they captured, what they did to the Chinese, what they did to the Koreans, what they did to the people of the Philippines. You don't really understand the horror of how they. How they conducted themselves and why it was necessary for us to us to do what was necessary to destroy them. And so that's just a lack of perspective. It's a I live in this moment perspective, not a world history perspective, not a humanity perspective, not an understanding of how the heart of man is utterly wicked. And let me tell you, I've been in the business of wiping out utterly wicked nations for a long, long time. We even in North America had a giant nation who did human sacrifice, and their society utterly collapsed. We're not even sure exactly how it happened, but literally just collapsed and ceased to exist in South America. I think that was the hand of God at work. We know for sure, and we've already studied through. God destroyed all of humanity in a flood. And if you. Even if you don't believe that God destroyed all of humanity in a flood, because you don't, you don't, you don't believe that the Bible is telling accurate stories, well, then why do you believe this story is accurate? The truth is that God saw humanity and that it was utterly wicked and that the world couldn't go forward with this group of people. The world could not move forward with this group of people in it. And so he took that group of people out in a flood. We know this about God. We know that God says that he's long suffering, slow to anger, plenty in mercy. He wants people to provide acceptance and love for the stranger. In fact, he told Israel to accept the strangers in and to even teach them how to worship him. We know that he waited hundreds of years before he even liberated the promised land. In fact, the Bible says that he waited until the wickedness of the Canaanites was at its fullest. He waited till their wickedness was in its full stage. And we know that their depravity was great. We know that they indulged in child sacrifice, cult prostitution, **********, pedophilia, Sodom and Gomorrah. Looks like it was a great place compared to what had taken place in Canaan over the last 400 years. When I, the Israelites, were not in Canaan. Sodom and Gomorrah was just the beginning of the story. They killed their newborn children in cult sacrifices. And the Midianites didn't attack Israel with their armies. Even though they had five kings and great cities and great fortresses. They sent their women to entice Israel into that type of sacrifice. So their type of warfare was not willing to be to confront Israel militarily. It was going to be to entice Israel into their cultural ways, to take Israel down by making Israel like them. And God said, we're not going to have that. We're not going to have anything that had anything to do with the sexualization and the destruction that had happened in Canaan. We're not going to be a part of that. And when they did their best to entice Israel toward it and caused a plague, it caused a plague that killed thousands of Israelites that was due to their enticing them into their cultural ways, God said, get rid of them. Don't leave them alive. Don't leave them with the ability to, to cause any more destruction anymore. Problem. These things are not hyperbole and they're not something that Moses is overstating. He understands that God, once a society, tips to a place where it is at its core evil and all its people are evil, and they are going to indulge themselves in this type of depravity. And I've already said what it was. I mean, God says, and then they're doing their best to entice his people into it. Could not leave them alive on the borders of the promised land. Couldn't leave them alive. They've proven that not only that were they going to be depraved, but they were going to do their best to cause God's people to be depraved. And so when, when they did their best to destroy Israel, God took his vengeance upon them using Israel. And that story, just like the Khmer Rouge and **** Germany and, and imperial Japan, those stories still go on today. When a people, when a people are so wicked that they, they will do that, they want God's people destroyed. God still to this day, removing them from the borders of Israel, he still to this day is doing that. And people don't like that. And I can promise you the enemy doesn't like that. And it's a difficult, it's a difficult topic to deal with. And I will say this, that this passage is hard to read. But I do understand that the sins of the father passed to the second 3rd generation. We've already read that, we've already studied that. Now we also know that the grace of God or the change that God brings by his goodness and mercy are to a thousand generations. But when a people won't accept that and a people dive deeper and deeper in depravity. God will not contend. His spirit will not contend with that forever. Eventually, as in this passage in scripture, but as in history, in its totality, eventually God. God destroys those people groups. He destroys them, he ends them on the face of the earth. And the truth is, there's a reason why a small band of people, a group of people that are today less than 25 million in the world, have existed for 3500 years. And it's not because they perfectly served God, but it is because they have served God. The Israelites are still on the earth today, and the midianites are not. And the reason is because the Israelites, in all their messed upness, in all their inability to do it right, have kept God and the remnant of God in their hearts. Yahweh, the one true goddess. And so God has kept them on the face of the earth, and they are still here, and they are a strong nation because of it. And so, you know, sometimes we would just prefer to skip over passages like this and not deal with them. But the truth is, is that we need to deal with them. And we need to see that side of God. Because one day God will condemn all those who have not placed their faith in him. He will condemn them to an eternal, everlasting death, a death separation from him in hell. And when we can't accept that God's judgment and his vengeance upon those who would seek to destroy his will and his way is true and real, then we begin to not accept that God is a holy God. We deny his holiness. And when you get there, then the God that you're talking about and the God that I'm talking about are two different gods, not the same. Our God is loving long suffering. I mean, he allowed this to go on for 400 years. I mean, we didn't allow the Nazis to go on for 400 years. He allowed it to go on for 400 years until their wickedness had come before him. And it was so great that he could not stand for them to be there anymore, no more. And so he wiped them out. Our God is a holy God. And you will glorify him. You'll either glorify him as grace and mercy and his providing for atonement for our sin, or you will glorify his holiness through his wrath and judgment. And it's just plain as that. And that's a clear teaching of scripture. Also, if you'll notice, most of scripture is about his grace and mercy because the invitation is, is to trust him. But we can't remove the things that say that he's holy and that he's deserving of that trust. We can't remove it.

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.