Numbers 33:10-49 Bible Study | Episode 825

December 6, 2024

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

Numbers 33:10-49  Bible Study | Episode #825

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 33. Numbers, chapter 33. And I, uh, we're gonna do verses five, uh, through 49. And, uh, as you're looking at five through 49, you're going, how can you do five through 49? Well, there's two choices that I had, uh, preparing for this Bible study. The first choice was to actually read five through 49 and just have a comedy hour. And, uh, you go, a comedy hour? Yeah, there, I mean, some of these, some of these names of these places, there's no way I could read them. There's just this not. I would probably. It would be hilarious. It really would. And if you really knew what the names were, it would even be more hilarious. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to do that at all. I'm going to point out two very important things about this. This passage describes, it says then the children of Israel in verse five moved from ramesses, meaning in, in Egypt and camped in Succoth. They departed from Succoth and camped in Etham, which is on the edge of the wilderness. They moved from Ethan and turned back to well. And then we go into it and it goes into. Well, the Bible takes five, starting verse five and going all the way through verse 49, which is 45 verses. It describes the different places. It gives names for the different places where God's people moved and camped. Very little commentary. There's just a few little comments. One of them is about one of the places they stayed that's got. That had twelve wells and 70 palm trees. It's one of those places that's mentioned in the Bible. It's named Zealam. It's one of those places that's mentioned in the Bible a couple of times. And it's. It's, uh, you know, a known place even today. Um, and then we then it talks about camping at Sinai and meeting with God. And that's kind of in verse 15. And then uh, as they move, then you have a multitude of verses, over 20 verses where it names a place that they move to. Now you go, why is that important? Why, why is it important? Well, the first thing that you need to understand about the Bible, the Bible is a self authenticating book. What do I mean by that? Well, there's two ways the Bible has self authenticated itself. One of the ways is through prophecy. The Bible has very specific prophecies about very specific things. It's not like some of the people that are lauded as, as, as prophets. You know, historically, I can't even remember the name of the guy who supposedly foretold of Hitler, except for he, he named him Hitler. Not Hitler, but Hitler, by the way. That's not a prophecy. That's, that's not a foretelling. That's a, that, that's just a random guess. And by the way, when you read his prophecies or his writings, they are so wildly ununderstandable, hard to, hard to read that you really don't even know what he's talking about. And then because it is so random and so hard to read, if you dig through it, you're liable to find something that you can tie to something in history just because there's letters and words there. But the Bible is not that way. The Bible, the Bible gives us very specific prophecies about things that are going to happen, about Jesus, about God's plan for the future. And in those prophecies, when those prophecies are fulfilled, it's clear that it's going to happen. I mean, do you know that the Bible prophesies that the children of Israel will be regathered in the, the promised land, uh, long after they are scattered by the, uh, Romans? Uh, do, do you know that there's a prop, there's prophecy in the Old Testament and the New Testament about that? Uh, yeah, there's prophecy about that. Uh, and that happened, that happened, you know, 2000 years after, after the prophecies, some of them three and 4000 years. Um, and so prophecy is the, is the hallmark of the Bible. There are other religious books in the world. None of them self authenticate themselves by prophecy, meaning none of them have passages in it in those books that, first of all claim to tell us something that's going to happen in the future. Second of all, none of them have, have a, have those prophecies come true if they do have anything that says anything about the future. They're left undone. They're left unfulfilled. And so when we're studying scripture and we're reading through the Bible and we hit these places where God says this is going to happen, where a prophet speaks. In fact, in the Old Testament, there's a section of scripture called the major prophets, and we have a lot of those. There's several major prophets that write long books of prophecy. And then we have minor prophets, meaning their books are smaller, but their prophecies, none the more powerful. None the less powerful. I mean, they are. They are. They're just as powerful. Joel. Joel speaks of Jesus and the coming Messiah and is dead on the money. Dead on the money about who Jesus is. So, as you're. As you're studying through scripture, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, these are books. Daniel is so specific that people hundreds and thousands of years later believe that Daniel had to be. Had to have been written after when it was claimed to be written. And the reason they thought that way is because it was so accurate, so on the money, so dead on true, that those who read it believed this could not have been written prior to it happening. It is so accurate. And that's. That's the fingerprint of God. That's. That's God authenticating his. His. His scripture. He's saying this. I'm speaking through this, not. Not men. These men are the. These men who are writing these things are inspired by my holy spirit. Sure, I'm using their personality. You can see their personality in the writing, but I am. I am the one who's speaking through these. These pages. And. And so you've got. You've got in this passage another method of self. Self authentication, and that is that the Bible is archaeologically accurate. What do you mean by that, pastor? Well, as you read through scripture, you read of these names, and then you can actually go to Google Maps and look these names up. Now, some of them. There's a few of them that we're not sure where they're at. I mean, you know, some of these names, but. But, you know, in. In verse 15, there's two names there. Verse 16, two names. Verse 17, two names. Verse 18, two names. Verse 19, two names. You, as you go through verses 15 through 37, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 to 30 names of places that are mentioned in scripture here. And of those 25 or 30, there's probably a third of them that we have trouble knowing where exactly that's at. A third of them were. We pretty sure we know, Archie. You know, we've dug there, we've, we found reason to believe that that's that place. And then there's a third of them that, you know, are still, that's what they're called right now. That's the place that they're, they are called that to this day. We know exactly where they're at. Uh, and so, uh, it's not really hard to kind of figure out, okay, if they move from here to this place, we're not sure about where it's at to this place. Well, we kind of know it's somewhere in between the two. We don't know. It may not exist today. It may not. It, the, the location may not be, uh, uh, a place where people live today. So, you know, it's buried in the sand, it's buried in time. But, but that doesn't change the fact. Just because I can't find every one of these doesn't mean that God wasn't dead on accurate with it. It just means that God was saying, look, I'm going to tell you where the children of Israel went. I'm going to tell you where they camped at, how they moved. I'm going to tell you that. And so that over 3000 years later, when you go look for them, you'll know where they are. I mean, if you think about it, 3000 years later, 3000 years later, we can go and find these places, you know, well over half of them. We know pretty accurately exactly where they're at. God saying, I exist throughout time and space and I exist throughout history. And all that you write down and think about and all that is remembered and all that's not remembered, I'm lord of it all. I'm the ruler of this world. And I'm the ruler over time, which is a aspect of this world. It's really as a dimension of this world. Time is interwoven in space. And so we know that time is an aspect of creation. God says, I'm the lord of those things and I'm gonna give you these names. Moses is gonna write them down and exactly what they called them. And then you're 3500 years later, you're gonna be able to find most of these places on a map, or you will, you'll know. We'll know pretty much where they're at and go be able to seek them out and find them. That is a, that is a powerful, powerful fingerprint. Almost as powerful, I think, is the prophecies. Because how many places in America have, are abandoned and lost that and we've only been a nation for less than 300 years. And we can find these places 3000 years later, ten times the amount of time we can find them. Then you get to 38, and in verse 38 we see God tells you exactly where Aaron died. He tells you when that happened, the 40th year, Israel coming out of the land of Egypt. And then we understand that Aaron died about a year or two before they were going to enter into the promised land because God said they were going to have to wait 40 years, and he died 40 years after they left. So he said that about a year or two into their journey. And so we know, we know how all this works out and we know that these places are real and you can have confidence about God with that. God, God is. God is. If you want some evidence, those are two great pieces of evidence, the self authentication of scripture, meaning God authenticates that. You know, for me that's, that's kind of important in my, in the legal profession. One of the things we, we do, especially for testamentary documents. What do I mean by that? Well, they're documents that deal with somebody wanting to let everybody know what's to happen with their property after they pass on. It's a time, it's a time issue. They, they, they want to have a say in their state or the residue of their life. And that has all kinds of biblical meanings for me. They want to have a say about the residue of their life after they're gone. They want to, in some ways, have something to say about time. And so in those documents we want to be able to, we want them to be able to self authenticate themselves, meaning we want them to. We want them to be able to be authenticated without having to go and find the people who witnessed it. Because by the way, in time they may have passed away. And so how do we do that? Well, we have two witnesses and then we have somebody notarize it, which is a notary which says, this person has been, been commissioned by the state of Alabama to sign documents saying that the people who are signing the documents are the people that they say they are. And so we have a person who authenticates the two signatures of the witnesses and the witnesses are authenticating the signature of the person who is, who is, who is writing the will or who is assigning their will. Self authenticating. It's very difficult if you think about it. That's, you're going through three separate the person signs their will, the witnesses sign saying they saw the person sign their will, and then you've got a notary who's saying that they notarizing the signatures of the two people and they are who they say they are, who witness the person signing the will. Self authenticating wheels. It's. It's strange. God says, I'll do that, too. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you two methods to authenticate me. I'm gonna. I'm gonna give you prophecies. And when they come true, you're gonna be easily able to tell that I was right. And then I'm gonna give you places. I'm gonna give you actual locations on the map in the world you live in. And 3000 years later, you're gonna be able to find them. What awesome God. What an amazing God. What a wonderful, wonderful God we serve. He does not want to leave us as orphans, and he does not want us to think we're orphans. He wants us to know who he is and know that he is and to walk with 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.