Deuteronomy 4:44-49 Bible Study | Episode 851

January 13, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 4:44-49 Bible Study | Episode #851

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 will 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 Deuteronomy, chapter four. We're finishing the chapter out today. And what we're reading today is actually a rehashing of what's happened, but it's set in a former fashion. That would be kind of like a argument that would be made in court. And as we study through it, I want to spend some time looking at, well, a particular part of the passage that explains why he's saying this. And it also gives us some understanding about how God revealed to the children of Israel his process of revelation. And so in this passage, which seems kind of innocuous and in some ways, as you're reading through scripture, sometimes you pass these things by and you miss them. But it is giving us an understanding of the way God is not only putting his fingerprint on the passage, he is. He is telling us exactly the things that God does. As far as saying, hey, look, I'm giving you evidence, proof that these things are true, that these things that I do are true. One of the ways he does that, it's not the most impressive way, but it's a very important way, is he names people, places, times and events and that happened. Why is that important? Well, because God knew that later on there would be archaeological evidence of those history. Dates, times, events, places, all those things. And by. By spelling them out and. And making sure that Scripture has a lot of that in it, God is making sure that you. You know, that. That you can look back and say, hey, the. There's definitely a Moses and a Daniel and a. And King David and. And, you know, you. Before you go through it, Abraham and. And farther and farther back, even as far back as this, which is really over 3,000 years from today, you can look back and we know that these things took place. In fact, most of the world believes in aspects of The Old Testament, and when I say most of it, the Christian world, the Jewish world, the Muslim world, make up at least half of the world population. So at least half of the world's population believes that this is, this is true. This is, this is scriptural. This is God putting his fingerprint on it. And the reason they have that is not because it's some kind of blind faith. God gives us in the, in the very rudimentary way, the very basic way, he gives us evidence. And then he also gives us evidence that in very supernatural, powerful ways, through prophecy and through the testimony of others of the mighty works of God. And those things are added on to, and, and, and make, make God's testimony more and more powerful. And so you go, why are you dealing with this, Pastor? Well, because I'm a lawyer. I mean, I like testimony and evidence and things like that. Why? Because I have to use them. They're tools of my life. And I know when I go into court and I'm going to, and I'm going to make an argument or I'm going to, I'm going to ask the court to do something, I have to present the court evidence. Why? Because in order for someone to believe, trust, act upon what you say, you've got to, you got to either have a reservoir of truth that's out there for them to hold on to, or you've got to have. Or you got to have evidence that is clear that there's obvious that what you're saying is true. And so when we read these passages and God says here, I'm going to give you this idea, this understanding, this evidential information. When he says, I'm going to do that, we need to listen, we need to sit back and go, okay, what are you, how are you saying it? Well, he starts out this way. Now, this is the law which Moses set before the children of Israel. Now he's saying he's about to give them the law. And he does in chapter five, we're going to start studying through the second presentation of what we have as, as the, the second presentation of what we have as the Ten Commandments. And so we're going to go through the Ten Commandments because we've already had, it's already been given to us in Exodus. But we're going to, we're going to go back and here in Deuteronomy, we're going to have another presentation of it. Why? Because Deuteronomy is a, is a recap. It's a Reese recall is going back through and explaining to the children of the children that left Egypt is going back and explaining to them how God. How God has delivered them. It's Moses telling them he's going through what God has done. And so when we read this, this is what he's saying. I'm going to give you the law. But. But you need to understand that that law and that revelation comes from a process. What are they? He says, verse 45. These are the testimonies, the statutes and the judgments which Moses spoke to the children of Israel after they came out of Egypt. All right, what he's saying is, I'm. I'm telling you, I'm get. I'm testifying to you. I'm telling you what I experienced. I'm telling you what I was told as far as the statutes. And then I'm telling you how God led me to make judgments from those things. So what do we have here? Well, we have a. We have a process. He says, I'm giving you testimony. I'm telling you my experience in this. What happened in which I received this understanding. How did I get this understanding? And that's what I'm testifying to. He says, I'm. I'm going to give you. I'm going to give you the statutes. I'm going to give you the actual revelation that I got from God. The word that I received from God. I'm going to give it to you. All right? Then he says, I'm going to give you the judgments. I'm going to give you the judgments that I made because of those, because of my testimony and because of the statutes. Well, if you think about that, that's the process of faith, right? I experience God. God reveals himself to me. What does he reveal to me? Well, he reveals to me truth. The statutes are a representation of what we would broadly call the truth of God. So I have a experience with God delivering me truth. I have a testimony of truth, okay? That's a revelation from God. That's a very specific way of describing having a revelation from God. He says, these are the testimonies. My experience of God revealing the truth. I remember, remember that God's revelation to us comes in many ways. He has a general revelation to the whole world in his creation that you can clearly see attributes of his nature and character in creation. And then you have the very specific revelation of God in His Son, meaning God reveals to us his. His true divine nature, His. His qualities. Understanding who he is, understanding his character, understanding his heart, understanding his mind. We understand those things through a very specific revelation. Which is through his word and to his son. And then finally we have, we have what we call the judgments which Moses spoke to the children of Israel after they came out of Egypt. So he takes his, his experience and that truth that God gave him and then he put them into practice in his judgments that he gave to the children of Israel. There we are. That's the process we have, we have experiential relationship with God in which he gives us divine judgment and truth. And then we, we act upon it. We, we do those things. And he says I did it. I did these things. Moses spoke to the children of Israel. Where did he do it? When did this happen? Did this really happen? Did this go on? Sure it did. On the side of the Jordan, in the valley opposite of Beth Peor, in the land of Sihon, king of the Amorites, who dwelt in Heshbon. Notice we got places and people, all right? And, and, and, and we've got nations. We can find these things. He says, when Moses and the children of Israel defeated. Israel defeated at whom? Moses and the children of Israel defeated after they came out of Egypt and they took possession of the land of Og, king of Bashan, two kings of the Amorites, who were on this side of the Jordan. Toward the rising of the sun, meaning east of the Jordan from a roar. Notice he'd given us, he's given us geo geographical locations, not only cities and towns, but he's telling where, telling us where those cities and towns were so that later on archaeologists, archaeo archaeologists could go and look for those places, which they did and they found them. Why? Because God's telling you I, I know where these places are. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you where they are. Some of them is still, we're still in existence, he says, he says from Aror and then which is on the bank of the river Arnon, even to the mount of Sion, that is Mount Hermon, he says, and all the planes on the east side of the Jordan as far as the Sea of Arabah. And the Sea of Arab was the Dead Sea below the slopes of Pisgah. And we know that the Dead Sea is beside Mount Pisgah. We know where this is. We know where it's taking place. And so what do you have? You have Moses saying, I'm giving you my experiential testimony. I'm giving you the truth that I received from God. And then I'm telling you how I put that into practice in my judgments. And this is where I did it. By the way, that's how you, that's how you open up with a witness on a witness stand. It's very important. You got to identify who they are, right? Then you got to identify their qualifications for testifying. Meaning why, why are they up there telling you anything, right? If they're, if they're giving you, if they're giving you expert testimony, you got to qualify them as an expert. If they're giving you, if they're giving you testimony as to what they saw heard in that regard, whatever that is, or testimony about something that they did in the, in with a, with an object or an item in the court, you gotta, you gotta qualify them. How do you know this? How do you see this? Do you. I'm, I'm showing you this map. I'm showing you this, this writing. I'm showing you this thing. Is it, does it look like the thing that you saw when you first, when you were first given it as part of this case? And they identify how they experience the world, how they experience that case, and then, and then once that's, that's taken care of, then you get them to testify as to what they did with it, what, what happened, what, what do you know about this? So you can see how this passage is, you know, real attractive to a lawyer because, you know, the law came from the Bible. It did. It really did. I was shocked and amazed at how much of, how much of the law came from scripture. When I was in law school. I'd been pastoring for better part of two decades when I went to law school, and shocked really that it was passed down throughout Europe and then on into England by the Romans. And then eventually, eventually, as they interacted with Christianity and became Christian, it became a part of the British common law. And then it was passed on to us when this nation was founded. And God's word, his testimonies of his truth, has passed on from generation to generation and for thousands of years. And that's evidence of God's revelation, reality and truth. And when I look at this, this is just kind of an opening with a witness. And Moses is teaching me as, as 21st century lawyer to our 20th century lawyer to, to know how to do it, know how to do this right? And I guess I'm a 21st century lawyer anyway. And yet he's also teaching us that what he said and what God said is true. And that's probably the most important thing. It definitely is for everybody. It's the most important thing that God would teach us his truth. That way. And so I pray that as we experience those truths and as we walk in those truths, I pray that we'll continue in our process of testifying to what the things God has done for us and the truth that we have been revealed and then the things that we did about it. What a wonderful God we serve. 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 na