Deuteronomy 5:17-18 Bible Study | Episode 858

January 22, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 5:17-18  Bible Study | Episode #858

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 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 5. We continue in the Ten Commandments, and we're going to deal with two commandments. Two commandments. Mainly because Jesus deals with both of these commandments in the Sermon on the Mount when he's describing the state of man and the. The natural state of man in sin. And then he. He gives an explanation of. Of why he's come and why the law. And this is the embodiment, the encompassment of the law, why the law is ineffective in its ability to change human life, to change human beings, to make them someone that can be redeemed. Well, someone that can be in the presence of God, someone that's not sinful. And so we need to first define them because I think it's important, especially in our modern culture, we struggle with defining things and giving a clear definition of how things, what things are and how they work. But in this, we can get a pretty clear understanding of what each commandment says and what it means. You shall not murder. And the new King James does a pretty good job of just really breaking these down into plain English without adding a lot of words that might. Might lead you a little bit of strain. Now, murder is the intentional taking of a life. I'm just giving you not just the legal definition, but, but an. An idea and understanding of how God sees it. Murder is the intentional taking of a human life by another without a natural defense. And what do you say? Without a nap. What do you mean by a natural defense? Well, murder is where I intentionally act in a way that I know or have reason to believe or should know. I know I have a reason to believe or I should know is going to result in the ending of a life of another. So I take that action and I don't have a natural defense for it. And what I Mean by natural? Well, that's natural law. And it's, it's really the hallmark, one of the cornerstones of our jurisprudence, system, our legal system. And a natural defense might be self defense. It might be the defense of others. And there's some other very obscure defenses out there, but those are usually the two main defenses. Is where I, I'm defending myself or I'm defending a group of people that would defend themselves if they could. In the way I'm defending myself, I would be defending myself. And so the defense of others and the defense of oneself is a defense, meaning it's a natural right. It comes from God. Defense for the intentional killing of another or the intentional taking the life of another without a defense. So it is, it is a defense for murder, and it's a complete defense, which means you can't be convicted of it if you ha. You rightly use that defense. Murder is the intentional taking of someone else's life without a natural defense. All right? And it's not to kill the. By the way, murder, it's not murder. When you're fighting in a war and you kill a soldier from the other side, that's not murder. Okay? You have a natural defense for that. You are, you are operating within the command of your, of your government and you are killing soldiers on the other side. Now, if you kill other people on the other side, there's some issues that come involved in that. Not if you don't, if you, if you kill civilians, there. There's some other things that come into play. And that, that usually comes into play to those who sent you to do it. And so you have, you have murder, then you have adultery. Now, adultery is a sexual relationship outside of marriage. When you are in marriage, meaning adultery is where you have sexual relationship with somebody outside of the, outside of your marriage. Once you are marriage, you say, well, what about if you're not married? Well, that's called fornication. And that's dealt with in scripture too. Sex outside of marriage in general is fornication. Sex outside of marriage, when you are. Marriage is married is adultery. And so now that we kind of have that understanding of what those, what those commandments are and what they mean, you can kind of begin to move on and say, okay, why did Jesus deal with these? Well, the reason Jesus dealt with these on the Sermon on the Mount is because they are probably the most passionate and the most difficult of the commandments to follow. In the sense that when your emotions take over and there's two primary emotions, two primary drives, I Guess that take over. When they take over, you end up doing these things, okay? And they. And they originate in the heart of a human being. Murder is the end of some act of hate. When you hate someone and you conceive in your heart to get rid. To take the most fundamental. One of the most fundamental rights a person has, which is a right to life. When you. When you hate someone so bad that you're willing to take their life, when you're willing to murder them, well, that's a. That's a passion that. That comes from. Well, a wicked heart. It does. God. God hates sin, but he does not hate human beings. He loves human beings. He hates that which separate human beings from him. God loved the world. In fact, we know that from John 3:16. He loved all of his creation, and he sent his son to die for it. So God, he hates wickedness, but he loves human beings. And so hatred is a great motivator for murder. In fact, it usually is the motivation for murder. You regard them so little and you disdain them so much that you're willing to take their life. Adultery is. Comes from the passion of youthful lust, meaning the lust that we begin to feel even as we're children and young adults. And that lust becomes greater and greater. And adultery is operating in that lust outside of marriage when you. When you shouldn't. And it is a. It is a powerful instinct, very powerful in human. In human. In the human life. The sexual instinct is a very powerful instinct in the human life. And God made it so. So that we would multiply in the earth. Without it, I will tell you, men would have very little to do with women with it. Men want to have everything to do with women. And men are not naturally socialized. And they're not. It's come as a natural part of who they are to be socialized or to be relational in the way they function in the world. The sexual motive or the motivation to fulfill sexuality is a great motivation for man. And it causes him to desire relationships outside of himself. And then ultimately it. It causes him to learn how to live within the confines of society and be productive in society. God has given us that great gift. And so when we. When we deal with both of these things, we understand that these are passions and lust and desires that are deep in our hearts and oftentimes are marred by our wickedness, okay? They're marred by our wickedness. Our hatred for what or who somebody is turns to a hatred for them, which ultimately ends into a desire for them to be dead, okay? To take their Natural light, right to life. Adultery is the sexual instinct operating wrongly outside the body. And that's what it is. And so when we. And outside the confines of marriage. And Jesus said, you've heard it said in, in the. In the sermon on the mount, Matthew 4 through 7, Matthew, chapter 4 through 7. He says, you've heard it 5 through 7. You've heard it said, thou shalt not commit adultery. But I say unto you, any man who's looked at a woman with lust in his heart has already committed adultery. And what he's saying is that instinct, when it's mixed with that sin, nature becomes something that is evil. It's wicked, it's wrong. And the commandment to not commit adultery helps us identify the depths of that wickedness. This Ten Commandments helps us identify that that's outside of God's desires. It's outside of God's nature, and it's wrong. Okay? The same is true of murder. He said, you've heard said again, and he's quoting the Ten Commandments, you shall not commit a murder. But I say, anyone who have has hatred in his heart. So what he's saying is murder is the outward manifestation of hatred, which is the opposite of God's character and nature in your heart, manifest itself out in your life. And he says. He says that's wrong. And what he's. What he's saying is, it's wrong not because of the action of killing someone, although that's wrong. It's not wrong because of the action of adultery, although that's wrong. He says, it starts somewhere, and it manifests outside of your body. It manifests out in the world. But the start is that you have a heart bent toward hatred. You have a heart bent toward sexual gratification outside of God's will and God's way. And when he says when. When you do that, you prove that God's law is true. And you prove that you are utterly helpless to deal with it. You. It's, it's, it's. You're. You have no. You have no innate defenses against it because you are so wicked. You are. And so he says. He says, you can't do that. You got. There's got to be another way. And the other way is not to throw away the law, because the law continues to help us identify God. It identifies the very character and nature of God. It's not to throw away the law. It's to have something that is going to help me fulfill the law. And Jesus said, I didn't come to destroy the Law, but be a fulfillment, fulfillment of that law. And what he's saying is, I came so that I could help you get to the place where you fulfill the requirements of the law. But you do not live in such a way that you are living by the law because you can't do that yourself. There's got to be something else that does that. And we learn from the teachings of Christ, from the understanding that he says, you know, you got to have, you got to be born again. You have to have a. The Holy Spirit come and live with that new human spirit that's placed in you. You've got, you've got to begin to allow the Holy Spirit and your new human spirit to change your heart, to alter your ways to save you. And remember, he's saving us. God's saving us mainly from ourselves, okay? He saves us from the world. He saves us from sin and darkness. But really he saves all that stuff coming together in us. He saves us from ourselves. And that salvation from ourselves allows us to live by God's will, by walking in the way and in the light and in the life. And who is that walking in the way Jesus walked. Walking in the life Jesus had. Walking in the light Jesus gives. And how do I do that? By living by the Spirit, live by the Spirit and do not gratify the desires of the sinful nature. How do I know what the desires of the sinful nature are? Well, the desires of the sinful nature are in opposition to God's character and nature. So when God says, worship him and serve him only, we don't naturally want to do that. When God says, honor your father and mother, we don't naturally want to do that. When God says, don't murder, we naturally, as our, as hateful, wicked human beings, we desire to take others lives because of our hatred for them. When he says, do not commit adultery, he's saying, don't act sexually outside of, outside of the confines of marriage. But we want to do that. We desire that. That's the desire of our hearts and the commandment. All it does is identify the wickedness. The Spirit is what leads us into the way, the truth and the life, okay? It leads us into the light. That is God's way. It leads us into all truth. The Holy Spirit leads us into God's life. And that's how it works. That's how, that's how, that's how the law leads us to an understanding that we are wholly inadequate to live by it. And we need a redeemer to fix us to Solve that problem. And that redeemer is Jesus Christ. And when we walk in his will and his way, we have life and we have abundant life. Now that, that is, that is. That is one of those things that, that is real, real, real important. And we know that, as Miles says here, the law is spiritual, but I'm fleshly. It's a great passage from Romans, having been sold into the bondage under sin. And so what, what we say, what Miles gives us, Sarah, Romans, he's saying, you know, we, we are under the bondage of sin. And the law is spiritual. It is. It is a definer of the character, nature of the spiritual God. God the Father is complete Spirit God, the Holy Spirit's complete Spirit. God the Son is the physical manifestation of God, but he is the embodiment of the law because he is lived by the spiritual truth that is the law. And we're wholly inadequate to do it. And so what does the law do do? It defines for us who God is. What does the Spirit do? The Spirit leads us into that truth, to the fulfillment of that truth. And so it's hard, it's hard to first comprehend. It is. I mean, it's difficult. It's difficult to get it in all its nuances. And I'm not even telling you that I get it in all its nuances. But once you really realize it, you begin to love the law. Really you do. You begin to love the law. You begin to love the Old Testament and understanding these things because you begin to see that, okay, I can know the character and nature of God by knowing these things. And then you begin to love God by the Spirit and you begin to love others because you love God. And then, and then your life begins to walk in a fulfilling, powerful way. And so I just want to take that stop and look at it tomorrow. We're going to look at you. Shall not steal. It's going to be a really good dive into our understanding of how society ought to be built and how the world God made actually works in the world that we live in. And so we're going to dive into that. But the law is powerful and it's good and it's a schoolmaster. It teaches us. And then the Spirit leads us into the fulfillment. 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.