Deuteronomy 5:19 Bible Study | Episode 859

January 23, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 5:19 Bible Study | Episode #859

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 five, and we're dealing with the Ten Commandments. Now I want to, I want to kind of do a little pivot this morning and, and go into some more depth and theory and understanding and kind of explain some things that will help you down the road and I really think are important understandings for you to have in the society that we live in and understandings that we have in the, in the nation that we live in. And obviously I'm teaching from the United States and understanding how the Old Testament law was taken. And obviously the Old Testament law, from what I've been teaching for a while, is a representation. It's God's manifestation of his character. He's telling us how he exists and understanding that when God created the universe, he created the universe out of himself. I mean, he, he did not create universe from something other than himself, he created the universe from himself. And so the laws that define God correlate to the laws that govern the universe. And that makes sense if you think about it. Basically the laws that are the Old Testament law that come directly from the character nature of God. If you did a math equation, Old Testament law, and remember that equal sign that was kind of wavy, which means it's not exactly the same, but it's pretty much the same. It would be that squiggly equal line, the laws that govern the way our universe operates. And in fact, the way we got modern day science, the way we got to the place where we have modern day science, is the people who understood that the God who created the universe also created creation and nature. And so nature, being the natural world that we live in, came from the laws of God. Then we can study not only the laws of God, but we can study the laws of nature and know God better that way. And Romans chapter one explains that well also, and I've said this several times during our Bible study over the course of the last several years. But Romans chapter one says that, that God's divine nature and his eternal qualities are easily seen in that which he created, which is a very eloquent way. Well, it's God's way of saying, I made the universe from myself and my nature can be seen in what I made. And so obviously, his nature is a nature. His nature has an ability to be defined by the law. It has an ability to be defined by a life, meaning the life of Jesus Christ. It has ability to be defined by overarching characteristics like grace, like holiness, like love. Those, those characteristics are overarching understandings of the, of the very nature of God. The law is a, is a definer or it sets the parameters of his character and his holiness. And the universe is kind of a beautiful, intricate, masterful presentation of him in his divine. Well, as he says in Romans 1, his divine qualities and his eternal nature. And so when we get to the Ten Commandments, the Ten Commandments kind of define, or, you know, hidden in the Ten Commandments or maybe right in the wide open. The Ten Commandments kind of define the natural law that governs the way we actually live as a society. Because our society, our government structure, the fundamentals that undergird how we relate to each other in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution are based off of natural law. I don't know if you know that or not, but it's based off of the laws of nature as we see them and as they correlate to the laws of the Old Testament. And you go, pastor, I just don't know what you're talking about. Well, I want you to think through it, maybe even rewind this, maybe look up natural law, maybe begin to think about how, how, remember all this came from God. The Bible says in John 1 about Jesus, everything was made by him, and nothing that was made was not made by him, which means it came from Him. So it's got to correlate some, it's got to come together some. And there is an aspect of natural law that is heavily under attack in the world that we live in and in our society itself. And I want to, I want to kind of pull that out of this. I want to pull it out. And so, so you can kind of see how it's. How the natural law that fundamentally governs our society is being attacked. And then obviously how that would be an attack on the Old Testament law or on the very character and nature of God. And so when we get to the ten Commandments, you've got the first commandments, and you get through honor your father and mother. And then you have these series of. Well, there are five commandments here. And each one of them, except for the first one, basically says, neither this, neither this, neither this, neither this. And the first one is, thou shalt not murder. You shall not murder. Okay, so it starts out, you shall not do these. This is the parameters. It's the law. It sets the parameters on what is holy and right and what's not right. And the first thing is, you shall not murder. And then if you read it actually in the Hebrew, it's neither adultery, neither steal, neither bear faults witnessed against your neighbor, neither desire my neighbor's wife. Okay? And it goes through those things. But it starts out, you parameters. It's a fence. It's saying, here's the fence, don't kill. You shall not kill. Neither adultery, neither steal, nor neither bear false witness. Notice how it's real simple. It's almost like stakes in a ground. And then you put the fence around the stakes, and you now know the parameters of God's nature. You know who God is by actually looking at that and reading that and seeing that. But the third one is really, really important because there's a fundamental behind it that I want to get to, and I've already done 17 and 18, which is killing adultery. Today I want to talk about steel. I. And if you'll think about it, in order for me to steal something from you, you have to have a right to own something. You have a right to have something as property. Now, I want you to hear me, that comes from the Old Testament. And as, as a society, we say that people have a right to property because of the Old Testament and because of the fundamental understanding that there is a right of ownership or a right. Each individual has a right to own the product of their life or the things that derive from your life and your work and your efforts. You're working your efforts called labor, but your life, you have a right to the things that are the natural. They're the natural outgrowth of who I am and what I do. And so if you have a right to freely use and to freely own the product of your life, the product of how you've lived, then you have a right to property. And that's probably part of natural law. I'm going to go to the Declaration of Independence because it's based off of the natural law. Like I said, it's based off of the law of God. It says we hold these truths to be self evident. We hold these truths to be obvious to everybody that we're endowed by our creator. Meaning we've been given these things from God. They're naturally from God. They're the natural world. In fact, science used to be called the philosophy of the natural world. So we, we hold these truths, these, this truth to be obvious to everybody that all men are created equal. I now that does not mean that we're created the same, but we're created equal in that we have fundamental rights that are the same for everybody. Are you with me? Now we're not created the same, but we're created with. At its core, at its core we all have the same fundamental rights. And then it says among them and it names them in ascending order of importance. Life, liberty. And it should have been property. Okay, it wasn't property. They said the pursuit of happiness would, which would be the pursuit of your own will. And it's part of it. That would be a part of it. If I pursued my own will and then I, I got things from the world because I pursued my own world, my own will, then I would, I would naturally have a right to the product of my pursuits. So it's a way of saying property without saying property. And the, why didn't they just say property? Well, because people owned human beings and that would have messed up the first right, which is a is, is the right to life. And the second right, which is a right to liberty. So you can't own people and then, and then say everybody has a right to life and liberty and property because you don't have a right to own people. Okay, which makes perfect sense. But the natural law, the under their understanding of things, the natural law said that we had a right to the product of our labor. And so obviously if I pursue happiness, if I pursue my will, which would make me happy, then I would have the right to the product of my will, which would be property. So it was end around in order to not say property so that they messed the whole thing up. Now you go, why did they do that? Well, because they'd been owning slaves and it was wrong and it was evil. Okay, Just way it is, it was wrong and it was evil. And they knew it was, all of them knew it was. Every one of them knew it was okay. But they couldn't, they would never bring us together as a nation by getting rid of it at that time. And it cost us a whole lot in our history. Them not being able to do that. But the fundamental truth of the natural law still remained, and that remained. That which remained is that you have a right to own property. You go, pastor, why are you big into this? Well, because godless Marxism teaches you that you do not have a right to property, that everything that is, is. Is in the world is the property of the governing body. Okay, so Marxism teaches us that the products of our labor are owned by the collective society or the government. You would say, well, if it's the collective society, that might be a good thing. Sure, it might be. If the society was perfect and good, it would be a good thing. But. But it's not. The society's not perfect and good, and the government is definitely not perfect and good. And so if everything that we have is owned by the collective society, which is ultimately controlled by the government and the government's imperfect, then everything we have is fundamentally marred and messed up. And so we can't have that. We have to have an understanding, a true understanding, which comes from the way God actually made the universe, that which is the natural world. We have to have fundamental understanding that we have a right to life, so you can't kill somebody. We have a right to intimate relationships that's not messed up by somebody else, so you can't commit adultery. We have a right to be free. We have a right to own property. And you can't steal or take that property from me without compensating me. And so there's a right to property. And this says in the Ten Commandments that nobody has a right to take what's mine or yours or anybody else's, because it's the product of our lives. And we have a right to direct the product of our lives, how it's used and where it goes, even pay, even to our children and our grandchildren, because they have a right to benefit from the product of our life, because they do have to struggle with the product of our lives in the sense that they struggle with the things we give them from our sin nature that are terrible and they have to work through them. And so we have a right to. We have a right to life. We have a right to liberty and. Or freedom, and we have a right to property. And that's why you shall not steal. Pastor, that was a long way to go around the tree to get to this. Sure it was. But I want you to know the whole tree. I don't want you to know part of it. I want you to be able to see this not only from the biblical perspective, because that comes from God. But I want you to be able to see it from the character perspective which comes from God. And I want you to be able to see it from the actual practical, how it's, how it's played out in the world perspective. Because by the way, that comes from God. To remember the Bible is holy. The Bible is perfect. The Bible is true. And probably as important as all of those things are, the Bible is practical. For me, the prop. The Bible is relevant for my life right now. And how do I know that? Well, if you really look into it, you figure it out that yeah, the Bible is relevant for me today. It is. It is intensely relevant for my life because God is. He's eternal and his life is here in this moment with me. In fact, his life resides in me. The life he has, he's given to me. Those whom the Father give me, I give eternal life. That's what Jesus said. What a beautiful gift. It's the life of God that he's given me. 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.