Deuteronomy 7:9-11 Bible Study | Episode 870

 February 7, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 7:9-11  Bible Study | Episode #870

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 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 Deuteronomy chapter 7, and we're dealing with three verses here that are kind of stark. They're kind of out in the open.

God just is, you know, laying down the truth and allowing his people to hear, hear that truth and, and begin to understand that he handles his business. God is a God who handles his business and God is a God who is going to take care of that business.

And we, as a New Testament believer, we can take this and understand this. And it allows us to release our bitterness, our hatred, our, our desire to be avenged in certain areas, our desire to be.

For God's righteousness and holiness to be, to be revealed. And, and when we see some of the things we see in, in the world today in the news and, and we see people act the way they do and treat the way.

Treat God the way they do, it causes us to be angry. We, we can release that. You can, you can let that go. And why can't I let that go?

Well, because God says this. Therefore know that the Lord your God, he is God.

Therefore know that the Lord your God, he is God, the faithful God who keeps his covenant of mercy for a thousand generations with those who love him and keep his commandments or keep his ways or keep his.

His word or keep his, his precepts.

He's. He's got. And he says you need to know. And, and this is one of those foundational principles. In fact, in, in my, in my ordering of the principles that, that are important to really make a part of your heart and your mind.

The, the, the fundamental principle that is, is first and foremost.

And I do know know. It's part of a theological argument too. But, but it is probably part of that theological argument because it's true.

But the foundational principle that you have to, you have to Come to first. As you begin to think about God now, do you have to come to it and know it?

When?

Do you have to know it? When, when you repent and turn to God? No, but it is a underlying principle that kind of allows me to begin to layer on it who God is and understand God is.

The God is the principle of God's sovereign power, his, his position in the universe. And one would think that you would get that from his title. But oftentimes we don't get that.

We don't, we don't, we don't make that a part of who we are. That. We don't make that a fabric of our being. That, that God is God.

That God, the word God, which means the creator of the universe, the, the author of the universe. It's not a, it's not like the gods of Greece or gods of Rome or, or the, you know, the gods of the, of the Egyptian pharaohs.

It's not like the gods of, of, of Canaan, the, the BAAL gods. The, they're not individual gods who have some kind of power.

When we talk about God, we talk about the preeminent being in the universe, the, the, the creator and author of the universe. That's what we made. Now you can question, you know, there is question as to whether or not the universe somehow began on its own.

Okay. Which philosophically is a terrible road to go down for those who don't believe in God, because anything that has a beginning, has an initiator, has something that initiates its beginning.

You can't begin on your own. You, Something begins. If you have a beginning, something begins you. And we know scientifically haven't always believed this in the past. In fact, until science came along, we believe some, some, many, even Christians, even the Church believed that the universe began.

The universe didn't have a beginning. It was an eternal, it was eternal in its nature itself. But we now know that the universe has a beginning. And we, we know it scientifically, we know it from our understanding of physics, uh, and our, uh, God's revelation of that.

So the universe has a beginning, and nothing that begins, begins without something initiating or starting it. Okay, and that's a, that's a philosophical principle. It's a, it's a, it's a scientific principle, though.

You know, even, even, even the layers of science that come past it. You know, object in motion tends to stay in motion. Well, an object that's not in motion does not tend to begin to have motion.

The corollary of that is true.

And so God is the preeminent initiator of the universe. He's God.

And then God says, look, I'm God. I'm sovereign. I'm the Creator of the universe, and I'm a faithful God who keeps my promises, my eternal contracts. That's what a covenant is, an eternal contract.

I keep my eternal contracts and my mercy.

So you don't have to always perform.

In fact, you know, in a contract, each side has a. Has to. Has consideration. And I don't know if you know that. I, I'm getting into the legal field, but each side has consideration.

In a contract, I have to give something. It might be labor, it might be an effort, might be knowledge, something. In the contract, I give something for something. There's consideration on both sides, and if there's not consideration on both sides, then it's a gift, okay?

It's not a contract.

So a covenant is an eternal contract.

And that contract is, is that God is going to deliver us from sin and death. He's gonna. He's gonna give us access to all that he has and all that he is.

And we are going to serve Him. We're going to be his. His people. We're going to walk in his will, in his way, by faith. We're going to have. We're going to keep his commandments.

That's what. Now in the Old Testament, that was the, that was the, the covenant. In the New Testament, it's beyond that. It's not, it's not just keep his commandments. It is to trust him and walk with him on a daily basis is to.

Is to hear his voice and follow Him. Now you say, well, that's really the Old Testament to. Pastor, you're right, it is.

It is. We. We walk by faith and not by sight in the Old Testament and the New Testament.

Our righteousness comes by faith in the Old Testament and the New Testament. And so as you're, as you're studying through scripture, He. He says here, he says, here I am.

I am faithful to keep my covenants with you and mercy for a thousand generations. Mercy is giving me something that I.

Mercy is not giving me what I deserve in the sense of the penalty for my sin.

So, so we serve a God who is. Who is God and who is faithful to keep his covenants. And he is faithful to provide us mercy for a thousand generations, for those who love Him.

Notice what does God desire from us? To love us. He desires from us what he gives us, which is his love. He desires to. To give us his love. And He Desires to.

To. To shower us in his mercy.

And he also does this. And that's the end here. And he repays those who hate him to their face to destroy them.

Now that is the end of things.

That those who do not trust him will be lost to him.

They will be destroyed. And he doesn't do it. He doesn't do it hidden. He does it out in the open.

He does it. Obviously he is. He is just to destroy them.

He will not be slack with him who hates him. Meaning he's not going to dawdle with them. He's not going to. He's not going to act as if he. He's.

He's not going to handle these things.

He will repay him to his face. He's now said it twice.

He says he will repay him exactly what he deserves. He's going to give them what they deserve.

He's going to make sure that they. That they know who he is, God and who he is.

Therefore you shall keep the commandments and the statutes and the judgments which I command you today to observe them.

What he's saying is you keep the covenant. The covenant, the contract.

You're my people, I'm your God.

I will give you grace and I'll give you.

I'll give you all the blessings. I'll give you my promises. I'm a fulfiller of my promises. And you will walk with me by faith and keep and keep my judgments and keep my statutes, and keep my commandments, and keep my.

My will and keep my way. All the things that. That that derive from Him. You'll keep those things. You'll walk with me in those things. And we'll do it by faith.

You'll trust me. You'll. You'll trust me as being the initiator of all things. And you'll keep my commandments.

Now, you know, when we go, we've been studying through the Psalms first and then through the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Old Testament.

Really we're getting about 40% through the Bible. When we finish Deuteronomy, we'll be 40% through the chapters of the Bible.

The 40% of the chapters are encompassed in, in Psalms and the first five books of the Bible. And what do we have? All the time he's taking us through stories, taking us through understandings, taking us through issues.

And then he says, I'm God, I'm rich in mercy, I'm rich in grace.

I. I make a covenant with you.

You. You hear my word. You keep my precepts. Oh, and I'm, I'm a just God and a holy God and I am going to repay those who hate me to their face to destroy them.

I'll be not, I'm not going to be slack in that. I'm going to make sure they know that I'm doing it in to their face.

That's what I'm gonna do.

It's kind of straightforward, isn't it? It really is. It's straightforward scripture.

It's, it's Old Testament principles that we can see alive in the New Testament in Jesus Christ.

It's, it's, it's, it's the whole council of God all come together in one and it's powerful. It's life changing. It really is. It, it, it does several things. It frees me to chase after God and do.

Be godly. Be, do the things God does. Love people, help people. Be life changing to people.

Have your voice make a difference in people's lives. Have, have what you do have significance. Not only physical significance, not only temporal significance, not just significance in the moment I'm in, but eternal significance.

Really, really have life changing significance for other people. Powerful, powerful, life changing significance for other people.

And I don't have to hate my neighbor. I don't have to be bitter about the situations that are around me in the world. I don't have to always have a frown on my face because things aren't happening the way I think they're shattening.

People are not doing what God should do. People are coming up with all this crazy mess that they come up with all the time. But by the way, they've been doing it for thousands of years.

You know that, right? I mean this is not the new, the new norm. I mean this is. These things happen that because they're the. They come from the heart of the wicked human heart.

They come out of those things. But I don't have to hate them for it. Why? Because anybody who is going to reject God, he will handle. If you hate him, he's going to handle that.

And I don't have to. He's God and I'm just a trophy of his grace. Meaning I am, I am a being that, that champions and glorifies his grace and mercy and his goodness.

And so I don't have to worry about protecting God's holiness.

He'll do that.

I just need to love my neighbor as myself. Love other believers in a self sacrificial way. The way Christ loved me. Love God with my heart, my soul, my mind, my strength.

These are the precepts of the these. This is the law of the New Testament.

All the other law, all these other commandments and statutes and judgments, they hang off these.

They can't, they can't, they, they can't, they can't stay up without those.

And you know, we just went through the greatest commandment, last chapter. It's found in Deuteronomy, not in the New Testament, in the Old Testament.

And so understanding that gives me freedom. It frees me up. I don't have to be bitter and upset all the time. I don't have to walk around angry. I don't have to be in control of things.

I can let God be in control of things knowing he's going to keep his covenant with me. He's going to give me peace and going to give me the good things and going to provide me mercy in the midst of my failures.

And that's probably just as good a news as anything else. Even though I fail, yet I still succeed because God is God and he loves me and I love.

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.