Deuteronomy 12:29-32 Bible Study | Episode 891

March 10, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 12:29-32 Bible Study | Episode #891

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 12, verses 29 through 32, and we're dealing with a passage that is really the explanation of how and why God allowed the children of Israel, told the children of Israel, ordered them to go and take the promised land and drive out the inhabitants of the promised land. We'd already read several times that God told the Hebrew children, told the Israelites to go into the promised land and to destroy the peoples that were in the promised land because the sin of those nations had reached its peak. It reached its fullness. And God said he waited until their wickedness was at its zenith, at its high. And then he. He used the children of Israel to destroy them. Now you go, well, what made them so wicked? What made them so terrible? Well, you see this in the passage that we have here and God's warning to his people not to have anything to do with that practice, not to have anything to do with them. Now that is an understanding that's important. Sometimes you'd read this and go, well, God's telling them not to be like the world. It's a little more than that. God is telling us throughout scripture not to be like the world. God does tell us to not go after the world, to not chase after the world, to not turn your hearts toward the things of this world. That is a true statement and it's a great teaching. It's a good thing to teach every child. It's a good thing to teach adults as they think about their lives. Is your life being invested in to the world? Are you investing your life into things which you are using to build not only the kingdom, but to build your family, to build the work of God in your own life? Are you doing those things? That's a great question to ask, but that's really not the crux of the problem that we find in Canaan before the Israelites go in, that's not the issue that is being faced. The issue that's being faced is there's a society there, there is a culture there that is so corrupt and so terrible that it's deserving of being destroyed. Okay, now you can't say, I know we live in a world today where the world wants to tell us that all cultures have their own place and that you can't say any culture is bad except obviously Christian culture. But the truth is that there are cultures that are worth destroying. And we have, as Americans, been a part of doing that. There was a culture, and there was a culture that existed in the heart of Europe in the 1930s and 40s that was worthy of destruction. And as we think back throughout history, there have been cultures that were worthy of being destroyed. And the reason they're worthy of being destroyed is because their wickedness is reached a place where the peoples around them just could not stand for them to exist near them because of the ugliness of their culture, the death and destruction of their culture. And so when we get to this passage, God is giving them a stark warning through Moses before they enter into the promised land. He says, when the Lord your God cuts off from before you the nations which you go to dispossess, and you displace them and dwell in their land. Now, notice God is speaking in future tense as if what he's saying is going to take place, as if what he's saying is going to be true. I want you to hear me. God is eternal, which means he has no beginning or end. He does not live in. In the confines of time. Oftentimes I hear people when they're teaching through the Bible, they're limited by their understanding of what eternality is and the eternal nature of God. And they always are placing, you know, they'll place confines on God's omnipresence. And the confine is, is that God's everywhere right now, but he's not everywhere right now. He's everywhere at all times. That's omnipresence. That's not omnipresence. Where he's everywhere right now is, well, I don't know what it is, but that's not the word that describes it. The word is, is. God is everywhere at all times. As far as God's time is concerned, though, he's not in time. He's all. Everywhere at all times, at all time. Which means he's. He's omnipresent. He's everywhere. And God knows all those things. God understands all those things. And so when God speaks as if the future is going to be this way, he's not speaking speculatively about that. He's speaking as if he knows because he does know. He is literally living in the future. He is in the future. Well, right now. And so God, when he says, you're going to dispossess them, he knew he would. They would. He knew that that's what he was sending them to do. And that's what would happen. He says, when you go to dispossess them and displace them and dwell in the land, take heed to yourself that you're not ensnared to follow them after they are destroyed from before you, that you do not inquire after their God, saying, how did these nations serve their gods? What he's saying is don't have anything to do with them. Don't ask, don't research as to how they. How they did things. Don't. Don't do anything that has anything to do with them. That's called. That's called. That is in modern understanding, that would be to. To totally destroy their culture. To totally disengage from their culture. It would be cultural destruction. Okay. He says, don't have anything to do with them. Don't have. Do not consider why, how, or what they were doing. He told them to take their. Their stone altars and grind them down. Don't just take them and use them for something else. Totally destroy them. Take their high places and lay them low. Take their places of sacrifice. Totally destroy them. Have nothing to do with them because they are a wicked culture. How do we know that? Well, their wickedness had reached a completion. He says, you shall not worship the Lord your God in that way. For every abomination to the Lord, which he hates, they have done to their gods. Which means their form of worship, their way of worshiping their gods was an abomination to God. That. That is a strong word. Oftentimes. Oftentimes we use that. We use that and we don't understand is the idea of being utterly detestable to God, that what they did in their worship was utterly detestable to God. Well, you asked pastor, what did they do? Well, he tells us he hates what they've done to their gods, for they burned their sons and daughters in the fire to their gods. What were they engaged in? They were engaged in human sacrifice. It's not something that's abnormal. Actually, in world history, we find human sacrifice going on around the world. In fact, the God that they worshiped, Moloch or Molech, you'll see it spelled M O L ech or Mol Och, is actually a BAAL God. If you go back through the understandings of where that came from. The BAAL gods are from that ancient pagan religion which had its beginnings in Babel. And Nimrod was the king of Babel and his wife actually claimed to be the moon God, claimed to be the God of the female God, and that Nimrod was a God himself. And all these ancient pagan religions which we find really throughout a whole lot of Asia and Africa and Europe come from this. And Moloch is one of those gods. And you can just look him up. He's an obvious. There, he's right there. When you Google him, he's right there to be found. And he, they, they would set him up. He was, he was human size as far as the, the statues or whatever they made of him, made of him. And he was made of bronze or brass or a metal that could be heated up. And they would place their infant children on his white hot arms and sacrifice their children to him. They would kill their babies. And God calls that the shedding of innocent blood. You're going to find that later on when God is dealing with the children of Israel, because they're going to actually, some of them are going to actually go into that practice. The nations, the seven, the 10 nation, the 10 tribes in the north, are going to actually have people that begin to practice the worship of the BAAL gods, and Moloch being one of them, and they're going to begin that type of stuff. And God is going to send them into exile. Well, he's not going to send them in exile. He's just going to utterly destroy them and scatter them among the nations as slaves. And those, the people that were in those places are not going to exist anymore. They're not going to continue on. Why? Because God is the author of life. In fact, that's what John says about Jesus in chapter one of the Gospel of John. He says in him was life and that life was light to men. And he is the author of life and he is the author of, of reproduction. He's the one who brings about children into the world. And he knows each child before they're knit in their mother's womb. He knows all of them and he values that life. He values that life. Life is important. Your life is important. God's life in you is important. He values that to greatness. Because it's an essence of his nature. His life is eternal. And Jesus says, those whom the Father give me, I give them eternal life. I give them the life that God lives. I give them his life. And so understanding that that is great value to him and that he is not interested in the innocent innocence, losing their lives, he doesn't desire that. And to have a practice that intentionally sacrifices the lives of innocence is detestable to him. It's an abomination. He will have nothing to do with it. And you can take that as just an understanding of God. That is an understanding of his nature. He said, utterly destroy them. Drive them out. Don't leave a single one of them alive. Don't even leave their animals alive. Destroy every bit of it. Every bit of it. You destroy it all. And don't have anything to do with them. Don't inquire into their practices. Don't have anything to totally destroy them. Wipe them as far as their existence ever existing. Wipe them out of the lands that you take. And do they do it? No, they don't. Because when you begin to worship the world, you slowly slide into darkness and death. And so that's what happens. And we're gonna study through that. That's what we're gonna study through. We're gonna see how to walk in the light as he is in the light. John also says that. He says that in his first epistle. You want to walk in the light as he is in the light. We want to be life. We want to walk in that. That life was light to me. And we want to walk in that life. And that's what life's all about. And so whatever I command you, Sid, be careful to observe it. You shall not add to it nor take away from it. What he's saying is, do it my way. Do it my way. I praise God that he's given us his way. He's given us. Revelation, chapter nine tells us he's given us that small that is sweet to the taste, but it's bitter when it goes down into our stomach. Because it does change us. The Word of God does change us and makes us alive and whole. And so I pray that, that you'll take this truth and just add it to your understanding of God. It's not something that. That is necessary to act upon right now, but it's one of those understandings of God that makes you really begin to worship 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.