Deuteronomy 14:3-21 Bible Study | Episode 896

March 17, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 14:3-21  Bible Study | Episode #896

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 14, and we're dealing with the passage where Moses tells the children of Israel what they may and may not eat. And he calls the things that they may not eat detestable or abominable to them. And it's not just eating. They can't even touch them if they're dead. And this is an important passage, and it was definitely an important passage for them because I. I personally believe that God was directing them away from. From. From some foods that would have caused them to be sick, caused them to. To deal with illnesses that other nations were struggling with, and. And God was moving them away from those things, and he had a purpose for doing it. And you go, well, why do you believe that? Well, because as in all these passages in the Old Testament, Jesus deals with this specifically. And then also you have it being dealt with in the book of Acts by Peter. And then the Apostle Paul deals with it in Corinthians and Timothy about God's removal of that prohibition in the New Testament. And that has some great theological meaning and great theological understanding to be studied. He says, you shall not eat any detestable thing. There are things which you may eat. The ox, the sheep, the goat, the deer, gazelle, deer, the road deer, the wild goat, the mountain goat, the antelope, and the mountain sheep. If you'll notice, he is naming the animals that live in the area that he's in. He's not naming all the animals around the world. He's just naming the animals the area where the children of Israel are at right now, in the wilderness. And also in the promised land. He says, you may eat every animal with cloven hooves. Now he's going to be more specific about how to determine this. Having the hoof split, meaning they've got really kind of looks like Two, it looks like two parts to their hoof. Such say a horse does not have a cloven hoof. If you see a horseshoe, it's perfectly round nevertheless. Of those that chew the cud and have cloven hoofs, you shall not eat. Such as these. The camel, the hare, meaning a form of rabbit. The rock, the rock hyrux. Those that chew the cud but do not have cloven hooves, they are unclean for you. Also. The swine is unclean for you. That's pig, because it is cloven hooves yet does not chew the cub. You shall not eat their flesh or touch their dead carcass. These you may eat of all that are in the waters. You may eat that have fins and scales. And whatever does not have fins and scales you may not eat as it is unclean for you. Those are really probably mostly mammals, so they weren't able to eat mammals from the sea. All clean birds you may eat, but these you shall not eat. The eagle, the vulture, the buzzard, the red kite, the falcon. These are either scavenger animals or they are predatory animals. The red kite, the falcon, the kite after their kind. Every raven after its kind. The ostrich, the short haired, short eared owl, the seagull, the hawk after their kinds, the little owl, the screech owl, the white owl, the jad jackdaw, the carrying vulture, the fish owl, the stork, the heron after its kind, and the hoopo, hoopoe and, and the bat. And every creeping thing that flies is unclean for you. And you shall not eat. Now notice he's saying you can't eat any insects. No insect eating, he says. And you may eat all of the other birds, all the clean birds. You shall not eat anything that dies of itself. Meaning you can't eat anything that you don't kill. You must kill it. If it, if it dies on its own, you can give it to the alien who's within your gates that he may eat it. Or you may sell it to a foreigner. For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. You shall not bore the young goat in its mother's milk. And we've dealt with that. And we will deal with that even more. This little passage that deals with boiling the young goat in its mother's milk, that's that. That was a pagan practice and it's got a lot of lot of other things that I don't want to get into today. All this is a part of the law. It is, it is the law. And it becomes a intricate part of the practice of the Jewish people throughout the Old Testament age and onto today. We have kosher, kosher restaurants, kosher foods, because of this dietary law. And the Jews follow it in detail. And it is a part of their religion because God gave it to them in the wilderness through Moses. And Moses goes into great detail in this passage of explaining how to live by that dietary law. Now you go, well, why don't we live by it? Well, the reason we don't live by it is because first of all, Jesus taught that nothing that goes into your body makes you clean. He is moving them to the fullness of the understanding of what is sin and how sin is manifest in our lives. And what does that mean? Well, the issue of sin is not the actus re, as I would say from a legal perspective. It's not the act that makes it sinful. What makes it sinful is the. The intent, the heart. And you go, well, isn't the act wrong? Sure it is. And is it sinful in itself? Yes, it is. But Jesus wanted us to understand that the true problem is the heart. The true problem is the issue of the heart. And when the heart is out of line, well, then the actions are going to soon there follow. They're going to come out eventually. And so he wanted to change the heart. And then, you know, just like in the Old Testament law, a manslaughter, for instance, a unintentional killing of another would have been. Would have been able to be dealt with because that didn't deal with someone having the intent to do evil. It would have just been that someone passed away because of an unintentional action. We can deal with the flawed universe, the entropy of our universe, meaning that it tends toward chaos, it tends toward death. We can deal with that. What we can't deal with is your heart being bent toward evil. That needs to be changed. And that's what Jesus was saying. He says, what goes into your body is not really the issue. What, what comes out of your heart is the issue. And then, and then you have, in Acts 10, Peter, seeing the vision of God letting down all these foods from heaven and showing them to him and say, go, take, eat. And so God removes the prohibition of eating these things. And then, then you have it also being dealt with when Peter kind of slides back in the wrong direction and the Apostle Paul publicly rebukes him for that. And then you have it being spelled out in Corinthians and in Timothy, God is explaining to him that this has been. These dietary laws have been set aside so that we can more completely understand that the issue is with the heart, not with the food. But if you follow these dietary laws, you have to follow them completely. You have to follow them ultimately, or you are breaking the law, which means you can't eat any of them. You can't eat anything that you have not killed, has not been killed by you or by someone else. And you cannot touch the dead carcasses, meaning you not only can't eat them, you can't even touch them once they're dead. You might be able to touch a pig, although I would tell you the Jewish people would not ever have touched a pig. But. But you can touch a pig while it's alive. You just can't touch it after it's dead, or you can't touch its meat after it's dead. So Jewish people don't touch them at all. They don't have anything to do with that. And so this is an important passage, especially for the Jewish people. It's really important for us to read it and see how real, specific God was about this. And that's why the Jewish people are very specific about it. That's why those who go after the Jewish faith, those who are Jewish, think this is very, very important. And this is a very important passage for them. It's very explanatory. God is very detailed about it. And I love that about God, because God, when he does give you a rule, that when he does give you a law, a precept, a statute, when he does that, he tends to give it to you in its fullness and allows you an opportunity to follow it. The problem is the heart of man does not follow the law. The heart of man always wanders away. So God has to give us a new heart and give us the Holy Spirit to lead us so that we do not indulge the desires of the sinful nature. Not because we're sinless, but because the Holy Spirit is empowering us to walk in the light as he is in the light. And so, as we understand this, this is a neat passage. I enjoy reading it. I love the. The different animals. It is definitely a. A primer on the animals that the Jewish people would have dealt with in the wilderness that they live in. We have animals that are all very similar to these, but, you know, they're different, different, I guess, categories of these animals. And he says they couldn't eat them. But you can today if you follow the law. You can't even touch him, by the way. And so you're not under the law. If you are touching them. I don't know why I said that. Just important that you know that.

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.