Deuteronomy 20:16-18 Bible Study | Episode 921

April 21, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 20:16-18  Bible Study | Episode #921

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 20. Deuteronomy, chapter 20, verses 16 through 18. It's one of those passages that is reiterating what God has said to them about the people, the Canaanites who live in the land, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, all those ites, I call them the multitude of ites that live in the land that they're going to possess. And it is a stark statement. But I want to lead you through the process of understanding it from a spiritual perspective and understanding it just from a physical perspective. Because God had given them the land. God had physically given them the land, and he says to them, but the cities of these people which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance, meaning the cities in the promised land, in the land that God has given them as inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive. Nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy to them the Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the parasites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, just as the Lord your God has commanded you. Meaning this has been told many times. And it has. We've been doing this Bible study for. For, well, I guess four years now. At least three and a half or four years now. And, you know, we've got this Bible study on Hope Alive podcast. So if you missed a whole bunch of it, there's a podcast out there called Hope Alive. It's got them in a thousand. There's close to a thousand of them on there. And we've been doing this Bible study and we've been going through the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. And we know that God commanded them to do this at least two or three times before now. And he's telling them to do it again. He says list. Now they give the reason why don't just say do it. He says, lest they teach you to do according to their abominations. When you're living with them, they teach you to do an abomination is a detestable thing. That's what God calls it, a detestable thing. Lest they teach you to do according to the detestable things which they have done for their gods. And you sin against your Lord God unless you that that's, that's what he's saying. His reason is for doing this. He says you're to destroy everything that breathes lest you leave anything that remains. And you, you teach. They teach you to begin to do the things that they did to worship their God which God considered detestable. Now I've been into, been through it many times that involved human sacrifice, if especially infanticide, which was the killing of newborn babies on the altar of Molech. They were involved in that. And by the way, eventually the Hebrews in the north, some of them actually began to do that by the time God utterly destroyed them and sent them into exile. Really didn't send them in exile, he just scattered them among the nations, never to be known from again. And so it's not like God didn't do the same to them, have them utterly destroyed and utterly wiped out the Northern Kingdom. And we don't even know where they're at. I have no idea. They don't exist as far as the Jewish people are concerned anymore because they were utterly cast out into the nations because why they were taught the abominations of the people of the land. And God said have nothing to do with that. Now how do I bring that over into the contemporary. Well, the way we bring it over into contemporary and I guess the best illustration I can give you is as you know, as a judge, as someone who deals with people who have severe drug addictions. And I do deal with them. And that is, that's one of those things that when you really around someone who's really, really deep into it, you realize debilitating and how deadly it is, how, how it just sucks the life out of people. And you know, when you're around someone like that, if you've got, if you've got some grace in you, you, you, you feel sorry for them. And I definitely do. I definitely have, have a lot of grace for those who suffer from addiction. And, and I work, you know, I want to help. But, but the methodology for helping, the methodology for getting to the place of help is. Is a stark methodology. What do we have to do? Well, we have to get them away from everybody else. We have to segregate them, meaning we have to put them in, get them to a rehab place. And some rehabs are just set up to make money. And I know that they're not all good rehabs, but. But there are some really, really good rehabs out there. And you get them segregated, you get them immersed in the word of God, you give them a job, you get them a job in the community that they're in, away from not trying to get them job that's not going to be in connection with any drug issues. And then you allow them to be immersed in God's word and eventually you get that. You get their physical addiction. Oh, you get over the physical addiction. They have to go through a lot of, you know, withdrawals and things like that. And then some. Some drugs are different and interesting. Alcohol is one of the worst ones as far as withdrawal is concerned. But you get them, you get them off that. You get them off the, the. The drug. You get them into the Word, you get them healthy physically, meaning they're eating food again. And, and then eventually, eventually that immersion in the Word begins to change their heart and their mind and give them strength enough to eventually get to the place where they're not. Not using drugs. Now you go, well, does that always work? Not always. The first time, no. Does it always work the sixth time? Not always. It may take many, many, many tries for a person to do it. Some people do it in the first try, some people do it in the second and third. What I mean by that? Well, you know, each person is different. Just, you know, God's made us unique. And he's going to glorify himself with the drug addict. He is. Just like he's going to draw, you know, with the, with the prostitute, the whoremonger, the. The. The liar, the thief, all those people. Thief on the cross. Did he glorify himself with the thief on the cross? Sure he did. Did he glorify himself with. With the woman caught in adultery? Absolutely. Did he glorify himself with the woman at the well who, you know, couldn't keep a husband, couldn't stay married, was a pariah in the community? Absolutely. Did a glorious glorify himself with the demoniac, the guy who had the legion of demons in him? Absolutely. Did he glorified himself with all those people because he gave them deliverance, he gave them healing. And then for some of them, he actually gave Them power, they had power to overcome. And God does those type things for people. And it is possible for that to take place, but the way it takes place is you got to get them away, away from the problem. You got to get them away from the atmosphere, the culture, the people that they live with that brought about the opportunity and the lifestyle of addiction that they were in. That's what you got to do. I mean, that's how it works. And so you can't have them around that. Well, that's a clear spiritual picture. God said, I can't have you around these people because eventually you'll get to child sacrifice, you'll get to infanticide. And I can't let that happen. I gotta. I can't let you get to the place where you're willing to place your children on an altar for another God. That's detestable. That's horrific. Now, there were other things that were detestable and horrific, but that was the, you know, that's the, the brutal end. And if you've ever been around someone who's really at the end of their addiction and when. I mean that they're close to death, meaning that, you know, I've had, I've represented a lady one time, she came in with a lot of clothes on, overcoat. She was probably freezing, if you want to know truth. When they did a drug test on her, she, she tested positive for everything that. That drug test tested everything. Turns out that, you know, because she tested positive, she was in court, she's found in contempt. And she was, we. She was sent to the county jail. She weighed. She weighed less than 70 pounds. This is a grown woman. And she was just, she was, you know, her heart rate was low, her blood pressure was really, really low. She was just real close to, you know, the drugs were real close to just totally killing her. And, and, you know, got her to rehab. And the first rehab, and I don't know anything but the first rehab she got healthy, she got stronger, she, she got her mind right, she got in the word. And that's the next key. And that's the thing I'm going to speak about at the end. She got in the word and she, she came back from the precipice of death. Now, do I say that she's right now healthy and doing well and she hadn't had any relapses? The likelihood. No, she's probably had a relapse or two. She probably had a struggle. But she's also known what it is to be in the promised land. And therefore there is an innate desire in her heart, especially if she's born again. There's a desire to go back to the promised land, There's a desire to go back to those things. And so that will be a help to her, to get her where she needs to be. And as you kind of go through that process, eventually you get people who get to help where they need to be. And what draws them back to that? Well, it's the immersion in the Word of God. Kind of what we talked about on Sunday. If you abide in my word, those who believe in him, he said to them, if you'll abide in my word, you know, I'm going to give you all that life, I'm going to give you all that hope, I'm going to give you all that power. But you got to abide in my words. You got to spend time learning to trust what I say, learning to walk in it, learning to allow me to heal you from the struggles of the past, learning to allow me to deliver you from those things, to set you free from those things, which takes a long time of studying God's Word. And, you know, really a year of intense study is wonderful. It's powerful. But, you know, it's really not. It's not, not. Not near equal to, you know, a lifetime or 20 or 30 years of doing it. So you're not going to be as powerful as you would be in 10, 15, 20 years. And that's why you run into people who used to be drug addicts that have been in the word for 20, 30 years. And you say, I don't know, I can't believe you were a drug addict. We can't, because, you know, God's more powerful than the drugs. And once, once he's done those things in their lives, I mean, he's going to. He's gonna, he's gonna way overcome it, and that's who he is. And that's how that works. And so God says, don't have anything to do with it. And so what do we do as a church? Well, we immerse people in God's word. We hold true to God's Word. And that's really important. We don't. We don't make exceptions just because someone in our family or someone we like has an issue. We all got issues. We don't accept make any exceptions for anybody's issues. Okay? Now, do we condemn people over their. No, we don't. We're not in the business of condemning people over their issues. Do we Point out the issues in wisdom and love and begin to help people reorient themselves from the world, from the death of this world to the word of God. Yes, we do. Yes, we do. And we're not going to be ashamed about it. We're not going to back down from it. We're going to be truthful about it. These things are not according to God's will. They're not according to God's way, and we're not going to do those things. We're not going to do it that way. And as we finally get to the end of it, as we kind of walk into its fullness and its end, you see powerful things happen in people's lives. Powerful deliverance, powerful healing, powerful power, the power of God actually at work in their lives. And you want to have that. You want to have that, and we want to do that. And so that's why God said, when you go into the promised land, don't have anything to do with that. Separate yourself from that in the sense of you don't want to be around them. Well, in a, in a, in a very spiritual sense. In the New Testament, we come back and say, you know, don't have anything to do with people who say they're Christians but do not practice Christianity. They, they practice these other things. The Bible says, don't even eat with them. What, what he, what he's saying is, is you can't, you can't mix. You can't mix sin and God. You can't mix leaven and unleavened. The mixtures just don't work. And so God says, if you'll listen to me, do what I say. If you'll walk in what I'm saying, if you'll be who. If you'll immerse yourself in what I say and not allow the world to have its way and its will in your life. If you'll do that, you know, I'm going to give you freedom. I'm going to give you. I'm going to give you. I'm going to set you free. I'm going to heal you. I am going to empower you. And so that's what it's all about. And that's why he told them that. And the principle is in the Old Testament several times, and it is fulfilled in the New Testament because of the blood of Jesus. Praise God.

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.