Deuteronomy 21:10-14 Bible Study | Episode 924

April 24, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 21:10-14  Bible Study | Episode #924

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 21. And, well, it's just one of those rules, one of those laws that God gives us. It is a really good insight into how God sees the importance of marriage and the importance of the husband wife relationship because he deals with what would be a very somewhat rare occurrence. But he wants to make sure that even in the midst of this rare occurrence that the sanctity of the marriage relationship is kept meaning. He wants to make sure that even though a marriage might start this way, it doesn't mean that it should be treated any differently. And that's how God is. He wants to keep his pictures holy, meaning the pictures of him that he's created in the world that he's made for us in the world. He wants to keep them separated and holy so that they, they correctly and, and completely identify those relationships as far as our physical world and the way we live. And so the same thing's true of marriage. And so in, in this passage that's been dealing with warfare and dealing with how soldiers and how, how we, how we do all these things. One of the things that happens in warfare, especially during this time, and it really happens still, as far as taking listeners, this is a regular occurrence. And so he wants to make sure that when someone that is part of his people decides they're going to marry someone that they've taken captive, that they treat them the same way. And you go, well, should they be marrying people that they've taken captive? Well, I would say no, if we put this together with other passages. But what if there's somebody that they took captive that has been a servant to them, that has heard about God, come to the place where they trust in the God of the Jewish people, the Hebrews here, and someone wants to marry them, and that's what happens. Here it says, when you go out to war against your enemies and the Lord your God delivers them into your hand and you take them captive. Now remember, notice this is a total work of God. You're going out to war against your enemies. God has instructed you. You're victorious over them. God delivers them into your hands. That's a work of God. And you take them captive. And you see among the captives a beautiful woman and desire her and would take her for your wife. All right, this is the Jewish word for wife. It's not a different word. It is the word for wife. You take her as your wife, then you shall bring her home to your house, and she shall shave her head and trim her nails and shall put on clothes of her captivity. And she shall put off the clothes of her captivity and remain in the house and mourn her father and mother a full month. What he's saying is you've got this person that you've taken into captivity, and because they've been in slavery or they're just a servant in the community, and you want to marry her, you must first let her deal with her relationships with her family and her separation from her family and her separation from the, the, the life that she is living to the life that she has. And, and God wants to make sure that, that that's importantly done here. He's not. He. He's saying, you know, you're, you're. She's. She's out there, she's with her, her, her family serving. And, and, and you want to take her as your wife, as her, as, as your wife. You need to understand that she needs time to mourn not only the loss of her town, wherever she's from, but her family. And she's going to now become a part of your family. But you need to give her a chance to deal with that emotionally on her own. And so what do they do? Well, you're going to shave her head and trim her nails, meaning you're going to take away the things that attract you to her. You're going to allow her a time for healing and a time for mourning. And we're going to make sure that she's in a position where she can do that and where you will let her do that. A reminder that you're going to allow her to be separated. It says she shall put off the clothes of her captivity, meaning she's no longer going to be in any way. She's no longer going to be a captive, a captive of the society. She's not going to be in captivity anymore. So she puts those clothes away, she's going to become a full member of the Jewish people. She's going to remain in your house. Meaning you're going to take care of this. If you're going to do it, you're going to pay for it. You're going to make sure that this happens. She's going to remain in your house and she's going to mourn her father and mother for a full month. Meaning you're not going to just say, okay, you got a week to get over it, or you got a few days to get over it, and then we're going to move on with our life. You're going to give her time to mourn the loss of her family. And maybe the family's not totally lost, but you're going to still give her that time to mourn. Not being in her family, not being in her village, not being in her way of life. You're going to give her that. After that, you may go into her and be her husband and she shall be your wife, but not until you give her time to adjust to what's happened in her life. If you're going to take someone to be your wife, then we're going to do the things that are necessary for, for this person to, to, to adjust. And we're not just going to bring them in and now we defeated them, so we can just do with them what we want, especially in the, in the, in the context of marriage. We're not going to do that. You're going to, you're going to, you're going to allow her to become a woman that is able emotionally and able, able relationally to have, to have a good marriage with you. And the way you're going to do that is you're going to respect her, her family, and you're going to respect her, her loss. And you're going to make sure that when she is, when she is out in the community that she's closed in a way that symbolizes her freedom. And by the way, taking off the clothes of captivity means that she's going to get to choose whether or not to marry you too. It doesn't mean that you're just going to take her and make her. When you take off the clothes of her captivity, you're saying to her, you get to choose whether or not to become a regular member of this society. And there's a lot of choice in that. There's a lot of power in that, too. And so when we're studying this, it is a powerful statement of we're not going to mistreat female captives and just force them to be some subservient version of a wife. We're not doing that. She's going to be totally inculcated in society. She's going to choose to be a part of it. You're going to make sure that she's treated as far as her dress and the far. As far as who she is. You're going to be. You're going to treat her as if she's a part of society and you're going to give her time to mourn the losses that she's suffered that probably likely weren't, that she didn't have anything to do with. Okay, there may be that, you know, her, her. Her family and her society may have been evil. And it may be that God wanted to, to. To destroy them. But, but this may, but this tends to not be that. Because remember, this is talking about capturing someone from a city far, far away. God told them to wipe out the Canaanites, but he gave them instructions about how to deal with those cities that they might capture far, far away. And by the way, they never did that. And so I think this has a tendency to try to give us some insights in the spiritual realm for believers as far as spiritual warfare is concerned. And so when we're reading this, we understand that these relationships can't be made. You can't force these relationships. These relationships have to be nurtured and you have to provide the best environment possible for them to happen. And that's what God's saying here. He's saying that this relationship needs to be one such that the person who is inferior in the relationship because she is a captive gets to be brought up to equal and then gets a chance to be inculcated into society, a chance to mourn her loss and mourn her family, and gets a chance to choose whether or not she wants to be. Wants to be your wife. And then, and then once all that's done, then you can be her husband. Y'all can be married. But until that happens, until she's elevated to the position where she should be, as any other Jewish woman would be, until she's elevated to that position, you don't get to just take her. Okay? There's rules to this. You don't just get to choose who you want. And that's just the end of it. And she's still, in essence, a slave. And yet your wife not going to board that way. We're not going to do it that way. And that's what God's saying here. And it shall be, if you have no delight in her, then you shall set her free. Notice if you're going to divorce her because she was just some fancy for the moment, you're not going to send her back into captivity because she's not captive anymore. You're going to set her free, but you certainly shall not sell her for money. You shall not treat her brutally because you have humbled her, meaning you have made her your wife and you have put her in this position where she's no longer a virgin. Well, that's true. And you've put her in a position where now she's a divorced woman. You're not going to humble her that way. You're not going to humble her in that. You're going to divorce her and you put her back into her prior position. That's not going to happen that way. And so you kind of see here that God is, God is protecting marriage and he is instructing his people how to do it well and how to do it such that it would not be a, it's not going to be a, a, a problem for his people because they are mistreating. Because once you allow that to happen in society, once we allow those things to take place that way, before you know it, they're going to begin treating the Jewish women that way, before you know it, the infection of mistreatment and misuse of this gift, God's given us a marriage, it begins to eat into society. And we see that even in our modern culture, how in many ways we have marred the picture of marriage and how that should be. And how many people suffer from that marring because they don't get the chance to have the healthiness and the goodness that God has created in marriage. And so as we're studying this, we need to step back and take a broader look at it and say, what is God doing here? What God's doing here is he's saying, you're not going to have a second class of marriage. There's not going to be a second class of wife in the sense of you're going to take them captive and they're going to be treated as a pseudo servant and pseudo wife. We're not doing that now. Do they end up doing that? Yeah. In fact, Solomon has 700 of them. But that wasn't good for him and it wasn't good for society. It's very destructive. And so when we, when we think about God's model for this, it's important that we. We take that on fully and completely, and we understand that the way God set marriage to be should be done that way.

Period.

Full stop. No. No ifs, ands, or buts. We should not deviate from what God created because he created it as a perfect picture of his relationship with us. Okay? And so that's the way it. That's the way Scripture identifies it. And God holds. Holds it high and very important. And it should not be marred even because there's some societal situation that is developed. We should always do it the right way.

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.