Deuteronomy 24:1-4 Bible Study | Episode 932

May 6, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 24:1-4 Bible Study | Episode #932

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.

We are In Deuteronomy, chapter 24 and verses 1 through 4. Deuteronomy, chapter 24 and Verses 1 through 4.

Another one of those passages that just really wreaks havoc on the narrative that the Bible is misogynistic and that God.

God is misogynistic toward women.

And when you read it with a modern mind, with a mind from today,

you fail to recognize how God is protecting women in this law.

During the time periods past,

we as societies did marriage well, in a lot easier way. And when I say a lot easier way, I've married off two daughters in the last decade and one in the last year.

The ceremonies are very short, but the preparation and the getting ready for those things are very long and arduous.

And most of the societies in the world, that doesn't take. That doesn't take that long, and it's not that expensive.

In fact, in most societies, if two people want to be married, they just say that they want to be married.

They may say it in front of a group of people and then they're married.

It is a contract between two people in the legal sense. But really what it is is it's a covenant between two people. It's a special relationship in which two people swear to take the other's interest above their own in every possible way and do that which is in the best interest of their companion,

their mate, their husband or wife, and do that as best as they possibly can. And so when that happens, they're married. Now, the problem with that is in most societies around the world,

in most societies around the world, the problem is that they can get divorced almost just as easily. Now,

in the west, we've made marriage certificates and the government has stepped in, and that started happening during the Dark Ages. The government has stepped in and taken Control of that, meaning the government began to be the arbiter or decider of marriage.

And you go, well, how does that work? Well, remember, there's three institutions. There's the family, there's the church, and there's the government. And those institutions have purposes and meaning within society.

And if one institution begins to usurp the authority or the area of control that another institution was meant to have, well, you end up having chaos. And what happened is the government began to take control of that in some ways for some very negative reasons, maybe racial reasons, maybe they were financial reasons,

wanting to make some money off of it. Maybe it was for a reason of control, meaning they wanted to have information on who was married and who wasn't married anyway for some good reasons, sometimes, maybe, maybe for divorce laws and things like that, in which they were trying to make sure that people didn't take advantage of each other.

Some of this stuff goes back to common law. But anyway, government has slowly, slowly seeped in to the marriage relationship, which was always in the past, not the purview of the church, because many people say, well, it must be in the church's responsibility.

Nope, nope.

The church was not the institution that had control of marriage.

The institution that had control of marriage and marriage was made for was the family. In fact, marriage is the core relationship, is the. Is the core covenant relationship on which families were to be built so that families could be healthy and children could be grown in a nurturing, healthy family and in which they could learn to know God and learn to walk with God.

And so when they took, when we took marriage away from the family and began to control it either by government or the church, well, things got a little haywire. And God knew that was going to be the case because it was the case all around the world.

That was one of the things that was being done in the world. And so God made some rules about it. And many of the rules are found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible,

as far as ways in which these things can be set out and controlled. Now, one of the things that has been historically an issue in societies is wife swapping,

meaning I marry my. I would marry a wife, and, and then, you know, there's a swap made and, and intimacy's had. And then, and then my wife comes back home.

Now, the problem with that is in many cultures and societies, that's an issue. And not only is an issue, it's illegal.

You can't do that. And so, and, and we're not talking about Western Societies that are a little bit more open, but we're talking about just societies that feel like that's just a negative thing.

Which, by the way, it is. And so what they do is in those societies,

when the government and the church doesn't control it is they just divorce their wife and swap wives. And then the next day they divorce the woman that they had and they take their wife back.

So there's constant divorce and marriage and marriage and divorce and marriage and divorce because the men are in control. The men, men, men control the situation. And they.

And so God steps in and says,

I'm not going to allow that. That's not going to be the case for the Israelites. And he makes a simple rule, and it's found in chapter 241 4. He says when a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some uncleanness in her meaning.

Notice he's finding and he's making the termination.

It usually is a determination that he doesn't like her in some way. And most this has to do with sexual things. Notice he finds she finds no favor in his eyes.

It's all about his perspective. And he writes her a certificate of divorce. Notice Moses is going to allow divorce because. Because the heart of the people is hard. That's the words of Jesus, and that's his explanation for the allowance of divorce.

And. And you go, well, why did Jesus deal with it? Well, because it's a problem. From the time of Moses till the time of Jesus, 1500 years, divorce is a problem.

It's a bad problem. It a destructive force in society. It's destructive force to government, it's destructive force to the church, and it's sure, sure enough a nuclear destructive force to the family.

And so it's a problem. And it's always been a problem. And it's the problem. It's a problem, as Jesus said, because the hearts of men are hard. And so he says if he writes a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house,

when she is departed from his house and goes and becomes another man's wife, so he's given the whole explanation, she gets divorced, her husband gives her a certificate of divorce, sends her out, she finds another man,

and then the former, and the other man sends her out of the house, or if the latter husband dies, who took her as his wife. Either way,

if she is no longer married to the second man, meaning she left the first man, she goes and marries the second man, whether he divorces her or he dies anyway, she's.

She's no longer married. She's either widowed or divorced. Again, he says then her former husband who divorced her must not take her back to be his wife after she is.

After she has been defiled. That word defiled is not a negative term. It means it has a bunch of. I'm not getting into it today, especially on morning Bible study when we got kids listening.

So it says, for it is an abomination before the Lord,

not that she's defiled, but that he would take her back after she's had another husband.

And you shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.

Now,

the reason for that is not because people can't change and forgive and get back together. That's not that. That has nothing to do with the hardness of heart. In fact, that's not a hardness of the heart.

That's forgiveness and peace and grace. And those are good things. The reason this was written is so that men couldn't divorce their wives,

send them to another man and take his wife, and then sometime the next day or the next week or the next month, do the process again and swap them back.

There's going to be no wife swapping. If you divorced a woman, you could not take her back as a wife. If you ever divorced her, you couldn't take her back.

And if you had relations with another outside of marriage, you were guilty of adultery, and you and the one you had the relationship with were to be killed. So you couldn't divorce your wife and swap her.

And you could not just decide you were going to do what you wanted to, whether you're married or not. And so you see how God begins to put boundaries around not only the family.

He puts protective boundaries not around, only around the family, but he puts boundaries around around marriage itself.

And he says, you know, this thing is important. It's. It's something that is. Is vital to my people. It's vital to my. Vital to governments and churches. But most of all, this is vital to families.

And we're not going to have these things go on. And so if that happens, then.

Then we're not going to allow you to use it as a tool or method to.

Well,

to. To feed your own lustful and lascivious desires. And so you cannot commit adultery and you cannot swap your wife by divorcing her and remarrying her. That's not going to work.

And I think it's actually very neat that God did this.

It is a clear bright line where God is saying that marriage is important and marriage has a big role to play in society and it has a big role to play in families.

And so I am going to hold it sacred and I'm going to sanctify it and I'm gonna place laws in place that protect it 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.