Deuteronomy 29:20-29 Bible Study | Episode 949

May 29, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 29:20-29  Bible Study | Episode #949

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 29.

And, well, the last several verses in chapter 29, verses 20 through 29. Actually, 20 through 29 is a treatise on the passage before it. And what I mean by that.

Well,

God warns them against a person,

and it's clear, a man or a woman. Verse 18, it says, so that there may not be among you a man or a woman, family or tribe.

Notice not only individuals, but groups of people,

families, themselves, whose heart turns away today from the Lord our God, to go and serve the gods of these nations that they may not be among you a root bearing bitterness or wormwood.

We talked about that,

how bitterness oftentimes is what causes people to turn away from God once they know Him. And so it may not happen when he hears the words of the curse that he blesses himself in his heart,

saying, I shall have peace even though I follow the dictates of my own heart. What it's saying is. He's saying is, I'm going to. I'm going to enjoy life. I'm going to be able to do things.

I'm going to be able to walk in the way I want to walk. I can do all these things.

I can enjoy life myself by doing what I want to in my own heart. By. By doing my own will. It, you know, really, that's what it's saying. He says, I follow the dictates of my own heart.

As though a drunkard could be included with sober. And I talked about that pretty, pretty long detail.

The next passage deals with how God views that. Okay. The next passage deals with how God viewed that. This passage deals with the person and their perspective. Now we turn to God's perspective.

God says, the Lord would not spare him,

for then the anger of the Lord and his jealousy would burn against that man and every Curse that is written in the book would settle on him,

and the Lord would blot out his name from under heaven.

Notice the result of rejecting a relationship with God is that you get the fullness of the world,

okay?

It is that you get the fullness of the world. Oftentimes people say, I don't understand why people act this way or do this way.

Well, the reason they are is because they blinded themselves to their own will,

okay? And when I say blinded themselves to their own will, they blinded themselves and that, and that has resulted in them chasing after their own will. They, it might even be better said they blinded themselves unto their own will,

meaning they blinded themselves and now they're going to. They're going to chase after their own will. And when you chase after your own will,

you have everything that is, as we talked about Sunday, not God.

You have all the things that are clearly not from God.

And, and when you have the things that are clearly not from God, what do you have? Well, you have, you have the depravity, the lostness,

the despair, the loneliness, the singleness. You have. You have all those things.

And, and you are separated from him. And when we're separated from God,

we, we don't have. We have no hope. We have. No, we, we, we. We must gain all of our, all of our peace and all of our purpose and all of our passions.

We must gain them for ourselves.

All right? Listen to me. And they must fulfill us. They must. They must ultimately,

they must ultimately make us joyful, happy, and peaceful.

Well,

there's nothing in us to make us that way.

One of the things, One of the things that I've. I've learned in life, when somebody is chasing after something according to their own will, they're never happy.

They're never happy.

Billionaires always want more billions,

beautiful people.

For some reason,

beautiful people will go and have surgery,

surgery. So many surgeries to where they're not beautiful anymore.

Billionaires were chased after money so much that the money means nothing to them.

Athletes, athletes will, will,

will.

They'll chase after their athletic ability. And then when they reach the pinnacle of their athletic ability,

rather than chasing after the championships that they want, they'll take time off, they'll. They'll stop in order to protect their athletic ability, when their athletic ability is fleeting. We see this in sports all the time.

Not so much football, but especially in basketball.

Athletes who are great athletes who say they're saving themselves,

actually,

are saving themselves from actually getting what they wanted from the athleticism they claim the championships, the wins it happens all the time.

It happens all the time in life.

People who chase after their own will in their own way. When they get that will in the way, they realize that it's empty.

They realize that it's. That it's broken. They realize that it doesn't have any eternality to it. It has, it is. It is temporal. It lasts only for a moment.

And, and, and what happens when I have it? All the curses that come from not having God, all the curses that in, remember, curses are binding something that binds me up.

That's what the word curse means,

means to bind me up. The things that I have placed myself in bind me up.

And as they bind me up, I don't. I don't see peace. I don't see joy, I don't see happiness.

All I live in is despair.

And, and,

and, and ultimately the worst part about it is, is he says he blots his name out under heaven, meaning you. You pass away. You. You end your life with nothing.

And all the time you had a chance to know God.

Verse 18 says, so that there may not be among you a man or a woman, family or tribe, who heart turns away today from the Lord our God. Notice they turned away from God.

They, they left God.

And the Lord would separate him from all the tribes of Israel for adversity.

Notice God separates them out because, because they're going to be a problem for the other people. They're, they're adverse to the other people.

He. He removes them because of their adversity, because of their adverse position as far as he's concerned,

according to all the curses and covenants that are written in the book of the Law,

so that the coming generation of our children who rise up after you, and the foreigner who comes from the far land would say, when they see the plagues of the land and the sickness which the Lord has laid on it, notice,

he says, I'm going to make it evident to everyone,

everyone who shows up, the foreigner, the generations to come. I'm going to make it evident that to separate yourself from me is to take on all the curses of the world, to take on the destructiveness of the world.

The whole land is brimstone, salt and burning.

It's not sown, nor does it bear, nor does any grass grow there.

Like the overthrow of Sodom and Gomorrah, Oddmat and Zeboim,

which the Lord overthrew in his anger and his wrath.

All nations would say, what has the Lord done so. So to this land?

What does the heat of this great Anger mean what he's saying is, is, is that God's a jealous God and if the people turn toward him, he will lay it waste.

By the way,

this truly, I mean this happened if you had gone to Israel in the late part of the 19th century or the early part of the 20th century,

last century,

if you'd have done that,

you would have found a barren land with very few people living in. I know they say, you say the Palestinians and all that.

The Palestinians, that's just the people that are there,

that actually the word Palestine is just a slur by the Romans because the Jews rebelled against them.

There were people there, there were Jews there, but there were also people there. And not many,

not many.

Most of the land without, without any plants growing, without any, any farms operating,

very few herds. Just a barren land of nothingness.

And by the way, that land had been a barren land of nothingness for really 2000 years since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 780 A.D.

sure. Did we send armies to,

to in the Crusades to try to take back Jerusalem. Yeah. What was the main problem? The main problem is, is that there was nothing to eat and no water there.

That it was, it was a barren dead land.

If you go to Israel today, there's water everywhere.

If you go to Israel today, there, there in fact there's a giant,

there's a giant man made reservoir and there's a river basically I guess you'd call a man made river that flows through the middle of it that provides water for all of Israel.

Israel is a beautiful land with grass and farms everywhere and people everywhere.

But those who rejected God.

It became that it came,

a barren land, hot and dry and dead.

Verse 25. Then the people would say, because they have forsaken the covenant of the Lord God, their fathers, which he made with them when he brought them out of the land of Egypt.

For they went and served other gods and worshiped them, gods that they did not know and that he had not given them.

Then the anger of the Lord would arouse against the land to bring it on,

bring on it every curse that's written in the book.

And the Lord uprooted them from their land in anger and wrath and great indignation.

Easy for me to say. And cast them into another land as is to this day. Notice verse 23 to verse 28.

Happened from 70 AD till basically the Jewish return which began in the first part of last century.

They slowly began to come and eventually as World War II began to happen,

they began to flow into the land more and More and ultimately led to Israel becoming a nation and that nation becoming a well,

becoming a vibrant people again.

That happened for almost 2,000 years.

This passage here,

where God says what he's going to do to them when they chase after other gods actually is taking place.

But in the Christian heart, it's the same way he leaves your life and your heart. Barren, lost,

dry, desert, nothing.

When you're his people.

When you're his people.

We call it going to the pig pen. Using the illustration that Jesus gave us of the prodigal Son. But the truth is, is that that happens all the time.

It's not something that's a secret.

When God reveals himself to you and then you chase after your own will in your own way, there's just emptiness and hopelessness. There's only despair and the curse of sin.

The secret thing that belongs to the Lord our God.

But those things which are revealed to belong to us.

Notice the secret things belong to the Lord our God. But those things which are revealed belong to us.

God knows everything.

But when he reveals things to us, they are for us.

His revelation is personal for you and to our children forever. That we may do all the words of the. Of the law. That we may do the will of God.

Now you read this and say, you know, Chad is. It's. It's so harsh. It is harsh.

But if you look around you, the world is harsh,

life is harsh.

And there's only one real source of hope in life,

and that's Jesus.

And so all the things that happen around us happen for a purpose, to make Jesus known.

Even the negative things make God known to us. It makes us realize that there is a moral code, that there are moral, that that there is a. Is. Is a path in a way, and that we need to walk 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.