Deuteronomy 31:9-13 Bible Study | Episode 953

June 4, 2025

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

Deuteronomy 31:9-13  Bible Study | Episode #953

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 31,

in verses 9 through 13,

while we are not far from the end of Deuteronomy. And we'll be on to Joshua, which is a really a fantastic study of entering into the promised land, taking the promises of God.

It begins and works its way through all that it takes to really walk in faith with God and battle the giants of your life. And that's what the book is about.

But in this passage, we have Moses preparing the people.

He's going to tell them to do something about the law, and then he's going to put Joshua in his position.

And then there's going to be some songs.

They're going to. And a song is a telling of your story.

That's why the Bible talks about singing new songs, because every person has their own story, their own walk with God. And so you've got all that going on.

But right here, Moses says this. So Moses wrote this law and delivered it to the priest. What law? The five books of the Old Testament. The first five books of the Old Testament.

So Moses has written Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy,

and he's delivered them to the priest. This is a sizable undertaking.

You know, oftentimes we think, well, it's just five of the 66 books. You know, there's 66 books in the Bible, and it's just five of them.

We started this Bible study back right at the beginning of COVID and we went through the longest book in the Bible, which is the book of Psalms.

Then we backed up and began through Genesis. And we're finding ourselves getting to the end of the Pentateuch, the five books of the Old Testament that begin the Old Testament that were written by Moses.

And these books,

along with Psalms, make up about 25%, a little bit less than 25% of the chapters in the Bible, of the words in the Bible. So you've got six books here that we've studied through that make up about a quarter of what is Scripture.

And so they're obviously fairly long books, especially when you add in the longest book,

psalms, you, you, you have, you have a sizable portion of Scripture. And so he wrote these books, and they are,

they're, they're, you know, they are the foundational documents of, of what we understand to be God's plan for humanity.

And so he wrote them down and then he passed them on notice. He writes them and then he passes them on.

This is a lot different than other spiritual books that we have,

or so called spiritual books that we have from other religions.

These were written by one of the patriarchs of the faith.

It's written about.

A large portion of the books that Moses wrote were about things that happened in his lifetime. Now the book of Genesis brings us to his lifetime, and then obviously the beginning of the book of Exodus brings us to his lifetime.

But, but most of these books are, are his,

his experiences, his, his hearing of God and relating God's word to the people. And so this, these stories are, are from Moses. And what does he do? He passes them to the elders of Israel.

That's what it says in verse nine. And Moses commanded them, saying,

at the end of every seven years,

at the appointed time in the year of release.

That's the many jubilee, I would say I call it the many jubilee, but it's the seven years where people are released from their servitude at the end of every seven years, at the appointed time in the year of release, at the feast of tabernacles.

He's saying, when, where and how?

Why are we doing this? What are we doing?

When all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God in the place which he chooses, which means it's in Jerusalem, but they don't know that yet. He says, you shall read this law before all of Israel in their hearing.

So what is he saying? Well, what he's saying is, is that these books of the law, which make up about 15% of the Bible,

should be read at the feast of tabernacles.

All of them. I mean, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. Something that took us, you know, four years to study through.

He says,

you ought to take these books of the law and you ought to read them at,

you ought to read them at the feast of Tabernacles. Now they were later on gonna have copies of it. And they would be in synagogues all over Israel. There would be places where they would be able to take that book and read it.

But I will say this over Jewish history. It wasn't always that they had the Bible, that they had the Pentateuch, they had the five books of the Bible.

And so God made sure that there was a time and a season where you could go somewhere,

sit down, and you say, well, we do that all the time. We got it on our phone, we got it on the Internet. Yeah. And how many times do we actually sit down and ponder and think about God's Word?

Many of them couldn't read. Many of them didn't have any access to God's Word. Especially during the first few hundred years.

There weren't that many copies of these.

They were beginning to make them. The scribes are the ones who began. That whole group of people began not long after these were written to be able to make extra copies of it.

So there weren't a lot of places where you could go and hear it.

And these books were treasures.

And to be able to go and sit down and hear God's Word read to you aloud and hear what God has to say and understand once every seven years was a treasure to them.

It was important to them. It was highly important to them.

Why? Because these books mattered.

They were God's revelation to them.

And so it says, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God in the place which he chooses, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing.

Gather the people together, men and women and little ones and the stranger who's within your gates, meaning everybody in society needs needed to hear these things. God said they needed to hear them once every seven years.

They needed to hear God's law read to them aloud.

At the feast of Tabernacles, there was a time and a place where God's law would be taken out and read. And by the way,

there were seasons and times during Israel's life where they did not do that.

In fact, there's kings that figure out, hey, and find the law and realize we're not doing what this says.

And they read it aloud to the people again.

The hearing of God's Word is the beginning part, the hearing of God's revelation. God speaking to your heart is the beginning of your turning to God and experiencing all that God has for you.

God reveals himself through the written and spoken word.

He does.

And, and you know, that's God's plan. That's what he. That's how he. That's how he makes things happen that they may hear, that they may learn to fear the Lord your God and carefully observe all the words of his law.

He wants them to, he wants them to hear it,

he wants them to observe it and he wants them to fear him. They want them to have the right understanding of who he is.

So I hear it, I understand who he is,

and then I obey, I walk in obedience to it because I trust him by faith and that their children who have not known it may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God as long as you live.

Meaning this was written so that the children could hear,

so that the children would hear what's going on.

Can you imagine being a teenager?

The first time it was read maybe was when you were 7 or 8 and you didn't really know what all it was talking about.

And then all of a sudden you're 14 or 15 and you begin to hear God's law and it resonates in your heart and you really take it in and you begin to understand what happened in Egypt and what happened in the desert and all those stories.

And then when you're 22 or 23, you hear it again and by now you've really started to understand what, how, how, why we're living the life we're living and doing the things that we're doing.

And by the time you're 30,

when you hear it, it, it just,

it just explodes because you're beginning to see it in your family and then in your late 30s you hear it again and then all of a sudden you take on the leadership and communities and then you begin to say we're going to be this type of people.

See the word of God back then could, could,

could control and lead a society.

Being read just once every seven years,

it's powerful and it's effective and it's life changing.

But it must be ingested,

it must be taken in.

And when a people fade away from that, when they, when they wander away from God, from hearing and reading God's word,

when their services, their worship services are more about,

well, they're more about what the person standing up there thinks rather than what God's word says,

that's when a people begins to wander away from truth, wander away from God and wander away from kingdom, the kingdom.

And so the Word of God is very, very important.

And God wanted to make sure that the people heard his word even though they didn't want to go up on that mountain and hear it from him directly,

even though they were stiff necked. People and refused to do what he said. Going into the promised land,

he understood the importance of him giving His Word and the importance of those hearing it and receiving it.

And so we must do that also,

that we have a heritage of this, a 3,500 year Heritage of God's Word being passed down to us.

And our regularly spending time thinking about it, considering it,

allowing it to be a part of who we are,

allowing it to wash over us like a warm bath, like a warm shower each and every day,

it leading us, guiding us, it being on our hearts and being in our minds,

it being before our eyes constantly. It gives us vision, it gives us understanding,

and it gives us hope.

When you walk with God closely, when you know God because you know His Word,

there's great hope in that. Even when the struggles come and the difficulties are around you and they're all over the place around you, even when that happens,

God is a God of hope and God is a God of life.

And so as you're doing that, you have to trust him and you have to hear Him. And the only way I can trust him is to hear Him. Isn't that what the Ethiopian eunuch said?

What's to keep me from being baptized?

How can I know unless somebody tells me?

And so the telling of God's Word,

the reading, the relating of God's Word is life to a whole man's body. It's life to those who find it.

And we need to always,

always, always place Scripture in its high position,

which it has very high position,

and allow God's Word to move us, change us,

grow us, and ultimately lead us through the.

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.