Deuteronomy 32:1-22 Bible Study | Episode 956

June 9, 2025

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

Deuteronomy   Bible Study | Episode #

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 32.

And it is the song of Moses, which God told Moses to write.

It's his.

You know, really, I guess the best cultural way to describe this is a warrior song.

It is a lot of times,

a lot of tribes in America of the Native Americans who. Or American Indians who,

who lived here,

they would write a.

You know, it's a death song. It's a song of that they would sing when they were passing away or sing right before a battle to prepare themselves for their death.

This is not that in the sense of a song of battle, but it is a song that kind of reveals Moses mindset and it definitely gives an idea about how difficult Moses task was of leading these people to the promised land.

It reveals a lot of bitterness. There's still some bitterness you can see in this.

And not only that, you.

You get an idea of God's plan for them.

So it's got a lot of good stuff going on. It's a really good. It's a really good chapter.

We're going to spend a few days in it and then we're quickly moving on to the promised land.

But I think we can gain a lot from this. There's a lot of insights to be had.

And because it's a song from his heart,

you kind of get a really good insight into Moses.

And a lot of people want a good insight into Moses. Obviously, he is the preeminent figure in the Old Testament leading up to David and the true picture of Christ coming, the true archetype of Christ coming.

And so Moses has a big role to play. And he is the prophet and he's the lawgiver and the greatest man of the Bible, of the Old Testament, in my opinion,

and obviously God's opinion also, because Moses is one of the ones that met Jesus on the mount of transverse Transfiguration. He is. He is a premium. He is a. He is the premier figure in Scripture.

And so knowing a little bit about him personally is.

Is something that kind of helps you understand this story.

He says, give an ear, O heaven, and I will speak and hear, O Earth, the words of my mouth.

Let me teach. Let my teaching drop as the rain,

my stick, my speech distill as the dew, as raindrops on the tender herb,

as a shower on the grass.

For I proclaim the name of the Lord, ascribe greatness to our God. He is the rock.

His work is perfect. For all his ways are just and are justice.

A God of truth without injustice, righteous and upright is He. Now, those first four verses follow a pattern, a long, long pattern of people who write Scripture recognizing that God is revealing Himself through His Word and through his creation.

And you see that here, that God's Word is much like his creation. It unveils who he is. In fact, more than like his creation,

it heavily unveils who he is.

And so understanding that kind of seeing that as it works out in,

in Moses's life is a. Is powerful. It's really, really powerful.

Moses is.

Moses is.

Is.

Well, he spurned on the thing that God did. That is the most important to Moses, as you can see as he starts. This is not the plagues in Egypt.

It's not parting the Red Sea.

It's not the fire by night and the pillar, the cloud by day.

It's not the manna. It's not the. It's not the.

The water from the rock. All those great miracles. I'm not diminishing them all.

The most powerful thing for Moses is meeting God up on that mountain and hearing God speak to him. His Word. That's the most powerful thing you get from this passage.

That's what you get out of this passage is that Moses, the thing that Moses in his whole life,

mattered the most to him is his word. Is God's word.

God's word. God's call.

You know, Moses, Moses was called from on top of that same mountain and told by God to go deliver his people. And Moses buckled under that. Moses did not want to do it.

In fact, he gave excuses why not to do it. We've been through that in our study, through these first five books of the Bible. So we come to the end of the first five books of the Bible.

All the wonderful, powerful, amazing, matchless things that have happened,

miraculous things, things such that even Christians or,

well, we'll just say Christians question whether or not the Bible is accurate or true about those things.

The thing that Moses thinks is the most important is his God's revelation of his truth, which is these five books.

Moses thinks that the most important thing he's learned about life, about himself and about God is that God is consistent. He's true. He's just. He's perfect, he's right. And he does things perfectly and well.

And Moses knows that because he's talked to God.

Now, that's. That's a powerful understanding from Moses. That's something that.

That's something that resonates in my heart. Okay.

It is something that makes me understand.

Why does John start out with. In the beginning was the Word. We're talking about this old man who's writing about his Savior and Lord, who he knew as a teenager, who was crucified when he was a teenager and resurrected and rose and was transfigured.

He was taken up to be with the Father,

and he starts his gospel about him was in the beginning was the Word.

Why? Why? Why are these great people who have met God face to face?

Why is their point of view the powerful and the goodness and the righteousness of God's Word? Why is that? Because it resonates with them. It is. It is. The thing about our God is good, great, wonderful.

He's all creator. He's all those things, but he's able to actually reveal himself to us. He's able to actually speak to our hearts. He is a God of revelation. He's a God of his word.

Powerful.

Verse 5, we get a little bit of. But the people,

they have corrupted themselves.

They are not his children because of their blemish. A perverse and crooked generation.

Do you thus deal with the Lord, a foolish and unwise people?

Is he not your Father who bought you?

Has he not made you and established you? What he's saying is people don't act like they're his children. Even though God has provided, he has delivered them, he's provided for them, he's bought them at a price.

And yet they don't.

They don't receive him, they don't accept him, they don't take Him.

And that's the dichotomy. And really, that's the dichotomy of Scripture. It's going to be the dichotomy of the rest of the Old Testament. It's the dichotomy. It's the thing that's the struggle.

These people know me, and yet they don't act like they know me.

Remember the days of old.

Consider the years of many generations. Ask your father, and he will show you your elders, and they will tell you.

When the Most High divided their inheritance to the nations, when he separated the sons of Adam, he set the boundaries of the people according to the number of children of Israel.

For the Lord's portion, His people, Jacob is his place of inheritance.

What he's saying is, look,

God made the nations. God separated things out, and yet he provided for his people his inheritance.

God's the one who is ordering the nations.

He's not just the God of our nation. He is the God of all things.

And yet,

as far as his people are concerned, God made things for his people. He made it possible that his people could know him,

and he made it possible that his people would have a portion or inheritance in the world.

He found him. He found him in a desert land and in a wasteland and a howling wilderness. He encircled him. He instructed him. He kept him as the apple of his eye, as an eagle stirs up its nest, hovers over its young,

spreading out its wings, taking them up, carrying them on its wings.

So the Lord alone led him, and there was no foreign God with him.

He made him ride the heights of the earth that he might eat the produce of the fields. He made him draw honey from the rock and oil from the fellow curds from the cattle, and milk from the flock with fat, and lambs with rams, and breed of the breed of Bashan and goats with the choicest wheat.

And you drank wine, the blood of the grapes.

Now,

there is an element of this being a prophecy of Jesus. Okay,

there is an element of that.

But really what he's talking about is his people. He's talking about Israel.

But the truth is there are aspects of this that kind of begin to. To point to someone, that God, a single person. And remember, Moses served in that role. So it would be something naturally he would turn to, he would push toward, he would think about.

He is the deliverer of Israel out of Egypt, okay?

He knows that there's got to be a deliverer that fixes it all.

Well, he knows that deliverer because he's met him, he's talked to him on the mountain.

And so he understands that God's going to bring about that deliverer on the earth.

And this passage prophesies that,

but it also prophesies God's people. And he is saying that God made a people out of someone that was nothing,

Abraham out of something that was nothing. And he sustained his people even though they were from nothing. And had nothing.

And God's big into that.

But what happened? Well, he says, but Jeshurun grew fat and kicked. You grew fat,

you grew thick. You are obese.

Then he forsook God who made him,

and scornfully esteemed the rock of his salvation, meaning the rock where the water came from,

the rock of God's salvation who is Jesus. They provoked him to jealousy with foreign gods, with abominations. They provoked him to anger. They sacrificed to demons, not to God. Now notice, they sacrificed to demons,

okay? Not to God, to God. They did not know to new gods, new arrivals,

that your fathers did not fear of the rock who begot you. You are my unmindful and forgotten the God who fathered you.

He's talking about Israel here,

that they've turned to other gods.

And this is the message of scripture that God has delivered us.

I want you to hear me. We're talking about believers, that God has delivered us, and we continue to turn in our hearts toward evil.

Okay?

That the salvific process is a struggle for us because we oftentimes turn away from God the way we should. The way we should walk with him.

It says. And when the Lord saw it, he spurned them because of the provocation of his sons and his daughters. And he said, I'll hide my face from them. I'll see that their end will be.

For they are a perverse generation, children in whom is no faith.

They have provoked me to jealousy by what is not God. Now notice, I love that by what is not God,

that's sin.

For those of you who hear me talk about what is God and not God,

this is kind of where it comes.

They have removed me from anger by their foolish idols.

But I will provoke them to jealousy by those who are not a nation.

I'll move them to anger by a foolish nation.

For a fire is kindled in my anger and shall burn to the lowest hell.

It shall consume the earth with her increase and set on fire the foundations of the mountains.

Moses here is talking about what he's dealt with in the wilderness.

And what he's dealt with in the wilderness is a people who chose to chase after other things other than the God who's delivered them from bondage in Egypt.

And there is a whole lot of anger from this. And they've chosen,

not God. When they got to the mountain and they had the opportunity to know God and experience God, they chose to reject him.

And that has consequences.

And I want you to hear me. He's talking about the people who went through the blood on the doorpost. They, they went through the seed, the first baptism.

They, they, they, they heard God's word from the mountain, they received God's word and yet they walked faithlessly before Him.

And that's a picture of the salvific process. That's a picture of us not walking in faith.

And, and what happens to those people? Well, they don't go into the promised land.

They don't get the spirit filled Christian life.

So people that do not walk by faith do not experience God's best on the earth.

They do experience the new birth, they do experience glorification. But what they don't have is the great value of the sanctification process.

I can remember teaching this even as a young pastor with teenagers, teaching teenagers that the most important thing, the most important part of our lives that we spend with God is the part of our lives where we walk with him and experience his best.

And if we spend our lives,

waste our lives wandering away to other gods,

we miss out on God's best.

That does not mean we miss out on heaven.

What it means is we miss out on all that God has prepared for us.

And that is a sad, sad thing.

That has been the point, I guess, of most of my ministry is to teach people to walk in faith with God and to experience his best.

And it has led me to understandings that I couldn't have imagined I had 30 years ago or would have.

And it's also allowed me to experience.

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.