[0:00] This message was recorded at Vision Baptist Church in Alfred, Georgia. It is our prayer that you will be blessed by the preaching of God's Word.
[0:13] That is a great story to have, and I hope all of you do have that story. I see that the Cook Trio put Papa Cook on the curb, and you want to sing anytime with me, Brother Cook, I will stay with you, okay?
[0:26] I will not leave you behind and go solo. So if you turn to Deuteronomy 24 and 25, as you're turning there, I meant to make mention of it earlier. I just assume everybody knows, but I want to make sure you do, that Pastor Miss Betty and the teams down at the Pastors Conference in Peru.
[0:43] Brother John and maybe some others would know, but I would think it's been right over 20 years that they've been having a Pastors Conference. It was long ago that it was the 25th anniversary of the Gardner family getting there, and you can see pictures online.
[0:56] God's really blessing that, the time they're preaches and having teaching times throughout the day, the strength in the churches, and we need to be in prayer for them. And then Brother John, Miss Sandy, and the Gibby family just got back from Chile.
[1:09] Sunday night he'll give a report on that, and I've already read a little bit of the report he gave, and I was really excited to see that. I wish we could all get on a bus, maybe an airplane. Let's go on an airplane. Let's go on an airplane and go see Chile, and then immediately go to Attaquipa.
[1:22] If you could see those two things, you'd be really excited because you would see what happens in discipleship over a couple decades. Go to Argentina while we're at it and see what God's doing there to see that.
[1:33] If you faithfully do discipleship in churches and train people, you really make a difference in the country. And we're blessed to have many ministries represented from our church. All right, Deuteronomy 24 and 25, that's where we're at.
[1:45] I told Pastor that's the real reason he's in Peru is because we're in Deuteronomy 24 and 25, and he just looked around, where can I go? And he found a place to go. That's only funny because we know it's not true about him.
[1:57] He is not afraid of difficult passages. This miscellaneous section is what it's called from 22 to 25. He was already in it. I just didn't notice how hard it was when he was preaching it.
[2:08] And now I've noticed in the study, but some people call this 22 through 25, the chapters, miscellaneous legislation. And I don't know what you think about the word miscellaneous, but I usually think lesser value.
[2:21] I was thinking my mom ran, had a shop, a flea market. It's just a bunch of junk. But she had this store, and we'd have grab bags. When you just didn't know where to put things on the shelf, we'd put them in a bag and staple it, and we'd call it a grab bag.
[2:34] And people would pay a couple dollars for it. And I always loved to see people, they'd get a grab bag, and then I'd watch them through the windows. They'd walk out, and they would open it up, and it'd just be a bunch of junk. They didn't make any sense why they had it.
[2:46] They're just staring at it. Well, miscellaneous doesn't mean lesser in value. It just means that it's hard sometimes to understand why the passages are together. Like in the Proverbs, it seems like it's covering a lot of topics.
[2:58] And as I studied, I really think all these are connected, and I hope you're encouraged by this fact. As I read about this, on Sunday night, one of the teenagers said, How do I get anything out of Leviticus? I was in the Q&A, and my first answer was, I'm just glad that you've ever read Leviticus, and I'm glad that you care to get something out of Leviticus.
[3:16] And I don't know, but when you find it... No, I didn't tell them that. I said, it's difficult. And this is a difficult place to get something devotionally from. But as I was reading it, Brother Dan, I was thinking, God, why do you care?
[3:28] There's 13 different miscellaneous legislation here, little passages. And I think, why do you care about this? And why do you care about this? And God, why do you care about all these little things? And then I just thought, I stopped my sentence and thought, God, why do you care?
[3:43] And I just thought, that's the most wonderful thing in all of the world. Why does God care about me at all? Why does God care about my marriage? Why does God care about the way that I relate with you?
[3:53] Why does God care about poverty? Why does God care about anything that's happening down here on this little globe that he created, full of people that rebelled against him and killed his son?
[4:04] Why does he care at all about any of it? And then I realized that God was in the details. I was excited about that. Because the two words that you can leave here tonight with is that God cares.
[4:16] And when he's involved in our lives, we should be thankful for it. And when he helps us and when he gives us these instructions in life, we want to follow him. We are not the Jewish people and this covenant was not given to us.
[4:28] And so even though we live in a new covenant, the nature of God doesn't change. Which means these stories about our God relating with the children of Israel still allow us to learn something about his nature and who he is and the God that we worship.
[4:42] Let me give you one example before we read. I'm not going to read it all to you at one time. We're going to teach it. I put the sections in some categories to help us. But verse 8 of chapter 24, here's an example of what I'm talking about.
[4:53] Take heed in the plague of leprosy that they observed diligently to do according to all the priests. The Levites shall teach you as I commanded them. So you shall observe to do them.
[5:03] Remember what the Lord that God did unto Miriam by the way after they were come forth out of Egypt. The next couple verses is going to change topic here. And we have 13 of them.
[5:14] So in passages like that, and I gave that in case you weren't familiar with reading it, why I say that it was challenging is that we're going to see two things real clearly. First of all, the terrible wickedness of the human heart.
[5:26] They show us what man is capable of doing if left alone. And we saw that very clearly in chapter number 22. When you're saying, God, why did you even need to make a law about that?
[5:37] We would never do that. And he says, yes, you do that. You're already doing that. And we're always shocked at how horrible man can be. Then secondly, God provided everything connected with his people.
[5:50] Nothing escaped his attention. Nothing was too small or too tender for his care. I think there's an expression that the devil's in the details. Is that an expression?
[6:00] I'm upstairs. But there's an expression that the devil's in the details or God is in the details of our lives. As a mother cares for the details of a child, God looks after them and us.
[6:15] Their clothing, their food, their manners, and their ways towards one another. How they were going to build their houses. How they would plow and sell their grounds. How they were going to carry themselves in the deepest privacy of their personal lives.
[6:26] God cared about all of it. And we may here see that there's nothing too small for our God to take notice of when his people are concerned. I am married to a professional mom.
[6:38] I didn't know that I... Y'all looked like I was going to say something bad here, okay? She's upstairs. She can't hear me. It's okay. I am serious. You know, when you look for a wife, you think somebody you love, you want to spend time with. But you don't think this is going to be the mother of your children.
[6:50] And I'm grateful. There's a lot of great examples of moms here in the church. But I am blown away with the things that my wife worries and thinks about. I'm going to make up something because if I told you a true story, it wouldn't be healthy for me, okay?
[7:03] I'll make up something. It would not surprise me at all for my wife to sit up in the middle of the night and say, What are we going to do if Tinsley struggles with science in middle school?
[7:13] I've already looked up three different places you can get tutoring from. And I'll talk to some of my friends. That would just be run-of-the-mill conversation for my wife. She is not only looking at the details of their life right now, but she's looking in the future and every possible hypothetical scenario that could ever happen.
[7:31] All right? We know what happens if Thatcher plays college football. All right? I've told her you just mark that one off. All right? And so she's looking at all those details, and it's an expression of love. Dads, it's an expression of love towards our kids when they're like that, when our wives are like that.
[7:46] And we shouldn't see it any differently when we look at our God and see that he's concerned about the details of our lives, and he's given us instruction. Many of you in here, and more so among the younger generation, will grow up without a father in their home.
[7:59] Over 50% won't have their father in their home. But every one of us have a book here with the Heavenly Father that's trying to help us navigate this messy world that we live in. And we ought to love that and be grateful for it.
[8:12] So I'm going to show you here that God cares about our marriages. God cares about our Mondays. Naomi Evans will be glad to know that. She hates Mondays. God cares about the value of life.
[8:23] God cares about justice. And God cares about generosity and integrity. And at the end of chapter 25, he's going to tell us to remember Amalek.
[8:33] And on Sunday night, Lord willing, we will look at that, and we'll see why we're supposed to remember Amalek. So before we jump in this, I want to encourage you, when you come to these passages and ask, you ought to ask God, tell me more about you.
[8:46] Not just tell me what to do. The Bible is God revealing himself to man. People change, circumstances change, but the nature of God does not change. And so in a passage, when you're saying, I don't really understand what to do with this.
[8:58] I'm not newly married, and I'm not supposed to be going to war. Or whatever the scenario is, you can say, I can't place myself in that scenario. You can take a step back and say, God, I see you better by the way that you tell these people to handle this.
[9:12] All right, first off, God cares about our marriages. Verse number 1 of chapter number 24, we're going to see here that he protects the dignity of women. When a man hath taken a wife and married her, and it came to pass that she find no favor in his eyes, because she has found some uncleanliness in her, then let him write a bill of divorcement, and give it into her hand, and send her out of his house.
[9:35] And when she has departed out of his house, she may go and be another man's wife. And if the latter husband hate her, and write her a bill of divorcement, and give it into her hand, and sendeth her out of the house, or if the latter husband die, which took her to be his wife, her husband, which sent her away, may not take her again to be his wife.
[9:53] After that she is defiled, for that is an abomination before the Lord, and thou shalt not cause the land the sin which the Lord God giveth thee for an inheritance. We see here in this passage that the purpose was to protect the dignity of the woman when she did not find favor in the eyes of her husband.
[10:11] This is not case law. This is not case study for divorce. If you'd want a complete, thorough study of that, you came on the wrong night with the wrong preacher and the wrong passage. In this passage, we're finding that a man put a woman away for whatever reason, which was allowed in their time lawfully.
[10:27] Doesn't mean it was condoned, but it was allowed. She goes to another husband, and that husband puts her away for the same reason. The original husband can't say, you know what? I'll take you back. And he says, if you do this, you're going to defile the land.
[10:39] What would happen in Jeremiah 31 verse 1, he says, doing this, that would play the harlot with many lovers and return again, saith the Lord. He says, if you treat women like this, you're going to just write up pieces of paper.
[10:50] You're going to say, I'm tired of you. I'm going to send you over across town to my friend's house, and then I'm going to bring you back. And you're going to play the system. And God's going to say, no, I care too much about the dignity of women for you to play like this, for you to work around the system like this.
[11:05] And he told them, you're not going to do this. We know in the case of adultery, the woman would be killed. So that's not the case here. We know that in the scenario of divorce here, it appears to be a different cause.
[11:16] God's not condoning it. He actually states here that there's no favor found in the man. We know that God will not have us put our wives away in this manner. We look to the New Testament, Matthew 5, 32, saving for the cause of fornication, commit adultery.
[11:32] So he's not teaching on divorce here. He teaches on dignity of the women. Then a second passage, chapter 24, verse number 5, still in this topic of marriage. Lauren Howith, carpenter, so sorry.
[11:44] I've been practicing not to say that. You're going to love this verse, okay? How many of you have been married for less than a year in here? Would you raise your hand? All right. Jeffrey, put your hand down. Okay. Let's see. So if you haven't been married for a year, you're going to like this, Lauren, okay?
[11:58] We shall take steps here to secure joy, a cheer in our marriages. This is 24, chapter 24, verse number 5. When a man hath taken a new wife, he shall not go out to war, neither shall he be charged with any business, but he shall be free at home for one year, and you shall cheer up his wife, which he has taken.
[12:16] This verse reminds us of how important marriage is and how important the beginning days of marriage are that makes marriage more important than society often makes it.
[12:28] No warfare or no jury duty, no public ministry office here being followed until a year of marriage. You like that, don't you, Lauren, right? He's still got to go to work, okay? That's not what we're talking about here.
[12:39] He just shouldn't go to war, maybe not do jury duty, or whatever would relate to this. A husband is to pursue righteousness by bringing joy to his wife. It says that a man has a job, Bo, in his first year of marriage, he shall cheer up his wife that he has taken.
[12:57] Ladies, your God loves you so much that he instructed people in the Old Testament here, for those ladies, he told those bonehead men how to act in the first year of marriage to take care of you.
[13:10] What a loving father to look after you in such a way. To say, I don't want you throwing them around, and I want you to take care of marriage because God cares for it.
[13:21] God cares about marriage. God cares about your marriage, and this is good news. And then the third thing we see in these passages of Scripture is the honor widows when the spouse will die.
[13:33] Verses 5 through 10 in chapter number 25, and let me give you a summary of it, because since we go through the church, we go through the Bible as a church, we don't go through the church as a Bible. That would be something completely different, and I'm not sure how we would do that, but we probably should think about it.
[13:49] But as we've been through the Bible, we've seen this played out a few times. We've seen Ruth and Boaz, when Ruth went to the nearest redeemer, kinsman redeemer, and for whatever reason, he didn't like it, didn't want to share his inheritance.
[14:05] And then so he goes before the committee there in town, the leadership, and they take his shoe off, and they spit in his shoe, and they say, now you'll have the name of the person with a loose shoe, and kids are going to make fun of you.
[14:17] And they like said, that's okay. They're like, kids are going to make fun of you. That's what they told him. Grown men in a courthouse or whatever, they said, from here on out, kids are going to make fun of you. I just think that's great.
[14:28] And so he was sentenced to that. And then we have Judah and Tamar, that's another case, where Tamar's husband died, and then the next one was supposed to have a child with her, wasn't willing to do it, and so she had to be deceptive so that she could have a child, because she knew there would be no inheritance, nobody to take care of her.
[14:46] Well, this is the passage of scripture where we get that teaching to tell us that, because God cares about widows. He wants them to be taken care of. He also cares about the honor and dignity of your spouse that dies, that God was writing that there, that God cares about that.
[15:03] That excites me, okay? It doesn't excite me just because I had to have something to preach tonight. It really excites me to know that God cares about the details of our lives and of our marriage there.
[15:15] So he cares about the happiness in our marriage. He cares about the dignity of your wife. He cares about widows, and he cares about your spouse, your family, after somebody in your family dies, because we have a God that cares.
[15:28] We also have a God that cares about Mondays, and I know you think that's hard to believe, but he really cares about Mondays. He doesn't just tell us how we're supposed to act in this building together, but he tells us how we're supposed to act together when we work together.
[15:40] In chapter number 24 and verse number 6, the lender shall not become lord of the lender. The man shall take neither of the upper millstones to pledge, for he taketh a man's life to pledge.
[15:53] When thou dost lend thy brother anything, thou shalt not go into the house to fetch his pledge. Thou shalt stand abroad, and to the man whom thou dost lend shall bring out the pledge abroad unto thee.
[16:04] And if the man be poor, thou shalt not sleep with his pledge. In any case thou shalt deliver him with the pledge again when the sun goeth down, and he may sleep in his own raiment, and bless thee, and it shall be righteousness unto thee before the Lord thy God.
[16:17] Proverbs 22, 7 tells us that the rich ruleth over the poor, and the borrower is servant to the lender. That's the nature of it. Before God even spoke, the human nature of man knows this is how things are going to work.
[16:29] If I loan you something, you're indebted to me, and I will lord over you. Well, God says, talking about this nation together and how he wanted them to treat each other, he says, don't take the instruments a man family needs to make their meal for collateral.
[16:45] Don't take their blender. Don't take their stove. Don't take their microwave if you're a college student. Whatever is needed to cook a full meal for a family, don't take it away from them. And that's what the millstone was.
[16:57] It talked about two different parts there. Basically, it doesn't work without either one of them. It's the mill that goes around and proof you ever go there, and you can see one where the water goes underneath the building and it spins.
[17:07] Who's been there and seen that with us? And it turns there, and it says, don't take your hands all across the room here, okay? And you see the millstone turning, and that's how they would make whatever they make bread out of.
[17:18] That's as far as I can take you with that, okay? Secondly, if you have a man, he's so poor he doesn't have anything but this coat, this kind of robe that he would wear. It wouldn't be at the closing, but it would keep him warm.
[17:29] And he says, I'm going to borrow something. I need to borrow your hammer. I'll leave you my coat. And then you need to give it back to him that night. Don't keep it overnight because he's going to be cold, and he needs it.
[17:40] And you can't say that's not my problem because your brother being cold at night is your problem here. If you have a day laborer, which was real common in those days, pay them at the end of the day. Don't say, I'll deal with it later.
[17:51] I'll just pay them the next morning. Because you should be concerned for your employees and know they need that money to make it through the day. God cares about the way we do our business because he cares.
[18:04] And because he cares about us, he cares about all the details of our lives. Let's see how much farther we can get here. Verses 14 and 15, he tells us he cares about the way that we treat our employees, that we should treat them with kindness here.
[18:19] We should treat higher workers with kindness. This, not only paying them on time, as I've mentioned, but looking after them here. And it says that if you don't, God will hear their prayers talking there.
[18:32] That God hears your prayer. If you have a boss, you have a company you work for, and they're mistreating you, when you pray at night, God hears that because God cares. So don't just talk to your coworkers about how bad it is.
[18:44] Don't just complain to your spouse about how bad it is. Talk to the God of Kevin because he is letting you know he cares about that. God cares. Did I say the God of Kevin? All right.
[18:55] Whoa. God cares about. Thank you, Brendan. All right. God cares about. Scratch that off. Okay. I told you no new doctrine when pastors got here tonight.
[19:06] Got in trouble for that one last time. All right. God cares about how we provide for those who work for us. 25 for common passage. Thou shall not muzzle the ox with treadeth out the corn.
[19:16] That's found again in first Corinthians chapter number nine. He's going to say this is the way that you should take care of the pastors in your church, which is to say take care of them. Don't just pay them hourly, but really take care of them.
[19:28] Keep them alive doing the work. And that's a positive side if you're standing on this. Take care of us. Don't let us die. The other side of it is they're only provided for as there's a work that's happening.
[19:39] They can't go out into a barren field and not plow and not do anything and expect to be taken care of. But as you have somebody working for you, take care of them. Care about them.
[19:49] And that's what's being taught here for us there. So God cares about our marriages. He cares about our Mondays. And then lastly, we'll get to the other two later, is that God cares about how we value life.
[20:03] 24-7. If a man be found stealing of any of his brethren or the children of Israel and make merchandise of him or selleth him, then thou thief shall die and thou shalt put evil away from among you.
[20:15] If you kidnap somebody and you take them and sell them, you should die. Doesn't that seem really drastic? Doesn't that seem very strong? Because God was teaching them, you do not get to undermine the value of life.
[20:29] I have set the value on life. And you don't get to redefine it. And so if you take somebody's life from society, you're going to lose it. His sentence with death, if he was being mistreated here, he will forfeit his own life.
[20:43] This isn't political. This is very much biblical with very obvious applications to how we as the children of God feel about abortion. We do not undervalue life at any point.
[20:55] In the womb or at 95, we don't have the right to undervalue it. We say it's a gift from God. It's life. And we will not be involved in undervalue in it.
[21:06] Not because we're children of Israel in the Old Testament and we're not allowed to kidnap because we have a law that says it. No, because we know the nature of our God. And we see it here and we'll see it again.
[21:17] We see it all through our Bible. We know how our God feels about people. And so because that's the way God feels about it, that's how we feel about it. We should look after our health by avoiding sin.
[21:27] In 24, 8, take heed in the plague of leprosy that thou should observe diligently and do accordingly to all the priests. The Levite shall teach you as I commanded them, so you shall observe the dew.
[21:38] Remember what the Lord thy God did in Miriam, by the way, after we were come forth out of Egypt. Remember what happened to Miriam? Moses' sister, she was rebellious. She had leprosy.
[21:49] She went to the priest and the priest put her in quarantine. And even though she was very influential, she had to follow the same quarantine as everybody else. There's no partiality that was happening there. Sin was brought on.
[22:01] Disease was brought on. Lack of health was brought on by sin. We know that's not always the case. As an example with the man that was blind, they said, who sinned? Said it's not that case. It's a case that God wanted to be glorified.
[22:12] But we also know that sin does bring on bad health and disease and shortens our life. And we're told here to take heed, to pay strict attention, to give due attention, do not treat it lightly.
[22:24] It's dangerous. When Jesus healed the man with leprosy early in the ministry in Mark chapter number one, he said, go to the priest. Because that's where you were supposed to go to. He would have went to the priest.
[22:35] The priest would have saw him, saw that he was completely healed, maybe noticed, maybe admitted that Jesus was the Messiah. That was what Jesus told him to do. But he didn't follow God's guidelines, and because of that, it hurt the ministry there.
[22:49] Folks needed to remind the Miriam as a warning to behave. God chased the Miriam for her evil contacts towards Moses. Even Moses' sister had to follow the rules and wait in quarantine, and they could not be partial in this area.
[23:03] I was recently with Chris Garnier. He was helping me out. We were driving somewhere, and we were talking about health, and I made some joke about just not really caring, you know, about my health or something like that.
[23:14] And he just looked at me very seriously and said, that's not funny. He's like, I said, I'm just joking. He said, no, you really can't joke about that. You can't joke about your health. God's given you your life.
[23:25] He's given you a ministry. And you need to be as healthy as possible so that your days can be prolonged and you can do ministry. And he kind of juked me there because we were joking about all kinds of things, you know, and he kind of said, not funny.
[23:37] And he just played that card on me, and I didn't see it. But I really, as I studied this, I thought, you know, it's really not funny to do that. We don't worship our bodies. We don't become overly concerned about it because we know there's a day we're going to die.
[23:49] But we see in the nature of God that he cares about human life, and he cares about our health, and he cares about our marriage. He cares about women's dignity. He cares about how we treat employees. He cares about how we, when we loan things to people, how he wants us to treat us because God cares about us.
[24:07] And that's good news for all of us in here because he does. Because in the details of life, you wonder if anybody else cares. You might think, does anybody in your family care? Does your spouse care? Do people at church care?
[24:18] This is such a small thing. Nobody cares about it. And God says, let me just demonstrate to you how much I care. And we'll get to some more on Sunday night that are even more peculiar.
[24:29] But I think if we run the gauntlet, we're going to see that there's not an area of your life that your heavenly father not only cares about, but if you will look to him to guidance, he will help you.
[24:41] He will guide you. We are so blessed not only to have his word, but we have the Holy Spirit allowing us to understand it. We have an unfair advantage on life because we have a father that cares about us.
[24:54] We have an unfair advantage in life because we have a book that dictates and tells us how we're supposed to live in the act. And we just got to look to it. And when you get to these hard passages, look for your God. When you can't find anything to do, when you have your task list and say, I just can't find anything to do because I don't have any oxen today and I haven't loaned anything to anybody.
[25:12] I just can't find anything to do. Say, here, I just found a God to worship. I just found something new about my God or something that I was reminded of about how loving and kind he is.
[25:25] Let me pray. And then Brother Jeffrey is going to come up here and make our announcements. Be in prayer for Pastor as they're there in Peru and the Pastors Conference going on.
[25:35] Kyle and Hannah will be there next year. And so that's exciting. Make sure you're in prayer for them. Send them an email and let them know. Before I do pray and Jeffrey gives announcements, let me make all of them for him.
[25:46] Just kidding. One announcement on the church website. You can sign up for the men's retreat or talk to Andrew about it November 6th and 7th. We really want you men to come to that. It will be a great time.
[26:02] This message was recorded at Vision Baptist Church in Alfred, Georgia. For more information, log on to www.visionbaptist.com where you can find our service times, location, contact information, and more audio and video recordings.
[26:17] Thank you.