40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Episode 162 (Deuteronomy 6:1-16)

Episode Date: April 25, 2019

Chad and Daniel start chapter 6 of Deuteronomy. God tells the people to listen and to teach the word of God. What is the significance of the language of milk and honey? What does this and crossing the Jordan have o do with baptism? What does it mean that God is one? Why does God say not to put Him to the test? All of this is discussed. Have a listen! 1517 Podcast Network CHF Minneapolis Christian History Almanac Support The Podcast

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is part of that 1517 podcast network. You can go over to 1517.org slash podcast, see all the other podcasts that we are associated with. Pretty proud of the stable podcast over there because we got a little bit of something for every need that you have. Those apologetic needs, those historical needs, those exegetical needs. We got all of those things. Right now, the newest thing that you can subscribe to that's about to come out, the trailer's up so you can subscribe to it, is the Christian History Almanac with Dr. Daniel Van Voorhis.

five minute long podcast 365 days a year every day it pops up and you can learn a little something about history chad this would make you the smartest guy with everyone you're around i listened to the trailer the other day it sounds fantastic it does sound fantastic does it not uh i've listened actually some of the episodes chad and i'm like well i'll just become so much smarter at the end of the year i'll know all kinds of historical things he's talking about people you never even heard of that did some pretty interesting things on that day in history so then when you roll into work you will be able to say hey bob you know you know what happened 700 years ago today this guy died he's the patron saint of bees you know why that is and then and then i mean you just become

you just become the guy that knows so many things that no one else knows that's worth something so you should probably go check it out uh go subscribe the christian history almanac also we're going to be doing an event in Minneapolis. May the 4th will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota at Berean Baptist Church. We're going to be talking about the resurrection and the life afterward. I will be there and a whole bunch of other people, Eric Sorensen and Scott Keith and Jared C. Wilson. So we want to hang out with you. So you can go over to Christ So Fast, go to the City Events page, click on it, and you can register for free. But it'd be great if you did register. All right, Chad, we are up in that Deuteronomy. We are. We're actually at the very beginning of a,

I don't know if it's the most important chapter, but certainly one of the most important chapters in Deuteronomy. It becomes one of the most frequently quoted chapters in the New Testament, for sure, because we have in verses four and following the famous Shema, which is often called the quintessential confession of Judaism, but it's also one of the quintessential confessions of christianity so yeah we got some good stuff coming up all right well let's get into it all right so this is uh it's a relatively short chapter there's only 25 verses so i'm going to start by reading the first three verses and do a little bit of a discussion about those and then we'll get to the heart of the matter which is chapter which is verses four through nine so

here's how it starts out deuteronomy six now this is the commandment statutes and the judgments which the Lord your God has commanded me to teach you, that you might do them in the land where you are going over to possess it, so that you and your son and your grandson might fear the Lord your God to keep all his statutes and his commandments, which I command you all the days of your life, and that your days may be prolonged. O Israel, you should listen and be careful to do it, that it may be well with you and that you may multiply greatly, just as the Lord, the God of your fathers, has promised you in a land flowing with milk and honey. So there's a lot of very Deuteronomy kind of language that's scattered throughout here. We have this threefold reference

to the various ways in which God is communicating his will to the people. It's called the the commandment, which in Hebrew is the mitzvah, commandments, mitzvot, the statutes, the judgments. This is common Deuteronomy language, kind of in a generic sort of way, you might even say, for a description of all the various ways in which God is talking to Israel and expressing his will for them. So these aren't necessarily like three carefully exclusionary categories of different kinds of words of God. It's just more kind of a general way of expressing everything that God is wanting to communicate to Israel. So this is what he says, God is giving me to teach to you, which of course is what Deuteronomy is all about. This is Moses teaching

the Israelites. He's reminding them. He's calling them to remember what has gone before. He's calling them to be courageous in the face of what's coming up, because as he says at the end of verse one, they're about to cross over. They're going into the land which God is going to give them as a possession. And so a large part of what Moses is doing in Deuteronomy is actually what he's going to talk about in verses four and following. He is impressing upon the hearts of the Israelites as strongly as he can, as incessantly as he can, how important it is to cling to the words of God. Because the minute that they don't, the minute they don't guard these words, then the hearts are going to go astray, as indeed the entire history of Israel before this point and

then after this point proves as well. So that is the repetitive goal of Deuteronomy, is for Moses to press into the hearts of the Israelites all of these words. And it's not just for this generation, but as he says, it's going to be for your son and for your grandson. So the words that he's giving them is meant to be it's a it's a a multi-generational word so every generation is going to hear and remember and learn and do everything that moses is commanding them today and then he kind of verse three is sort of a segue into what we're going to hear in verses four and following because he names the people he says israel and he has this language of listen to shema so oh israel you should listen and be careful to do it at the the two there's sort of a

an echo between these two words to to hear is shema and to guard or to keep is shemar so you should shema you should shemar you should listen and you should be careful you should you should guard in such a way as to guard these words so that you keep these words to do these words and as we i think we talked about this at the end of the last episode verse three mentions that the result of all of this guarding and keeping and doing is that it will actually be well with you so that the goal of these divine words is always for the benefit of his people he's not trying in other words to make life more difficult for them or to somehow make life terrible for them by the keeping of his words rather he is wanting things to go well well with his people and that they

multiply greatly uh just as he promised them in this land that is uh flowing with flowing with milk and honey so that is that's the introduction to what we're about to hear in in verses verses four and following typical kind of deuteronomy way of speaking about the divine words yeah i i think the the language of of milk and honey is interesting that's a weird thing to say do you say like what's this land like well it's flowing with milk and honey okay uh that's that's weird like does that mean they have rivers of milk and streams of honey is this what this means is this some kind of like is this like some you know land in narnia where this is how it how it goes that's what it sounds like right uh but milk and honey are actually pretty common in both the

Old and New Testament. But what's interesting is that milk and honey are synonymous actually with, or they're the example given, of what it's like to ingest the Word of God or to hear the Word of God. So we see David, when he talks about God's words, he says they're sweet like honey, right? So this is the sweetest thing they have, and this is how he describes them, that the words of God are like honey on my lips. This is mentioned several times in the Old Testament. They associate honey with the Word of God. You have examples in the New Testament

where someone like Peter will say, as newborn babes long for milk, so long for the pure word of truth, this sort of thing. And so milk and honey are associated throughout the Bible with the Word of God, which this chapter is talking about the words of God and then saying this land is flowed with milk and honey.

I don't think those things are disconnected. One of the things that's interesting, too, is in the very, very early church, a baptismal rite, way back in the first centuries of the church, they would baptize you, and then they would put a white robe on you, and then as they placed this white robe on you, symbolizing the righteousness of Christ, They would then give you milk and honey to eat, symbolizing your entrance into hearing and meditating and ingesting the Word of God. So you would eat honey and you would drink milk. So even the early church sort of did this, too.

That's beautiful. It's especially fitting with baptism because baptism is that water crossing over into the promised land of the kingdom, right? Right. And that's exactly what, of course, is about to happen with the Israelites, too. So up to this point, they have not yet tasted that milk and honey. But once they cross the baptism of the Jordan, as it were, and enter into the promised land, then they will enjoy that. So that's a great point to make, and that's why it fits so well here with this accent so much upon the words of God. So the milk and honey, I guess, not only in the biblical times,

but also into the early church, has this connotation of the ingestion of the Word of God. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so baptism is your—and they will cross, like you said, they will cross water. But baptism is your entrance into a land that is flowing with the good and sweet Word of God. That's sort of what is illustrated there. That's what the promised land is. is the land where the Word of God reigns, which is a good thing because what he says is true and right, and his promises are all guaranteed. So baptism is your entrance into that, and that's what's happening here.

This is what God desires this land to be. Now, they won't exactly have that happen because they will run away from the commands in no short amount of time. They will abandon a lot of this stuff. But the desire from God is that you enter a land that is flowing with his good word. Maybe we should bring back that milk and honey tradition of baptisms. That's pretty good, right? That is pretty good. Yeah, I was at a—my favorite service of the year is what's called Easter Vigil,

which I know is not practiced in all traditions, but we do it at our church. And one of the things I love about the service, two things I love about the service, is it's always the Saturday night before Easter Sunday. And there's a very, very heavy accent on a lot of Old Testament narratives, which are the foreshadowing of what happens at the resurrection of our Lord. And these are very baptismal in focus. There's the reading of creation and the flood and the crossing of the Red Sea amongst some other Old Testament readings.

So I love that, but I also love the fact that it's extremely—it's just dripping with baptism, baptism imagery and symbolism. And ideally, you have actually baptisms that happen at the Easter Vigil, and we did. We had three young men from Rwanda who were baptized at our church on Saturday night. And as you mentioned, in the early church, one of the things they did was to put white baptismal garments on them, And we do that at my congregation. After they were baptized, all three of them were vested with white garments, and then there was no milk and honey. That would have just really topped it off for you.

Yeah, that would have topped it off. They were given a candle, of course, which is symbolic of the light of Christ and to let that light always shine upon them. But, yeah, you know, if we'd had milk and honey— You would have felt like you were right in line with David saying, taste and see that the Lord is good, right? I didn't think the Easter Vigil could be any better, but, yeah, a little bit of milk and honey.

I think that would be the cherry on top. Yeah. Yeah, milk and honey is sort of a bunny trail, but, hey, milk and honey is in the text. But it does the symbolic job well because milk is full of nutrients, especially back so this is what you know infants get how they get their nourishment and you're a babe in christ at this point um then honey is sweet and so they're telling you that christ is here to that words of god are here to nourish you but they're also they're also very good

you know so it'd be it's not as good if it's a land flowing with spinach and kale you know it's not the same yeah i'll stick with milk and honey things this is a this is a great to sum up This is a great intro into what we're about to hear. Those first two verses are setting the stage for what's coming next. So verses 4 through 9 is the next unit. And I'll read those. Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart. and you shall teach them diligently to your sons and shall talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way and when you lie down and when you rise up and you shall bind them as a sign on your hand and they shall be as frontals on your forehead and you shall write them on the doorpost of your houses and on your gates so this uh this particular section is uh even though usually we only associate it with that first verse that you could really call the entire section the the shema shema from the hebrew verb for for here because of course this is the way that verse four starts out so in hebrew it's shema yisrael adonai eloheinu adonai echad it's a lot

shorter in hebrew there's only there's a lot fewer words in in the hebrew but they communicate basically the same thing and this as i mentioned earlier at the start this is this is the the quintessential confession of Judaism. It's recited every morning when they get up, it's recited every evening, it's part of the Jewish, multiple Jewish liturgies, so this really is, I guess you could call it the Jewish equivalent of the Christian Apostles' Creed or Lord's Prayer. I mean, one of these one of these central confessions of christianity that is universal and known by basically every every believer and on the lips of every believer so this is for uh for judaism but this is also there's not like some sort of this is this is the jews confession and not and not

the christians confession this is this is our confession because there's absolutely nothing in here of course that is not in complete conformity with everything that we confess as those who believe in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because, of course, we also confess that the Lord our God, the Lord is one. So it starts out with this call to basically open your ears. We talked about this, I think, a couple episodes ago, the importance of listening. We talked about in the context of the fact that there's not a Hebrew word, strictly speaking, for obey. Instead, the word usually translated obey is actually a phrase in Hebrew, and that phrase is to listen to the voice of.

So we talked about the significance, the vital importance of listening to the word of God. So that is what Israel is called to here, to shema Yisrael, to hear, O Israel, to open your ears. And then, in the words that follow, you really have the core confession of who God is in a couple of different ways. So literally in Hebrew, it's only four words. It is Yahweh, our God. So our God would be one word. Yahweh would be one word. So Adonai Eloheinu, and then Adonai Echad. Echad is the word for one. So what I love about this is that so much is squeezed into these few words. So first of all, Yahweh is our God. So he's not just God, but he's our God. He's my God. And that our is the word of faith. So when we can talk about

other gods. We can talk about Baal. We can talk about Asherah. We can talk about any of our modern gods in our societies, in our religions today. We can talk about the fact that some people believe in them, but we don't call them our God, because when you say something, someone is yours, then that is a word of faith. So when we say Yahweh, our God, that our is the confession confession that he is not just god but he is the one in whom we believe in whom we trust whom we follow the one who has claimed us as his own so there's a word of faith that's built into this this confession so yahweh our god and then who is he well he is he is one he is he's not a multiplicity he's not the yahweh who's here connected with egypt or connected with syria

or connected with Israel, where you have kind of a multiple Yahwehs, like you did with some of the other pagan gods, you have one. So he is only one God, and he's united in his essence. So this is the core confession of monotheism. So you got both of these active in these very few words. You have the name of God. You have that adjective of faith, the hour that is there, which is part of the confession that's going on here.

And then you have the description of who this God is. He's one. We're not polytheists. We don't believe that there are many Yahwehs or many gods, that instead that God is unified. He's one. And that unity is what then binds us into a unity with him by virtue of the faith that he gives us to call him our God. Well, this is obviously a go-to Old Testament passage for the Trinity, because for God to say that he is one implies that that would need to be said. In other words, if Chad doesn't need to say, I'm one Chad, well, he is only one. In every way, he's just him. But God says, I am one, because God is also three. But he wants to make it clear that even though he is three persons,

he is one God. If he's not three persons, he's just one person, I am one, is not only redundant, but it's sort of insane. There's no reason to make this distinction, right? Unless there could be some confusion. Yeah, and that confusion has been part of the Old Testament as well as part of the New Testament and the history of the church, really. We've often been accused of being a triotheist, believing in three gods. But the Christian confession has always been that God is three persons in one essence. So the unity, the oneness of God, has always been just as important in a confession as the fact that there are three persons.

Because, yes, it's a mystery. Yes, we will never completely grasp the depths of what this means about God. But at the same time, just because it's a mystery doesn't mean that we haven't been given something to confess. about who he is. So we say what God has given us to say. We say that he is actually Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. But we also say, as he does, that he is one. And, you know, of course, the history of the church is basically the history of trying to enunciate that as clearly as possible in the face of the multiplicity of false teachings that are out there. That's why we have the Apostles' Creed. That's why we have the Nicene Creed. That's why we have the multiple

trinitarian confessions about history. This is our way, in the language that God has given to us, of trying to actually be faithful in our confession of who God is, because it's not just kind of a, it's not just because, you know, it's an academic interest, or even just kind of a theoretical, theological kind of interest, because we are wanting to speak about God faithfully in the way that He Himself has communicated Himself to us. So just as we've discussed before, we don't want somebody telling lies about us, so we don't want to say lies about God. We want to confess Him, to speak of Him faithfully as He has revealed Himself to us. And so when we talk about the unity of God, Deuteronomy chapter 6, verse 4 is at the forefront of that. Yeah. All right, so that's the

it starts out, how does it go from there? Well, it shifts from this confession of faith, this confession of Yahweh, this confession of His unity, to talking about love. Verse 5, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might. This particular verse occurs several times in the Gospels. Some of them are parallel occasions, Some of them are not. But one I think that probably most people are familiar with is the introduction to the parable of the Good Samaritan, right? A certain lawyer comes up to Jesus and says, teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life? And Jesus says, well, what does the law say? How do you read it? How do you recite it? And the lawyer responds by quoting this.

you shall love the lord your god with all your heart all your soul and all your might and you shall love your neighbor as yourself and uh jesus has this great answer he says yeah that's right uh all you got to do this just do that and and you'll live then of course he goes on the lawyer is wanting to he's wanting to justify himself and so of course he wants a clarification as to as to who his neighbor is yeah maybe he should have asked a clarification as to who his god was too just to make sure he was he was on track there yeah he seems the the lawyer in that parable seems very certain about who god is but seems like he's looking for some wiggle room on who exactly he has to love uh in regard to other people yeah sometimes people people ask the wrong questions right i mean

that would have been that would have been a great occasion for jesus to say well who is your god but we need to clarify that before you start talking about who your who your neighbor is And I suppose the parable of a good Samaritan actually gets around to that because how we treat our neighbor is also a revelation of who our God is. And very often, if there's no love of the neighbor, then how can there be love of God? And perhaps the God who's actually being worshipped is the person in the mirror because love of self does not generate love of neighbor or love of God, either one. but that that's one occasion where this comes up uh it also comes up a couple of other times in the gospels where jesus is asked you know what's the what's the greatest commandment and this is i response uh he quotes this and then he quotes uh usually this verse and uh what is it

leviticus 18 you shall love your neighbors yourself usually those two are quoted quoted together even though love of neighbor is not talked about here of course it's talked about in leviticus and and jesus says that you know these on these two two commandments uh hang the whole law and and the prophets so if you if you really want to know where like all of these laws in the old testament it's kind of you know there's so many of them it's easy sometimes to get kind of you know the distracted by all of the the various kinds of regulations and rules and laws but if you if you only want to know where all of them are pointing, well, here it is. It's to love of God and to, and to love of neighbor.

And of course, Paul says that to love your neighbor is to, is to fulfill the law. So this is where all of this, all of the laws are directed. It's not towards some sort of static obedience, but instead they're directed to vertical as well as, as well as horizontal love to the emptying of yourself out to God as well as to the neighbor. So that's where every single thing that we have in the Old Testament

concerning commandments, this is where they're all leading us. So love of God. Verse 6, these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart, and you shall teach them diligently to your sons. You shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, when you lie down, when you rise up, shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontal loss on your forehead, and you shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates.

Now, whether this is meant to be taken literally or not is a matter of debate. Certainly, the first part is to be taken literally, that basically every occasion that you have, the words of God are to be on your lips, right? So you shall teach him to your children when you're at a house, when you're on the way, when you rise up, when you lie down. In other words, what the Lord has said is to be the subject or the topic of conversation at every opportunity. and the reason this is important is the very reason that deuteronomy gives us over and over and over because they're so easily forgotten so in order they might be remembered impressed upon the heart written on the very souls of believers they are to be repeated in and of course in an

oral culture this is this is the way it was done everything was was communicated by means of speaking by means of teaching so that this constant repetition of the words of god might might make the impact that that it does now the pharisees took this very literally yeah as far as binding them on the on the the heads and arms what you mean yeah yeah the practice of uh the uh tefillin the tefillin are like the little leather pouches uh that the jews use in which you have scraps apartment parchment or uh certain verses from uh exodus and deuteronomy are are written and placed inside these little parchments and then the tefillin are these little leather pouches are wrapped around your arms and around around your forehead uh as a literal

fulfillment as a literal keeping they would say of of these words from deuteronomy 6 now there's been debate even even amongst the jews throughout the centuries as to whether these are these commands are to be taken literally or not uh there's also you know the practice of having a uh, uh, what it's called. Oh, Mazuza, a little, uh, container that's by the doorpost of, uh, by the, the, the door jam of Jewish homes. When I, when I studied at Hebrew union college in Cincinnati, I stayed in the dorm during the week and then, uh, traveled back to Indiana on, uh, on the weekends. And even my dorm room had a little, uh, little container that had within it—I couldn't open it, it just was attached there,

but I'm assuming it had within it a little scroll with these words here. So this is their literal way of making sure that every door you enter has this reminder of the significance of the Word of God so that you're surrounded by it completely. You know, it's pretty funny that they would take it literally, try to fulfill it put the container there but you couldn't access it so you can't actually read what it says you just know it's in there right yeah you just have to you work on the assumption that inside this little uh little container is is the actual word of god yeah i mean there's a there's

always a risk kind of this literal externalization of these kinds of words where it's it's as if just binding them literally upon your arms and foreheads is enough well of course it's it's never enough uh there's nothing wrong with with traditions and customs and practices uh whereby we are reminded of the word of god but we we can never forget that the that the goal is to get the word inside you right it's not to keep it external it's to keep it internal so that's why he says that you shall you shall they shall be on your heart in in verse six so that anyway that is uh There's more that we can say about that, but I think that's a pretty good summary of what verses 4 through 9 are all about. To open our ears, to impress these words, not only upon our heart, but upon the hearts of our children.

and love of God, love of neighbor, and to surround ourselves more or less with the word of God in order that that word might always be that which informs us as to who we are and to whose we are and that to which he has called us. And then picking up with verse 10, we read this. So it's going to come about when the Lord your God brings you into the land, which you swore to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, to give you great and splendid cities, which you did not build, and houses full of all good things, which you did not fill, and hewn cisterns, which you did not dig, vineyards and olive trees, which you did not plant, and you shall eat and be satisfied. so when you've been given all these things then he says in verse 12 watch yourselves lest you forget the lord who brought you out from the land of egypt out of the house of slavery i've always loved this particular section because it's it's really unlike a lot of deuteronomy it's more

i don't know it strikes me as kind of more poetic which you don't you don't have a whole lot of poetry in Deuteronomy, but I've always loved this description. It's Moses' way of graphically reminding the Israelites, hey, everything that you're about to be given when you cross into the land of milk and honey, remember, it's all gift. So these houses are full of lots of good stuff, and you didn't fill them. There's going to be cisterns there that have already been dug, and you didn't dig them. There's going to be vineyards and olive trees and you didn't plant them. So everything that you're about to be given is indeed gift. It's not reward. It's not a salary. It's not anything that's based upon what you deserve or have merited. Instead, it is sure

100% gift. So when you've been given this gift, remember it's a gift and watch yourselves lest you forget the God who has given all of these things to you. And I think the reason that Moses accents this, and I think we all know this from personal experience, is because the dangerous situation that we enter is when we forget that everything that we have, especially when we've been just showered with all of these gifts, the dangerous thing is to forget that indeed it is all gift that we that it's not some kind of reward it's not merited but instead it's all nothing but the grace of god that's active active in our lives and we when we've been when we've been given all these gifts there there's always that lurking tendency to think that to transform

the gifts into into something that we have somehow somehow deserved and the minute that we do that the focus is not on god the giver but upon us the deserver and everything is turned backwards so watch yourselves lest you forget verse 13 you shall fear only the lord your god and you shall worship him and you shall swear only by his name and then he goes on in verses 14 and 15 to talk about kind of first commandment sort of stuff shall not follow any other gods all the gods of the peoples around you, because the Lord your God is in your midst as a jealous God, something that we've talked about multiple times. And then verse 16, we have a familiar verse. You shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massah. This is the verse that Jesus quotes in

the second temptation, once the devil places him on the pinnacle of the temple and tells him to cast himself down. And so Jesus responds, you shall not put the Lord your God to the test as you tested him at Massa. The Israelites were thirsting and complaining. This is briefly after the exodus out of Egypt. And God stands on the rock and Moses strikes the rock and water gushes out. And yet because they tested the Lord, the place was named Massa, which actually means the place of testing so this verse more or less says don't put the lord your god to the test as you did at the place of of testing and it as i said it's one of the it's one of three old testament verses that jesus quotes from this particular section of deuteronomy during his temptation

in the wilderness as his way of not just responding to the lies of the devil but also of reminding us, by quoting from Deuteronomy, what he was out in the wilderness to do. He was out there not just to be tested, but he was out there to redo what Israel had undone. So to live faithfully and obediently the life that Israel did not when they were in the wilderness for 40 years. Yeah, I think that sometimes the testing thing can be difficult for people to understand, because, you know, you do have these situations where it seems like God sort of welcomes this kind of things, like where it seems like, hey, try me and see if I'm not faithful. This kind of language appears in the Bible as well. But what this is more about is trying to sort of malign

God or tempt God, this sort of testing, where you start saying things about God, like the sort of things the israelites said like god has brought us out here in order to kill us like don't be don't be messing around with that sort of stuff and of course in the temptation of jesus we have him literally being tempted to sin which is of course you know not not something you want to do with god yeah i think in the case of israelites we see just in the narrative itself that as time goes on the more that they are shown the the goodness of god for them and the fact that he is on their side, that he is going to provide for them, the more serious repercussions that they experience as a result of not believing in his promises.

And so we have lots of cases where the Israelites are grumbling, and they're doubting, or they're just outright rebelling. But as time goes on, the farther and farther they go in the wilderness, and the more and more miracles that they see, then the severer the punishments become until finally when they rebel at the edge of the promised land. And, of course, they're sentenced to 40 years in the wilderness. So there is this escalation that goes on, too. And it's a good reminder for us that, you know, the fact that they'd seen so many miraculous events was no guarantee of their fidelity.

And miracles, as I've said before, miracles, faith based on miracles has a short shelf life. Because we are, by nature, those who easily forget even the miraculous. And that's why the emphasis in Deuteronomy, as well as throughout the scriptures, is not necessarily to remember the mighty deeds, but instead to let the words of God about these mighty deeds and about everything else, let those be that which is the basis of your faith. Because, well, as Jesus says in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man, that if they won't believe Moses and the prophets, they won't believe even if someone rises from the dead. So rather than a faith based on miracles, it's a faith based upon the Word of God. Yeah, but you see an example of this, that the miracles only go so far when the Pharisees see a bunch of miracles and say, well, that looks like something the devil would do. So, yeah, if we ever needed an example, that would be it, right? That's it.

That's it. It was firsthand, right? Exactly. Even that wasn't enough. Exactly. And that is it, guys. We are out of time. If you would like to support the work over here, you can do that.

It is all free. And the reason it's all free is because a whole bunch of people do a little bit. You can be part of that if you go over to the donate page on any of the sites. It all goes to the same place. And if you're one of the people that do that, thank you so much. it is you that makes it possible chad i will see you next week all right see you then