40 Minutes In The Old Testament - Nehemiah 9:7-26 (Episode 368)

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

The Levites recount the great saving acts of God. This God is a God who sees, hears, and acts. Stiff necks are everywhere. And God is always ready to forgive. Chad and Daniel discuss all of this. Have a listen! Show Notes: Support 1517 1517 Podcasts The 1517 Podcast Network on Apple Podcasts 1517 on Youtube What's New from 1517: Join the 1517 Academy Freedom Lessons Street Team Finding God in the Darkness: Hopeful Reflections from the Pits of Depression, Despair, and Disappointment by Bradley Gray More from the hosts: Daniel Emery Price Chad Bird

Welcome to another episode of 40 Minutes in the Old Testament. 40 Minutes in the Old Testament is a 1517 Podcast Network podcast. You can go to 1517.org slash podcast and check out all the other podcasts that are living over there while you're over there. Check out all the other things that 1517 is doing. There's a lot of other podcasts, daily articles, academies, got a whole publishing house. You can check out all the videos from events that we've done. A lot of stuff to do over there. Make sure you go there and check it out.

We ended in Nehemiah chapter 9. we sort of just stuck our toe in the water of a recounting of Jewish history here. And we got to verse 6, where we were talking about creation. So this is a, what is this, sort of like a prayer, I guess? Sort of telling God what He already knows, but it's good for you to tell Him that you know it. And so they're going to do the whole history here, and that's what we're going to join them in. yeah you're it's just i i love this aspect of of the way the bible often ouches the language of prayer i mean typically we think about prayer as you know we're asking or we're confessing our

sins or whatever it might be but a lot of times in the psalms anyway when when you have prayer or praise actually what you're doing is yeah you're you're telling god this is who you are and this is what you've done but in so doing you're praising him yeah so it's the idea of i'm i'm going to recount uh to you who you are and what you've done and in that way i'm i'm confessing i'm praising i'm giving thanks to you for all of all of who you are and all that you that you've done for me and for and for your people so it starts out in verse six with creation talking about god is the alone is the one who made heaven earth seas and host of heaven is worshiping him and he preserves all all of them so that's just verse six and that's just kind of the opening

element of creation there's nothing more that's said about explicitly about creation so if you think of that as kind of the recap of genesis one and two then the next verse which is verse seven is going to take us, we're going to leapfrog over everything that happened from Genesis 3 to Genesis 11, and we're going to focus on Genesis 12 now, the calling of Abraham. Yeah, one thing that we

didn't point out last episode about the way they start is that you are the Lord, you alone, and then you have made the heaven, all this stuff, and you're going to go through a bunch of stuff that God alone is responsible

for, right? And so there is this, it's not just like, hey, you were involved in this, right? He was part of the process. Yeah. No, it's like you and only you could and did do this. So all the credit for anything good all goes to you. It goes to a singular place. Yeah.

I mean, that's why the confession of God as creator is so important. I don't think we often will kind of reflect on that. The fact that God alone created the heavens and the earth points to the fact that God alone is going to be the one who's able to also save us, redeem us, sanctify us, keep us, all those sorts of things. So it seems to me, and maybe this is a wrong impression, but it seems like a lot of times when we talk about creation, God is a creator. Our focus remains kind of on, well, he's the all-powerful one in doing this. So it's very true, but also the fact that he alone is the one who did this is indicative, theologically, of modernism, that he's the one who's going to be doing all these other things too

because no one else is remotely capable of doing those. So verse 7 says, kind of starts out the same way. There's no alone here, but it starts out, you are the Lord. Kind of the alone is assumed. You are the Lord, the God who chose Abram. and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans, and gave him the name Abraham. I'll go and finish this Abraham part. This is 7 and 8.

You found his heart faithful before you, and made with him the covenant to give to his offspring the land of the Canaanite, the Hittite, the Amorite, the Perizzite, the Jebusite, and the Girgashite. And, I love this, I love the last part of verse 8. and you have kept your promise for your righteous that beautiful yeah what does it mean that god is righteous well one thing that it definitely means is that he's a promise keeping god that's that's god is righteous well how does he how does he demonstrate his righteousness by keeping his promises he made a promise to abraham and he and he kept it yeah this i mean this is a good thing to know about god that he's a promise keeper i mean this is a this is a very good news because

he makes really good promises and uh it's good that he keeps them abraham is like an a i don't know i mean i'm sure we talked about this when we went through genesis and stuff but you have to remember that abraham is like a really unlikely person for god to call like this is like god starts from the jump when he's like you know like creative people by calling like a like a really weird like his selection is strange it's very strange yeah it's like well don't you need to choose someone who's young and righteous and a monotheist and all those sorts of things and god's like i don't think so no i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna choose a guy who's very old uh who's married to a woman who's very old their past child bearing age and they were

this is the part they're they're married but they're also half brother and half sister can to keep that in mind too yeah another weird element to this and uh they were both raised presumably then the same household i mean they're half brother and half sister by uh an idol worshiping father yeah so this is yeah this this does not have the elements that lend a lot of hope from just an external perspective yeah there's not a lot here to work with and i think the order of things here is important too because you might be tempted to read this as like hey you chose Abraham because you found his heart faithful before you, which is not what this text says. This text says that you chose Abraham and brought him out of the land of earth, so he was doing some

other thing, had nothing to do with God, was actually doing things with other gods, and you brought him out of that. And then after that, you found his heart to be faithful before you. But the call comes first. The call is not because of the faithful heart that God found, like, oh, look, go goody, there's a faithful heart, I'll call him out, I'll use him. No, he calls him out when he's doing whatever he's doing over there, and because of the calling out, Abraham then is faithful to God, and then he says, and you made a covenant to give his offspring the land of the Canaanite and the Hittite. But even that covenant, there's not like a because there, there's not like you have to pay attention to the language.

God calls him out. He does find his heart to be faithful, but it's not because he found his heart to be faithful that he made a covenant. It's not what it says. It just says that he did. Yeah, yeah. If you go back to,

and I'm sure we talked about this back in Genesis, but it's worth, that was a few years ago. If you go to a lot of the Jewish traditions and legends, they will explain in these traditions why God chose Abraham. they chose him because you know he uh he rejected the idolatry of his father and at one point he burned down the this little sanctuary that had all of his his father's his father's idols in it and because of that god seeing him to be a faithful monotheist called him now that is a

an outlandish lie that you can't you can't get anything more uh backwards from the way that the scriptures present abraham says absolutely nothing about that he was pious he was a good guy they had the right heart that he was a monotheist no god called abraham because god called abraham he chose him yeah he called him he chose him he called him and then once god did this and spoke his words well then abraham believed god and it was reckoned him as as righteousness and he made this covenant with him and so i mean this is in many ways the perfect uh transition from what we heard about creation so creation was spoken into existence by a good and gracious god wasn't like there was something there and god saw it he's like oh i kind of like that i like the way that is i'm

going to make that into the heavens and the earth no he just spoke and it's same same here with abraham there was nothing in abraham that attracted god's attention like you know some moral quality and God's like, oh, I can work with that. No, he just, he spoke, he called him. And then Abraham believed what God had said to him. Yep. All right, so he calls him. Abraham believes and the God makes these promises

that through Abraham is going to come a blessing. And this is important to point out too, to all nations. Now this in Nehemiah 9 points out that he's going to make a covenant to give to his offspring, that's Zerah, and it's in the singular as it commonly is. So that can refer to a specific individual or it can refer to just offspring in general. And included in that would be Jews and Gentiles. I mean, this is kind of a bigger picture than just what's happening in the Old Testament. So anyway, here the focus is upon giving them the land of all the Ites, Canaanites, Hittites, so on and so forth. So God makes a

promise and he's going to keep it because he's righteous. Now, so that's Genesis 12 material and following through the death of Abraham. Now we're going to actually skip forward more in biblical history. We're going to skip past the death of Abraham. Nothing's going to be said about Isaac and Jacob and Joseph and all those things that take up the second half of the book of genesis instead we're going to skip to the book of exodus now with nehemiah uh verse chapter nine verse nine and so continuing and you saw the affliction of our fathers in egypt and heard their cry at the red sea and performed signs and wonders against pharaoh and all his servants and all the people of his land for you knew that they acted arrogantly against our fathers and you made a name

for yourself as it is to this day i'm going to kind of pause there and we'll we'll uh pick up from there in just a second so of course you know biblical history uh the descendants of abraham end up in egypt and they're afflicted they're enslaved and the god hears their cry he says he saw the affliction of our fathers in egypt and then he called them out and then we kind of skipped to the red sea and he heard their cry at the red sea of course they're trapped pharaoh changes his mind comes out with his army and the israelites are between the israelite the egyptian army and the red sea so there god performs the signs and wonders against pharaoh and his servants and he knew they had acted arrogantly against against the israelite fathers and then we have this you made a name for

yourself as it is as it is this day so it's kind of the idea of god established his reputation so he made a name for himself well how did he do that so what kind of reputation did god establish what kind of reputation did god have and the reputation is that he's the god who saves yeah that's that's yeah that's it was just so beautiful because it's like okay god made a name for himself at the red sea what kind of name did he did he come away with kind of reputation well You know that thing about The God of Israel What he's known for

He's the God who saves That's what he does He's a promise-keeping God And he's a saving, saving God You can sort of take this text And you say, okay, God What happens in this text That God would build a reputation

The reputation he has is that That God of the Israelites He sees, he hears, and he saves That's what he does That's what he does yeah it's a beautiful perfect description of who he is so uh verse 11 kind of goes on with the more particulars you divided the sea before them so that they went through the midst of the sea on dry land and you cast their pursuers into the depths and we have a simile here as a stone into

mighty waters now that image metaphor or simile is drawn directly from the song at the sea exodus 15 two verses actually use this a similar image uh exodus 15 5 says they went down talking about the egyptians they went down into the depths like a stone and then verse 10 says they sank like lead into the mighty waters so either way of course you you come away with a picture or as nehemiah puts it as a stone into the mighty waters so they sink and the israelites walk safely through through dry ground to to the other side and then beginning with verse 12 we have some more some more details and this is a this is kind of a fascinating i didn't know this until i looked at this text in detail but there's a kind of a fascinating symmetry here so if you if you uh

have your bible open sometime just take a look at verses 12 through 22 and what happens in those verses is we're going to hear about how God leads them with a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar five by night. And then he comes down on Sinai. Number two is he comes down to Sinai, he gives them his Torah. And number three is that he provides for their needs, gives them bread and water. And number four is all about the land. Okay. So you got the pillars, you got Sinai, you've got the bread and water and then you have the the land now the next thing that happens is documenting the rebellion at the at the golden calf incident all right so we're going to get to that in just a second but can that's the interlude and then after that it picks right

back up with the same four things that i just noted god this is verse 19 you're gonna hear about the pillar again and then you're gonna hear about how god gave his good spirit to instruct them that's going to be about the torah and then he doesn't withhold manna and water for them and then verse 22 is going to pick up with the land again so the same four things are repeated but the important thing is that in between those in that interlude is where you have the rebellion of the israelites so god does all these four things is the israelites rebel at the golden calf and god does not turn his back on them yeah he actually he responds by doing the same things that he was doing before.

In other words, he's merciful. Our sin is not going to stop him from loving us. Yeah, it's almost like he says, okay, here's the things. Here's who you are. You did all this creation. You called out this guy. You're a God who sees the suffering,

hears the cries, saves his people. Here's all the good things you did. Here's what we do in response. Like, here's our response. It's not good. So all this awesome stuff, this is how we respond. And then what do you do? More awesome stuff.

Same awesome stuff that you've always done. Yeah. Yeah, when I saw that, this wasn't original to me, a commentator pointed this out, but when I saw that, I was like, yeah, that right there tells you what kind of God we have. Yeah. He does all this wonderful stuff for us, and then we sin, and God forgives us, and then He does more wonderful stuff for us. yeah it's it's a weird thing you would think you know and we know that we're not this way because

we know ourselves maybe we don't know ourselves as well as we think probably not uh you'd think like man if god just would do some stuff for me like if he just really show up for me and you know take care of my problems and if i just knew he was caring for me like i would man like how would i have miracles how could i not be faithful to this god well the answer is quite easily this is this never works out this way no no there's besides maybe the the disciples of jesus there was never a generation that saw more miracles than the israelites did yeah i mean come on the the 10 plagues and then the parting the red sea and the manna and the water i mean it's like every day you wake up you're like yeah what a miracle god is gonna work today

and then you have rebellion you got hard hardened hearts so uh and of course the same thing in the ministry of jesus you know his not just his disciples see all these things but other people too we've we've talked before about the the raising of lazarus you know jesus raises lazarus and the reaction of the teachers of the law are like uh now we got to kill two people yeah We've got to kill Lazarus. He has to die again. And definitely we've got to kill Jesus. That's a response to a miracle.

Yeah, a response to a miracle, too. I think one of the funniest things in the New Testament is when Jesus feeds like 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish, the next day, he's giving them some teaching or whatever, and they say, What sign do you do that we might believe? What? Same people. Same people. What do you, yeah, well, maybe I see a little sign here.

Maybe then I could believe your words. And what they're really doing is like, hey, you got any more of that fish and loaves? Or what are we doing here? Any more of that bread? Yeah. And then in John 6, they leave him. Yeah, well. After he starts to preach and teach.

Well, yeah, and this is where Jesus finally gives the response that's correct. When they say, hey, we're going to need a sign. and then uh and he says it's an evil and adulterous generation that seeks a sign and uh in other words like the signs haven't ever kept anyone faithful to me like i mean i've done signs for you people from the beginning of time and you still end up chasing after other gods you're evil and adulterous i mean he's speaking here theologically obviously and of course he's gonna say that jesus is saying in that moment dude i i did say about the first time i've done this i've done signs for your fathers and what do they go do they go build a golden calf that's

a these signs ain't gonna help you i think about that and there's those moments in my life when i just pray that god would work a miracle i mean i don't think there's anything wrong with that but don't think that if god is gonna work a miracle all of a sudden all of your faith issues are going to be resolved it don't work that way no i mean you don't have to you don't have to know a lot about the bible to realize that the human heart does not work that way we can see a lot of signs a lot of miracles a lot of wonders and that doesn't mean all of a sudden our hearts are going to be completely revamped and the whole rest of our lives we're just going to stand in awe of god doesn't work that way no be nice if it did but it it doesn't so the back

to what was happening here uh picking up then with verse 12 by a pillar of cloud that you led them in the day and by a pillar of fight pillar of fire in the night to light for them the way in which they should go same pillar uh just different appearances uh for day and and for night and then verse 13 uh takes us to sinai exodus 1920s and onward stuff you know they're at sinai all the way from about halfway through exodus all the way uh into the book of numbers they're there for over camp there at the mountain for over a year so you came down he descended on mount sinai and you spoke with him from heaven and you gave them right rules and true laws and good statutes and commandments and verse 14 you made known to them your holy sabbath and commanded them commandments

and statutes and the law by moses your servant that's a good way of summarizing all the things that you have from exodus 20 all through the end of exodus into leviticus and scattered throughout the rest of the rest of the torah a lot of stuff right god comes down on sinai and he who spoke creation into being that we heard about at the kind of beginning of this section now is going to speak also these uh these laws and rules and statutes basically just giving them the the sinai the sinai covenant in all of its all of its details the only detail that's mentioned specifically is that he may know to them his holy sabbath so um that's so that's 13 and 14 after that verse 15 says you also you gave them bread from heaven for their hunger and you brought

water for them out of the rock for their thirst and you told them to go in to possess the land that you had sworn to give them so we got pillars we got uh the covenant given at sinai you got manna you got water from a rock you got you telling them hey that land i promise you go get it you go in to to possess it and of course their response is obedience and faithfulness yeah no there's a there's a big but at the beginning of verse 16 so god having done all this but they and our fathers what do they do they acted presumptuously and they stiffened their necks and did not obey your commandments in fact they refused to obey and were not mindful of the wonders there we go were not mindful of the wonders that you performed among them but they

stiffened their neck and they appointed a leader to go back to slavery in egypt oh i remember how good it was back in slavery and those were the days that yeah that nostalgia of uh of slavery yeah we just go back leaks and onions the leaks and onions are calling they're just calling me back to egypt i can't remember who it was at the last event we did someone was talking about the uh i think it was gretchen ronovic that was saying this about the about why would you want to go be uh like what's the appeal of slavery like what what's good about that how would you ever think that that would be a good idea and uh what i think the explanation she gave was uh but man we were productive i tell you what we built a lot of stuff i mean it was i mean we were we were doing we were

really doing some stuff there and uh that's the appeal of slavery is the doing that's yeah i mean that's galatians right yeah why do you why are you so quickly abandoning the gospel that i preach to you paul says and going back where to the law yeah back to slavery yeah there there is that because it's measurable right like hey i made a lot of bricks today i know like that so that's good absolutely yeah it's all all focused upon me me me here's what i'm doing and it can be you know cloaked in religion here's what i'm doing for god oh sure yeah i mean that's that's the that's the appeal for a lot of people well it's slavery it's pure and pure and simple yeah you're just wanting to go back to egypt you know this is a a there's a term in here that i always grew up uh

wondering about and uh i'm interested to know what you think that you have this uh this stiff neck right so like the bible says it's a lot like you have a stiff necked people man i was like what i mean that's like what's a weird saying right like oh it's a little stiff neck and it seems once i got past 40 and i had more stiff necks than i had in the past i started realizing what this term means and what you what you find really difficult to do when you got you know like a stiff neck is a turn it's very difficult to turn with a stiff neck your head your head does i've if i sleep the wrong way like if i want if you're talking to me i want to look at you i gotta turn my whole body your entire body it doesn't no longer pivots on a swivel it

does not pivot anymore. And it seems that this term stiff neck, to me, as I read it, maybe you've got more insight into this, is this sort of acted, like, our fathers acted presumptuously and stiffened their neck. This is, they would not turn from the direction they were going. So this is a, you can't repent with a stiff neck. You can't turn and go the other direction. You can't turn...repentance is turning to God. It's not turning to, you know, the good thing over here that you're supposed to do. That's not repentance. Repentance is turning from your sin to God. You can't do this with a stiff neck. You're not going to turn your head and look back to God. You're going to stiffen your neck and say, no, I'm going this direction. I refuse to turn.

That's how I read it anyway. Yeah, I think that falls within basically the same uh orbit of where i take this it's it's so no matter how you want to explain it that way or another way uh in the sense of uh like an animal that refuses to take the yoke or an animal refuses to do what you want it to do that's often the way this is explained uh it doesn't really matter in the end it's this idea of self-will yeah i'm gonna go the way that i want to go i'm not gonna go the way that anybody else especially god wants me to go i'm recalcitrant is of course another way this is often explained so it's just it's a stubborn self-will that itself is inherently irrational because it means that i'm going to do what i know if if i believe in god at all what i know is not

actually what is best for me i'm gonna put my hand on that hot stove i'm gonna be stiff-necked and I'm going to put my hand on that hot stove. Even though it's not good for me, even though it's going to hurt in the end, all those reasons, I'm stiff-necked and so I'm going to continue going down this same path of rebellion, even though it would be best for me

in the end not to do that. Yeah, I was walking my dog the other day. My dog is not good for walks. If she's off the leash, it's okay, but if you put her on a leash, she's not good at the leash. And she's trying to get out. She always tries to get out ahead of me

And her body gets straight as a board, pointing in a direction, pulling on that leash. Her head's just straight forward, and she's choking herself to death on the leash. And you're like, hey, if you just knock that off and go walk alongside me and just go where I'm going, this would go a lot better for you. She's very stiff. She is stiff into her neck, most certainly, in this situation. And I'm screaming at her to repent for this insolence, and she will not. she cannot like as long as she's stiff like that uh she's not going to turn and go the direction that we're supposed to be going so i'm fighting her the whole time and uh yeah that's that's kind

of what that is yeah gk beal in his book on idolatry explains it in the sense of uh of an animal like stiffening their neck and what he relates it to his his well-known saying from that book is that uh that we we become what we worship basically is the idea yeah that uh either for or we resemble what we revere is i think his phrase either for our ruin or for our restoration and so what he says is the israelites are called that because actually of the golden calf they became like that that animal right they stiffen their neck and so they resembled what they what they reviewed golden calf pretty stiff neck on a golden calf pretty stiff neck yeah not a lot of movement going on there so that's what they did they acted uh presumptuously stiff their neck

didn't obey the commandments, didn't listen to God's voice, refused to listen, weren't mindful of the wonders, on and on and on. And this was demonstrated, of course, in the construction, not only in the construction of the golden calf, but they appointed a leader to go back to slavery. This Moses, we don't know what happened to him. We need somebody who's going to take us back to where we were productive, back to our days of slavery. Now, how did God respond to that? So this is about halfway through verse 17. After they appointed a leader to return to their slavery in Egypt, we read, But, another but, you are a God ready to forgive, gracious and merciful and slow to anger,

long of nose, as we pointed out multiple times, long of nose, meaning patient, abounding in steadfast love. And because of all that, you did not forsake them, even, verse 18, Even when they made for themselves a golden calf and said, this is your God who brought you up out of the land of Egypt and had committed great blasphemies, you and your great mercies did not forsake them in the wilderness. It's pretty good gospel right there. That's pretty good. God that's ready to forgive is good. That's good news, because that tells you that God doesn't have to get himself ready to forgive.

Like, you come to him with your sin, and he's like, well, let me get myself ready. Let me think about it. I guess I'm going to have to get ready to forgive you. God is always just ready. He's ready to go. He's packed up, right? He's like, I'm ready to go. I'm ready to do this.

I'm ready to forgive right now. I think it was in Dane Oatland's book, Gentle and Lowly. I was reading a section the other day, and he used that phrase, provoked anger. that we've seen a lot of times and he pointed out uh you know the one thing that god is not provoked to do is to love and to forgive it doesn't need to be provoked to that nothing like get ready as you were saying to do this this is just who he is this is part of part of his nature you can provoke him to anger but you can't provoke him to mercy because he doesn't need to be provoked that's his that is his disposition that's what he is always inclined

to do ready and willing and eager actually to to forgive yeah that's one of the beautiful things about god is you never have to say you know like kind of uh get god to the point where he's ready to do that it's like he's always not only eager but joyously forgiving forgiving us as he did as he did israel so in his great mercies he did not forsake them in the wilderness and then we pick up with those same four things that i mentioned earlier the pillar the instruction and the the necessities of bread and water and then the land that's the same order that we're going to hear about these in verses 19 through 22 so the pillar of cloud to lead them in the day did not depart from them by day nor the pillar of fire by night to light for them the way in which they should go

so pillar stays verse 20 you gave your good spirit to instruct them so that's the equivalent of what we heard earlier in verse 13 about god coming down on sinai and giving the all the the statutes and the torah so in this case it's explained of god giving his good spirit to instruct them so the spirit wasn't you know waiting until pentecost so he could finally come down he was always amongst god's people pentecost is just a a special outpouring a theophany that uh that takes place in acts chapter two the spirit was there to do what the spirit always does he takes the words of god and uses these to teach to instruct to console to warn all those sorts of things so the spirit of god was instructing them and he did not withhold you did

not withhold your manna from their mouth and gave them water for their thirst for 40 years you sustained them in the wilderness and they lacked nothing their clothes did not wear out and their feet did not swell i kind of like that the older i get the more i kind of like that last promise about feet not slowing yeah yeah i have a lot of i have issues with plantar fasciitis which is not good for someone who loves to to hike and to run so my feet i don't have problem my feet swelling but i do have problems with my heel hurting so it'd be nice not to have to worry about uh about that but this is the way god cares for them he uh he gives them pillars he gives them his torah he gives them a spirit he gives them food for their mouths and water when they're thirsty and even

make sure that their clothes didn't wear out and their feet from all those years of walking did not did not swell now verse 22 is going to take us really to the the land part and we're going to hear more in this section about what god is going to do when they get actually after these 40 years when they get to the promised land and even kind of before them when they're starting to conquer of these peoples and that are around the kind of the outskirts of the promised land you gave them kingdoms and peoples and allotted to them every corner so they took possession of the land of Sihon king of Heshbon and the land of Og king of Bashan you can read about those in in the Torah and then verse 23 you multiply their children as the stars of heaven that language of course is

taken directly from genesis 15 when god calls abraham outside and says hey you know look up and if you can count the stars and so you'll be able to count your descendants so this multiplication of children as the stars of heaven is god being righteous fulfilling his promises and then you brought them into the land that you had told their fathers to enter and possess of course the fathers die in the wilderness the children go in and they enter and they possess the land which is what verse 24 picks up with so the descendants went in and possessed the land and you subdued before them the inhabitants of the land the canaanites and gave them into their hand with their kings and the peoples of the land that they might do with them as they would and they captured fortified

cities and a rich land and took possession of all of houses full of all good things and cistern cisterns already hewn vineyards olive orchards fruit trees in abundance so they ate and were fulfilled and became fat now that's actually a loaded term became fat and delighted themselves in your great goodness the reason i say that's a loaded term is because when if you go back to deuteronomy 32 it speaks of israel growing fat and then what do they do they kicked this is deuteronomy 32 says but uh yeshurun which is another name for israel yeshurun or israel grew fat and kicked you grew fat stout and sleek then he forsook god who made him and scoffed to the rock of his salvation so the the growing fat part uh is couched here as if it's a good thing

and it is but the problem is when israel grew fat they also grew rebellious which is you know exactly what uh uh it's gonna it's gonna happen here happen here as well so uh yeah this whole section is basically uh you know it's a recounting of the end of uh end of the torah where you have the defeat of og and you have the defeat of sihon and then picks up with joshua so we've covered genesis opening two chapters of genesis and then you get genesis 12 with abraham you skip to exodus then you go to exodus 20 and now we we're going to skip to the end of the torah all the way to joshua so this is really i mean this is a uh a recounting of a lot of this this biblical history So we're now at really the sixth book of the Old Testament in this telling of the story.

So basically, this is God, again, being righteous, being a promise-keeping God, giving this land to the Israelites. And it's like if you move to a different town and you don't have to buy a house. You just move and there's a house ready for you, and it's stocked, all your furniture's there. There's two or three nice cars in the driveway. and uh the electricity and and the gas and all the bills are paid and uh you know the cupboard's full you get the fridge is full that's kind of the idea is go in and all the things are already there you didn't have to work for them you don't have to do anything you got your cisterns already dug you don't have to dig out a cistern i mean it's all there and so you get fat and you can

delight yourself in your great goodness and that's that's great until you get to verse 26 yeah that's when uh you have a it's not a but it's a nevertheless and you know what's coming you know that as soon as you hear the language of receiving all these gifts and getting fat the next thing that's going to pop up is not not going to be good and yeah that's what we hear in in verse 26 nevertheless they were disobedient and rebelled rebelled against you and cast your torah behind their back and killed your prophets who had warned them in order to turn them back to you and they committed great blasphemies yeah i mean so obviously next episode we're gonna we're gonna get into this but uh i i really like this way of talking about what it really means to be

someone who doesn't keep the law this isn't a uh well then you just like you know you you disobeyed Which, of course, I mean, they did. This is a step beyond that. This is, they cast your law behind their back. Now, did they keep it? No, they threw it away. Like they say, the opposite of keeping. So if you were to keep it, you would not be like throwing it behind your back.

This is the implication here is that you're going this direction. You take the law, throw it behind your back, and you just keep walking over there. You just left it back there somewhere, discarded it completely. this is what it means to be someone who does not keep the law but not simply that you don't trash it yeah not that's simply that you don't obey it uh but you just discarded it entirely i mean threw it you threw it away yeah it's a vivid image yeah i mean you everybody everybody can see that happening it's like you want a piece of trash and you just toss it behind your back and you and you leave it like you said earlier with the stiff neck you just keep going in the opposite

direction you don't turn back you don't turn back to it yeah so uh yeah we'll hear more about that uh uh what's happening here in in the next episode but we're going to see kind of the cyclical pattern that we deserve observed in the book of judges that's going to be the the theme that's going to be recounted here in uh the next few verses uh but this yeah it's been a good good chapter i mean i think if anything else what i'm coming away from this chapter with is just overwhelmed by how God, how good He is. Yeah. Despite all the things the Israelites do, He's still ready to forgive, abounding in loving kindness, doing all these great things for them, despite all that they've done, because, of course, that's all, that's good news for us sinners today.

That's it. All right, well, we'll be back, breaking down more of chapter 9. There's a lot, I mean, we're trying to break down the, you know, the first five books of the Bible in a chapter here so it's taking a minute but uh we will get back to it next episode chad i will see you then see you then