Ten Minute Bible Talks Devotional Bible Study - How God Protects People | Torah | Deuteronomy 24-25

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

How does God look after the poor and vulnerable? Does the Old Testament say anything about women, minority or human rights? What does the Bible say about caring for the poor? In today’s episode, Keith looks at verses in Deuteronomy 24 and 25 to discover how God calls people to care for others. Your support makes TMBT possible. Ten Minute Bible Talks is a crowd-funded project. Join the TMBTeam to reach more people with the Bible. Give now. Like this content? Make sure to leave us a rating and share it with others, so others can find it too. Use #asktmbt to connect with us, ask questions, and suggest topics. We'd love to hear from you! To learn more, visit our website and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter @TenMinuteBibleTalks. Don't forget to subscribe to the TMBT Newsletter here. Passages: Deuteronomy 24 and 25 Resources: When Helping Hurts

Welcome to 10-minute Bible Talks, where we connect the Bible to your life. In the time it takes to get to work. I'm Keith Simon. As society becomes less Christian, then it is going to be less concerned about the weak, the vulnerable, and the poor. Because women's rights, minority rights, children's rights, human rights are built on Jesus' ethic. When you remove Jesus from the public square, humanity just returns to what it has, been in the past, the powerful exploiting the weak. There are significant sections of the Old Testament that are designed to protect the weak and vulnerable. Deuteronomy 24 and 25 are one of those

sections of Old Testament law. Instead of choosing a verse or two to focus on, let's just look at several verses and then see if we can find the common theme. Okay, buckle up. It should be fun. Let's start with Deuteronomy chapter 24 verse 1. If a man marries a woman who becomes displeasing to him because he finds something indecent about her, and he writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her, and sends her from his house. And after she leaves his house, she becomes the wife of another man, and her second husband dislikes her and writes her a certificate of divorce, gives it to her and sends her from his house, or if he dies, then her first husband who divorced her is not allowed to marry her again after she has been defiled. That would be detestable in the eyes of the

Lord. So can we just start by pointing out that divorce is not commended here. It's not permitted here. In fact, these verses are not concerned about whether or not a divorce should happen. It simply deals with the reality that divorce will happen. And then it seeks to protect the vulnerable woman after the divorce has taken place. So what these verses say is that a man can't remarry a wife he's divorced if she has subsequently married another man and divorced him or been widowed. Now, the practical effect is to protect this unfortunate woman from being a football passed back and forth between two foolish men. The woman, who's the vulnerable one in this situation, is also protected by the certificate of divorce, which her husband must give her. See, that shows

that she is officially divorced and she is able to remarry. If she didn't have that certificate of divorce, she could be accused of adultery. Deuteronomy 24-6 takes up. another subject. It says, do not take a pair of millstones, not even the upper one, as security for a debt, because that would be taking a person's livelihood as security. Societies have to regulate lending and borrowing, because if they didn't, it would be very easy for the powerful to exploit those in need. Here we are told that the borrower is not permitted to take something from the lender that is indispensable and use that or even require it as collateral against a debt. So here we're told that a person can't take millstones,

which would have been used to make bread and hold those millstones as collateral. If the lender held the millstones to make sure the debt was paid back, the borrower would soon find themselves in a worse position. They wouldn't be able to make food for their family. borrowing and lending is also the subject in verses 10 and 11 here's how they read when you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you so here the lender the one who has money the one who has status the one who has a power is forbidden from going

into a person's home to take something as collateral So there are boundaries, there are privacy rights that are recognized by the Old Testament law. Human dignity matters. I mean, poverty robs a person of so much, but the poor should be able to control their own home. Not having much money shouldn't mean that people can just walk into your home and take whatever they want. Now, notice that the borrower does have to give collateral to the lender, but they get to do it on their own terms. They get to do it with dignity. If you've ever really had a friendship with a poor person, then you know that their need extends

beyond just a lack of money. Their poverty often leads to a lack of dignity or their voice not being heard or them not being given respect or their freedom not being recognized. That means it's possible to offer charity in a way that is unhelpful in a way that robs people of their dignity. There's a great book called Wiener. helping hurts. It hurts people when the help they are given is demeaning even if that happens unintentionally. Okay, Deuteronomy 2412. If the neighbor is poor, do not go to sleep with the pledge

in your possession. Return their cloak by sunset so that your neighbor may sleep in it. Then they will thank you and it will be regarded as a righteous act in the sight of the Lord your God. So just like the millstones were essential to make food, so the cloak is necessary. to stay warm at night. If it's held as collateral, it must be returned at night so the borrower isn't too cold to sleep. In the next set of verses, vulnerable workers are protected. It says, do not take advantage of a hired worker who is poor and needy, whether that worker is a fellow Israeli or a foreigner residing in one of your towns. Pay them their wages each day before sunset, because they are poor and counting on it. Otherwise, they may cry to the Lord against you,

and you will be guilty of sin. God hears the cries of the worker who isn't paid on time. These are day workers and they depend on receiving daily wages to support their family. So the scriptures command the employer to pay a fair wage and to pay it on time. We're still in Deuteronomy 24, but we pick up a new set of laws. It says when you are harvesting in your field and you overlook a sheaf, do not go back to get it. leave it for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow, so that the Lord your God may bless you and all the work of your hands. When you beat the olives from your trees, do not go over the branches

a second time. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow. When you harvest the grapes in your vineyard, do not go over the grape vines again. Leave what remains for the foreigner, the fatherless, and the widow. Remember that you are slaves in Egypt. That is why I command you to do this. Now here landowners are told to not go back and be thorough and get all the crops out of the field. They're not told to intentionally leave crops in the field. It's just that inevitably there will be some grape, some olives, and some wheat that remain after the harvesters have gone through it. And what the scriptures tell the landowner is leave all of that. And you heard this repeated three times in those verses.

Leave it for the foreigner, the orphan, and the widow. See, the law ensures that the weakest and poorest in the community are enabled to have access the opportunities they need in order to provide for themselves. Now, opportunities could be financial resources, but it could also be access to education or legal assistance or investment in job opportunities. You don't think of those things as handouts, but as a matter of a caring society, making sure that people in the community who are overlooked have the people. the opportunity to have a job, to have an education, to provide for themselves and their family.

And the motivation to remember the poor and the vulnerable is that the Israelites were once slaves in Egypt. In other words, they had been poor and vulnerable themselves. When Israel forgot their history, when they forgot all that God had done for them, then they forgot the poor among them. Did you catch that? When we forget the gospel, we forget to be gracious and kind to those who are overlooked by our society. Christians should be advocates for the poor because God is. Hey, thanks for listening. If you want to go deeper, sign up for the 10-minute Bible Talk newsletter. You'll get a short email once a week. It'll challenge you to grow in your faith, give you interesting background on today's passage, and a lot, lot more. Just click the link in the

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