Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. What's happening, y'all? P. R., do you know? I do. Granted, it was technically five years ago yesterday, but do you remember where we were five years ago yesterday, March 11th and March 12th? We were, things were falling out very quickly from that point. March 11th and 12th, five years ago yesterday. 2020. Something happened in 2020. Oh, 2020. You said that and it got me. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So I have, I'm looking at my journal entries from that timeframe. I have. Oh, I have some pictures here. Yeah. It was a beautiful day that day. I can see that. I'm looking at the room that we met in. It was a nice room. We had dinner that night. Do you have a picture from dinner that night? Our wives joined us all. I don't have it in my journal, but I may have it in my photo catalog, but yeah, it was that was a beautiful day. I see. So we had lots of good snacks there. I see that. That was good. Yeah. What a time. Yeah. We were for those of you wondering what, what's going on. And we were at our pastor's retreat, our pastor summit, as it came to be known back in California. And we were all out to dinner and our wives had joined us for dinner that night. And we were sitting around the table and news broke March 11th, 2020, that the NBA had canceled the rest of the regular season due to the outbreak of COVID 19. And so as you're listening to this today, which is as you're listening to it Wednesday March 12th, we were. In the office is trying to figure out what we were going to do. Do we keep church open? What's happening? And at that point, I think we were still planning on having church, but by that weekend we were, yeah, by that weekend, I think everything was, I think we went online by that weekend, didn't we? I believe so. I can't recall other ones. I think that was what happened. I think we all decided this was what everyone's doing. It's only prudent. We have to. Yeah. And that didn't last long. We figured out how we can meet and we met outside, but yeah, but it was not, it was crazy, man. We had no clue what was coming, no clue and thankfully it ended up being not nearly as. I remember our lead pastor at the time was saying, Hey, we need to get ready to do mass funerals. We need to get ready to start burying many people from this. Cause we didn't know what was going to happen with COVID. And thankfully that didn't happen. I think we did lose people in our church. We had one or two that I can think of off the top of my head who died as a result of complications from it, but complications from yes, just a, It's just a crazy time. I'm thankful it's in the rear view mirror. It's amazing that it's already five years ago. It feels like it's closer to it's in more recent history than that. At least as I, I think back on it, I think we're working hard to forget it, man. I would agree. I would agree. Yeah. It's just that popped up on my memories as I was going through them yesterday. It was like, Hey, five years ago today, somebody tweet. That's what it was. The NBA canceled their regular season. Oh yeah. Yeah. That was, I think we were having dinner when they were leaving the floor. Yep. There was an NBA game happening and people were, they were, the referees called the game off. Rudy go bear. He was patient zero in the NBA. Oh, wow. I don't know who that is. That's not surprising. But another name that I want to shout out though, is Mike Sklemeny Mike, you are the man. He, so he heard the call. In fact, there's two names, but Mike was the one who's the first one that came to me. I turned and said, Hey man, I heard you want me to build a desk. I'll take care of that. That sounds fun. I could do that. I'll do it real quick this afternoon. So that afternoon came up to the office, set up my desk. And this morning, Mike, I have no idea how you move this thing. This thing is heavy. I was trying to try to maneuver it to my corner. And the other desk is pretty light, really easy to move around. But this one feels like it's got some serious heft. So I don't know how this guy turned it upward. But it was impressive as much. I came to your rescue. I heard you whimpering in there and not able to lift a, yeah. And I was like, Hey, pastor, I can help you. And I said please, I need more than I have right now. And so I came in and you. Yeah. I did most of the lifting. You did. You picked it up with your own two hands and you were sitting in the corner with your non alcoholic Mai Tai and an umbrella in it. And you were watching me do all the heavy lifting. Put it over there. Yeah. Servant boy. I think that's exactly how it went. If I remember correctly. Yeah. Yeah. Felt, felt like a lot like that, that Mike Scalmini, thank you for putting it together, man. What a huge blessing. And Steve Marston. As Mike was putting it together, Steve texted me and said, Hey, do you still have that desk to put us to put together? And I'm like, Oh dude, thank you so much. But Mike's already on it. So I love our church. I'm so grateful. I used it today. I was thankful for the desk. I was enjoying it. It's beautiful. I love it. Thank you guys for your help. They appreciate you have time. Yeah. Yeah. Steve worked that out. Cause he gets the heavenly rewards of being willing to have the generous heart to serve. Yeah. But he didn't have to do the work. Didn't have to do the work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, we were noodling each other a little bit with that making fun of each other there and You sent me that article about how apparently that's a sign of a good friend. That's somebody who is What was the actual winning somebody who's willing to mock you to insult you? It's something like that Yeah, someone who's just straight up making fun of you and saying bad things about you and your family Yeah, that's a sign of real love and affection. I think that was in one part of the Bible Yep. Couldn't remember the exact reference in the Bible, but it was in there. Yeah. And I was like, Oh, that's why we're so close. That's it. It's a term of endearment. It's a a mode of endearment to just mock somebody. Yes. Yeah. That's great. Sure. That's how that works. So if you're out there and pastor out, has never taken a shot at you, then he really doesn't care about you. Actually. Yeah, that's funny. If there is some truth to it. Obviously if you Are constantly making fun of somebody and taking shots. It could reveal something much deeper. That's unhelpful. It could, but. It also could be something playful and fun. And if someone's doing that to you, it's probably because they care about you, they care about you. They trust you. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's jump into our daily Bible reading for today. Deuteronomy three and four. Deuteronomy three opens up reminders of the defeat of Og and of a Reuben and Gad's agreement to cross over and fight with their brothers before settling again there across the Jordan, the trans Jordan these last two sections, chapter two. And the reminders about Sihon would and then the reminders about Og here again are setting the table for the charge to Joshua that's coming up in Deuteronomy chapter three, verses 21 through 22. This charge to Joshua is your eyes have seen all the Lord your God has done to these two Kings. So will the Lord do to all the Kings into which you are crossing the kingdoms into which you are crossing. So remember, God is setting this up. He's reminding them, he's giving them these victories because this is what they're going to have to do. And so God is showing the people what what waits for them across the Jordan river and what they're going to face. And he's reminding them, telling them, Hey, as I've won these victories on this side of the Jordan, I'll win the victories on that side of the Jordan. And so this would have been an encouragement to them. And by the way, note in Deuteronomy three, nine, it talks about the. I believe it's three nine. Is it three nine here? Maybe it's not. Sidonians call Hermon Sirion. Maybe it's three 19. Did I miss a one? Nope. He talks about the bed here of the king and he says the bed, there it is. Verse 11. He says, for only Og the king of Bashan was left to the remnant of the Rephaim. Behold, his bed was a bed of iron. The word for bed there is probably more likely. A reference to a sarcophagus the resting place would have been the idea there, but this is probably not his actual bed, but a sarcophagus or the tomb into which his body was placed. And so it's referring to the death of this King and his burial in this iron large sarcophagus that his body would have been laid to rest in there. 13 feet by nine feet. That's massive. That's a, that's huge. So what's the significance then of it being a a resting place as opposed to a physical bed? It just yeah, no go ahead. Sorry. I was just going to say, what's the biggest differences between those two things? If it isn't as bad which if it is his bed, 13 feet by six feet would be, that's bigger than a King. But what does it mean if it's a sarcophagus? I think it's just a reference to his burial chamber rather than his bed. Cause it fits the context a little bit better. It's talking about the defeat and the death of this King. And so then all of a sudden to be talking about his bed is a little bit of a strange non sequitur there. But if it is talking about his tomb, the sarcophagus in which he was placed, then it makes a little bit more sense. Yeah. Also maybe explains the dimensions a little bit more because I think, yeah, that's massive. That's huge. All right. So from here we go on for Moses real quick here. One last attempt at getting a pass to enter the promised land. Moses was like, God, please, can I please? And if you've got kids, you know what this is like. You issue the punishment and maybe your family's going out to ice cream that night and one kid's been disobedient. You're like, Hey you're, you've forfeited your right. You're not going to get any ice cream tonight. And then. You're at the counter and the kid's dad, can I please the rest of the time? Dad, can I please earn it back? Can I get it? It's kind of Moses right here. He's God, please, can I go over there? Can I enter the promised land? And God again says no, and allows him to see the promised land from Mount Pisgah there, Pisgah's mountain. And he reiterates to Moses though, that Joshua was going to be the one to take the lead and take Possession of the land with the head of the people, which tells us again, that sin has reverberating effects and consequences that even if it is forgiven, which it was for Moses, it does not negate or mitigate the extent or the depth of the consequences that are incurred. are found because of it. Can God forgive very awful sin? Absolutely. Can God forgive the worst of sins that you could conjure up in your mind? Yes. But boy, you don't want to feel the consequences that come because of those things. You could still leave your family and your life in shambles because of a stupid decision that you make in the heat of passion. And instead of doing that, how about just being obedient and trusting the Lord and not disqualifying yourself or even inconveniencing yourself for years to come because of some bad decision that you make when you're upset. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's on the heels of this that when we find the charge to Israel in chapter four and it really is summed up in chapter four verse one, now Israel listen to the statutes and the rules that I'm teaching you and do them. And so listen and obey. That's something that we teach our kids from the time that they're little and repeat. Over and over again, listen and obey. And that's the charge to Israel here. Listen and obey. And I think it's appropriate following what we just read about with Moses saying, Hey God, can I go? Because that's what Moses failed to do. Moses did not listen well to what the Lord had commanded him to do and certainly did not obey it. Maybe he listened, maybe he heard, maybe even understood. And yet his actions betrayed. The opposite. He disobeyed God by striking that rock rather than speaking to that rock. And he was going to suffer the consequences. Moses is laying this out here in chapter four, and he's wanting Israel to understand that they had a need to listen and obey because if they didn't, then there were going to be consequences. He's going to charge them in verses five through six. Listen to obey because you've seen how it's been a safeguard to you when you didn't commit the sin of bail worship at Peor. He's going to say you were preserved because of your obedience there. Deuteronomy four, nine. He's going to say these words, take care. That's a recurring comment. Either take care, be careful, or keep watch. And here it's over your soul diligently. And that again, building off what you were just talking about, PR, that, that idea that we need to be careful not to give ourselves over to sin because of the consequences involved there. We need to guard our souls. It's a Proverbs, right? Solomon says, keep guard your heart for from it flow the springs of life that we do three. Yeah. Careful over over what we give ourselves over to some similar idea here but listening and obeying, that's what the reiterated theme is throughout chapter four here. Yeah, I really I keyed in on verse nine because it's just so powerful. It speaks to us today as much as it did to them yesterday, the last final years of their wandering the word for diligently, keep your soul diligently means with your strength, your power is a word that we've come across before. And it means like your veryness, the very strength of your body, the very strength of your mind, use all of that to. Keep a diligent watch on your life. It sounds a lot like first Timothy chapter four, keep a close watch on your life and your doctrine for for doing so we'll say both yourself and your heroes is basically what Paul says, but he says this to everybody as a means of saying, look, you have to make sure you don't forget. Notice that's what he says there. You don't want to forget what your eyes have seen and depart from those things. Bless you forget, don't forget and Christians, sometimes we can begrudge hearing faithful teaching because faithful teaching is often teaching that reminds us of things that we already know. And that can be tedious and it can feel like, man, do I really need this? Come on, give me something new or novel. And really what we need is to be reminded of what we know so that we can cling to it and not forget it. This is what it means to keep your soul diligently. And that's good. If you have that at your church, that's a great blessing. Don't don't. Look down on that. That's a good thing. Yeah. Yeah. And noted versus 25 through 28, that the main threat in judgment here is the threat of exile. He says, I call heaven and earth. Verse 26 to witness against you today that you will utterly perish from the land that you were going over the Jordan to possess. Remember the land was part of the Abrahamic covenant promise here. You won't live long in it. In verse 27, the Lord will scatter you among the peoples and you will be left few in number. So God laid out the parameters here. When this is going to happen in spoiler alert. It's going to happen. This is not going to be a shock all the way back here, right on the doorstep of the promise land. God is laying out to the people saying, this is the consequence that will happen. If you disobey, if you do not keep these commandments, you can't expect to keep the land. You're going to be sent into exile. And we're going to unfortunately see that's going to come to fruition later on, as we study through the times of the Kings. How is it possible in verse 24 that God is jealous? Every time we talk about someone being jealous, it's never in a positive sense. So how is it possible to apply this to God that he's jealous of consuming fire? Yeah, he's jealous for his glory and he has to be, because if God has a, his any category in which he might render glory to someone other than himself and. Excluding the Trinitarian concept of the fact that as we've seen in John 17, Jesus is praying, father, glorify your son. But outside of the Trinity, if God has a category to glorify anyone other than himself, then he is in effect worshiping something other than himself. And by definition of being God, he is worthy of All worship, all glory, all honor, all exaltation. And so God has to be jealous for his own glory because that's part and parcel with him being God. He's the only one really that we could say is jealous for that. However, there, there are other ways that we can be jealous in a good way. We should be jealous for the affections of our spouse. If you're married, you should be jealous for the affections of your spouse. That's Good thing. That's a God honoring thing for the two of you to be committed to one another in that. But as far as jealousy goes, as the world conceives of jealousy, yeah it's usually not a good thing, but here it is a good thing because God is being jealous for his glory. Can you define jealousy then? Because the word itself conveys in our current vernacular, the word itself is automatically a negative connotation. Yeah. If you were saying, man, I'm jealous for my spouse. No one who's not a Christian who knows their Bible is going to say, Oh that's fantastic. They're going to say dude, are you okay? Maybe you need some therapy and counseling. So when you say jealousy, when we see it here in scripture, can you give us an understanding that is not a secular based understanding? Yeah, I'd say it's a, almost a passionate desire. There's another word that sounds similar and that's zealous. That when we are zealous for something, we have a passion for it. We have a drive for it. We have a desire for it. And I think when that desire is on the right thing, it's a good thing. When that desire is misplaced, then it becomes a bad thing. And if that desire is we're jealous for our spouse because The Christ exalting picture of a marriage is for a husband and wife to be committed to one another in a biblical way, then that is a zeal. That's a passion. That's a jealousy that ultimately serves to glorify God. That's a passion that is for the glory of God. But if I'm jealous because I'm looking at everybody else with a side eye and I'm skeptical of every other guy that walks by and I'm angry at every other guy presuming upon them things that maybe they're not. Even thinking or doing or saying or anything else, that's a sinful jealousy. That's an insecure jealousy. That's a self motivated jealousy. And so jealousy for the sake of God is a good thing. Jealousy for the sake of self is a bad thing. So just real quick, I don't want to pound the drum too hard, but let me just identify a couple of the definitions that are first to pop up. One of them is feeling or showing envy of someone or their achievements and advantages. Is that what we're talking about? Nope. That's a bad thing. Here's another one. Feeling or showing. Suspicion for someone's unfaithfulness in a relationship is that we're talking about a bad thing. Okay. Here's the third one that I think might be helpful. And there's actually a fourth that could also fit to fiercely protective or vigilant of one's rights or possessions, right? Yes. That's what we're talking about. This is third level. That was a. third one down. So all the definitions that we're trying to get to are layered below how most people understand the word. The third one is of God, demanding faithfulness and exclusive worship. So the third and the fourth are what we're getting at here. It is fiercely protective. It is a right, fierce protection. It is right to fiercely protect your wife. But when we talk about envy or suspicion, we're not saying that. Please don't be that way with your wife. Don't be that way with anybody. Don't be that way with your husband, your kids. There is a fierce protection. That's good, but envy suspicion. That's not what we're talking about. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And because God is a jealous God, a God jealous for his own glory, that's why the threat of exile is there, but also he's a merciful God. And that's why there's a, an offer for restoration. There's this great ending section in verses 32 through 38 there where he's saying, who is like me, who's like the Lord, who's like Yahweh, what God has done, what I've done for his people. And again, a motivation to consider that. To drive us towards obedience. And that's so good too. As we think about listening and obeying here, God is in part motivating the obedience of the people, Israel by saying what God has done for his people. What I've done for you consider all of the blessings and good things that have done for you as fuel for why you should listen and obey, and that's in part us with the cross, looking back at that and the empty tomb and saying, wow, because of everything that God has done for me, I desire to listen and obey. to him because I love him for what he's done. I'm not trying to pay him back. I'm not trying to make up for what he didn't do already, but man, I love him because of what he's done for me. And so I want to obey him. I want to listen to him because of those things. Yeah. And on top of that verse 39 here says that God in heaven and above the earth is the only one, there is no other God. In addition to him being the kind of God who loves us. He's the only God who exists, right? He's the only one there. And so he's telling his children. Please don't be deceived by these idols Don't be deceived by the people that you're about to invade. They're worshiping all these different demonic forces But there's only one God and so you would do well to serve that God even though it's true. He is loving It's also true that there is no other there's no one else to serve or worship This is the only God. Yeah. Let's end with a question from somebody that was not submitted on the email, but was actually asked in person. I was interacting with somebody this weekend and they asked a question. Oh, this is interesting about the comment that was made and it was, it's almost like an offhand comment. I can't even remember exactly where it's made here. Oh yeah. What did you say? But yes, no God did. But it was the comment that said. It was talking about the exodus and it said, and also judged the gods of Egypt as well. Yeah. Yeah. So we talked about that. Did we talk about that on the podcast? Pretty sure. I recall talking about it. I thought we did. Maybe we did. Anyways, we could revisit it again but specifically you mentioned there are no other gods, but there's these demonic forces, right? Yes. So maybe in connection to that, how the exodus was. It judging the demonic forces there in Egypt. Oh, yeah, there are a billion perhaps trillions upon trillions of lowercase g guts The Bible is perfectly okay using the term Elohim Which is the word for God to describe the different kind of spiritual forces that exist outside of God himself capital G the difference is of course, there's only one true God that's worthy of our worship and worthy of adoration There's only one right God to worship because there's only one true God who's all powerful all knowing all the omnis that we talked about God But when it comes to lowercase g gods, there's infinite numbers. I mean you could go to the Hindu religion And you could talk to all the different pantheon of gods and you could say, yeah, those are gods. Those are lowercase g gods. And I have no problem using that terminology. So we would say, yes regarding the Egyptians, all of the plagues were meant to combat And to showcase the superiority of Yahweh over the pantheon of Egyptian gods. And so there's a bit of a, there is consensus that when God is issuing the plagues, they are saying, look, Oh, you think your God happy is in control? Nope. Here you go. Here's the frogs happy deal with that. Can't deal with that. Oh, what a surprise. That's because you're not God. I am that kind of thing. He does that 10 times over to showcase that he's the one who's the one true God. And that's really the point. There are multiple lowercase G gods, but there's only one true uppercase G God. Great, that's a good answer. Yeah. Lemme pray and then we'll be done with this episode. God, we are grateful that we do know the one true God in the face of all the others, and that we do not, don't live in the same pantheistic culture. We, we, as pastor was just saying, have maybe neighbors who do live in that realm, in that world, or certainly we can look around and see that there are gods of materialism and wealth and fame and all of these things around us that certainly are, have demonic forces behind them as well. And we don't wanna turn a blind eye to that and think that we are somehow insulated from. And that because we live in America and we've evolved past these things, we want to be aware of just the spiritual warfare that's present, the darkness that's out there. And we want to be all the more committed to you as Moses was calling the people of Israel to listen and obey. We want to guard our souls and keep our hearts and be careful about it. And we thank you for your word that we can look to say, how do we do that by looking to your word, even as we'll talk about tomorrow as we get into chapter six as well. So we thank you so much for this. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen. Keep reading your Bibles, tune in again tomorrow for another edition, the Daily Bible Podcast. See you! Bye!

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