1476 - “Learning the Story to Pass it on” Deuteronomy 6

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Each weekday, Dr. Crisp will be discussing biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Tune in daily to start your day right and deepen your understanding of how to better walk the way and enjoy the journey. Here's your host, Dr. Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Welcome to On the Way. This is Tony Crisp, and this is Podcast 1476. First, let me say thank you for everyone who is listening to these podcasts day after day. And I am so grateful to God that we can meet together on a regular basis. I know many of your lives are so busy, and you are in the Word and you study the Word. And I just want to say thank you for letting me be a part of your life and your ministry and what God has given you to do. I promise you, these are not canned. These things are out of my heart. And even when we replace something, we send these out with prayers that what God is doing in your life, that this will aid you and compliment you and help you to understand the Word of God better. And as you hear something that helps you, do what the Lord would have you to do, but I want to encourage you to pass these on to someone else. They might not hear the same thing you do, they might not know of someone who simply just teaches something that even a child can understand, because my mind is very simple. And what I have sought to do over the years is take complex theological issues and not make them more complex, but try to simplify those for those of us who are common people. Because I am a common man, I grew up dirt poor and learning as I grew. God saved and changed my life at age nineteen and He's been changing me ever since. And because I came up in such meager circumstances and with such a lack of emphasis on anything that was academic or anything that was in any wise difficult as far as learning, I am so sensitive to that. And I pray that God would help me to continue to make the word of God plain so that the common man can understand it. If people listen to this, and many do who teach in seminary and teach in Bible colleges and universities, and I'm so grateful that you're hanging in there with me. And from time to time I do a podcast that I know is more difficult to understand, but for those of you who have studied for years, when I bring in something that is historical or linguistic that many have not studied, you track right with me and then write me and tell me how it was a blessing to you. And that feeds my soul when you do that. And so thank you for that, and thank you for listening. I just wanted to get that out because many people I know listen to this and it's listened to across national and international lines, and I'm so grateful for those of you who listen that English is not your primary language, but you listen to someone with a southern drawl and accent. Some of you uh have told me that because I talk slower, it's easier for you to understand. That's not always true here in the United States because everyone doesn't speak with a slow southern drawl, so they want me to speed up, but I'm glad that it helps you. So I want us to deal with the story of the Crimson River in a new light, and that is we have been going from Old Testament to New Testament, New Testament to Old Testament, and there is method to that madness. Yesterday the podcast was on It's All About Jesus, and I want us to never forget as we're going through the Old Testament scriptures, that when we're talking about the foreshadowing and the typology, all of the symbolism, looking forward to Messiah, that the Messiah is Jesus. We're not talking about some no-name person, some entity that is yet to come. Yes, many people believe, especially Jewish people, that Messiah has not come. I do not believe that. I believe Jesus is the Messiah. He's the anointed one. He fulfilled the scriptures and he fulfilled the prophecies concerning the Messiah. And that's why the New Testament and especially the gospels and then the teaching of the apostles is filled with references to the law, the prophets, and the writings. Because Jesus fulfilled those to the letter, even to the point of what he said on the cross, how he said it, when he said it, and to whom he said it. All of that is in the scriptures. But what I want us to do is to go back to the Old Testament, and from time to time we'll jump to the New Testament to help us see what the end of what we're learning is all about. Because sometimes you can get caught up looking at what God is going to do that you forget what he's already done. And I don't want us to do that. There's many prophecies that are yet to be fulfilled that will be fulfilled literally, historically, they just haven't happened yet. But God is faithful to his word. And all of the scriptures that were prophecies, which is history written in advance, that God says it's going to happen, they happened concerning his first coming. But more prophecies were made and are made about his second coming and some aspect of that than about his first coming. And so most of the prophecies concerning Messiah have yet to be fulfilled. And many have been, but most have not. And so we're going to deal with that because the story of the crimson river doesn't end with Jesus' first coming. Why? Because our redemption is not finished yet. Yes, our sin has been paid for. I'm not saying that in any wise. I dealt with that yesterday and have dealt with it many times. And any of you who know my teaching from the scriptures, you know that's what the Bible teaches. And I have been plain on that. But what I'm telling you is our redemption as a whole is not finished yet. Our salvation is not finished yet, because the Lord is not finished with us. And we are not going to have our glorified bodies until Jesus comes again. And then when he comes, the dead in Christ will rise, the soul and spirit will be reunited with the body. We will have a totally sanctified body that is called a glorified body, one that will be like the body that Jesus had, that will be absolutely perfect, it will be recognizable, all of those things that I've taught you in the past that's very clearly taught in the scriptures. What I want us to do is to just go back and begin to put some more pieces back together, because salvation is not just about the forgiveness of sin, and that's it. It is about eternal life. It's about a new life. It's about a life here and now, a life that is a life of God living in us, God renewing us, renewing our minds, and letting us work out that salvation that He has given us on a daily basis. And I'm not talking about working for our salvation, but I'm talking about a salvation that God has given us, coming to realization of that more and more, and the freedom that we experience in Jesus, and the identity we experience in Jesus, and the union with Christ that we have because of what he has done. And so we're going to go back, and I want to remind you over and over again what Moses reminded the children of Israel before they went over into the promised land. He didn't get to go, but Joshua, his protege, did, and God was gracious to Moses and to Aaron and to Miriam because they didn't always live as they should have lived. And aren't you grateful that God is so merciful and so patient with all of us? But we're going to, for the rest of the week, deal with things you already know. But remember, it was both Paul and Peter that said, I want to stir up in you what you already know. I want to remind you of what you already know. I want to tell you again of what you already know. We're so afraid that we're going to repeat ourselves, and everybody's trying to come up with something new. Listen, the greatest thing we can do is to tell the old, old story for those who know it best. For they seem hungering and thirsting to hear it like the rest. That's the old hymn. I love to tell the story. I deal with this with pastors all over the place. They will say, How is it that you, after 50 years, are still getting new material? I said, It's not necessarily new material. It is that I am just telling a different aspect of it. I mean, who can exhaust the riches of Christ? They are infinite. We can never fathom the great depths of God's love and his mercy and his grace and his kindness and all of the things that God gives to us. Who can know the unknowable? There's so much that we'll never know till we get to heaven. But there are many things that God has told us, and he told us to teach our children, and he told us to teach our grandchildren, and to teach the next generation. This is what Moses said, and he said it early, and he said it often. In Deuteronomy, as he was rehearsing, they were about to enter into and what God had done for them and what he was going to do for them. Deuteronomy 6 is like the preamble to everything that Moses said. And I've taught you about that when you have the Shema, the Shema, as we call it. Here, O Israel, listen, listen. The Lord our God, the Lord is one. He is the only. He is. He is the one, and we're to have no other gods before us. It's not a polytheism that we believe in. It is a monotheism and that one God is one. And yes, he is three in one, but don't try to figure that out. Just receive it as God has revealed it to us. But in that same sixth chapter, the early parts of it, Moses said, I want you to understand that what you are taught, you need to teach to your children and to your grandchildren as a way of life. And you do that when you get up in the morning, when you walk by the way, when you're eating your meals, when you go to bed at night, when you're talking with them. It's a way of life. It's not something you do one day a week or two days a week or ten minutes a day. You do this as a way of life. Some of the greatest lessons you will teach your children is when you're going on vacation, you're riding in the car, you're working out in the yard, you're sitting around talking about family things, and you can teach them the great principles of the Word of God and the way that God would have us to live, and they'll listen to you. And it's not, okay, we're going to sit down here 10 minutes, and I want everybody to keep their mouth shut and we're going to have quality time in this next 10 minutes. What I want you to understand the teaching of the Bible is, and specifically places like Deuteronomy chapter 6, is that quality time rises out of quantity time. You don't say, okay, we've got about 10 minutes, we're going to learn everything we need to learn, and you're going to listen. No, their minds are going to wonder. And this is why we've got to keep it interesting, and that happens by them hearing something over and over again. And so for the next couple of days, I want to talk to you about these days that God built into the Jewish system that was instructive not only for them, but it's instructive for us then and now. And these days as Shabbat and the sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee and the new moon and Passover and unleavened bread, all of those Levitical appointed days, these feasts, these festivals, these fast days. We're going to look at those, but not going into great detail on each one, but to help you to understand the reason for those, the purpose for them. And those are so that they can be teaching tools to remind us of who God is and what He's done. Man, I can't wait to meet with you tomorrow. We're going to get into this, and I hope that I'm going to share some things with you that for some of you will be the first time you've ever heard this, the first time you've ever known this, the first time that anyone has ever answered the question, why? You know what? Why? We'll get into that tomorrow as we walk on the way. This is Tony Crisp.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Thanks for listening to On the Way with Tony Crisp. Tune in every weekday for information on biblical passages, people, places, and prophecies. Fridays are for your questions. Email your questions to questions at TonyCrisp.org. Then just listen for your question to be answered on Friday's podcast. That's questions at TonyC R I S P dot org. Thanks for listening and have a blessed day on the way.