July 22, 2026 - Deuteronomy 21 & Psalm 142

We read Deuteronomy 21 and Psalm 142,.

For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compassbiblesv.org. Keep reading. Keep growing. God’s Word is a lamp to your feet, and a light to your path. 

Transcript

Welcome And Reading Plan Vision

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Welcome to the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Plan, where we are seeking to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, with God's word lighting the way. I'm Josiah Smith, Leaf Pastor of Come to South Valley. Today is Wednesday, July 22nd, 2026.

Deuteronomy 21 Read Aloud

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Listen intently to God's written word, Deuteronomy 21. If in the land that the Lord your God is giving you to possess, someone is found slain, lying in the open country, and it is not known who killed him, then your elders and your judges shall come out, and they shall measure the distance to the surrounding cities. And the elders of the city that is nearest to the slain man shall take a heifer that has never been worked, and that is not pulled in a yoke. And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither ploughed nor sown, and shall break the heifer's neck there in the valley. Then the priests, the sons of Levi, shall come forward, for the Lord your God has chosen them to minister to him and to bless in the name of the Lord, and by their word every dispute and every assault shall be settled. And all the elders of the city nearest to the slain man shall wash their hands over the heifer whose neck was broken in the valley, and they shall testify, our hands did not shed this blood, nor did our eyes see it shed. Accept atonement, O Lord, for your people Israel, whom you have redeemed, and do not set the guilt of innocent blood in the midst of your people Israel, so that their blood guilt be atoned for. So you shall purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst, when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord. When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand, and you take them captive, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife, and you bring her home to your house, she shall shave her head and pair her nails, and she shall take off the clothes in which she was captured, and shall remain in your house, and lament her father and her mother a full month. After that you may go into her and be her husband, and she shall be your wife. But if you no longer delight in her, you shall let her go where she wants, but you shall not sell her for money, nor shall you treat her as a slave, since you have humiliated her. If a man who has two wives, the one loved and the other unloved, and both the loved and the unloved have borne him children, and if the firstborn son belongs to the unloved, that on the day when he assigns his possessions as an inheritance to his sons, he may not treat the son of the loved as the firstborn, in preference to the son of the unloved, who is the firstborn, but he shall acknowledge the firstborn, the son of the unloved, by giving him a double portion of all that he has, for he is the firstfruits of his strength, the right of the firstborn is his. If a man has a stubborn and rebellious son who will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and though they discipline him will not listen to them, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gate of the place where he lives, and they shall say to the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey our voice. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and fear. If a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day. For a hangman is a curse by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God has given you for an inheritance.

Psalm 142 Read Aloud

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Psalm 142. With my voice I cry out to the Lord. With my voice I plead for mercy to the Lord. I pour out my complaint before him. I tell my trouble before him. When my spirit faints within me, you know my way. In the path where I walk, they have hidden a trap from me. Look to the right and see. There is none who takes notice of me. No refuge remains to me. No one cares for my soul. I cry to you, O Lord, I say, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. Attend to my cry, for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me. Bring me out of prison that I may give thanks to your name. The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with

David In The Cave And Lament

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me. Now, Psalm 142 is superscribed, the superscription there that talks about David in a cave. If you notice there in your Bible, it says a maskell of David when he was in the cave, a prayer. Now, there are two occasions where David was in a cave. Both of them were connected to fleeing from Saul, who was seeking to take his life. Uh, one of the occasions is in Geti, that's 1 Samuel chapter 24. Uh, but the the other occasion is the cave of Adulum, which is 1 Samuel 22. So two different caves, kind of a similar situation that brought David to the caves, and that is fleeing from Saul. So the psalm itself really kind of functions as an individual song of lament, a sense of sorrow. It's a prayer voiced by someone who's experiencing acute distress. And so, of course, David here in this situation, running for his life, running from Saul, hiding in a cave, is in fear for his life. He's experiencing acute distress. And so David really is describing isolation and persecution. And so he's crying out to the Lord, he is seeking to be heard. And in a sense, the psalmist feels, David feels, alone and trapped with no one to care for him. And yet, what does he do? He cries out to God and he anticipates deliverance. I mean, that's really the structure of the psalm. It's even titled in the ESV, You are my refuge. In verse 5, I cry to you, O Lord. I say, You are my refuge, my portion in the land of the living. O Lord, verse 6, attend to my cry, for I am brought very low. Deliver me from my persecutors, for they are too strong for me. Bring me out of prison that I may give thanks to your name. The righteous will surround me, for you will deal bountifully with me. So in this psalm, we yet again can learn from David and what it looks like to cry out to the Lord in the midst of affliction, in the midst of feeling abandoned, in the midst of great difficulty, crying out to the Lord, having a psalm of lament, like Psalm 142, to give you language, to structure your prayers, and to remind you of where your help comes from. And even connecting that to what we just talked about on Sunday from Proverbs 3, 5 through 8, really, Psalm 142 is a great orienter to remind you to trust in the Lord. Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not on your own understanding, and all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths. And so Psalm 142 is a different angle to that same reality. That in the midst of heartache, in the midst of persecution, in the midst of affliction, you you can cry out to the Lord and remember that God is your refuge, He is your portion in the land of the living. So such a great, encouraging psalm here, uh just to think through and pray through. Now, of course, many of the Psalms have some very similar themes of laments, of crying out to the Lord, of asking for help. But yet we see that here again in Psalm 142, the masculine of David, when he was in the cave, uh prayer. And so that's helpful for us to

Unsolved Murder And Atonement

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think through. Now, Deuteronomy 21 continues some of the things that we talked about yesterday with justice and a proper procedure for things, and there is a kind of explicit instructions for what to do for unsolved murders. If you were to stumble upon a body in a field, you don't know who struck him down, you don't know who killed him. There's a specific way that Israel was to seek atonement on behalf of the Lord because blood was shed, and that was a very serious thing. And so they had to go through this process. The the body was measured from city to city, and the nearest city, the elders were responsible for grabbing a heifer and going through this atonement sacrifice again in verse 9 saying you purge the guilt of innocent blood from your midst when you do what is right in the sight of the Lord. And so some very specific instructions, again, specific to the nation of Israel.

Captives, Dignity, And Hard Hearts

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And we have even what to do when they conquer cities and they are marrying female captives, how they were to treat them. Um there's honestly, as strange as these instructions are, there's a sense in which you can see that the women are being treated with a level of dignity that was unheard of in the ancient Near East context of the Bible. Uh they were not to be sold as slaves, it says that they were not to be sold for money. Um it says, nor shall you treat her as a slave in verse 14. Uh so there was a sense in which God is having provisions and stipulations for even how to treat and deal with female captives from foreign um cities. When you go out to war against your enemies, and the Lord your God gives them into your hand, and you take them captive, and you see among them the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire to take her to be your wife. Um now, even think about this. It is forbidden for them to marry foreign um uh women, to marry foreigners who are uh uh adulterous and I uh uh filled with with idolatrous worship. Now, this reminds me of what Jesus talks about in the gospels when they the Pharisees come up to him and ask, essentially, uh, if divorce is permitted. And to make a long story short, he says that Moses does permit it, obviously, God through Moses, uh, but the reason why that there is a sort of caveat and even stipulations for how to go about a certificate of divorce is because of their hardness of heart, because of their sinful hearts. There had to be some level of managing, as it were, by law uh what would happen, what would be the result. And that's what we see here. Even though marrying a foreign woman, this is not a this is not an endorsement of that. This is not God going back on his word. It's that reality of in their hardness of heart, uh, they would end up doing this in their sinfulness, in their rebellion. And so um God's basically having stipulations and protections for those women that they aren't supposed to be marrying, but we know inevitably that they do, and God is trying to protect them. So we have other things, a rebellious son, inheritance for the rise, right of a firstborn.

Cursed On A Tree And Christ

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Now, what's interesting here at the end of the chapter in verses 22 and 23, it talks about you know, a man hanged on a tree is cursed. Now, I hope as you read that, there's something in you that goes, wait a minute, that sounds familiar. Where have I heard that? Well, if you go to Galatians chapter 3, verse 13, Paul talking about Christ in the gospel. He says, Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. So that's exactly what we see here in verse 23. You should not, you know, or verse 22 rather, and if a man has committed a crime, punishable by death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. So Paul says that Christ um became a curse for us to redeem us from the law. Cursed is everyone who is hanged on a tree. So this even in Deuteronomy is a forward-looking gospel glimmer that finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ.

Context For Israel’s Laws And Closing

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So we're kind of wading through some more chapters here with some really interesting, hard to understand laws. Now we got to remember that these laws were given to a specific nation during a specific time. Uh, so this is not necessarily a universal thing. It was to set this nation apart and to uh even for the other surrounding nations to make them a witness to uh the reality of God's holiness, they were to, in obeying these things, um they were to treat God as holy. And and so, you know, even though there's some strangeness here, it's some it's important for us to see the context of which uh the nation of Israel was formed and even some of the commandments that God had um for them. Uh but in Deuteronomy, uh in um Galatians, we see that connection of Christ, and even in Psalm 142, we have another yet call from a different angle to trust in the Lord. He is our refuge in our times of trouble. But thank you so much for joining us today on the Lamp and Light Bible Reading Podcast. For more information about Compass Bible Church South Valley, visit compass Bible SV.org. Keep reading, keep growing. God's word is a lamp to your feet and a light to your path.