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P8: Does the Bible Condone Sex Trafficking?: Deuteronomy 21:10-14 | Bible Study
April 4, 2024 · 1 hr 4 min
P8: Does the Bible Condone Sex Trafficking?: Deuteronomy 21:10-14 | The Torah Bible Study
Series Torah: The Law of Life Bible Study Support this leader Liking this video? Support this ministry.
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Empowering multimedia ministry for bold Christian living: Weekend Messages, Deep End Podcast, Deep Dive Bible Study. Tim Hatch, Lead Pastor, Waters Church, 26 years of pastoral ministry, book author.
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Understanding Difficult Texts in the Torah 0:01 Alrighty. Let's get started with Torah study tonight.0:37 Good evening. Welcome into the Deep Dive Bible Study. I am your host Tim Hatch here on Tim Hatch Live, youtube dot com slash tim hatch live. Kicking off tonight with liking the video, subscribing to the video, hitting0:49 the notification bell, get notified every time we go live. That would be a real big blessing to my life, to this channel, to what we're trying to do here. For your spiritual good, welcome in all1:01 of those who have rejoined us for our study on Torah. It is part 8 and we are going to deep dive tonight into a text that you are going to say, I can't believe that's1:12 in the Bible. Literally, that's what you're going to say. It could be hard to read the Bible. Right? For 1, it's long, 66 books and thousands of pages. Number 2, it's old. It was1:24 written, the most recent parts of it, 1900 years ago, 1800 years ago. And then number 3, it's got some crazy statements like today's topic. As in, what do you do1:36 when you want to take a captive woman home with you whose husband you just killed? Yeah. That's in the bible. Let's get started with deep dive.1:49 The deep dive season 7 presents Torah, the Law of Life. Very excited.2:01 Very excited indeed to get into tonight's topic and you're going to love it because the Bible is difficult to read. You do need people to interpret it. There does need to be historical2:13 analysis, linguistic analysis, contextual analysis. There has to be translation analysis. That's my job. That's my behind the scenes work every time I've preached the word or taught the word. I am2:25 in deep into that, examination of the scripture so that I can bring out from it, timeless truths that were contained in a timed culture but can also2:37 then be translated or transferred to our time. So timeless truths that were given to people in a timed culture, historical culture, and then are translated or2:48 transmitted to our culture, our time today. So, yeah, we are in Deuteronomy chapter 21. And the reason why we're in Deuteronomy 21 on the heels of3:00 going through the 10 Commandments is simple. We're going all the way over to the other end of the spectrum when it comes to Torah because Torah has a lot of laws that make sense. Do not kill. Right? Do not steal. Do not3:10 commit adultery. People can get on board with those. Even, you know, Christians can non Christians can say, well, I don't put the lord god first because I'm not a Christian, but I understand why that's a law. Well, we're3:19 going to the other end of the spectrum. And I mean, we're going all the way over. Because I think if we can tackle this text today, it's going to, number 1, empower you for studying other parts of Torah. Number 2,3:31 it's going to alleviate some of the criticisms that you've probably heard about Torah from skeptics and atheists and even have maybe read about in some of the more recent atheist attacks on scripture.3:44 Number 3 is going to give you great confidence in God's word. And finally, and this is gonna shock you, it's gonna teach you about your savior, Jesus Christ, because this is not about us. It's about Jesus. So3:56 we're starting today difficult sayings in Torah. And I'm going to say this is part 1 of a series within the series. Yeah. So so4:08 the series is called Torah. And this is now a series within the series on Torah. And it's going to be a series on the difficult sayings of Torah. And we're gonna do another series in this study this year4:19 within this series. So, again, overarching series, Torah, the law of life, but underneath some subseries. Number 1, difficult sayings, difficult texts like tonight. Then number 2, we're gonna do difficult4:31 concepts like slavery, like warfare, holy war. How do we justify that? Like, there was another 1 on the top of my head. Oh, child sacrifice. Why does God ask Abraham Abraham4:43 Abraham, sorry, to sacrifice Isaac? And other crazy texts. We will be looking at it. Remember, Torah is not just a law. It's the first 5 books of Moses. So my aim and my hope in this study is4:56 to first bring right out into the open the attacks against the bible because of these crazy texts. And then kind of lead you through how do you look at these texts in 3 ways.5:08 So with that in mind, let's get started in part 1 of difficult sayings in Torah. The atheist angle has made a huge, made up a huge amount of ground in our cultural language5:20 about scripture over the last 20 years. The 9 11 attacks that were rooted in fundamentalist Islam or jihadist Islam really gave birth to a5:32 new atheist revolution. At the time, I was in ministry just starting out and Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and some other very notable, very loud, very vocal atheist came out with5:43 books about how religion is poison, everybody who's religious is stupid. Old Bill Maher wrote, and directed and starred in the book, the movie, the documentary Religious Religious. And so there was this kind5:55 of renaissance, if you will, of atheism that came out in response to what looked to be a religious attack upon our society. Well, it's dissipated over the last, 20 years, but it's still6:07 there. In his book, God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens Christopher Hitchens, who is now dead and facing probably eternal condemnation, wrote6:19 these words in chapter 7. He said, the Old Testament contains a warrant for trafficking humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride price, and for indiscriminate massacre. But we are not6:31 bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human animals. Okay. This is the atheist angle on the text. Look at all the horrible text. Oh, and the reason why it's horrible6:43 is because it was put together by horrible people. But I will say right off the bat that Christopher Hitchens is very much disconnected from reality because even as an evolutionist,6:55 you have to agree that we all came from those who were here before us. Right? No 1 just popped into the modern world out of thin air with greater moral values and a sense of right and wrong. We7:07 all descended from formerly barbaric peoples. Okay. And society as little as a hundred and 50 years ago, friends, was still enacting slavery on this continent in this7:18 great free nation. Right? And as little as, what, 70 years ago, Jim Crow laws and segregation were the law of the land and everybody accepted it as normative. We have made great advancements, but we7:30 must not be historically arrogant nor ignorant to suggest that we are better than those people. No. We come from those people. They were operating within a context and a time in which they lived. We are now7:42 operating in a time and context in which we live. And I absolutely guarantee that future generations will look back on our generation and say, I can't believe that you used to do7:54 blank. Okay. Because the human experience has been morphing and transitioning. Sometimes it takes a step back. Sometimes it takes a step forward. Sometimes it takes a step back and 2 steps forward.8:06 Sometimes it does the opposite, a step forward and 2 steps back in cultivating a free, just, more humane, more, if you will, civil society. So when Christopher Hitchens takes on the writers of the Bible,8:18 he does a disservice to historical analysis right off the bat because everybody comes from historical people. Now when it comes to the difficult sayings, I've got a couple of points that I wanna share with you. Right off8:28 the bat, let's get started with them. Number 1, the Bible is not written to you. That is a predicate for everything we do in this study. The Torah, the first 5 books of Moses, were written by Moses to Israel, ancient8:38 Israel, 3500 years ago. So it's not to you. This is not God saying, hey, modern Americans, when you're at war and you see a beautiful woman who belongs to the enemy and you just killed her family, hey, take her into the8:50 house and marry her. Like, this is a good plan. No. This is not written to you. It's written for you, but it's not written to you. Number 3, the Bible is 3500 years old, like we just said, especially this text we're8:59 going to deal with right now coming from Moses. Number 3, the hard sayings in the Bible invite us to lean in, not to check out. So many people take the easy road. The easy road is to look at it with a very unscientific9:11 mindset, which is what Christopher Hutchins and the new atheist do, and to say, well, I don't understand it because it comes from a context of absolute barbarism. So it's so easy for me to just to discard it out of hand9:21 because, frankly, and this is what they want to admit, they want to discard it. They don't want, accountability to God. And they don't want to be held to his standard. So it's easy to wipe out the whole bible when you9:33 can pick a few hard sayings and and check out of those sayings. Number 4, the hard sayings reveal God's heart for the helpless. And I think this is probably the9:44 biggest point that I need to make and we're going to make actually through our analysis tonight of Deuteronomy 21, that god in the law is always keeping9:56 the helpless person in mind even in the text where we don't understand it. As we peel back the layers historically, biblically, contextually, linguistically,10:08 we're going to say, wait a second. God is protecting the people who can't protect themselves. And even in this text here tonight. And then number 5, and this is the most important. Remember, Torah protects the community10:20 from the individual. Torah, the law of God, says the individual will not, through his own desire to live as he pleases, upend the communal peace that God wants his people10:32 to experience. So all that in mind, we now have laid a foundation for the difficult thing series that is going to be a series within the series of the Torah. Part 1, the law of the captive10:44 woman. And let me just say, this text is a doozy. Deuteronomy 21 10. Listen to it. Just listen to it just as you are. Okay. Don't even start to analyze this. We will get to that.10:56 But just listen to it and you can see why the atheist make their points. Deuteronomy 21 10 to 14. When you go out to war against your enemies and the lord your god gives them into your hand and you take them11:08 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 pare her nails. And she11:20 shall take off the clothes in which she was captured and shall remain in your house and lament her father and mother a full month. After that, you may go into her and be your husband and she shall be your wife. But if11:30 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.11:44 Okay. Raise your hand in the comments if you're happy we're talking about this text. And you should be because, again, there is so much to be discovered in this text that you you're gonna love it. I'm I'm telling you, I11:55 am pumped. I am amped to get to this content to to get this to this content and to ignore these, difficult saying series in the future for, season 7 of the deep deep dive.12:06 K. Right off the bat, what do you see? What do you hear in the text when you read it? You probably hear a lot of misogyny, patriarchy,12:19 totalitarianism, fascism a little bit, chattel property, women being subservient to men. You know, all of these kind of things that the Bible gets accused of on a regular12:30 basis. Like, it's just on the surface and I and I put this out there just so you could have it as what I could say from my point of view, the text is saying, that god is giving permission for12:42 Israelites to take women from other nations to be their sex slaves. And when they grow tired of them, they can just cut ties with them, with impunity. They there's nothing holding them accountable to these12:54 barbaric and enslaving actions. That's the skeptics reading of this text. And if you stay there as a modern reader, you have absolute permission to get13:06 angry with the bible. You have, you know, absolute right I wouldn't say permission, but absolute right to come to the conclusion, if you will, that the Bible is outdated. It's unbelievably misogynistic, patriarchal,13:18 you know, misogynistic, all those kind of things. So you you you have the skeptical view here right on the right on the right out in the front here on the deep dive because I I don't want to live13:30 in a cocoon of bible study wherein I understand this text and shame on you for not. No. I have to come across a bridge, come and meet the text with you where you are and then bring you in. But here's a couple of things13:40 we gotta wanna be aware of when it comes to this text and difficult texts like it. The temptation is to judge this text based on my context. I am a 20 first century American. I am a male living in13:52 an American state. I live in a free and prosperous country. We are not enacting holy war. We America does not have a covenant with God. These things are important contextual realities that14:04 I have and you have, if you're listening to me from America, that the ancient Israelites did not have. Number 2, the temptation is to question the validity of other passages even to questioning essential tenets of14:15 Christian faith. This is where the deconstructionist movement comes from. You know, the people who are saying I deconstructed my Christian faith and now I'm no longer a believer. And what they do is they go to difficult14:25 passages like this and they say, I can't believe that I was taught that this is the word of God. How horrible of me. What did my parents or what did my teachers or what did my church do to me? Right? That's the idea here14:35 is that there's a slippery slope once you start, becoming the skeptic judging the Bible instead of investigating the Bible. And that leads me to number 3 in the temptation14:47 and this was big. Because the temptation is that in effect, I get to stand in judgment over an ancient text based on my limited experience and contextual frame of reference. Okay. This, a mouthful, but let me just say it14:59 like this. You get to tell the bible what's true and what's not true. The bible is now subservient to you. This is a very unhealthy and I would say just a very unethical15:11 approach to any text, any ancient text. Never mind the fact that I truly believe absolutely inspired by the Holy Spirit. It is written by men under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and is God breathed. You know, all15:22 all the classic inerrant, doctrines, I believe them. And take that aside and you have to look at the Bible for what it is, an ancient document in an ancient time that we did not15:34 to which we did not belong. And to take it with just the respect for where it comes from is essential regardless of the text. You read Homer. You read Tacitus. You read15:45 Plato with respect to the person and their context. You don't read them and sit in judgment of them because they were different than you. Right? We we have15:58 and secularists have far more respect for other works of ancient literature than they do the Bible. And it's kind of disingenuous on that on that part. So we don't stand in judgment of the text. We let the text16:09 speak contextually, historically, and biblically. And then as Christians, gospel y and I don't even know if that's a word, but let me just turn the word gospel into an adverb, if you will. We16:21 we receive the text gospel y. Okay. So 3 interpretive paths that we're gonna look at in this text tonight. Number 1, the historical context with contemporary comparison. That one's huge. Where16:33 does this text lie in history? And then what do contemporaries of ancient Israel say about this same situation? That cannot be spoken about enough. What did other, you know, Mesopotamian,16:45 Chaldean cultures say about a cap a girl captured in warfare when you conquered her nation? It's important to read that because then we're gonna have a picture of, well, where does God's word16:57 stand in relation to the ideals or the ideologies of other cultures that did not have the Holy Spirit inspired text. And we're gonna find stark differences as we get into this. Number 2 is the17:09 biblical context. And here's what we're going to do there. Where is this text in Bible history? And that's very important particularly with Deuteronomy 21. What is God saying in in this text in light of where he17:21 speaks around these issues in other texts? And that's there's not so much to be had, in this text on that on that nature, but I'm just drawing the the the interpretive pathways for you. It is for17:33 other texts but not this 1. And then, number 3, we number or still under biblical context, we have to understand that the biblical context is the17:44 interpretive context. So even the first line in the phrase, when you go to war, okay, is a biblical context. We're not dealing with peacetime law here. We're dealing with a very17:56 small subset of the human, historical story. Israel enacting holy or prescribed prescribed by God to take conquest of the of the Holy Land. And then18:08 finally, the gospel context. Where is Jesus revealed in this passage? And that is going to be and I want you to stay with me for the whole night. Oh, stay with me for the whole night because that is going to be the18:17 segment of our study that is going to really inspire you and hopefully uplift you. But what I'm trying to do with these 3 pathways is to not just teach you about this text but listen to me veryShow more In this video 0:00 Understanding Difficult Texts in the Torah18:25 The Law of the Captive Woman52:32 The Gospel in Context
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