After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 17:8–18:22

4/28/26 | Thad Yessa | DEUTERONOMY: Remembering God's Faithfulness; Responding in Obedience

(00:07):

Welcome to After the Sermon, a segment of the West Hills Church podcast where we answer your follow-up questions from Sunday sermon and share your personal applications of the sermon with the church for the benefit of others. I am this week's host, Pastor Will, standing in for Brian because we are taking the show on the road. Pastor Thad and I, who's here with me in the passenger seat. Hey everyone. We are coming back from the district conference for our EFCA Church Network at a great conference and we've actually got a cameo from a guest backseat pastor. We really should do ask the pastors episode. We might. We might go ahead and record both podcast segments while we're here because we got a guest pastor with us, Pastor Mark Castro of St. Paul'sy free in the backseat. Hi everyone.

(01:11):

We're giving him a lip tone, but we thought we'd answer your follow-up questions from Sunday or let Pastor Thad answer the questions as it were and I'm just going to ask them. Okay. So our first question, Pastor Day, comes from Callie. Thanks, Callie. Could you say more about what you meant when you said one of your main bullet points was God sustains true worship? She said, "I'm thinking forward from when these laws were given to not long afterward in judges and in first and second Samuel where the worship practices that God had laid out for Israel get super perverted by the people. " So yeah, if I can, I guess, put in my own words, Callie's question. Great question, Callie.

(02:18):

Thank you. God has to be the one to sustain the true worship of him, but why then do we see so much evidence in Israel's history? Dare we say in church history of the church, straying from true right biblical by the book worship of God, how would you explain or answer that one?

(02:46):

Yeah. I would do two things. So in the context of our text, specifically in Deuteronomy 18 where I drew that point out, would be God's sustaining and providing for the priest for the act of facilitating worship and sacrifices and that. So that's part of where that comes from, that God is the one who sustains them and thereby sustains true worship. I would respond to really the extrapolation of that in the rest of the Old Testament and the church today with so much false worship, verse worship, misguided worship, worshiping of false things would be God is not sustaining those things, but what is actually being sustained is the true gospel and the worship of him. You can think of the gates of hell, held up hell against the kingdom of God. And that ultimately, even if there are forms of false worship, true worship of God will in the end, eventually outlast, outlive, overcome any sort of false worship as false worship is eventually exposed.

(04:15):

Even think of the judgment at the end of scriptures that all will come for God and then those who are true worshipers of God will be the ones to enter the Canada and those who are not will be casted to judgment. So it's both a present moment for Israel that God is going to sustain their true worship by the sustaining of the priests, even though throughout sermon just emphasizing human authority will fail us sometimes, but God will ultimately sustain that which is lasting that is good, true, beautiful, the worship of him. So kind of a two part of sustaining the priest and thereby sustaining the worship. And then you think of an escallogical viewpoint in the end, the true worship of God will be the only thing that is sustained through the entry and people.

(05:17):

So if I try and think, hear Callie's question through the lens, or if I was to hear it on the mouth of a skeptic of the Bible or of God, let's say ... I hear it as an apologetical kind of question like, okay, if God created us to worship him and God desires to be worshiped and worshiped rightly, not worshiped according to these abominable practices of the vegan nations. And if God creates within that a people for his own possession, Israel and calls them out of abominations unto himself and God has to be the one to guide them and show them what right worship looks like in the first place, but also has to be the one to, like you said, sustain the true right worship of himself and keep us on the right path. I guess I could still imagine someone responding with the question, "Well, why then do we see Israel stray so often?" I mean, I guess again, they could ask the same question about the church today.

(06:37):

I mean, if God has to be the one to lead and guide his church and to keep us on the right path, why did Martin Luther ever have to come around and correct so much of the Catholic church? Why, even today? And I mean, none of us are completely sinless certainly in any of our churches. We're all just differing degrees of probably a little off of the perfect, right, true way of worship. So yeah, I mean, how do you think about replying to somebody who says, "If God wants the best for his children and he wants to be worshiped, he wants the best kind of worship for himself, why did he let Israel fall into these vegan practices fall away

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After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 19-20

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After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 16:1-17:7