After the Sermon: Deuteronomy 31:1-32:47
6/22/26 | Austin Gooch | DEUTERONOMY: Remembering God's Faithfulness; Responding in Obedience
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Welcome to the After the Sermon podcast. We answer follow-up questions and share your personal applications from the sermon for the benefit of the church. My name is Brian and I'm here with Austin. Hello. Elder Austin. This morning
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I sound so old when you say Elder Austin. It's a title. It just really sounds like
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Elder Austin. We
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Got one foot in the crave.
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We want to remind you with this podcast that sermons are not just a Sunday thing. We usually start off with just a brief summary of the sermon from yesterday so you could share that with us, that'd be great.
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Yeah, sure. We were covering a lot of material, 77 verses in Deuteronomy 31, verse one through 32, verse 47. And in those verses, the scene is that Moses is about to die and he's not going to be able to go into the land. And Joshua is going to be the new leader of the people of God. And so the main theme for the sermon was about passing the baton. How do we pass the baton of our faith from one generation to the next? And there's so much material there. That sermon could have gone in a lot of different directions, but it seemed to be the one that kind of coalesced to the top. One of the challenges from a sermonic standpoint was that we had to attend to the content but also to the form because the content of 31 and the form of 31 was mainly, we have a narrative scene, we have Yahweh giving instruction and the tent of meeting to Moses and Joshua.
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But chapter 32 is a song and in your Bibles, if it's like mine, it's called the Song of Moses. It's actually written by Yahweh. So it's kind of a misnomer. So anyway, Christ, we were trying to attend throughout the sermon to both what's going on, but also the form in which the information is presented. So we basically said, okay, we can in fact pass and must really pass the baton of our faith from one generation to the next. And we looked at the way that God provided to do that. And in the sermon, we looked at how he provides leadership, how he provides his word, how he provides his covenant presence, how he provides songs, how he provides knowledge of himself, knowledge of the people's waveredness. He provides punishment that first goes through Israel to cleanse them by idolatry, but climaxes in Christ and then he provides salvation and victory.
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So I chose grace as kind of the word to put it all together, but you could have taken it in either direction. So that was the basic gist. We can't pass the baton because of all that God has provided.
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Yeah. Thanks for preaching yesterday. So jumping into our questions, first one is from Micah who wrote, since God commanded that his people worship at the temple and only the temple, how did faithful people from the north worship God if there were any faithful people at all?
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Right. It's a good question. And when we say worship here, let's, I think to Micah's question, sort of narrow that to the cultic type of worship that is established in Israel. So namely like the setting up of the temple, well, first the tabernacle, the sacrificial system and so forth. And the short answer is that they weren't really able to do that anymore because the kingdom divides in one Kings chapter 12. That's a watershed chapter in your Bible. It's one of earmarked at some point to know what are sort of the major milestones of the history of the people of God. It's
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Grateful for the timeline overview that you gave.
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Yeah. Every once in a while, I think it's good to forget that the historical books and the prophets are not like flyover states. They're actually really important to understand the world that Jesus comes into and the very high tension moment that has been building both in Israel but also in the surrounding nations. And one of the first chapters that sort of sets the pattern for several hundreds of years is one Kings 12 and that's where the kingdom divides. Reyoboam is in the south, that's Solomon's son and then Jeroboam in the north. I say that to say that right there in one Kings chapter 13, so the following chapter is where we see the establishment of a completely false cultic and ritual system by King Jeroboam. So he says, "And behold, a man of God came out of Judah by the word of the Lord of Bethel.
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Jereboam was standing by the altar to make offerings and the man cried." I'm sorry, one Kings 12. Let me back up. It's in Kings 12, earlier when it divides in verse 25. "Then Jeroboam built a Shekem in the hill country of Ephraim and lived there and he went out from there and he built Pennywell and Jeroboam said in his heart, now the kingdom will turn back to the house of David. If this people go up to offer sacrifices and have the Lord of Jerusalem, the heart of this people will turn against their Lord to Reboam. King of Judah and they will kill me and return to Robin King of Judah. "So the king took counsel and made two calves of gold and he said to the people, " You have gone up to Jerusalem long enough, behold your God, so Israel. And if you're tracking, that sounds exactly like what Aaron said back in the golden calf incident.
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"But anyway, behold your gods of Israel who brought you up out of the land of Egypt and he set one in the fell and the other he put in Dan. So in verse Kings 12, in the back half of the chapter, we see Jeroboam establish false altars, false locations, and then later in those verses we see how he puts in his own priesthood. So the entire worship system that we've seen established coming from the end of Exodus all the way to Leviticus and then sort of recapitulated in Deuteronomy is completely misguided. This is really important for how we understand the prophets. When we read through the prophetic literature, we see twin errors. In the north, we tend to see heartfelt, if you will, worship, but the wrong way. In the South, we tend to see, again, this is flattening the issue a little bit, this is oversimplifying a bit, but in the South, we often see dry ritualism instead.
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So not in embracing from the heart and Yahweh wants both. He wants to see that we worship him in the way that he prescribes, meaning that there's a proper and good way to worship and there's bad ways to worship, but also it has to be a matter of the heart as well.
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And to what extent were their faithful people at all is somewhat challenging to say because we see, for example, certain members of the prophets and certain people being faithful, even if they didn't have the temple ritual system in place.
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That's good. Thanks. Next one is from Josh. He wrote," What would you say to the single moms or moms with unbelieving husbands who faithfully bring their children to church or were discouraged by the stats you read?
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"Yeah, this is a good question. And one of the challenges with the sermon is you can't sometimes qualify everything, right? And so in the comment, if you have forgotten or you weren't doing the sermon hearing the preaching is that there was a study done in Switzerland in the 1990s that was seeking to investigate what influence fathers have on the church going up to children. And the long story short, controlling for other variables, because remember this is not like a prescription pastorally or theologically. This is like a social study. But the general observation was that even if moms are very pious, that if fathers are not involved or if they're not churchgoers, there's a very low rate of that the child will in fact be a regular attendee. 2% is about the number compared to if fathers are involved, even if moms are not, it goes to about 66 to 75%.
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And that's enormous. I mean, that is enormously larger.
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However, what that study isn't asking a question is, okay, what is the likelihood of a child whose father is unbelieving or unattending in some kind of way? What is the likelihood that they will pursue in the faith given another condition? So say given a really good youth pastor and other ministers in the child's life or children's minister, whatever it is, depending on the age of the child, to see what the likelihood is then. And so not having that data at my fingertips, it's hard to say, here's the exact number, but the principle holds the same is that it is then the responsibility of the people of God to be able to help the mom in a time of need. And so don't be discouraged to say that, well, therefore my children's going to abandon the faith because God is gracious and kind and still holds onto his people.
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Next one comes to us from Victoria who wrote a question in an application, so maybe start with the question. She wrote, how come they chose Joshua to replace Moses? Does God go before us even if we don't feel called to go someplace like if we found a new job by our own strength and search versus feeling a calling by him to find a new job?
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So let's do the first question. The first one is, I'm going to have to read this. I got a slow brain today. So basically, why is he chosen to replace Moses? Short answer is that there's not a verse that says in scripture, here was God's rationale for choosing Joshua, but Joshua is a very well developed character and this is one of those times where using tools from literature like character development can be very helpful in reading the narrative books. I mean, if you've been tracking, we've seen Joshua since Exodus. I mean, I was trying to, I should have looked this up ahead of time on where he first shows up, but at a minimum, he's there at the covenant ceremony in Exodus 24 where Moses goes back to the mountain to receive the instructions of the 10 commandments. Well, sorry, has the 10 commands, but receive all the instructions that begin in Exodus 25, Joshua goes up with him.
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So he's been kind of a right hand fellow to Moses for a long time, number one. Number two is there tends to be, not always, but ordinarily there is a pattern of succession in leadership in scripture that tends towards the older instead of the younger. That's different than our modern world where you've got tech CEOs as an example, like Mark Zuckerberg builds a billion dollar company when he quits Harvard or similarly with Bill Gates. I know those guys are older now, Gates in particular, but sort of the notion of like the young one that sort of like has this meteoric rise across the older ones that's more of a feature, I think more of the modern world than it is for most of human history. So Joshua was also just, he's been faithful and he's old and he's faithful. We know that because in numbers 14, when they go and they send the spies and they see that they're really tall and scary, it's only Joshua and Caleb who are the ones that remain faithful.
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And so they get to actually be the elder ones who live for the next 40 years wandering through the wilderness while little Yakabed and whatever the name and Rivka go from being small to being 40 years older and then they have children and so forth and go into the land. We also see some interesting features of Joshua when we go into the next book, the book of Joshua and had there been more time, it would've been really cool to draw that out a little bit more. I tried to emphasize during the sermon the centrality of Moses as a key redemptive historical figure, meaning there's not really another Moses in the same sense until Jesus. Joshua is not like Moses 2.0. He shares some features. So as an example, in the beginning of Joshua, he always says," Be strong and courageous for I'm with you and so forth, but it's not until the end of Joshua, the very end where he is called the servant of the Lord and which is the same title that's ascribed to Moses.
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However, Joshua doesn't receive revelation like Moses does. He doesn't write a book of the Bible like Moses does and so forth. And so because of that, we don't want to flatten the distinction between those too much. He is the new leader of the people of God, but importantly, as we saw, even without Moses, God is going with them in his covenant presence. He's going to remain with his people and that's I think somewhat moving on to her second question. So if I can read it again, does God go before us even if we don't feel called to go some place? She gives an example, like if we found a new job by our own strength search versus feeling a calling by him to find a new job.
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I remember taking one of my theology classes at Covenant and the professor joking about the challenge it is to teach about God's omnipresence and he joked about that with another one of the faculty once upon a time and I can't remember the other faculties, this was Dr. Mike Williams who's retired now. And I think it was Peterson who said to him, "Oh, I don't go there." And he said, "Why?" I said, "Well, because if you read the Old Testament, it looks like God's always coming and going. " And that is true. And I love the way that Mike Williams put it. He basically made this notion that God's presence is never to be presumed upon. And so that's a very hard tension to hold together because on the one hand we do believe that God is present, but he's not always present in the same way and how exactly that works out.
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I don't know. That's a mystery of God because we see God show up and we see him leave presence, leave the temple and so forth. We do know that God does end well his people. And so there is this particular way that the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, when the word is proclaimed and people come to faith does rest upon his people individually but also corporately. So that's without going into more of a detailed doctrine of the Holy Spirit, that would be like kind of my first comment of like, does God go before us? The answer is yes, you want this car back. If not, I want to read it back on. Unlike if we found, how do we know ... See, it was something about if we don't feel called to go to some place. This is more of a pastoral question, meaning I would want to ask more questions of Victoria if it's a very specific pastoral issue.
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But for now, I think I would talk, how would I say this to everyone at the same time is I would look at Proverbs, particularly Proverbs chapter two. And what you see in Proverbs chapter two is the way that God ordinarily leads and guides the lives of his people is through wisdom. So he gives his wisdom and his word and he gives wisdom through his people. And so that tends to be the primary way in which he guides people's lives. So that would be my first one as opposed to like a felt call can be somewhat problematic because we can imagine some feelings feel really good, like this feels really
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Good
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And maybe that isn't the right thing to be doing right now because, and I think there are times where God leads us to speak into a land of milk and honey and it all feels good, but sometimes it's scary and it feels like God is pressing upon us something that like, "I feel pressured to do this even though I really don't want to. " And so the feeling language I think we had to be just a little careful with, it's not bad. It is good. Feelings can indicate our values, our emotions are important so I don't want to downplay their role, but I would say more would probably need to be said about a particular case.
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Yeah, that's good. Then she had an application. She wrote, "I will apply this teaching by warning the young women God placed around me to abstain from premarital sex until marriage to keep God's word." Good, good. Then last question for this pod. Anonymous congregant wrote, "Should single people step up to foster and potentially adopt children? While it would be ideal for children to have a mother and father is having one loving parent better than being in the
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System." Yeah. The short answer is I don't know. This is a really hard question to ask and I don't even know to what extent in the United States fostering opportunities are available for single parents. So part of that will align with what people should do over against what's actually possible. In any case, it is clear in scripture that the family is God's intended design of how children should be reared and yet God graciously puts common grace institutions in place because of the fall and like the foster system being among those things. And so I think to give a blanket answer would be challenging.
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Instead of saying, "I don't know, " let me say, "Here's how I would answer an ethical question in general." And it goes like this, do be, go see. So if you can remember, do be, go see, do be go see. You can approach a number of ethical questions and that's what this is. This is a Christian ethics question. So question number one is what should we do? What is our duty before God? And so in this case, we could talk about a love or neighbor. And so we see a child that is in need is in need of a parent. And so the question is like, should a single parent then fill in that space? And some people might look at the scripture on how best to answer that question. The next is go. So what should I or our goals be? Do is duty.
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This is what is in the law of God that comes out of what we just spent time in Deuteronomy setting.
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Did you
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Say B? Yeah. B will be coming next. So go is what are our goals? So like what should we be moving towards? B is who do I need to become as a part of this process by the ministry of God, who is it that I need to be in terms of my character formation to do that? And that might be one of the questions that could make the answer to this particular one go in one direction or another. Someone that might see a duty to do something like help a child in need might not be in a position because of where they are in their own spiritual maturity, their emotional maturity, their financial security and so forth to be able to actually do that. And then C is how can I tell? And what it means is there's a lot of competing stories in our world and time to answer the questions of how should we do something?
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And the answer that we do for C is like, what worldview should be adopted to best attend to those questions? I'm giving you an abstract answer to kind of a concrete question, but it's a very hard, I think, to answer without going on somewhat of a case by case basis.
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It is.
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Before we even get into the issue of like what foster systems and adoption agencies currently even permit. And I'm completely ignorant on the matter, so I'd rather not comment on one that I don't understand. Good question though.
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Yeah. Thanks Austin. Sure. We hope that this has been edifying for you as you seek to be changed and to love God's word more as you apply it after the sermon. So go apply the sermon, continue to make disciples and Lord willing, we'll catch you right back here next week.