(Disclaimer: This transcript is auto-generated and may contain mistakes.)

Man, Deuteronomy chapter one, we're starting out a brand new book tonight, so I'm gonna start out just by talking a little bit about the book of Deuteronomy in general. Of course, the name of Deuteronomy is from the Greek name for this book, and so it comes from the same root word as our word astronomy, right? So astronomy, if you break it down into its parts, means the law of the stars, right? Is that nomos ending means law, and then the deutero part means the second, so literally this word, Deuteronomy, means the second law. And the reason for this is that the book of Deuteronomy is largely redundant with what we've already seen in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers, especially, of course, Exodus through Numbers. And so it's a recap, it's a review, it gives a lot of the same teachings, the same doctrines, the same laws, again, and so it's called Deuteronomy, the second law. In fact, it doesn't really add anything to the plot because the book of Numbers brings us all the way to the end of the 40 years of the wandering in the wilderness, and then the book of Joshua starts out with them entering the promised land, and so the book of Deuteronomy is just stuck in there as a redundancy. Now, why is that? Well, see, the Bible is often very redundant like this where it'll tell the same story again. Like, I mean, just think about the New Testament, you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and there's a lot of repetition of the same things between those books. But this actually is helpful when you're reading the Bible because it really helps things to sink in when you repeat things, and especially when you get things from a little bit different of an angle. And so the Bible is a book that bears rereading again and again. We don't just read the Bible one time and then we're done with it, right? I mean, we should be reading the Bible constantly. Should I just decide, well, I've read the Bible enough times? I mean, I've read the Bible scores of times, so I'm just going to call it good at that. No, I've got to keep reading it again. And I don't care how long you've been in church, how many times you read the Bible, you need to read it again this year and again next year and keep reading it. And then even within the Bible, there's repetition. And so the Bible, being repetitive as it is, part of the signal to us there is that, hey, read this again, read it again and again. It can be repeated over and over again, and you'll learn more the second time than you learned the first time. And the third time you'll learn even more because you'll understand more and more each time you read the Bible. And especially it's nice to get everything consolidated into a short period. For example, this story that we're going to read here in Deuteronomy chapters one, two, and three, this is something that spans a lot of chapters in Exodus and Numbers, right? And it's all being like condensed into three chapters. And so that helps you to see the big picture because sometimes when you're reading a book that has a lot of rabbit trails like Exodus does, like Numbers does, you can lose sight of the plot and the big picture. The nice thing about Deuteronomy is that it just kind of condenses it all and just explains the story in a really logical way, A, B, C, D, et cetera. So let's start out here and see how this is structured. This book is not written by Moses, okay, but 90 some percent of it is the words of Moses because what it is is that it's Moses making speeches, it's Moses talking. So someone's writing this down and saying, hey, this is what Moses said. So in that sense, it's a book of Moses or it's by Moses, even though Moses is the one who wrote it, but it's being spoken by Moses, the vast majority of it, pretty much almost the whole book. So it starts out in verse number one, obviously the anonymous author, most of the Bible is written by anonymous authors, but the Bible says in verse number one, these be the words which Moses spake unto all Israel on this side Jordan in the wilderness, in the plain over against the Red Sea between Paran and Tophel and Laban and Hazareth and Dizahab. And by the way, the name of this book in the Hebrew Bible is not Deuteronomy. That's a Greek name for it. What it's called in the Hebrew Bible is just words, okay? So they typically just name the book after like the first word or the first meaningful word in the sentence or whatever. So this one is just called Devarim, which is just means like words. I don't know why they call it that, but anyway, I like the name Deuteronomy better. Verse two, there are 11 days journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir unto Kadesh Barnea and it came to pass in the 40th year in the 11th month on the first day of the month that Moses spake unto the children of Israel according to all that the Lord had given him in commandment unto them. After he had slain Sihon of the Amorites, which dwelt in Heshbon and Og the king of Bashan, which dwelt at Aztroth in Edrei, on this side Jordan in the land of Moab began Moses to declare this law saying. So apparently the perspective is coming from the east side of the Jordan saying, hey, this is the stuff that Moses said when he was on this side of the Jordan talking about the east side. And of course that's the only side of the Jordan that Moses was ever on because he was never allowed to cross the Jordan or into the promised land. But notice the timing. It says in verse three that in the 40th year in the 11th month on the first day of the month, that's talking about 40 years after leaving Egypt. So again, Deuteronomy is starting at the very end of the story. We're already to pretty close to Joshua chapter one in Deuteronomy one. So again, this is all just covering a matter of days, right? So the book of Deuteronomy covers a period of just days or day, right? It's just a couple days. And basically it's just Moses talking 40 years of wandering in the wilderness is over. They're about to enter the promised land and Moses is just kind of giving a recap of everything. He's going to give a recap of the story of how they got there and he's going to give a recap of the laws that God gave and things are worded a little bit differently. So it gives another perspective and another angle on God's laws. So it says in verse two, there are 11 days journey from Horeb by the way of Mount Seir unto Kadesh Barnea. Now Kadesh Barnea is the gateway to the promised land and Mount Horeb is another name for Mount Sinai, okay? So the Bible saying from Mount Sinai, uh, by the way of Mount Seir unto Kadesh Barnea, he's saying it's like an 11 day journey, you know, took them 40 years, but hey, uh, that's because they wandered around a lot as a punishment from God and we're going to get to that. So in verse four it says he is saying these things, these are the words that Moses spake after he'd slain Sihon, after he'd slain Og and done all this. So they're just right there. They're about to enter the promised land and he begins to declare this law saying, it says in verse five, the Lord our God spake unto us in Horeb saying you have dwelt long enough in this mount. Now here's what could maybe be a little confusing about this first part. This is why I'm spending time on this. I want to make sure you get this, is that the first five verses, we are 40 years into the wandering in the wilderness. We're at the gateway of the promised land, right? Moses is about to die. This is the very end of his life and he's about to give this second giving of the law here. Okay. This recap and, and, uh, tells the story and give the laws again. But now all of a sudden when we get to verse six, we have just jumped back 40 years in time because now Moses is beginning his speech and when Moses begins to speak, he goes back to the beginning of the story and he's now going to tell the story of how they got there, uh, throughout chapters one, two and three here. So when he says you've dwelt long enough in this mount, he's saying that's what God said 40 years ago when they were at Mount Sinai, Mount Horeb, because Moses right now is not at Mount Horeb. Moses is at the gateway of the promised land, right? He's on the land of Moab on the east side of the Jordan River. And so God said at that beginning of the 40 years, the Lord, our God spake in us in Horeb saying you've dwelled long enough in this mount, turn you and take your journey and go to the Mount of the Amorites and unto all the plains places neither into in the plain in the hills and in the veil and in the south and by the seaside to the land of the Canaanites and unto Lebanon and to the great river, the river Euphrates, the old, I've set the land before you. Go in and possess the land which the Lord swear unto your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob to give unto them into their seat after them. And I spake unto you at that time, again, going back 40 years, I'm not able to bear you myself alone. The Lord, your God has multiplied you and behold your this day as the stars of heaven for multitude. The Lord God of your fathers make you a thousand times so many more as you are and bless you as he had promised you. How can I myself alone bury your company? So here's what we need to understand is that numeric growth is good, okay? When it comes to our family, when it comes to our nation, when it comes to our church, when it comes to business or whatever, you know, numeric growth is good. It's a blessing. It's not a bad thing. But with numeric growth obviously come challenges and difficulties. Basically it's a little bit of a challenge to have 12 kids, for example, right? Or to pastor a church with several hundred people is going to be more challenging than pastoring a church with 20 people, right? In some ways it's less challenging, but anyway, as it gets bigger, right, there's just more that can go wrong, more problems, more issues, and it gets to a point where one person can't do all the work, one person can't handle all the responsibility, one guy can't just handle millions of people or something. You know, this isn't how governments work. Let's say our government has a monarchy and they just have one guy in church. It's not like he's just the only ruler and he just directly rules everything. No, he's going to have all kinds of people under him that he's delegating to. And so in order to grow as a family, in order to grow as a church, you must learn to delegate. And this is what Moses had to learn. And in fact, if we go back to Exodus, we would see it was Moses' father-in-law who took him aside and explained to him that he needed to learn to delegate. He was doing way too much himself. All the people were coming to him with all their problems. And Jethro explains to him, look, you know, most of these problems could be dealt with by just educating people in God's word. Like if everybody knew the law of God, if everybody knows what the Bible says, they're going to have less questions. They're going to have less issues. They're going to have less problems. And then when they do have a question, probably your staff or people that you appoint can help them out with those things and, and, and can judge matters. And then only the really hard things should make it all the way to you. Otherwise you're just going to wear yourself out. You can't just spend all day dealing with every little thing. And this is something that's important to learn as a leader, because a lot of times as leaders, we want to just do everything ourselves and want to micromanage and do everything ourselves and you can never grow like that. You're never going to be able to go to the next level like that. You've got to learn to just let other people do things. And sometimes the attitude is, well, if I want it done right, I have to do it myself. But that's kind of a prideful attitude also, because it's basically an attitude saying I'm better at it than everyone else. No one else can do anything as good as me. But sometimes we think that and sometimes it turns out not to be true. Sometimes we could be a little bit nervous about delegating something and then we end up delegating it and the person we delegated to might even do a better job than, than we will. And it can be a little bit humbling, but we need to be humble enough to realize, hey, I delegated that and that he did a better job than I would have done. Instead of having this prideful attitude that says, well, in order to get things done right, I must do everything myself. Okay. I don't know why that, but sometimes it's easier in the short run to just do things yourself. Sometimes it's harder to teach someone how to do something than just do it yourself. It's easier. Just, just get out of the way and let me do it. But the problem is if you'd say, get out of the way and let me do it, you're still going to be doing it 50 times, a hundred times, 200 times. Whereas if you invest a little time now in training someone, then in the long run you're saving a ton of time because yeah, it's harder today. It might be harder next week, but next year they're just doing it and you don't even have to do anything. So you've got to learn to train other people, delegate, let other people do things. Yeah. They're going to make mistakes. Sometimes some things they're going to do not as well as you would have, but some things they might even do better than you would have. Because what if I told you that you're not just the ultimate human being in every area? Now this is true in a church. Obviously as a pastor, I delegate a lot of things to other people. I don't do everything myself. I give them a lot of freedom to do stuff and make mistakes and try things and to work on their own and to take care of responsibilities. And I don't feel like I have to do everything myself. Now in the early days of the church, I kind of, it was hard for me to not do everything myself, but now I've learned, yeah, delegate and same thing when I had a business, when I was doing electrical work, you know, it's like I had a hard time delegating, but you have to, but not only in business, not only in church is this important, but what about in your family? Sometimes the mothers don't delegate and then mothers just run themselves ragged. Now look, if you have one or two kids and you just want to do everything because you want the laundry done a certain way, you want the dishes done a certain way, you want the housework done a certain way, whatever. But you know, when you get to have six, seven, eight children, I mean 10, 11, 12 children, you better delegate. I mean, you better know that in my house, my wife is not just doing everything herself. You know, she, and sometimes she, you know, I hope she listens to the sermon cause she needs to delegate a little more sometimes. Okay. You know, she's not here to defend herself, you know, no, I'm just kidding. But anyway, obviously my wife is a super hard worker, but you know, sometimes I'm trying to tell my wife, like you got to delegate because we've got all of these wonderful children and they need to work. And you know, there's certain things where I'm thinking to myself, like, why would I do that when there are all these able bodied children, they need to pull their weight, they need to do housework. And you know what? You're not doing your kids any favor by doing all the housework for them because they're just going to grow up to be a spoiled brat if you don't make them work. And so it's good to have your kids doing some dishes, doing some laundry, doing some cleaning and people wonder like, how do you do it with 10 kids with 12 kids, you know, how do you do it? Because honestly, having four kids is harder than having 10 kids if you know how to delegate because we keep adding kids to our family, but we don't, we always have a baby. We always have a toddler. We always have the young kids like that just hasn't changed for the last like almost 20 years. What we keep doing, the way I look at it is we're adding kids at the top, you know, because it's like we had like we had five, three and one, then we had seven, five, three and one, then we had nine, seven, five, three, one, 11, nine, seven, five. So we're adding them. We're adding a 13 year old, we're adding a 15 year old, we're adding a 17 year old. And if you look at it that way, I mean, are you having less work or more work by adding a 13 year old into the mix by adding a 15 year? I mean, look, there are people in this world who hire 15 year olds to come over to their house and help them with stuff. Well, we raised our own 15 year old for that. We raised our own 17 year old for that, you know, so, so by having these built in helpers, you know, they're changing diapers, they're doing dishes, they're doing laundry, you know, and then some idiot will come along and be like, ah, yeah, it's not fair. You make your kids do all that work, poor kid. It's like, shut up, you stupid lesbian. Just because you breed dogs doesn't mean you know anything about having kids, right? Some slob, you know, who basically, her children are her dogs or something, you know, and she calls them her babies or something, and then she's going to sit there and tell me that I'm abusing my kids by making them work. Let me tell you something, if you don't make your kids work, you're just going to raise a bunch of criminals. You're just going to raise a bunch of self-centered spoiled brats. Hey, I grew up having to do housework. Everybody has to do housework. And you know what, it's good for the kids to pitch in and help out and work. What else are they going to do all day? You know, and look, it's not like we're chaining our kids to some machine in a sweatshop in Cambodia or something, okay? I mean, the kids are educated, they sleep well, they eat well, they have time for recreation, but you know what, they also spend a little bit of time doing dishes, doing laundry, and I'm not going to apologize for that. Caring for children, changing a diaper, hey, why not have them take out the trash? Why not have them vacuum the carpet? Why not have them learn a little bit of humility, teamwork, a work ethic? I mean, they're going to grow up and be successful people because they pitched in. And then they're not going to be that lazy jerk at the job who gets nothing done because they grew up knowing, hey, it's all hands on deck. They pitch in, everybody does their part. And so don't buy into this garbage about not delegating housework. You know, you had those kids, you need to take care of them. You made the decision. No, I didn't make the decision to have those kids, I just went to bed with my wife and kids popped out. You made that decision, okay, Planned Parenthood. Maybe you can, I don't know, maybe you can come in here and give me a lesson on condoms and IUDs or something. You know, no, I, you know, I am a normal man, married to a normal woman and we go to bed together and kids are the result. And I've been doing it for 20 some years. You decided to have, no, you decided to give drugs to your wife so that she could grow a beard and be infertile, okay? You decided to use all these unnatural implements to stop yourself from having kids. I did, I just went through the normal biological life cycle for my species. You know, we just went through the normal biology of just man plus woman equals baby. You have to make some decision about that. You want to know the decision we made? The decision we made was to get married. That's the decision. Here's the decision for you. Get married or don't get married. Once you're married, going to bed together is not a decision. That's a decision you make before you get married. Everybody understand that? And you're not supposed to go to bed together until you're married. Otherwise it's fornication. Once you get married, there's an agreement there. That's part of what, it's to have and to hold. The hold there isn't like, you know, it's not just like this kind of hold, you know? You got to read into that hold a little bit, okay? It's a little bit of a deeper hold than just that. The result is children. So you want to know when I decided to reproduce was when I decided to get married because getting married, the product, the fruit of marriage is children, okay? So it shouldn't be like I'm the one who made this decision to have all these kids. No, no, no. Because having kids is the default. Just the normal default mode is having children. You have to actually do something to prevent having children. It's not like I had to go into my bedroom and say like, all right, honey, you know, we have to roll out this special new technique that's going to produce children. Because what we normally do doesn't produce children. So we're going to have to roll out, no, because what married people normally do produces children on its own. There's nothing special that needs to do. But I would have to roll something out to say, hey, we need to prevent having children. So here, let's take you down to the pharmacy and let's go buy this at Walgreens and buy that at CVS to stop having children. Does everybody understand what I'm saying? But see, the world's got this all backwards. But does that surprise you when the world has everything backwards? The world's just backwards, my friend. So we need to change our mentality. We need to renew our mind and get a biblical mentality that says having children is normal. Not this worldly philosophy that says, well, you know, I mean, having kids is a big decision, you know. Are you sure you're ready for that? Are you sure you can afford that? Well, you know, you should have thought about that before you got married. But if you get married, you should get married, say, okay, we get married and, you know, first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes juja with the baby carriage. That's the way it works. You know what I mean? Like that's just life. And so I'm not going to apologize for having a lot of kids. I'm not going to apologize for having a big family because I'm just going through the normal biological cycle that God has created for me. I've just, you know, got married and did what married people do and children are the result. I would have had to make a decision or a point or something in order to have a planned baron hood, you know, in order not to have children because the default mode is having children. And you know what? It may seem like a little thing, whether we look at it as planning to have children or planning not to have children. But you know, it really makes a difference in our mentality. And I think we need to get a mentality that says, well, you have to plan not to have children because the normal default is just you just have kids. I mean, you just because, you know, here's what I'm saying, you don't have to do anything special to have kids. Not trying to teach you about the birds and the bees tonight or give you a biology lesson. But you know, if you just get married and just do what comes naturally, yeah, there's going to be a pregnancy there, okay, in general, or at least it can result in pregnancy. You don't have to buy something at Walgreens in order to get pregnant. You have to buy something at Walgreens not to get pregnant. But you understand what I'm saying? Now the Bible says here in verse 11, the Lord God of your fathers make you 1000 times so many more as you are and bless you as he had promised you. So being multiplied 1000 fold is a blessing, according to the Bible. You know, I hope I have 1000 I hope I live to see 1000 descendants in my lifetime. All right, so we'll see how that goes. You know, a lot of it's not really in my hands to control. But you know, if I hopefully I live to be a super old man, and can have some kind of a family gathering where we have to rent out some giant hall or something just, you know, just to have dinner and I'll be like, what's your name again? Who are you people? You know? Hopefully, I'll have somebody that says I don't even know who they all are just yeah, you sired these people indirectly. I'm just like, okay, I mean, they I guess they kind of look like me. There's 1000 of them. Hey, may God multiply me 1000 fold. Amen. I, you know, I've had 12 kids, I've got the ball rolling on my end. We'll see what happens. But the point is, you know, it's a blessing to multiply. And we shouldn't buy into this worldly philosophy that tells us not to have kids. Don't be fruitful and multiply all the world's overpopulated and your carbon footprint and all this. First of all, I'm not even worried about that, number one, okay. You know, to me, that's in the domain of God. And politicians can worry about that and businesses can worry about that. Me personally, whatever I'm doing, is just a drop of water on a hot stove compared to all that anyway, okay. But number two, I'm raising my children to be responsible, productive members of society. They're not trashing the environment. You know, they're actually, hopefully, God willing, making the world a better place and actually contributing to society and helping society grow and move forward and they're being responsible citizens and so forth. And so, you know, derelicts are gonna keep reproducing. So why should I stop reproducing? You know, the Muslims are reproducing and they're like the derelicts of the world, you know. And you got just all these Muslims just pumping out all of these Mohammed fault, Mohammedan whatevers, you know, illiterate Mohammed followers that they're churning out. You know, why don't God's people reproduce a little bit? Why don't we raise up a godly seed and have a generation of Christians instead of all the Christians stop reproducing and then the Muslims can just keep pumping out their illiterate children, okay. Their pedophile worshiping Mohammedans piss me upon him, okay. And so, you know, we as God's people shouldn't buy into this worldly philosophy of not reproducing. You know, the Bible says that children are in heritage of the Lord and the fruit of the womb is his reward. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them. They shall not be ashamed, they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. Now a lot of people don't want to have kids because it's a lot of work, it's a lot of hard as, hard work as Moses said, you know, it's a cumbrance when you have a lot of people because Moses kind of compares himself to a parent. He's like, man, did I give birth to all these people? Like how can I handle all these millions of people alone? And so obviously it's a cumbrance, it's a burden when you have a lot of children. But part of the way to deal with that is to learn to delegate. Don't do it alone. Don't try to do all the work alone. You've got to train your older children to take care of younger children and have the family working together as a team and then everybody learns the teamwork and everybody can grow and move forward. And I got off on a little bit of a rabbit trail there because what I was saying was that people will say like, well, you're the one who made the decision to have those kids. And so it's not fair for you to strap your kids with that extra work of taking care of their younger siblings because, you know, you're the one who made that. It's like I made the decision for them to even be born. Like I made you. So yeah, I'm going to tell you that you're going to take care of your younger. Well, you know, they didn't ask to be put, they didn't even ask to be brought into this world, but I brought them into this world anyway. And now I'm going to tell them to do the dishes and to do laundry and to take care of the younger siblings. Why? Because I'm the boss. Because my wife is a boss, right? We don't go to our children and be like, oh, I'm so sorry that I produced you. How can I make your life easier? You know, what can I do to make your load easier so you can become a spoiled brat who doesn't know how to work? It's absurd. Make the kids work. Delegate. And then everybody can be happier, everything can run smooth, right? You know, you walk into a house sometimes, it's just chaos. And that's what people probably envision every big family, because they're like, okay, I have these two kids and it's chaos, you know, times six or whatever. And they're just kind of doing that math. But, you know, you could walk into a house with a huge family and everything's peaceful and running smooth. And you could walk into a family with one or two kids and it's just a complete circus. Right? But here's the thing. You know, what you want to do is you want to have a well-oiled machine, you want to have a system, you want everybody working, everybody contributing, everybody pitching in. And many hands make light work. You don't have to work as hard when everybody's pitching in. Everybody gets free time, including mom and dad. The kids get free time, but so do we, because everybody's working, everybody's contributing. And look, yeah, you're right, if you don't raise your kids to be productive and to help and to pitch in, it will be impossible for you to have a big family. I mean, it just, how could you just have nine monsters running around? I mean, it would be, it would be insane. But if you have nine children that are being brought up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and they're being trained and taught and disciplined and they know how to work and they know how to contribute, then, you know, it can be a real blessing to have a big family. It can be fun. It can be nice. It can be, uh, actually even making your life easier in some ways. And you say, well, I don't know what you're talking about because my kids are just all work and they don't help. Well, you know what? And that's your failure to lead because you need to delegate, you need to discipline, you need to run things decently in an order in your house and not let your children swing from the chandeliers and do whatever they want. You have to take the lead and take the bull by the horns and get things under control. That's what leadership is. And that's the job of mom and dad. But you've got to delegate. So Moses realizes, hey, it's great that the children of Israel number in the millions. I hope they number in the billions. You know, I would love to see them be a thousand times what they are today. And of course, uh, there have even been, and I don't know even how you could make this kind of a calculation, but I read something the other day that said that, you know, these different, uh, academics had calculated that, you know, if it weren't for all of the persecutions against the Jews over the last 2000 years, all the pogroms and holocausts and all the different things, they, they, they calculated that there'd be like, uh, you know, 6 million dollars. Okay. Uh, there are, there are like, there are 15 million, there are about 15 million Jews in the world, but I think they calculate that there'd be like 575 million or something. I don't know how they get a number like that, but a bunch of, you know, yeah, they probably just made up, they like to make up numbers, you know, but, um, they had like some number and they were saying like, Hey, we did all this math and we figured out and we calculated that there'd be approximately like, you know, 575 million of them or something, right? But why aren't there, why are there only 15 million? You want to know why there's only 15 million in the year 2023, thousands of years later, they're only 15 million because of the fact that they're not, they were not being blessed by God. So all these bad things happen to them throughout history as punishments from God. Now obviously that doesn't mean that the people who were doing it to them were necessarily in the right and obviously there were a lot of unjust things that were done and a lot of innocent people were murdered over the years. Obviously the Nazis murdered innocent people, but ultimately though, God will sometimes use wicked people to punish other wicked people. That's what he does all throughout the Bible. He'll bring in the Babylonians to slaughter the Israelites in the Bible. Does that mean the Babylonians are righteous in what they're doing? But that's what happened. So here's the thing, even these secular Jewish scholars are saying, hey, look how low our number is because of all these persecutions and so forth. You know, the blessing of God would have been that they would have continued to multiply and they would have hit these hypothetical numbers. You know, Moses is saying, hey, you could be a thousand times what you are today. May God make you a thousand times what you are today and bless you as he had promised you. He would multiply them. What did he say to Abraham? Surely blessing I will bless you and multiplying I will multiply you. And so, uh, we as Christians want to multiply, we want our church to grow. You know, a lot of people complain that the church gets too big. And I remember this lady left our church when we were running like 50 or 60 and she's like, oh, the church is too big for me now. And I told her, I said, well, you know, this is too big for you. I guess that's going to be a problem because I said, we're only going to get bigger. We're not going to stop growing. We don't want to just stall out at 50 or 60. We want to keep growing. We want to reach more people. We want to run, uh, as high a number as possible. And so obviously that involves needing more leaders. We got to delegate. We got to, you know, work together more problems, but it's worth it to have the bigger, uh, you know, army of soul winners out there doing the Lord's work. And so the Bible says here, take you wise men, verse 13 and understanding and known among your tribes and I will make them rulers over you. And you answered me and said, the thing which thou has spoken is good for us to do. So I took the chief of your tribes, wise men and known and made them heads over you, captains over thousands and captains over hundreds and captains over fifties and captains over tens and officers among your tribes. So there's this sort of delegation of these different levels of leadership. Like one person's in charge of 10, another person's charge of 50, 100, 500 and you have it broken down into this hierarchy. And these chief of the tribes, these wise men, these leaders that he's appointing, these are called judges because in verse 16 he says, and I charged your judges at that time. The judges are the people he just mentioned. The officers, the captains over 50, the captains over a hundred, the captains over a thousand. Those are basically the people who are doing the judging, right? And I charged your judges at that time saying, hear the causes between your brethren and judge righteously between every man and his brother and the stranger that is with him. You should not respect persons in judgment, but you shall hear the small as well as the great. You should not be afraid of the face of man for the judgment is God's and the cause that is too hard for you, bring it unto me and I will hear it and I command you at that time all the things which you should do. And so here's a good rule of thumb as a leader. If someone else can do something, they probably should do it. As you get bigger as an organization, as a family, as a church, anything that other people can do, you should probably have them do. And the things that are too hard for them is what you should be doing, right? The stuff that they cannot do or the stuff that you can uniquely do, right? So I don't want to spend my life wasting my life doing menial tasks that other people can do. If one of my kids can do something, they should probably be doing that. Is it really necessary for me to be the one who carries trash out to the barrel when I can have a small child even carry trash out to the barrel, right? And have them do that job. And the thing is when it comes to the church also, our staff at this church here is very knowledgeable about the Bible and they know how to handle a lot of things. So a lot of phone calls, a lot of emails, a lot of just personal issues and things get delegated to them. They handle those things. I don't handle them personally. But virtually every single day someone is calling the church or emailing, hey, I need to talk to Pastor Anderson. You know, I got to talk to Pastor Anderson. And then sometimes people get upset when someone else responds to them and says, hey, let me help you out. What do you need? It's like, well, now I want to talk to Pastor Anderson. You know, it's like, well, sorry, you can't. And here's the thing. What do these people need? Typically what they need can be handled by Brother Segura, can be handled by Brother Corbin Russell, right? Somebody else can handle it. And it can easily give them the answer, can point them to the right scripture, can, uh, but it's, I want Pastor Anderson to do it. But the thing about that is that I don't have time to do it. Now you say, well, you could, you could make time. You know what? You're right. I could, if I wanted to, I could answer every single phone call. I could call back every person on every voicemail. I could answer every email. I could deal with every problem myself. And I would last for a couple of weeks and then I would quit being a pastor and do something else seriously. I could do it for a couple of weeks until my head exploded and then I'd just be like, this is stupid. I'm done with it. I hate this. I would hate life. I would just be tortured for a few weeks and then I would just be like, that's it, I'm done. And then I would quit. What's the point of that? And that's what Moses, that's what Jethro told Moses. You're going to wear yourself out. You know, I'm not here for the short term. I'm in this for decades. I'm in it for the long haul. I want to still be here 10 years, 20 years, 30 years from now. So I'm not going to run myself into the ground just doing everything myself when there's no point. When brother Segura or brother Corbin Russell or brother Raymond Cooper or somebody, they might even do a better job than me. They can handle that stuff. And guess what? They email me when something's too hard for them. They'll email me, hey, I didn't know what to tell this person. You know, have you got something? And they'll basically escalate that up to me. And then I'm just dealing with more serious things than just the, you know, hey, hey, Pastor Anderson, you know, my pastor is pre-trib, what do I do? Like do I really need to be the one to personally answer that? Or talk to them or whatever, you know? And some people want to just talk to me just because they just want to talk to Pastor Anderson. They're just like looking for, like they made up a question. They're not even having a problem. They invented a problem because they just wanted to talk to Pastor Anderson. And here's the problem with that is that pastors are not supposed to be like some kind of a celebrity that we just want to get next to, okay? That's a worldly mentality. Isn't that the mentality that people, man, they want to get backstage at Faithful Word and get next to Pastor Anderson. You know, that's a worldly mentality. Because the world has their stars and they want to get next to some rock star or an actor or an actress and they have this kind of fanboy, fangirl mentality of getting obsessed with celebrities and everything. You know, let it not be so among us as God's people, right? I am just a guy preaching the Bible. And it's not really about me personally, it's about the stuff that I'm preaching. And so if my staff is preaching and teaching the same stuff and has the same help and the same information, then it shouldn't really matter. It's like when Naaman comes to Elisha and he gets mad because Elisha won't come talk to him personally and he sends Gehazi. And oh, you know, wasn't he going to come out here and talk to me? No, he's not. But who cares? All that matters is if you get healed of the leprosy. That's all that matters. Did you come here to get next to Elisha or did you come here to get healed of leprosy? And so we don't want to have this sycophantic, worldly, Hollywood star mentality or something where it's got to be, you know, this pastor or that pastor or this other pastor. It should just be about the work of God getting done. And so, yeah, probably a lot of people just want to hang out with Moses because Moses is Moses. But that's not going to work because Moses doesn't have time for that. And so he delegates that and he said, the things that are too hard for you, bring it unto me and I will hear it. And I commanded you at that time all the things which you should do. And verse 18 is key. I commanded you, not your judges, but the whole people, I commanded you at that time all the things which you should do. Here's one way to make sure that people don't need as much counseling and advice and meetings and appointments with Pastor Anderson. Here's a good way. Actually teach stuff on Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night. And then people have very few questions. Now if you go to a church where nothing's being taught, then yeah, you're gonna have a lot of questions. But hopefully you're getting most of what you need just from the preaching. And typically when people come to me for advice or come to my staff, usually we can just point them to a sermon and say, hey, here's the exact sermon that covers exactly what you're talking about. You're gonna push this button and you can listen to one hour of advice on that. And if that doesn't do it for you, that's probably all of God anyway, is what I said in that sermon. And so if we would actually teach the word of God to our people, they're gonna have less problems. I mean, look, do you think people who follow the Bible have more problems or less problems? I mean, following the Bible prevents a lot of problems. I mean, I remember when I was a church member, you know, I didn't constantly need to come to my pastor and ask him like, what do I do? Because it's like, I knew what to do because he's teaching me. I'm reading my Bible every day and he's preaching in the pulpit what to do. He told me all the things that I should do. The Bible told me what I should do. And I only had to go to him every once in a while, rarely, to ask about something really challenging or difficult. And so look, if you need help, don't hesitate. Reach out to me, reach out to them. I'm not telling you not to reach out. But what I'm telling you is that in a church like ours, a lot less people need help because they're actually following the Bible. And when you follow the Bible, things work. The Bible works. So your family life is going to work more than if you weren't following the Bible. Not to say you're not going to have any problems, but usually even when you have problems, you're kind of like, yeah, I'm having a problem, but I kind of know what it is. I know what the Bible says. And you know, it's funny, when people come to me for advice, sometimes I ask them, what do you think you should do? They usually already know the answer anyway. If they've been reading the Bible and listening to the preaching and so forth. And again, I'm not saying not to come and ask for help. I'm just saying that people in our church need less help than at churches where the Bible's not being preached and taught effectively because at those churches, people don't know what to do. And so step one is teach everybody the Bible. Teach everybody the Bible. Make sure everybody knows what they're supposed to do. And then step two, set up delegates that will answer questions that are just the same question every week. I mean, look, I'm sure if I asked, where's brother Corbin Russell? Where's he sitting? He's here. I know he's here. He's probably counting the offering or something in the back. But you know, I guarantee you that if we asked him right now about the voicemails, that there's probably a lot of things that just get asked every week, like same type of voice. Like you could probably categorize them into like 20 types of voicemails that come in or 20 types of emails. Now obviously sometimes there's going to be one that's really unique or different, but a lot of them are just going to be the same issue brought up over and over and over again. So he's already ready for it. He's already got experience. He's already had this conversation. He's probably had the conversation more times than I have. And so he's ready to go with an answer. Okay. So step one, teach the Bible to everyone so that they need less help anyway. Step two, when they do need help, don't necessarily escalate it all the way to the pastor. Have somebody lower in rank be able to just give an answer and then only escalate the stuff to the pastor that is more difficult because then you're not expecting one person to just run themselves into the ground dealing with everybody's problems every day, right? Let it work its way up the hierarchy. And here's the thing. You know, even sometimes even before you would go to the staff, you could go to your mom and dad. You'd go to your husband, go to your dad, go to someone else, go to your uncle or whatever. You know? And then it's like, okay, they don't have the answer. Now I'll go to the staff. Oh, staff doesn't have the answer. Let's go to pastor Anderson. Pastor doesn't have the answer. Pastor Anderson doesn't have the answer. You know? Well then, you know, where do you go from there, right? You just throw up your hands and say, I don't know. Or go to a different pastor and ask him, right? Who knows? It isn't an answer. Unfortunately, I don't have all the answers to life. I wish I did, but I don't. But like you, I'm learning. I'm reading my Bible. I'm studying. And so I'm going to try to figure out as much as I can from the Word of God. And so that's key in verse 18. So just in the short time that we have remaining, let me just kind of wrap up here with the rest of this. So after he sets up this structure of rulers of tens, rulers of fifties, rulers of hundreds, you know, and has these people helping out, then it says, they departed from Horeb through all that great and terrible wilderness, which he saw by the way of the mountain of the Amorites, as the Lord our God commanded us, and we came to Kadesh Barnea. And I said unto you, you're coming to the mountain of the Amorites, which the Lord our God did give us. Behold, the land thy God, or the Lord thy God had set the land before thee. Go up and possess it as the Lord God of thy fathers hath said unto thee. Fear not, neither be discouraged. He's like, all right, so we've left Mount Sinai. We've got our government figured out. We've got our bureaucracy figured out. All right, let's go. We're at the gateway to the promised land. This is the land that God has given us. So let's get in there and get it. Let's go team. And he came near unto me, every one of you and said, we will send men before us and they shall search out the land and bring us word again, by what way we must go up and into what cities we shall come. And the saying pleased me well, because what's the saying? The saying is, well, we're just going to figure out exactly how we're going to execute, right? Yes, we're going to invade the promised land. We're going to take over the promised land, but let's just send in some spies to make a plan. And Moses is like, great idea. Yeah, let's figure out how we're going to do it. The problem is that these spies end up exceeding their mandate because their job is just to figure out how are we going to conquer the promised land. Instead, the spies come back and 10 of them say, well, you know, it's the land's great. I mean, it's a beautiful place. It's wonderful, but we can't do this. Now God already told them that they can do it, but they doubt the Lord. And they say, oh man, you know, there are all of these walled cities and they have chariots of iron and that everybody there is bigger than us. They're just physically bigger than us. And we even saw some of the Anakims there, and the Anakims are actual giants. Now don't get some kind of a Jack and the Beanstalk kind of mentality or some kind of a Gulliver's Travels kind of mentality here, okay? Because when the Bible talks about giants or Anakims, the Bible actually talks about how tall these people are. And these people are on the order of like nine to 10 feet tall, okay? So basically, even in our modern time, there have been some people that are pretty close to those heights. You know, if you look in the Guinness Book of World Records or something, you're gonna even see some people that are those heights. So it's not some crazy, you know, 100 foot tall guy or something stupid like that. It's just abnormally large people. And you know, there was some genetic diversity back then that doesn't exist anymore because of the fact that, you know, before the flood, there were all these people that had reproduced before the flood, right? And then most of them got wiped out in the flood and only just eight people survived the flood on the ark, right? Just Noah and his wife and the three sons and their three wives. So that's what you call a genetic bottleneck, right? Because most of the gene pool all got wiped out, and then the earth got repopulated from just those really six people, you know, as far as the sons and their wives. And so you have this genetic bottleneck, you lost a lot of genetic diversity. But apparently, some of those genes for giants came through that, but maybe not all of them, maybe not a lot of them. And so back then, you did still have like a remnant of the giants. But then those giants ended up going extinct, it seems like ultimately, they ended up getting wiped out in the long run, as far as being this, you know, race of taller people. But again, they're still human. And they're still in the ballpark of the size of normal humans. They're not, you know, what we would maybe think of as giants, okay? So but they're freaked out by these people, you know, they're seeing people like Goliath and stuff. They're looking at these guys that are, you know, maybe nine feet tall or whatever. And then also just the people in general are just strong, mighty people in general. They've got weapons, they've got walls, they've got cities. They assumed, I guess, that they're just going to come in and just kind of find maybe maybe like when the Spanish showed up in the New World, and found the Native Americans and the Mayans and the Aztecs and then all the tribes that, you know, the English found up here in North America, you know, maybe that's what they expected. You know, they expected to go up against a culture in decline, right? Because when the Spanish showed up, did they find a whole bunch of technology and chariots of iron and a bunch of guys in armor with sophisticated weapons and walled cities? No they didn't, right? They mainly found people living hand to mouth, living in villages, not a lot of technology, not a lot going on. And so it was just relatively easy for very few Spaniards to just take over Mexico, right? And of course we know that the United States took over all of North America, and it wasn't really a huge challenge to defeat a lot of those people. Whereas this is a totally different situation because they show up and it's walled cities. I mean, this is a very sophisticated civilization. Yes, it's culturally and morally in decline, but it's going to be tough to defeat these people. But God never said it was going to be easy. God just said, I'm giving you the victory. I'm going to do it. The harder it is, the more glory God's going to get when he pulls it off, right? So if the Israelites show up and can conquer Canaan through the power of God, not through superior technology and superior numbers, then God gets the glory. That was God's plan. You know, he's going to bring them, he's going to do the work. He's going to give them the victory. They didn't have the faith to see that. Then I said unto them, verse 29, then I said unto you, dread not, neither be afraid of them. The Lord your God, which goeth before you, he shall fight for you according to all that he did for you in Egypt before your eyes. He's like, look, don't you remember when you left Egypt, Egypt is the most powerful nation in the world. You basically defeated the Egyptians through the power of God. You're going to defeat these people also. You know, the same way that you won the victory in the past is the same way you're going to win it in the future. And God tells us something similar in the New Testament. He talks about how the battles of the past, the trials and tribulations of the past, they give us patience and experience and hope because we've been through it before. If God brought us through that battle in the past, he's going to bring us through the next battle as well. It's like where Paul said, I was delivered out of the mouth of the lion. And then Paul said, the Lord shall deliver me from every evil work. See his logic there? Look, if God delivered me in the past, God's going to deliver me in the future. If I can defeat the Egyptians, I can defeat the Canaanites, okay? And so he said, don't be afraid of them. God's going to do it. Verse 32, yet in this thing you did not believe the Lord your God who went in the way before you to search you out a place to pitch your tent. So the real spy was God. God was the real spy. He went and did all the spying and no, we got to send our own spies. Ten of them ended up being bogus. Two of them were good. Okay. And then Caleb and Joshua were the two good spies. All the rest were bad. And you know, you know what happened to the 10 spies that were bad, they all died. And when they died, that kind of freaked everybody out because everybody's like, yeah, we need to listen to these 10 spies that, you know, that are telling us not to do it. And then they all die and they're like, whoa, maybe Joshua and Caleb are right. They're the only ones that are still alive. God has obviously smitten these people. Verse 34, the Lord heard the voice of your words and was Roth and swear saying, surely there shall not one of these men of this evil generation see that good land, which I swear to give unto your fathers. Save Caleb, the son of Jephunneh. He shall see it. And to him will I give the land that he had trodden upon and to his children because he had wholly followed the Lord. Also the Lord was angry with me for your sake saying, thou also shall not go in thither, but Joshua, the son of none, which stands before thee. He shall go in thither, encourage him for he shall cause Israel to inherit it. And so we see Joshua and Caleb are the only people from that generation that are going to go into the promised land. The 10 other spies die immediately. Everybody else has to wander in the wilderness for 40 years. And why are they wandering in the wilderness 40 years? So that everybody in that generation can die of natural causes and a new generation can rise up and be given a chance to go into the promised land. And so it says in verse 39, moreover, your little ones, which he said should be a prey and your children, which in that day had no knowledge between good and evil. They shall go in thither and unto them will I give it and they shall possess it. But as for you, turn you and take your journey into the wilderness by the way of the Red Sea. He's like, all right, you're going to detention. You're going to the wilderness. You're going to go on timeout for the next 40 years in the wilderness. But then they're like, oh man, I'm so sorry. We've sinned against the Lord. We're going to go into the promised land. We're sorry. We were stupid. The 10 spies are dead. We shouldn't have listened to those bozos. We're ready to enter the promised land. We don't want to wander in the wilderness, God. We were stupid. Forgive us. We're going in. And Moses is like, nope, it's too late for you guys. You already blew it. You already screwed up. You're not going into the promised land. You're going to go wander in the wilderness. But they decided to just go up anyway. And look what it says in verse 42. The Lord said unto me, say unto them, go not up, neither fight, for I am not among you lest you be smitten before your enemies. Like, look, without the Lord, you can't win this. This is a tough enemy. They've got the iron chariots. They've got the walled cities. They're huge. They're big, rough warriors. Don't go up without me. I told you no. So here's what's funny. When he tells them to go in, they won't go in. And then he tells them, all right, you guys aren't going in. And they're like, okay, we'll go in now. And he's like, no, don't do it. They went up presumptuously, trusting in their own strength, presuming that somehow they had the right to just order themselves into battle instead of following the Lord's command. And the Amorites, which dwell in that mountain, verse 44, came out against you and chased you as bees do. I mean, you guys were running. I mean, this is such a beautiful picture. Imagine getting attacked by a swarm of bees. How would you run? You're like, ah! Like it would be chaotic. Like you're not thinking. You're not looking which way you're going. You're just going, ah! You just berserk crazy, just ah! And he's saying, like, that's how you ran from the Amorites. Now remember, he's talking to the children, though. So he's like, hey, remember your dad's war stories? Let me tell you what really happened, because, you know, your dad might not have told this part of the story, how the Amorites chased him as bees do. And he was just, ah! You know, just indiscriminately just sprinting away from the enemy, just totally scared, and destroyed you. He chased you as bees do, and destroyed you in Seir, even unto Horma, and you returned and wept before the Lord, but the Lord would not harken to your voice, nor give ear unto you. So you abode in Kadesh many days, according to the days that you abode there. And so here's the deal, is that God is a God of second chances, and God has patience. But there's a point where God's patience runs out. There's a point where you do permanent damage to your life. You can't always fix everything, right? Sometimes you can commit a sin, or do something that will permanently damage your life, and you can weep before the Lord, and the Lord's just like, sorry, you know, you did this to yourself, it's too late. Now look, obviously God is merciful, and God gives a lot of second chances, and God really is gracious, but God doesn't give unlimited chances. And even if God does give you another chance, there are sometimes still going to be negative repercussions for things that you've done, right? I mean, you know, you look at people in the Bible that got a second chance, or that God blessed and that were allowed to do certain things, but, you know, there's still scars that remain from the mistakes that they made, from the things that they did. Even when they get right with God, everything's not always just totally peachy, you know? There are certain things where something will be damaged, you know? I mean, you know, one example you could pull out is like, you know, Jacob, right? I mean, Jacob did some lying and some deceiving, right? And God still loved him, God still blessed him, God still gave him, you know, a lot of blessings, but, you know, God allowed a lot of that deceit to come back and bite him. And he ended up reaping what he sowed there, right? And then ultimately, when he ends up wrestling with the angel in Genesis 32, he ends up being permanently damaged in his leg and limping for the rest of his life, okay? So that's something that he had to carry around for the rest of his life, an injured leg, you know? And would God have harmed him in that way had he not been cheating and deceiving and doing these other things, you know, where he lied and said he was Esau to get the blessing and so forth. Because, you know, when the angel wrestles with him, he even asks him, you know, what's your name, you know? And he tells him, my name is Jacob, you know, and he has to tell the truth about that. Whereas the first time he got the blessing, he lied about it and said he was Esau. And then he asked the angel, what's your name? He's like, well, why are you asking me my name? You know, the reason that I asked your name is there was a significance there. That's why he's like, well, why ask my name? I'm asking your name because you're the one who lied about your name. You know, that's the way I would interpret that story. And so the point is that, you know, yeah, you can always come back and serve God. And here's the thing, the people in the wilderness, they could still live a good life in the wilderness. I mean, they could still enjoy life in the wilderness. They could still serve God in the wilderness. And God actually gives them some great victories in the wilderness and they defeat some enemies in the wilderness. But would you rather live in the wilderness or would you rather live in the promised land? So obviously they missed out a little bit, didn't they? So we need to follow the Lord and get on God's plan A, which is the promised land, so we don't end up on plan B, which is the wilderness. Let's bow our heads and have a word of prayer. Father, we thank you so much for your word, Lord, and for this chapter. I pray that you would open our eyes that we may behold wondrous things out of your law as we go through this book of Deuteronomy, Lord. Help us to learn the lessons of this first chapter, Lord, about how multiplication is a blessing and how we need to grow, but we also need to delegate and that we need to have faith and trust in you and follow your word and not presumptuously do our own thing. And in Jesus' name we pray, amen.