Joshua, God's man for God's time. Let's talk about it on this edition of Key Light. That sounds interesting. If you were wondering, that was Steve Brown and I'm Mike Keller. The program is Key Light, relevant Bible principles without stuppiness and nonsense. Now here's Steve. Thanks, Mike. Hope you had a great weekend and I hope that your pastor was as faithful and as good in his sermon as mine was. If you're just joining us after not being here for a long time or ever being here, you need to know that what we're doing is that we're in the process of many, many, many, many week study of the Old Testament. And what we're doing, we're not doing line-up online and verse upon verse and precept upon precept. What we're doing is taking each book of the Old Testament, spending a little bit of time in it. Now I'm showing you some really good stuff in the Old Testament because most Christians really are not into that that much. And that's a shame. We're losing a major part of our heritage. And so this week, and probably today, we're up to the book of Joshua. I'm going to spend a little bit more time and show you one more thing from the book of Deuteronomy. And then I'll begin to introduce you to the book of Joshua. And then we'll do that this week and then next week, if it's all right with you, and I suspect it is, and it's my program, so I'm not going to take a vote. Next week, we're going to take a break, and we're going to talk about some Christmas stuff. And we're going to spend all next week talking about Christmas things built around the theme of Christmas, the incarnation of God in Christ. And then Monday is Christmas Day. And I really can't look at Joshua on Christmas Day. I mean, there's no way. So what we'll do on Monday is a surprise. I'm either going to do a traditional Christmas story that I've told you before. We may do that. I also have this great thing that you would love by John Gager at Moody's little girl when she was four doing the Christmas story that you might love. But we'll do something special on Christmas Day. And all next week we'll talk about Christmas themes, and we'll kind of at least dip our toe into the pool of Joshua over most of this week. Before we get to all of that, let's go before the throne. Father, we're glad we belong to you, glad that you found us, and glad that you promised to get us home before the dark. It's the end between times. Sometimes, Father, that is really hard. There are tough places we have to go and things we've got to do, we don't want to do. And people we've got to be with, we don't want to be with, and there are places that you have called us to minister in your name. And we've got to be Jesus in those places and it's hard. So Father, come alongside and dry our tears and bind up our broken heart and send us where you want us to go. And Father, if the tears cause us to see you better and it's only with hesitancy that we ask this but may we continue to cry. And if our broken heart keeps us close to you, may it remain broken. Father, we confess that we're not good but we're yours and you love us anyway and we're thankful. Now Father, not only forgive us but change us and make us more like Jesus. You know the pain, a lot of people who are listening to this broadcast are going through, meet them as the great physician, grant them emotional and physical healing. And then Father, as we study your word today on key life, we pray for the teacher that you would forgive him his sins. For they are many. We would see the teacher, even Jesus, and we pray in Jesus name. I'm in. Well, if you've been listening the last couple of weeks, we've been looking at the book of Deuteronomy and we introduced it and it was the final book by the way of the Pentateuch, the first five books in the Bible. We looked at a number of themes in Deuteronomy, four themes. We looked at the central verses that describe and define and point to what Deuteronomy is all about. Deuteronomy 10, 12 through 13 and then we looked at the four major themes in the book of Deuteronomy. We saw first theme as a God who was involved and who leads. The second, we looked at leadership, a man who cares and who leads. We looked at a vision to be passed and we looked also at a promise to be cherished. And we saw that God has promised a lot of things to Israel. And if you lied to them, he'll lie to you, but he hasn't. In 1948, when the nation began, people said, son of a gun. In my library, I have a systematic theology. And this may be one of the finest one-volume systematic theology ever written by Birkhoff. And if you read Birkhoff having to do with Israel, he is really heavy on Jews are no longer a part of the land. They're all over the world, the diaspora. And he says that God is now dealing with his covenant people, the new Israel, not Jews. And I remember reading that in thinking, gosh, where is he? And then I realized he wrote his systematic theology before 1948. When God started doing his things with you, I don't want to go too much in that. Then I became a tour director showing you some of the sites. Deuteronomy 9 and 10, 9, Moses rehearses Israel's rebellion. And then in chapter 10, Moses rehearses God's mercy and his love. And we saw that we're bad, but God is always good, always. And then we looked at, I don't know, I've got little markers here in my Bible. I don't know what else we looked at. I forget. But what I want to do, there were a couple of other things we examined. I'm doing the best I can. But if you've got your Bible open into the 24th chapter of Deuteronomy, it's a very interesting chapter. And let me tell you why. Because if you've ever read the 19th chapter of Matthew, that's the place where the guys come to Jesus. And they say to him, Moses, allow divorce. Now what do you say? Now they were trying to trap him to be really honest with you. And Jesus handled that quite well. And if I had time, I would go into some a word study in that chapter of Matthew, because it's quite interesting. Jesus uses two words to refer to divorce. However, what I want to do before we leave Deuteronomy is to go back to the 24th chapter of Deuteronomy. And show you the reference to which they were referring when they talked about Moses allowing divorce. It's the 24th chapter of Deuteronomy. When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens that she finds no favor in his eyes, because he has found some unpleeniness in her. And he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house, when she has departed from his house, and goes and becomes another man's wife, if the latter husband detests her and writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand and sends her out of his house, or if the latter husband dies who took her to be his wife, then her former husband who divorced her must not take her back to be his wife. Now that goes on and on. You might want to read it sometime when you have a little bit of time. But let me take some of these really interesting about that passage. First is the certificate of divorce. Let me take something that's going on in the time of Moses. And for those of you who have a bent toward women's rights, you're going to like what I'm about to say. In the time when Moses wrote, and in fact in the time when Jesus wrote, you know guys had it made. And by the way, it is the Bible that has been the rootage of the value of women. Don't you think it came from now? It doesn't. It comes from the Bible. And at any rate, the guys, if you didn't like your wife, you don't have to go to court. You don't have to go to one of these settlements. You don't have to do anything. You just had to say, I divorce you and kick her out of the house. And it was a real divorce. That's what they were doing at the time when Moses wrote. And also at the time when Jesus referred to this particular issue, it was called the putting away. That's the formal name for it. And you just kind of put your wife out in a garage. She was still your wife, but you were no longer her husband. So you could go marry anybody you wanted to, but she couldn't, you know why? Because she was still married to you even though you weren't married to her. And so how was she going to live? If she went out and they only had options she had in those days was to become a prostitute or to become somebody's mistress. And that's what Jesus was talking about when he was talking about adultery. Now you need to know that what Moses was talking about and what Jesus referred to was women's value, women's rights. Moses said in effect, and Jesus said in effect, you turkeys. Male ego is so big, what in the world are you doing? That is so ungodly. If a divorce takes place, you make sure that she has a certificate of divorce that says to the world that she's no longer your wife. So she can be remarried and in that culture those were about the options that women had. So she can be remarried without shame. And then there's always, you ever get this stuff from some Christian quote leader? We're not going to get the Joshua today. I've gone on and on here, but we will tomorrow, I promise. You ever get advice, a hurt advice from somebody. You get this couple, they get a divorce and she marries somebody else and he marries somebody else. And then they come to the church and then the elders who are godly say, you must go back to your first wife or you must go back to your first husband. I want to say, what are you crazy? You want to cause problems. I mean major big time problems, then you try to pull off something like that. And not only that, and this surprises people who I don't know what the Bible is to say. The Bible clearly teaches not only should you not do that for the problem's sake, you shouldn't do that because God says you shouldn't do that. All of this, by the way, is quite practical. It's God's safety valve. God knows that it's hard and divorce is something God hates horribly. As somebody I ask Ruth Graham, she believed in divorce. She said no, but sometimes I do believe in murder. Well most just knew that and he gave a certificate of divorce. A practical God for his people. You think about that? I mean, well I told you at the beginning of the program I get the Joshua and I didn't, but I will tomorrow I promise. Hey listen, if you don't have the little book or Christmas meditations, I'd love to get it out to you. Give us a call at 1-800-keylife-keylife-post office box 5,000, Madeleine Florida, 327-94-keylife-Canada, post office box 321-5-0, Cambridge, Ontario, N-3-H-5-N-3, or you can email us at stevetkeylife.org. This will help you get through Christmas and focus. And if you'll call right now or right right now, we'll try to get back to you before Christmas. I can't promise. Oh by the way, you could go to our webpage, www.wwwkeylife.org, and you could download it there if you want. But I think you'll find this really helpful and it's absolutely free and I really mean that. But listen, that does not mean that I'll turn down a contribution especially this time of year. Listen, those of you who have been called to give to this broadcast, could you give a little bit extra? I mean that would mean so much. And if you, and I wish you guys would pray about it. Now all of this stuff is free and I really mean it. I don't want you not getting it because you can't afford a contribution. But if you can, this would be a good time. You can charge it on a MasterCard Visa Discover card, include it in your envelope. And for any contribution of any size when you request it is my thank you. I'll give you the cassette teaching five facets of God's love. Gotta go, be sure to include the call letters of this station and key life as a production of Key Life Network.