31. One verse of scripture. This is a wonderful, wonderful
place to be. Wonderful place to be. Whether
therefore you eat or drink or whatsoever you do, do all to
the glory of God. Brother there has done us all
such a wonderful favor. He gave me this to use. Because
there isn't one on the back wall. Sometimes I get started and don't
know when to quit, literally. Let me thank you all so much,
you and your pastor and his wife, for inviting me here. I love
the opportunity to go to these conferences, hear some other
men preach, renew acquaintances with some of you, and my, my,
how you've aged. You know, I seem to have held
up pretty well, but some of you others, you know. No, you know, Bonnie and
I, well, I graduated college in 77, and Bonnie moved to Huntington
because we were already engaged. And in the summer of 77, we started
going to 13th Street Baptist Church in Ashland, Kentucky.
And there sat under the ministry of Brother Mahan for six years. But that's when I met some of
you. That's when I met Donnie. during that time. That was 40
years ago. And everybody that was alive
then is 40 years older than they were then, including me. And
it's remarkable how fast we got here. But boy, what a blessed
walk it's been. Blessed, blessed walk. Good time
with you all. And you ladies, you like to kill
me with that food. It was so good. I ate way more
than I have eaten in a long time. And I kept waiting. I rode in
with Bruce, and I kept thinking, when's he going to go home? I'm
about to die here. And I finally was going out there. And I'm
walking out to the truck, taking small steps like a man much older
than me. And I went home, and I conked
out on the bed for about an hour. And I woke up, and it was about
another hour before I was fully conscious. But that's good. That's good. Open your Bibles to Deuteronomy
chapter 33. We have been blessed with some,
I say good preaching. Of course, we know what we mean
by that. When someone preaches Christ, it's good preaching.
Good preaching's not determined by how animated the preacher
is or how well organized his points are. Got nothing to do
with the preacher. It's got to do with the one preached.
but we've been blessed to hear about him. And we have no reason
to think God will not continue to bless us that way. Beginning
in verse 26, Deuteronomy chapter 33, there is none like unto the
God of Jeshurun, who rideth upon the heaven in thy help, and in
his excellency on the sky. The eternal God is thy refuge,
and underneath are the everlasting arms. And he shall thrust out
the enemy from before thee, and shall say, Destroy Israel, then
shall dwell in safety alone. The fountain of Jacob shall be
upon the land of corn and wine, also his heavens shall drop down
due. Happy art thou, O Israel, who
is like unto thee, O people saved by the Lord. shield of thy help,
and who is the sword of thy excellency. And thine enemies shall be found
liars unto thee, and thou shalt tread upon their high places."
These are the last words of Moses to Israel. For 40 years he had
led them. The Bible says for 40 years the
Lord put up with their bad manners. You know what else that means?
Moses put up with their bad manners for 40 years. You would think
that a people redeemed bondage would have a great affection
for the one who led them out. But they complained from Egypt
all the way to Canaan, fussing at Moses, blaming all the troubles
on him. But he led them. He was faithful
as a servant in God's household. And being faithful to God, he
was faithful to them. And now he's come, a whole group there
about to go into the land of Canaan. Moses won't, but they
will. And he gives them the law of time, the covenant that God
made with them. That's what the name of this
book, Deuteronomy, Second Law. It doesn't mean a second like
a new law, but the law spoken a second time. And when He's
done, having laid all these things out once again, He spoke these
words to them that we have just read. And I was especially attracted
to these words in verse 29, Happy art thou, O Israel. Who is like
unto thee, O people, saved by the Lord? Saved by the Lord. You know, you take any group
of people, and they like to set forward that which they consider
most glorious about themselves, or certainly that which distinguishes
them from all other groups. We call ourselves Sovereign Grace
Baptists. because Baptist isn't enough
anymore. But countries, they want to be known by a certain
thing about them, and now people talk about American exceptionalism.
I'll leave that to your judgment about just how we're exceptional,
but we like to have people think of us in glorious terms. But Moses, in speaking to the
Israelites, says, who is like unto thee? And you'd think the
next words would be something wonderful and great about them. And he says, you know what's
so wonderful and great about you? You're a people saved by
the Lord. He gloried in the fact, not of what they had done, but
what the Lord had done for them. think on that a minute. That
which distinguished Israel from all the other nations was not
anything about Israel. They were just as obnoxious as
as all the other peoples of the world. We get this idea, and
of course it's been fed to us, it's a myth, we get this idea
that all those 400 years in Egypt, the Jews were being faithful
and worshiping God. No, they took up the gods of
Egypt. There were a few, a remnant, according to the election of
grace, who remained faithful, but for the most part, they just
became Egyptians. And so when they come out of
Egypt, they brought a whole lot of Egypt with them. And they
fussed and complained. And they didn't worship God aright.
They had no respect unto his grace to them. In fact, the greater
part of them died through unbelief. And now a whole new generation
has arisen. And Moses is saying to them,
you are the remnant, according to the election of grace, that
God preserved across this wilderness. And the only thing good about
you is what God did for you. You're a people saved. You know,
when Moses said this, I have no doubt there was a lot of love
in his heart as he said it. Oh, Israel, he loved them. For
all their obnoxiousness, he loved them. Imagine he said it with
some relief. He was done. He'd gone as far
as he could take them. There's a lesson for us in that.
Moses can't take them into the land, because the law will never
bring you rest. Howsoever good, righteous, just,
and holy it is, it cannot bring you rest. falls to someone else. And I imagine he said it with
a little envy because he can't go in. Now we know that he can't
go in because he did not hold God holy. At one point when God
told him to do something, and it wasn't just Moses disobedience
as you know like an act against the law or something, when he
struck that rock for the second time he corrupted the Gospel
of Jesus Christ who was once stricken not sat twice. And that's
why he couldn't go in the land of rest. And so he looks at those
people and says, oh, how blessed you are. You get to go in. I'm going to die here out in
the wilderness. You're going in. And he said it to them as
encouragement. Because they were going in, but
they were going into a land filled with giants, a land with challenges. Yes, it was the land of rest,
but they weren't going to rest the moment they stepped in there.
And he says to them, who's like unto you? blessed you are. You're of the saved of the Lord.
You can go in. Now, in this scripture we find
the name of the Lord. There, of course, we always say
the Lord, but that's the way the English translators handle
that name, Yahweh or Jehovah, however you want to pronounce
it. You find His name in there and you find the word for salvation.
And if you take the the abbreviated version of God's name, combine
that word with the word for salvation, you come up with Yehoshua. Jehovah
is salvation. And that's the name of the man
who is going to lead them in. Because you take Yehoshua right
out of Hebrew and bring it into English and they pronounce it
Joshua. But you take that name and bringing out of Hebrew into
Greek, and from Greek into Latin, and from Latin into who knows
how many languages, till it gets down to us, but it comes out
Jesus, Jesus, a people Jesused by the Lord. All who is like
you, who is like you. All those saved by the Lord are
blessed. Now in the King James it says,
happy art thou. And that's one way to put it.
In fact if you go up here to verse 24 it says, and of Asher
he said, let Asher be blessed with children, let him be acceptable
to his brethren, and let him dip his foot in oil. And the
name Asher is related to this word, blessed or happy. If our
Lord was speaking Hebrew there when He gave the Beatitudes,
what's called the Beatitudes, this is the word He would have
used, blessed. Now, I don't know much about
Hebrew, but I do know a little bit about Greek. And that word
that our Lord used, or that the Holy Spirit inspired the apostles
to use in quoting the Lord, blessed are those and blessed are they,
it means to be enlarged. And so I assume that's the idea
here that he's talking about. Happy, blessed are you, O Israel,
a people saved by the Lord. Now, it's amazing that you'd
have to tell that kind of people that they're blessed. You'd think
they'd already know it. But you know what? We are so fleshly.
We measure our blessings the same way the world does. We pat
our wallet pocket, and if it's fat, we're blessed. If it's thin,
we think we're not. We take our temperature, and
if it's too high, we're not blessed. If it's right, we are. I've had
people tell me, you know, and they say, oh, I tell you, the
Lord blessed us last year. Our business made more money
than it's ever made. And I'm thinking, well, that might not
be a blessing. I read a story once that Spurgeon called the
elders together to pray for somebody. You know, the word went out,
come, we got to pray for brother so-and-so. And so they gathered
together. And when they got there, what's
wrong? Is he sick? No. Well, is one of his loved ones died?
No. Well, what happened to him? Well, he had an uncle that died
and left him a huge inheritance. He is going to need grace to
deal with that. It's something that we who've
been saved by the Lord have to be reminded how blessed we are.
But we are, we're blessed immeasurably. Now if there's any way to kind
of try to put a measure on the blessings we have received, we
could go to Paul's math where he says where sin did abound,
grace did much more abound. Now, measure up your sin. That's
a lot, isn't it? I hope you think it's a lot.
I was on one of these Facebook threads, I think it was, several
days ago, and they were talking about Jesus Christ died for sins. He says, I've never done anything
bad enough that somebody had to die for me. And I said, you
can say that because you don't know the God you've sinned against.
But you take the measure of your sin, and then you add on to that. That's how blessed you are. That's
how blessed you are. We're blessed immeasurably. We're
blessed with true blessings, real blessings, everlasting blessings. Some of them are held in store
for us, but we've already been blessed with them. They're stored
in heaven. They are part of our inheritance.
We've been given the guarantee, the down payment as it were,
through the Holy Spirit who testifies to us of Christ and testifies
to all those spiritual blessings in the heavenly places which
are ours. but we haven't experienced them yet. We see them afar off,
as Abraham saw things afar off. You know, the life of a believer
is a life of hope. Now, what is hope? In our day,
we think of hope, we almost make a synonym with wish, but that's
not the way the word's used in the scripture. A hope is a confident
expectation concerning things to come. But Paul says, who hoped
for what he has? Therefore, we have the hope.
of righteousness. I realize there has been a righteousness
imputed to me, but I have this hope someday God will make me
into a righteous being, fit to be an inheritor with the saints.
But that's just a hope right now. I'm looking forward to that. You know, those saved by God,
have been blessed by God, are happy no matter their present
experiences. Now, I can preach this to my
congregation back home, and I already knew things that many of them
were going through. Well, there are not many of you
here that I really know the details of your personal lives, but here's
something I know. Everybody's got troubles. And here's another
thing I've learned. I don't want to say I'm an old
man. Well, maybe I am, but I mean,
I don't want to say it. But I've lived long enough to realize
that this life doesn't get better. You spend about 20, it's like
a roller coaster. You spend 25 years getting to the top of the
hill, and you think you're never going to make it there. And you
get up there and you think, whoo, and all at once the bottom falls
out from under it. And the rest of your life is
a a high-speed race to death, and there is no steering wheel,
there's no brake, and there's no gas pedal. All you can do
is ride. And sometimes it's scary. Sometimes it involves sorrow
unspeakable. Some people have, some believers
have troubles in circumstances of life. I mean, just things
happen. Some people have troubles in families. Oh, that can be
such trouble. You weep over your loved ones.
And, you know, there's nothing you can do. They just are what
they are. Some people, some believers,
they got the troubles of the mind, you know, just and depression
and anxiety and those kind of issues. Believers suffer from
that. But you know what? They're blessed.
They are blessed. Who is like unto them? They are
blessed. And I tell you right now, child
of God, no matter what your situation is, and I don't know what it
is, and I don't want to be flippant, and I don't want to act like
your trials aren't real, and don't break your heart. I'm not
saying that. I just want you to know this. You are blessed.
You are blessed more than anybody else in the world. There's nobody
else like you. You're blessed in Christ. Now
there's several things that can mean. First of all, you're blessed
because of Christ. You aren't blessed because of
what you've done. If God took into consideration
what you've done, you'd be cursed. Cursed is everyone to continue
with not in every point of the law to do it. So if you've got
blessing, you didn't get it because of what you did. You're blessed
because of what Christ did. And you know what that means?
You're blessed not just with blessings paid for by Christ. You are blessed with blessings
given to Christ. And then he turned around and
gave them to you. Are you accepted? You're not just accepted like
Christ. You are accepted with the acceptance that God gave
to Christ. Are you loved by God? You aren't
just loved like Christ. You are loved with the love that
God has for his son. We're blessed in Christ. that
until Christ runs out of blessing, now you think of that, until
Christ can be cursed, you shall be blessed. Now that's blessing. If right now Bill Gates died
and I found out that he had left his entire estate to me, that's
a lot. I don't think I'd have time to
count it all. But you know something? It could all be lost. I could
lose it, I probably could fret it away in stupidity in the few
years I've got left. The stock market could utterly
crash. Microsoft could go bankrupt. Well, if you're blessed in Christ,
there's not gonna be any bankruptcy there. There's not gonna be any
thief come in, figure out the combination and steal it. You
are blessed. Now, I wanna speak about some
of these blessings. What I hope this will do, I guess
I'll leave it to God to do what He wants with it, but my aim
in this is to encourage you and to remind you, the Israel of
God, how blessed you are. Because I know how easy it is
to forget that. I know what it's like to go day
by day and just notice the troubles of the day and the troubles of
the week or whatever. And so let's look at some of
these blessings and why we're blessed and what these blessings
are made of that we might be encouraged as we live our lives
in the land of spiritual rest, but yet in this world of toil
and turmoil. It says, there's none like unto
thee, O people saved by the Lord. Why is that? Verse 26, because
there's none like unto the God of Jeshurun. That's why there's
none like those, like Israel. Look what it says of him, who
rideth upon the heaven in thy help. Now he's using imagery
here. You know, God's Spirit, you can't
see Him, but you know, they'd look to the sky and they'd see
those clouds and all the power of lightning storms and things
like that. And that was awesome to them.
And even in our day of science, you know, it's still kind of
awesome when we think of what goes on up there in the heavens,
you know? And Moses said that the God of
Jeshurun is like that. He rides upon the heaven in thy
help when you see the thunderstorm. That's God in all his power coming
to help you. I know when a lightning storm,
I'm always afraid it's gonna hit me. But here's what we can
say spiritually speaking, all the lightning bolts that comes
out of God's thunderstorms aimed at my enemies, not me. And it
always finds its mark. He rides upon the heaven in my
help and in his excellency, his glory, his power upon the sky. The heavens declare the glory
of God. and the firmament showeth his
handiwork. Day unto day they utter speech. I was sitting out
there one time in autumn when the sky is so clear at night,
you know, not so much humidity, you know, and you lay out there
and if it's a moonless night, boy, there's stars you can see.
And you look out there and you think, man, that's a lot of stars. And you know, when David wrote
that. There's about 3,000 or so stars
visible in the sky. They didn't have telescopes.
They didn't know, you know, just what you can see with his eyes,
all they knew about. And you know, and David was just blown
away by that. But now here we are, what, 3,000
years later, something like that? And we've got that Hubble telescope
up there. I saw a picture once from the
Hubble telescope. And I said, boy, look at all those stars.
And I read the caption. That was galaxies. Each one of
them, maybe, with 100 billion stars in it. I was doing a study
in Sunday school class one time. And I can't remember where I
was. But I do know that I was wanting
to find out how many stars they think there are. So I wrote it
out and printed it out. It's a 62 followed by 27 zeros,
something like that. You can't even fathom that number.
And I remember thinking, as I looked at the sky that one night and
thought about heavens declare the glory of God. And then I
thought about how many of those stars I can't see, but they're
all declaring the glory of God. And I said, you know what? There's
a lot of glory to declare. Takes a lot of stars to get it
done. We got our minds wrapped up in this whole world. Do you
realize God's been declaring his glory for however long this
universe has been here? Out in regions we didn't even
know existed until the last century. And it wasn't a waste. God saw
it and took the glory of it and enjoyed it. Well, that's our
God. there is no God like Him. He spoke in those 62 whatever
27 zeros would mean and it was. He commanded and there they were.
They are blessed like no others because in verse 27 it says,
the eternal God and we might read that, that eternal God. That God that rides upon the
heavens and through the skies and is actually, that God is
thy refuge. Now, I'm saying that, I'm reading
that, you're the only one here who knows whether that's true
of you. Now, I can say this is true of the Israel of God. What
I don't know is whether it's true of you, because I don't
know your heart, but you do. Is your refuge God? Here's an interesting thing.
God is our refuge, but he is our refuge from himself. I heard a preacher made one of
those short statements. It's just so full of truth. He
said, God saved you by himself, for himself, from himself. God is the refuge from himself. The eternal God is thy refuge
and underneath are the everlasting arms. You think you feel like
you're going to fall? You are. Don't fret it. Underneath are the everlasting
arms and they've got you. When I was about eight, nine
years old, the house we were renting had a garage that was,
well, I'm sure back before that street had become full of houses,
it was a barn. Because it had one of those holes
cut in it so you could let hay down from a loft. And I remember
Dad was out there messing around. I don't know what he was doing.
But I said, Dad, if I go up there in the loft and drop down, would
you catch me? And he said, yeah. So I went up there. And there
was a whole lot of things laying around that hole. And I tried
to slide down. I lost my grip and come falling
out of there, and my dad caught me. And I was crying because
I thought, man, I'd messed everything up. And he said, now you go do
it again. And he went up with me and said, you prepare this
time. So we went up there and we moved things out of the way
so that I could lay down there on that floor and just kind of
scoot off safely, you know. He went down and I, with all
that preparation, I scooted off there and I went down and my
dad caught me. It wasn't until years later I realized that's
like our Heavenly Father. Now, sometimes we're prepared,
we do things right, and He catches us, and sometimes we mess it
all up. And you know what? He still catches
us. My preparation was wise the second
time, but my preparation's not what made me safe. That place
was too far to fall out of for an eight-year-old boy. I don't
care how prepared you were. My safety was in my Father, and
our safety is in our Father, in our Savior, those everlasting
arms of God, whose strength can never wear out. How blessed we
are. He shall thrust out the enemy
from before thee and shall say, destroy, destroy. One of the
things when I went through the book of Revelation, and I've
done that twice at home, I've come to love that book ever since.
I won't say I got a little idea. Someone taught me a little idea
of what it means. You know one of the things that surprised
me? You read all those judgments. Now most religions said, yeah,
God's going to come and judge because of all the abortion,
and homosexuality, and this. And they go through whatever
is the sin of the day. You know why God said He was
judging those people? Because they touched His church. He said concerning Babylon, the
great prostitute, the blood of the saints was found in her.
destroy, destroy. I was talking to someone today,
it's amazing how much what we might call simple transgression
God puts up with out of a nation. But you let a nation turn against
His Church and you watch what happens. I want to look at a
few places now in the Scriptures where this word translated happy
in verse 29, the Hebrew word behind that, where you find it. And it will describe where or
what kind of things our blessedness if you'll turn to the 32nd Psalm. Psalm 32, verse 1. Blessed, same
word, same word you find over there in Deuteronomy. Blessed
is he whose transgressions, or transgression is forgiven, whose
sin is covered, Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth
not iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. Now brethren,
you know, in another place, the psalmist said, bless the Lord
O my soul and all that is within me, bless his holy name. And
he begins to list blessings. And the first one he says, who
forgives all your transgressions. And I want to say, well, you
could have ended the psalm right there. And that's good. That's good. Sin lies at
the root of every curse we have. The elimination of sin removes
all the curse and replaces it with blessing. I want you to
think of this brethren. Once again, try to consider your
sin as much as you can tolerate thinking about. And you bundle
that all up. It's not like you put it in a
sheet and you just grab the corner and you gather it up and you
bring it to the Lord. He'll put it away. He'll put
it away. Now, if you're like me, there are things that you
know that you've done and there's nobody else in the world knows
you've done it. And you're glad. You're sure glad nobody knows
about it. But you do. And it gnaws at you. I recommend
this. Don't tell anybody about it.
You know why? There's only one person in all
the universe or outside the universe that can tolerate the knowledge
of your sin, and that's God. You tell Him. You can unload
your heart in His presence, and He'll put it all away, every
last bit of it. You say, but you don't know what
I've done. Yeah, and I don't want to. I have enough trouble
with what I've done. But there's nothing you've done
that the Lord won't put away. People ask about, you know, what's
the unpardonable sin? You know what the unpardonable,
to me, as near as I can tell, the unpardonable sin is not believing
God. And it's unpardonable because you didn't take advantage of
the pardon, you know? How do you pardon refusing a
pardon? You know why people perish in
their sins? Not because they make their sins
known to God, because they try to hide them from God. Blessed
is a man whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin is covered.
I've heard people try to say, well, you know, in the Old Testament,
sins were just covered, but they're put away. You know, something
that's just covered can be uncovered. Wait a minute, it depends on
what you cover it with. people try to cover it with a
baptism, they try to cover it with the Lord's table, they try
to cover it with a code of morality and religion, well that's going
to get uncovered. You cover it in the blood of
Christ, it's never getting uncovered again. Never. To whom the Lord
will not impute iniquity, won't hold it against you. You ever
offended a friend, I mean bad, and you feel you just ruined
it. You've ruined your friendship. But you go to them, you go see
what you need to be done, and you apologize. I don't worry
about it. I won't hold that against you."
Boy, isn't that a relief? And we come before God and we're
so broken down with a sense of our sin. He said, I'm not holding
that against you. He does not, when He says there's sins and
iniquities, I remember no more. What He's saying is, your sins,
your iniquities, your transgressions, whatever you want to call it,
God no longer puts that in the equation of how he deals with
you. It's not like he doesn't know
it happened. God knows everything that happened. To not remember
doesn't mean to forget in the sense of, you know, well, I'm
getting to where I forgot a lot of things. But God's not senile. It means he's not going to bring
it up again. He's not holding it against you. It's not, it
doesn't figure into what he thinks about you. and in whose spirit
there is no guile. Blessed is that man." You say,
oh, it is such a grief to me to know how awful I am. Blessed are you if you know what
you are. Blessed are you. You say, but
it's such a burden. Well, I know who can handle the
burden. Take it to him, but be glad you
know it. Be glad that God has not left
you in the deceitfulness of self-righteousness. There is no guile in you if God
has saved you. All right, now let's look at
Psalm 34, 8. Oh, taste and see that the Lord is
good. Blessed is the man that trusteth
Him. I don't know about you, but if
somebody puts their trust in me, it kills me if I can't come
through. And sometimes that happens. They
trust me to do something and either through laziness on my
part or forgetfulness, I didn't come through, you know. And they
were disappointed. I hate that. But the one who
trusts the Lord, he that puts his trust in him shall never
be put to shame. You know right now they keep
trying to put us to shame. They say, well how stupid. Atheists
are getting rather militant now. I call them evangelical atheists.
They're trying to make atheists out of everybody. And they say,
they mock, they like to say you're sky God. And I keep thinking
one of these days he's going to be disappointed. He's going
to be put to shame. I won't be. He's going to find
out that I trusted in the God who is and he does not fail. Is your trust in him? There's
a whole lot of times it looks like he's not gonna come through.
He will, he will. You know, I've told some people
before, going through rough times, I say, you know, this may be
a dark page in the book, but it ain't the end of the book.
You trust him. I was gonna say hang on, but sometimes we can't
even do that. We just trust. 65th Psalm, Psalm
65, verse four. Blessed is the man thou choosest,
and causes to approach unto thee that he may dwell in thy courts.
Now this was likely written in celebration of the installation
of a new high priest. Because the high priests were
chosen from the sons of Aaron. They were chosen, God chose them
because he had assigned that lineage as the high priesthood. And they were the ones who approached
God. And they were the only ones who did. Once a year, not without
blood, But they took blood there one time every year on the Day
of Atonement back there in the most holy place. Now, blessed
was such a man, but we know that ultimately this refers to our
Lord Jesus Christ. He is that blessed man whom God
chose. and the one called on to approach
God. And I don't have time to talk about it tonight, but when
he approached God, that's what he did on Calvary. He offered
himself without spot to God. He was both priest and sacrifice
on that day. And I'll tell you, and I would
say of Him, blessed is that man. I mean blessed in the sense of
like when we talk about blessed be the God and Father of our
Lord Jesus Christ. And blessed be our Lord Jesus Christ. He
was the chosen one of God and He approached, God caused Him
to approach unto Him. And boy the things He bore when
He did. But this is also talking about you and me. Have you approached
God? Well you know why? Because He
chose you and He caused you to approach unto Him. We preach
the gospel and we can't believe that people don't believe it.
We look at it, come on, that's what we wanna say. Come on, look
at it, it's right here, isn't this wonderful? I ain't gonna
believe in a God that chooses people. That's not fair. You
want fair? Everybody deserves a chance.
The human race had a chance. And the whole human race blew
it back in the Garden of Eden. Really, the whole human race.
There was only two of them, but the entire race blew it. We don't
need a chance. We need a choice made by God. And we need an empowering by
His Holy Spirit that moves in us to will and do of His good
pleasure, which is very simply to come to Him through Jesus
Christ. And we need that same causing force to work in us and
perfect that work until the day of Christ. Blessed are you if
God's chosen you and moved in you, made you approach Him through
Christ. And then last, look at Psalm
89. Verse 15, blessed is the people
that know the joyful sound. They shall walk, O Lord, in the
light of thy countenance. Now that joyful sound, I'm glad,
one thing I like about the internet, I got research tools I'd never
have otherwise, and I go to this site biblehub.com, you know,
and I can look things up in the original languages. I don't know
those languages, but I can use their resources to discover stuff,
and I found this joyful sound. Is it ever mentioned anywhere
else? Turn to Leviticus chapter 25. I about jumped out of my chair
when I saw this. wonderful. Leviticus 25 verse 9, Then shalt thou cause the trumpet of the Jubilee to
sound. That whole phrase is one word,
the joyful sound, the trumpet of Jubilee. You know what that
trumpet was? Every seven years, they had a
sabbatical year, but after seven series of seven sabbatical years,
they came to the 50th year. And at the appropriate time,
a priest would take up the trumpet, and he would give a sound. It
was the trumpet of Jubilee. And I assumed that there were
other priests with trumpets that could hear, you know, that one,
and then they'd relay it on to others, and it went over the
whole land. And in the year of Jubilee, when that trumpet sounded,
every Hebrew slave was free. Every last one of them. Everything
they had lost was given back to them. And they went home.
Now, we see the word trumpet, and what do we think of? Those
beautiful brass instruments with that commanding military sound.
That's not what they're talking about here. This is the shofar,
the ram's horn. You know what it sounds like?
I'll do my best. He goes, ooh! Really, that's what it sounds
like. You don't play music on a ram's horn. It's not the kind
of thing that's pleasing to most people to hear. But I'll tell
you who loves it. the slave, that hot sun, and
he's out there hoeing away. And he hears that joyful sound.
Gathers up his wife and kids and goes home. And there's nothing
the master can do about it. He can't say, wait, that wasn't
long enough to pay off your debt. You haven't worked enough. He
said, didn't you hear? Didn't you hear that trumpet?
I'm free. I'm free. Blessed are they who
have heard the joyful sound. They know that sound. And it
may not be music to anybody else's ears. But it is to theirs. It
is to theirs. Who is like unto thee? O Israel,
a people saved by the Lord. May God add his blessing.