DEUTERONOMY: LESSONS LEARNED (6 OF 10)

Deuteronomy: Lessons Learned (6 of 10)
Through the Bible Series
Roger Thomas
Deuteronomy 4:32-40
March 10, 2002

Introduction: History, so the saying goes, is something you either learn from or repeat. The former is always better! Repeating history can be a painful process. Yet that is what many of us do. This is especially true of mistakes. We all make them. And most of us repeat our fair share of them. Those who learn quickly repeat fewer of them. Slow learners keep stubbing their toes against the same rock before learning either to walk a different path or move the rock. This reality spells the difference between the person who has twenty years of experience and the one who has simply had one year of experience repeated twenty times. There is a difference.

Learning from our own mistakes is a good thing. But there is something even better—learning from the mistakes of others. This is a major part of what growing up is all about. Most of us sooner or later, get old enough and wise enough to figure out that we don't have to make all of the possible mistakes in life ourselves. Some who have gone before us have done a pretty good job of that already. Smart folk listen and learn from the mistakes of those who have gone before. The slower of us insist on waiting and learning for ourselves.

Deuteronomy the fifth book of the Bible, and the last book of the Law or books of Moses, is a book about learning the lessons of history so you don't have to repeat them all yourself. The book is actually the farewell address of Moses, the leader and lawgiver of the Hebrew people. Forty years before he had led two million plus Hebrew slaves out of bondage under the Egyptian Pharaoh, across the Red Sea in a mighty act of divine deliverance, through the wilderness to the foot of Mt. Sinai where the Ten Commandments were given and on toward the Promised Land. Unfortunately, the entire generation that had experienced such a supernatural deliverance fail ...

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