Good morning. When I have the opportunity to preach at Bethel, there are some Sundays that I look at the different verses that are laid out in our

lecture, the assigned lessons for the day, and think, huh, I wonder how these go together.

And this is one of those Sundays.

In the New Testament, we get the very familiar story

of the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness.

And in the Old Testament story, we get basically

a little piece of liturgy from a harvest festival.

And I'm left wondering how they go together.

But if you'll give me about 22 minutes, I hope I will be able to help you out with that.

So let's start here with the Old Testament.

The book of Deuteronomy is where our lesson

came from today. And many of you know already, but the book of Deuteronomy is literally the name means

the second law or the repeated law. Because it's the second time that Moses is going to give the people of

Israel the law. And it's a series of five sermons by Moses. And our section this morning is the fifth

and final sermon. And it's given to the people of Israel as they're about to enter

the promised land. They're literally standing at the Jordan River and they're going to go into the

promised land and Moses gives these sermons. And in the middle of this is this section we have from today, which is talking about a harvest festival.

And it's talking about the first harvest festival of the year.

It's a spring harvest festival.

It happens in May or June, and it goes by three different names, and you know it, but you may not know that you know it.

The Hebrew name is Sukut.

The English name for this is the feast of weeks.

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