Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Foreign.
[00:00:08] Speaker B: Welcome in to Think Deeper podcast. Jack Wilkie here, not with Joe Wilkie and Will Herb. They are on vacation. So I got a special treat this week. Got my old who Let the Dogma Out? Co host Titus Anderson and Daniel Mayfield and I reached out to both of them, said can either of you come on? They both could. So that's very nice treat for me. As I said, a nice treat for a number of our listeners who were a fan of that podcast. It's been about a year and a half now, but it's very good to get the band back together at least for one week here. So thank you guys for coming on and yeah, just I'll say that if you haven't listened to who Let the Dog Mount, you might really enjoy that podcast. It's more of a theological deep dive one. And so we've got a couple of seasons of that up on your podcast feed. It was just me and these two guys in the second season, me and Daniel and Jacob Rutledge in the first season. I had a really good time with it and again a lot of folks really enjoyed that and Lord willing, we'll bring it back in some form here at some point. But for this week I've got these guys here to talk about the Bible. How are you doing? And just a bit of a brief intro before we jump into it.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: Doing solid.
Got the other day like on Christmas it was 82 degrees here, so not sure how I feel about that. Growing up in Minnesota. I definitely like the fact that it's not know in the zeros or negatives for the whole winter long, but on Christmas I wish we, we could at least have a little bit of snow. But I'm not complaining too much. I think Today it's like 65 or 70 so it's awesome.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Not too bad.
[00:01:35] Speaker C: Well, I'm in Tennessee with Jack and we have the most schizophrenic weather in the entire world, I think. So it's, it's warm now. It'll be cold next week. It's, it's fine.
[00:01:43] Speaker A: It's good.
[00:01:44] Speaker C: We're all good.
[00:01:44] Speaker A: Have y' all had any snow yet this year?
[00:01:46] Speaker B: Do we have like a day dusting flakes? Yeah, yeah.
Yep. So yeah, just usual winter stuff up and down and all that. But what we're going to talk about this week, getting into it is Titus brought this idea of and I'm not really sure how to frame it. I haven't come up with a title for the episode yet, but really how we read our Bibles Our approach for study hermeneutics a little bit.
When you open the Bible, what are you going in there looking for? And there's. It kind of depends on what corner of the church you're in. I would say there's probably two or three major ways that the church divides. This side does it this way, this side does it this way, this side does it that way, and then there's some other ones. So we're gonna go kinda all over the place with this one with a few different approaches to the Bible. Where do you guys want to start with that one? Titus, you had the idea, so why don't you get us started with that?
[00:02:36] Speaker A: Sure.
[00:02:36] Speaker C: It was kind of on my mind because you know, January 1st, a great time to start a yearly Bible reading plan and lots of people are doing that. And I've heard a lot of back and forth in the church about that of like, well, you're not supposed to just read your Bible. You should be studying your B. As if like you have to reach this really deep level of spiritual interface with the text. And that's what we all want and are working towards. But at the same time it's never a bad idea to be reading the Bible. The formation, you know, just taking that text in, however you're getting it is going to really change you. And so with that in mind, you know, I thought about myself doing my Bible reading this year. Others around me and I thought, well, you know, it's not just easy to jump into the Bible sometimes, sometimes we hit it like a brick wall, like the one behind Jack. And you know, we just, we get smacked by it and we go, I don' really know what to do with what I'm reading, you know, and there's, there's kind of guided readings that you can do and there's commentaries that can be helpful.
But sometimes it leads to just kind of a very one dimensional reading of the text that's essentially wherever you come from. And the, whether it be our brotherhood or wherever you're getting kind of that one, that one look at it. And so when I think of Bible approaches, I just think when I approach the text, how am I, how am I coming to it? You know, what is my thought coming to it? Because any book we come to, we approach in an intentional way. We've all got kids and when a kid comes up to you with a board book or a pop up book and says, hey, read me this book, we approach that in a certain way. We know what we're getting into with that book. And when we go and read a novel, we know what that is, or a biography or a cookbook. And so my thought was just when we approach the Bible, how do we approach it? What do we think we're getting into?
And I think that that mindset is going to affect the way that we read and affect what we absorb from it.
[00:04:20] Speaker A: I heard this analogy a long time ago. It was from John Piper and he was talking about.
It was an analogy in one of his sermons where he, he said he wanted to come at it from a number of different angles. There was this text and you can come at it from one single angle and you're only going to get so much out of it. But he said that he was going to approach it more like a bumblebee would, just scoping it out from different sides, looking at it from different angles.
And one of the, I think one of the glories of this book is that it is, it's not a flat single dimensional thing. You can approach it from a historical grammatical approach where you're, you know, you're really digging into what was going on at that time and looking closely at the verb tenses and all of that kind of stuff.
But you can approach it in so many other angles that it's almost, you can't plumb the depths of it. And one of the scriptures that I think about a lot when I'm, as I come to the text, trying not to just look at it in one way is what Paul was talking about there in Romans, chapter 11. Right. You know, right at the end of his big long doctrinal treatise on the Gospel, he said that the, you know, he said, oh, the depths of the riches of the wisdom and knowledge and power of God. How unsearchable are his judgments and how unfathomable are his ways.
You know that, that Old sea terminology, you, you just can't plumb the depths. And I've certainly found that to be true. And, and also I just want to echo what, what Titus was saying that be at, you know, even if you're not skilled in these different forms of study, get the text in somehow, whatever you need to do, listen to it on a drive, read it through whatever.
God's going to bless you through that.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: Sure. And some of these are going to be drive by. Some of these are like heavy, really sink into it and, and kind of, you're making all of the connections and it's going to take you an hour to read through three verses kind of thing because of all the wor. Studies and Things like that that you're doing. So let's start with the drive by kind of versions. One of them is kind of the Bible as story. And this is a. All of these are good in their own way. And all of these can kind of go wrong in their own way, some of them more than others. And sometimes when you hear somebody say the Bible as story, they're kind of downplaying the principles, the commands, the need to obey, things like that. And they're just, well, it's a story about God and his love for humankind.
And so with that, they very much gloss over, smooth over the details and like, oh, let's not get caught up in some of those commands. Let's not get caught up in who's right and who's wrong about this. It's just the story of God's love. Well, it is an incredible story and I think sometimes we discount this to our detriment and that we don't see it as one full thing from Genesis to Revelation, that it's all interconnected, that all of the characters and players are all part of the same story and it's not, oh, fits and starts, oh, there's the old law, but then we just kind of drop that and start doing something else. No, it's all developing in the same direction. It's really cool to understand it that way. But on the other hand, if by, oh, it's just, it's the story of God's love of mankind means we're not going to look at it for law, we're not going to look at it for direction and commandments and things where we have to obey.
You'll hear people say it's a story that we're called to participate in kinda, but that usually is said at the expense of its commandments that we have to obey.
[00:08:12] Speaker C: Yeah, and you probably all of these approaches, what it kind of comes to for me is if you're too far deep into one and you've only been kind of singularly in one approach, you probably need a little bit of the pill that the other approaches give to you. And the story approach is great as a narrative approach going, hey, we start in a garden with the tree of life, we're going to end in Revelation, in the new heavens and the new earth, with the tree on both sides of the garden, with, with the fruit that heals the nation. So I mean, obviously the Bible is one story written by God. If we believe in the inspiration of Scripture and have a high view of inspiration as the three of us do we're going to say, yeah, it's one story written by God, and that story is a narrative.
It's just like Jack says, though, and just that sometimes I have a hard time not hearing dog whistles. I try to not to listen for dog whistles in the scene, everybody's intentions. But sometimes when someone comes out with this story approach, I'm always like, well, tell me more about your stances on some of these hard truths of the Bible. Because, you know, again, it kind of comes back to me almost like a little breezy, like. And sometimes, sometimes when you hear these story people, they're kind of like, well, it's a story. And that means that, like, some of it's kind of like more, you know, it's not historic in the sense that we think about the history book. It's more like these writers that were using these themes and doing stuff. And, you know, I think we just have to be careful about who we're listening to when it comes to this narrative stuff, because I think it can be done really well.
But I do see some dangers, and I don't want to be overly negative about that. I think it's just always helpful with any of these approaches. And this is a good one to start with of just.
You got a whole toolbox, right? Don't just use the, you know, the wire brush in your toolbox for everything that has a very specific use. Don't just use the hammer for everything. Not everything's a nail.
And this is one that I think is probably a good entry point, but not a good place to live as you continue your study.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, you've got. You have a whole.
Imagine if you had Google Earth where you can, you know, you can get this high point and you can, you know, maybe, maybe you can zoom into a degree, but you also have aspect of where, you know, a microscope that comes into play where you're able to zoom down to the cellular level and look at, you know, again, to a degree that you really can't plumb the depths of it. I do think that you need to get the full lay of the land. So seeing that story and knowing the whole redemptive history of God, which is one story from beginning to end, which is about how Jesus solves the great plight of man, sin and death. I mean, those things are at the start of Scripture and at the very end, Jesus is on the throne and the new heavens and new earth are in view. And he's saying, I'm making everything new. And so the entire story is that, but within it there's all these individual pieces of various covenants that God made with man. Some aspects of narrative where it really is a story that's showing that redemptive side of God. But then sometimes where there's command and law and at least the principles of God, where it's like, here's what we need to be digging into.
And you know, as you guys were talking to one of the things I was, I guess one of the cautions I would give on the story side of it, even within the story side of it, is sometimes we try to moralize every single story saying, you know, here's, here's the purpose of this story for us. This is what, is what God expects us to do based on this story. And so you've got like the Rahab, you know, the harlot in, in Jericho. Like we'll read into it, be like, well, see how she lied about. It's like, okay, that's not what it's about at all. In fact, she's being praised and she's, you know, she's being honored for what she did.
[00:12:00] Speaker C: So yeah, I think you're exactly right. And, and that, that kind of approach, again, that because it is shallow, we're just looking for something out of the text and that, that can, that can be an issue. You know, that with all of these things, if we're coming to the text looking for something, then we're already entering ourselves into it. You know, I think if we come to the text looking for God's will, the nature of God, we're not going to go wrong. If we come looking for this point or this moral or hey, at the end of the Bible class, I've got to say, okay, application.
You know, Abraham goes into Egypt with Sarah and you know, he lies and says that she's his sister so he doesn't get in trouble. Okay, the application is it's bad to lie. Well, that's an extremely one dimensional reading of that text and not at all in line with what the text actually seems to be saying. That makes it more complicated.
But we have to be able to do that hard work. And again, with everything we've said, like Daniel's saying, it's, you know, we need that big picture. Just like I said, just use this, get the big picture and then hold that picture in your mind when you zoom in. Because you have to zoom in at some point.
[00:13:05] Speaker B: Yeah, that's, that's. Is where this goes wrong is it's subjective. I'm picking the parts of the Story, I want to be part of my story. And so you'll see somebody, you know, the unhitching from the Old Testament thing, those uncomfortable narratives, like you guys are talking about the dishonesty or the genocide narratives and things like that. Well, how does that fit with the story?
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Well, it doesn't.
[00:13:25] Speaker B: So we're just not going to really talk about that. And so realizing our own subjectivity, we can smooth things over and miss some things with that. But it is a necessary approach to realize. And this is one I didn't really grow up with. Like, you get the individual stories. But as far as, like, okay, how does this plug into the grand narrative?
Sometimes that gets missed and it's very valuable to do that. And so I'm going to jump to another one here that's, I would say, closely related.
But it's a mythological view of the Scriptures and especially with something like Genesis that can be meant in a very bad way of like, ah, this isn't literal, so let's not take it too seriously. Or it can mean like, hey, these are foundational stories that not just help us understand the Bible, but help us understand mankind.
You got on the outline here, Titus, basic building blocks of human morality, things like that. That's a great phrase. And Jordan Peterson does an interesting job of this. He's kind of gotten famous for his Genesis and Exodus lectures.
I don't love that he doesn't take it as literally as I would like and that he's not Christian in the way I want him to be. But on the other hand, he's got a point in that, hey, you can trace the roots of basically all of human history and every fictional story we have back to these very real mythological roots of the Bible. But again, if we're not careful with this, this can get away from us too.
[00:14:50] Speaker C: Yeah, well, not all myths are made equal, you know, and that's kind of the point. You have to come away with this. If someone stands up in front of a crowd and says, I want to talk to you about the mythological aspect of the Bible, we're just going to assume, and they probably are intending to say the Bible is this great ancient text, just a super book that is just packed to the brim with wisdom and knowledge and it just tells us about the world and it tells us about ourselves. But, but myth of that kind is an existing genre in the world. Okay. Like, if you go back and look at, you know, if I was even going to say Greek mythology, which is, I'm no expert on, and we would say oh, that's about all those false gods and pagans and it is. But if you, if you go back and look at those stories, they are these very foundational stories about good and evil and duty and hon. And all of these things, you know, and, and, and that journey, you know, that a lot of these stories kind of have fulfill. And that, that aspect of myth, we see it in the modern day because I think writers, again, you know, put a pin a pity in the jar for me. CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien were, Were really into this mythological writing.
[00:15:58] Speaker A: But, you know, as he's, as he's talking about this, what C.S. lewis would talk about the myth, you know, he talked about it as the true mythology. And so I've, you know, I've. For early on, I was really impressed with Jordan Peterson because he was speaking at a level that I think. I mean, a level of depth that I think we've missed in a lot of other places.
And, and yet the thing that's been so frustrating is that he only sees these as sort of these archetypal big stories that have really no connection with, you know, the fabric of reality. One of the amazing things about the Bible is that it speaks to these grand truths that are going to be true across history. But from the beginning of the Bible until the end, we have these.
These little things called genealogies that are placed in there. And you have, you know, so and so begat so and so who begat so and so. And it's taking these stories that happened in real places with real people at, you know, real verifiable leaders that we can, you know, you know, archeologically dig up, and it connects that big story to reality.
[00:17:14] Speaker C: That, that, to me, is the difference between, you know, these great myths of old and, you know, what Daniel's talking about with the historicity of the Bible is that there has to be a source of these. These building blocks. They can't just show up and all these varying cultures with all these varying practices and styles, you know, but, but we see this, these common themes come up, and so there has to be a source of that. And I think if you spend your time studying the Bible, you're going to see that it is. It is the building block. It is the foundation upon which all else comes from.
And there's been people that have done work with that to show it kind of as the originating source. But, yeah, definitely, definitely useful for those building blocks. But, but of course, we, we have to have it grounded in reality or it. It's just we might as well be reading the Odyssey or the Iliad, I think.
[00:18:02] Speaker B: So. You see, some people kind of want it almost to be the Odyssey or the Iliad. We've got this, I don't know, movement online in recent years. The people really trying to be more historical, the trad kind of movement. And they're very much into the Western canon, classic literature, things like that, and Roman and Greek civilization. And they kind of look at the Bible as, like. Yeah, it's part of that. It's right in there. It's connected to those things.
It's like, yeah, kind of. But as you say, it underlies all of those things. It's better than those things. There's some people doing really interesting stuff. A Twitter account I follow, and I wish I could remember it off the top of my head, where he goes and digs into Greek histories. Iliad, Odyssey, things like that, and shows where essentially they're connected to the Noahic lineage. Some of these Greek histories, Greek myths, things like that, where they're referencing these names and, like, that doesn't mean anything to us. But if you look at the ancient Near Eastern literature, that was like, a name that. What they call Japheth, you know, in different cultures. And so, like, these. These are real things that happened, and they are rooted in the Bible. Like, the Bible is the roadmap to understanding all these things. Now, as far as, like, the gods on Mount Olympus. Yeah, some of that gets carried away, but as far as human history, that's very cool to see. As long as you keep it in. Yeah, the Bible's the key, the map for understanding and unlocking all of this stuff. Not. Yeah, it's just another really cool old story that kind of teaches us some basic morals or things like that. And so I think this is one that, for younger people, they kind of need to understand this, but get it right, is that they want to view it as this, but you have to do that in the right way. Whereas with older people, this might not be on their radar as this. The Bible as mythology kind of view it. And again, like, it does set the Spidey sense of, like, why are you calling it a myth? It's real. Well, some myths are very real. Your founding myth of a nation, of a people, of things like that. Well, there's the founding myth of the world in that it's the story that everybody pulls back to in some way or another. And so, again, young and old view this one kind of differently, but it's a very useful. Again, all of these are good tools to have in our toolbox. This is another one. If done right, it's pretty useful. Do you guys have anything more on that one or you want to jump to another one here?
All right, let's look at you have. I like this framing of it, rule book versus love letter, because those are two very common approaches. And I would say this is our progressive churches of Christ. Do the love letter approach our stronger conservative, I don't know, hyper conservative, I don't know, whatever.
I'm not trying to be derogatory here, but I think people understand what I'm saying. They take the rule book approach. As I've said, they very much view it as a legal code. And you will see them cite the Bible as a legal code. They'll say, well, we do this first Corinthians 16, we do this Romans.
And everything has to have a citation because it's again, in the same sense, when you get a ticket, it says what citation, what rule you broke, what law it was, or whatever. And so that can be very cold.
The love letter is a correction to that to be warmer and bring God's personality into it, which is great, but it sometimes discounts the other side of it. So I guess let's start on the love letter side and then we'll get to the rule book side of it. What thoughts do you guys have on the idea of the love letter approach to the Bible?
[00:21:27] Speaker C: You know, the one thing I would say about it, I mean, you could say, is there an aspect of the Bible that's a love letter? As in, is it a text that was written for me out of love by someone who has my best interest in mind and truly from the bottom of their heart, you know, has that compassion for me, then yeah, the Bible's a love letter. I mean, that's, you know, it is in that sense. But again, we go back to do I really want to pigeonhole the. The infinite depth of scripture as just a love letter?
[00:21:57] Speaker A: If you look at John 3:16, which is, you know, one of the most well known Bible verses in the entire world, even amongst people who don't believe it, places that most central part of history, which is the center of God's redemptive scheme, namely the crucifixion of Jesus as being motivated out of love for the world. So there's that overarching.
This whole movement is from a God who is gracious and merciful. It's him displaying his nature, which is love. But if all it's read as a love letter, I mean, then we're probably liable to reading into the text or I guess, skipping over a lot of the text, because I, if I think about, between me and my wife, if she wrote me a love letter or if I wrote her a love letter, you know, there's a lot of stuff in scripture that I would not really include in a love letter, and I wouldn't and certainly wouldn't receive it that way. And if I was going to preemptively view whatever was written to me as only a love letter, I'm probably going to ignore a lot of that stuff. It's also about justice and what's right and what's good and what's expected.
[00:23:16] Speaker B: Hey, folks, you've probably heard us talk about Focus plus and the Deep End. If you're wondering what that is. Focus plus is our subscription service available through Patreon.
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Yeah, I like the concept of love letter, but it's one of those you have to look at. Okay. How does David and Bathsheba fit the idea of a love letter? You say, well, he was forgiven or things like that. How does David and Goliath fit a love letter? How does, again, the flood or the cleansing of Canaan, how does that fit a love letter? It is. How does the law fit a love letter? How do the commandments that we have. How is that a love letter? Well, if you think of God's love for us as he gave us these stories as examples for us, and he gave us the commandments for our best good, he made them keep the Sabbath and the cleanliness laws out of their love for them, then. Yeah, but that's usually not what people mean when they say this, which is why it can get a little bit far afield.
[00:24:43] Speaker C: Yeah, sorry for my connection issues. I keep dropping in and out of the podcast, which may be best for everybody. But anyway, yeah, you just, you know, like you guys are saying what I was saying before I cut off just the pigeonholing of isn't a fully encompassing view. And if someone wants to, you know, I don't have any problem with someone saying the Bible is a love letter, but I would have a big problem with someone saying the Bible's just a love letter from God, you know, and it's just that oversimplification that's not giving. It's due to, again, those, those harder passages. Because, you know, going back to that idea that of people reading through the Bible, in a year, they're going to come across passages that don't read like a love letter. They're going to come across things. And so, you know, the. I guess the opposite end of the love letter spectrum would be that, again, that idea of just the Bible is just like going to the courthouse and taking one of the legal books off the shelf. It's literally like just a list of ordinances, you know, And I, I think that in the church especially, we've probably strayed pretty close to that oversimplification of, like, the Bible is a list of rules that drop from heaven. And it's so easy. You just follow the rules and bing, bang, boom, you're going to be pleasing to God and you're going to go to heaven.
But there's obviously some holes with that, too.
[00:25:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Just briefly, before we leave the love letter thing, I want to point out this is very popular in, like, pop religion. People are like, well, it's my theme verse. How is this verse speaking to me? That kind of thing? And it's like, it's not directly. Yeah, there's a principle in it. And especially if you put it in context, and we talk so much about Jeremiah 29:11 and Philippians 4:13, and, you know, I know how the plans I have for you and God, all things through him who strengthens me, it's like, yeah, but that wasn't God writing to you, saying, all right, you've got a math test today. This is what it's for. But when you take the love letter approach, again, as I say, the pop religion, the my Instagram verse kind of religion, that's.
That's where you get this. And so we rightly go against that to what you're saying here, Titus, the approach that looks at it as the rule book, and yet it very easily goes too far. Because one of my most frustrating things is where the people, where people will just say, well, the Bible's so simple.
It's just. It's so easy to understand. You just look up and it's like, you pull out your strongs and you go, okay, well what does it say about this? And you don't even have to go open your Bible. It's got the verse right there. You see it? Okay, I'm good. I understand it.
That's deep Bible study.
[00:27:07] Speaker C: Like.
[00:27:07] Speaker B: No, it's not actually. It's good to know your verses. But why are they there? How do they interact with other verses? How do they fit in the context they have?
Those are all important things that really get skimmed over when we do the rule book, I don't know, legal code version of Bible study.
[00:27:25] Speaker A: I also wonder how much even if, because it's not bad to, to have a part of, I mean, to look at parts of it as a love letter. Right. We've been saying that there, there is certainly a sense in which that's true. But I also wonder how much, if we're going to take that framing, how much we read into it a modern view of love that wouldn't even be consistent with the God who defines love. You know, we talk about bringing into the text our own cultural baggage and certain perspectives that we've been granted. Like, you know, like a fish swimming in water who doesn't know that he's wet.
We, we come into it with a view of what love is. That typically, I mean, it's been informed more by Taylor Swift than by scripture. And we come into it and it's more of a feel good type thing where if you're reading into it, that you're likely to miss a lot of what love actually is. Love is concerned with making me right. God is concerned with my eternal existence, not just with my temporal comfort. God wants for me to be justified. God wants for my sin problem to be taken care of. God wants for me to be sanctified and made whole and pure and new. And all of that actually fits very well into God's love for me. That's part and parcel to his love for me.
[00:28:50] Speaker C: Yeah, that goes back to the love without expectation. That's the modern love. Love me with no expectation of me. Love me without any kind of desire for me to do this. You know, and so you have that, as we said that on one side. And then you go back to what Jack was mentioning about what I call bookmark Bible, which is I can fit every, every law about being a Christian on a bookmark that you can stick in your Bible. It's got the plan of salvation. It's got all the verses about the five acts of worship. You know, it's got all my Scriptural references for don't do this, don't do this, don't do this, don't do this. And if it's on a bookmark, and that's great. But again, like Jack said, when we fool ourselves into thinking, well, that's deep Bible study, I'm getting really close to God. And it comes back again to a lot of times I think it can put Jesus in the background because Jesus came to give us this brand new rule book. You know, we have the old rule book in the law of Moses in the Old Testament. Then Jesus came to give us the brand new rulebook, the cheat codes, you know, how to get to heaven. And if we follow this exactly, we're going to go to heaven. And the reason we're going to go is because we're just better at following the rules than anybody else. And that, you know, so it puts Jesus in the background, it puts grace in the background.
And ultimately, as Jack has written on at length recently, Christianity becomes a game of how perfectly can I follow the rules? And then assurance goes out the window because invariably you're going to mess up. And so that's where you may need a little bit of the love letter. You may need to go back to the love letter and go, yeah, God does love me. And God does want me to be with him, and he does want me to be like him.
And if we can frame the love letter like that, I say, let's call it Valentine's Bible.
Let's make it the Valentine's Bible and say, yeah, God does truly love me. He truly does want what's best for me. And if I take that approach, then I'm going to pick up the yeah. And that is going to require self formation. That's going to require me forming myself into his image by allowing him to change me through His Word. And that's what this is all about. You know, that's how we're going to have to approach it.
[00:30:49] Speaker B: Absolutely.
They reveal essentially two different religions. The first is moralistic, therapeutic deism. Again, a thing I bring up a lot, it's a mouthful, but I think is the main religion in the US is God just wants me to feel good, be a good person and he'll take care of me. So a love letter, he didn't like, give me any specific commands. He just kind of said, I love you and I'm here for you. And hey, if you need anything, if you're having a bad day, just pray and I'll take care of you.
The other side, it is a legalistic, pharisaistic way of reading the text of, as you say, book, chapter, verse. Well, so recently I was did a book review on Charlie Kirk's book on Sabbath and what he meant by that was just take a day of rest and take a day away from your phone and from work and all those things and productivity for God and family and all that. It's a great idea. And just when I posted about that, I got a number of comments.
Nope, here's a verse. We don't have to do that anymore. Like, great. But isn't a day off a good thing? Like a day to take a step back from the rat race, from culture, from the smartphone addiction, from social media and all that?
Is that a bad concept? Well, this verse says I don't have to do that, so I don't want to hear about it.
Like, what a weird approach to this whole thing, you know, like, yeah, if somebody was coming along saying, thou shalt not travel a mile on Saturday or on Sunday, or you're in sin if you step in foot in the Kroger on Sunday, okay, then we can have that discussion. If somebody's saying, hey, taking a break is good. And you just go, well, I've got a verse for that. And conversation over mic drop, what Bible are you reading? And again, it is this approach to the Bible that just views it as a constant set of mic drops on any argument. Well, I've got this verse, so it's over.
There's a lot of verses, you know, there's a lot of principles. There's a lot of searching things out and developing maturity, as I always love to point to in Hebrews 5 and 6 where he talks about that. It's building discernment. You don't need discernment if it's just a list of do's and don'ts.
[00:32:50] Speaker A: There's an assumption in that, you know, just the Sabbath example that you just gave, there's an assumption in that that God at one point in history just kind of gave this arbitrary rule and that at some point he just decided no longer of value. And so God has somewhat changed on that it was just an arbitrary rule for them for the sake of having a rule where what we really need, I mean true discernment looks into it and recognizes, okay, the Ten Commandments, there is an eternal significance to every single one of them. There's is, besides the Sabbath, is there a single one of those other commandments that we would say is no longer applicable? No, they're 100% applicable to us today. Now, the given exact parameters of how they would live out Sabbath, like literally, you know, the way that they would take off their whole Saturday, that has, that has changed to a degree. But in principle, and again, this goes back to the very beginning. In principle, God rooted rest into the very creation of the world. The proverbs talk about how God's wisdom was what laid down and created everything. And it's so, it's so rooted in everything to where I think there's just a misunderstanding of who God is and how he works. God is not giving arbitrary rules for the sake of rules sake. They all have a purpose and a function. And even if we're no longer covenantally under what Moses established at Sinai, we are in covenant with the exact same God and we're following after Jesus who perfectly kept those laws and we're modeling his behavior. So I think that that safeguards against some of that just cut off. You know, we're past that. Let's move past it.
And it helps us to realize, okay, there's ongoing significance here.
[00:34:43] Speaker C: And we so 100%. And I always. You're exactly right what you said. I think a lot of times we view God as the lion tamer at the circus. He's holding up the hoop and he's just like, I'm just gonna see if you're gonna jump through it. And I agree there are times in the Bible where God gave people a test. He tested Israel in the wilderness. But even those tests, God is not going to act frivolously. He's never just going to be like, eh, just do this.
And if we have that mindset, then when we come from the Old Testament, the New Testament it is, hey, brand new hoop, like it's a shinier hoop. Jump through this new hoop. And yeah, that's just not what I see in the text as well. You know, Christians do. Christians have the freedom to implement a, you know, building block nature of God aspect into their daily lives in a way to bless themselves. I'd say it's all in the Gospels. It's right there, you know. Yeah. Jesus says the Sabbath was, you know, the man was not made for the Sabbath, the Sabbath was made for man. That's hugely instructional right there. And a lot of times what the. Here's a verse that means I don't have to do that. That approach really, I hate to say it, it really mirrors the Pharisees because Jesus comes there and says, you're not using your strictness as a law, with the law as a way to get Closer to God. You're using it license to sin. You're using as license to not fully invest. You know, sorry, the law says, I already gave my contribution to God. I don't have to take care of my mom and dad and putting them in the nursing home. You know, that's just one example. But. But there's Jesus saying, hey, you're not the holy people that you think you are. Just because you can quote book, chapter and verse of the law, you're actually using it as a veil to keep yourself from being spiritually invested. I mean, hey, churches of Christ, the church there it is straight between the eyes. We have to own up and be like, yep, we fall into that trap if we are not very careful. I would be very concerned about it.
[00:36:33] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. And again, what that does is it keeps you from seeing the Bible as a whole. It keeps you from seeing God's love in it. You miss the story when you're just looking in the concordance, flipping in like, all right, where's this citation? Where is this legal code that I can quote for this thing or the other thing? And all right, it says thou shalt. So I have to do it. It doesn't say thou shalt, so you can't bind that. We're not going to talk about it. And it's just, it's not healthy that I'll use that as kind of a transition point to.
We've got. Oh, Daniel, you got something.
[00:37:02] Speaker A: Yeah. I just wanted to just say one more thing before we. We move on.
Something I thought about over the last several years and I. Jack, you've written a little bit about it recently in terms of our confidence in our own salvation. I really think that one of the ultimate motivating factors behind some of our hermeneutic is fear. And it's. We're driven by fear, which absolutely has a place. I mean, the fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge, right? But there should be a place where we come into the presence of God and it's not a debilitating fear any longer. One of the things, one of the reactions of a fear fearful hermeneutic has been just like, hey, we got to meet in the upper room. Because they met in the upper room and just ultimately missing the point. But I think a better approach is to deeply study, draw close to God with a full, I mean, with our hearts fully ready to receive what he has for us. But then to accept that sometimes, and I know this is scary to us sometimes, the Holy Spirit, because he is Spirit cannot be grasped the same way that we could grasp hold of two, you know, stones that were held between the hands of Moses. This is, I think, ultimately what Paul is talking about in Romans 14, where he's like, look, there are some things that are not a matter of the kingdom.
There are, you know, some, some. I mean, he gives food and wine as, as, you know, examples of that. And in Colossians, he talks about special days, you know, holidays, Sabbaths, all that kind of stuff where the Holy Spirit, there's a freedom there. And I think that really scares us because if you try to grab hold of the Holy Spirit, he can slip right through your fingers.
You can't hold on to him like you can, you know, a stone, a stone tablet. But we have to understand God's also not this totally vindictive, trying to kick us out on a technicality. We're probably going to miss some things. In fact, every one of us will. And so we pray God keep me from presumptuous sins and trust that his grace is going to cover us where we fail. Strive to the best of our ability, and then trust and try not to live by fear.
[00:39:18] Speaker B: Hey, folks, I know a lot of you are looking for more Christian content for your daily walk. Of course, we often tell you about Focus plus and the daily devos and other content that goes up there. Of course, we have this podcast, Think Deeper. We have the Jim podcast Godly Young man by Joe and Will. But I want to also tell you about the Church Reset podcast feed. Every article I put out on my website, jackwilkie Co, goes up on the Church Reset podcast feed, along with audio from all of the videos I post to The Focus Press, YouTube, like cultural breakdown, Masculinity Monday and Thursdays through the text. And so if you're looking for something to listen to while you're doing chores around the house or on the go, check out the Church Reset podcast feed. Subscribe to get all the latest content as it comes out four or five days a week.
[00:40:01] Speaker C: I think one, one more thought on that is just. I think that talking about foundational texts, we live with Nadab and Abihu just squarely right in the front of our brain. Like, man, I'm going to turn the wrong way, or I'm going to hold my mouth the wrong way during worship, and God's just going to strike me down with fire from heaven. And I think there's a couple things on that. I think, number one, that story, given the nature of God, go read it. And it's obvious that there's more going on. Just.
They just thought they'd do something different that day or they weren't really paying attention. There's more going on there. There really is. There's even the possibility of drunkenness being involved. The fire was a very staid and certain thing, you know, in the Old Testament, that's a good study. Go look at how fire is brought. When Abraham goes to sacrifice Isaac, he brings the fire, right? He didn't bring the kindling, he brought the fire. There was a fire that was. That was already prepared that they were to use.
But again, we live with that in our brain. And I think we have that Hebrews verse. Our God is a consuming fire. And sometimes if we're not careful, the thought is, oh, we're going to get burned. Like, if I get in this fire, if I'm not careful, I'm going to get burned. We got to remember the burning bush, right? The thing about God as a consuming fire is he welcomes us in, and by his grace, we aren't consumed. We won't be consumed because he allows us. And again, it's Jesus. It's Jesus that gives us that more perfect access, that greater grace, but he gives more grace.
We're now in that fire. We're in the consuming fire of God in His presence, and we're not burned up.
And if I turn my head the wrong way or if I commit one of those presumptuous sins or those things that, again, out of my ignorance or out of the weakness of my flesh, God isn't just going to go, you know, you're incinerated. That grace is there. And again, the fear has its place. We should always be looking around going, oh, my goodness, we're in this fire.
We're playing. You know, I say playing, that's the wrong word. We're existing in the space with the creator of the universe. But remember what Jesus has done for us that takes fear from being the primary driver and puts it where it's supposed to be as part of the holistic experience of being close to God.
[00:42:11] Speaker B: Man, those are great points.
I really like the way you guys put that. But, man, I talk about this one a lot, so I'm gonna just save it for there, you know, leave it there. On the idea of approaching the Bible that way. But it really does rob you of so much stuff. It really does make you really miss out on who God is.
And then, of course, we've got people nodding along on the love letter side of it going, yep, they're missing it. Like, hey, you guys are missing some things too. You're missing the good of hard, fast obedience, you know, like that kind of thing. And so it's don't fall in either ditch, as we always like to say on this program. So and with that there's two, I would say again, things that are almost a split here are these last two that we have. And so I don't know if we want to put them together or not. There is the historical, grammatical, exegetical approach to the Scriptures, which is what I was taught in preaching school. It's very valuable. I think it's critically important that we do this sometimes that is done at the expense of typological reading of the Bible echoing and its stories kind of being self referential. And honestly, people go crazy for that. People love that. I love that stuff. When you see, oh wow, I never saw that connection between David and Goliath and Jesus and between, I mean there's just a ton of them. And I'm drawing a blank trying to do this off the top of my head of Jonah and Peter. A friend of ours has a really good point about that, of Jonah going to Joppa to get away from doing God's will and taking the gospel to the Gentile people and are taking a message of preaching to the Gentile people and Peter at Joppa being given the same opportunity. What are you going to do? You're going to go preach to the gentile like that's not an accident and yet you're, you're making an assumption there. You're going, I don't think it's a coincidence. I don't think that was meant to do that, but I can't 100% prove it, but you see it happen enough times. And so I guess I'm saying these, I like both of these approaches, but I think sometimes they're pitted against each other.
[00:44:04] Speaker C: Yeah, for sure. And you know, Daniel mentioned earlier, I think it's hard not to talk about this without talking about missing the forest for the trees. And there is something to be gained from taking your microscope and taking an individual leaf and putting it under the microscope and really, I mean, zooming in. I mean there's knowledge on that level. And when I think of the historical grammatical method, I'm thinking, hey, we're going to slow down and we're going to look at these trees, right? We're going to look at the trees, we're going to look at the leaves. Because even at that depth there is such a treasure to be gleaned from that and taking that really in depth approach. And so again, as Jack was saying, critically important commentaries, lexicons, all this stuff going back to the Greek, going back to the original manuscripts. There's so much that can be gleaned that do give us that historical grounding and again, informed. Because there's some things when we open up the Bible we're just not going to get. I mean you have the person that picks up the Bible randomly has no instruction, okay, cubits are everywhere. What's a cubit? You got to have a little bit of, you know, historical background, a cultural background, biblical background to understand what a cubit was in their context or talents or all this different stuff. That's a very surface level example.
But again, speaking of the typological, the historical grammatical is this idea that, yeah, the Bible was written by human authors with an intellectual intent. So it was written and when it was written, the person writing it down had a, had a context that they were writing in and had an intended message that they were trying to get across. And the historical grammatical method I think of that is how can we most closely get to that message? How can we get to that original source message? But on the other hand, talking about the typological, we have to remember, as we've said, the Bible isn't just a book written by men, it's a full narrative written by God. And so you are going to see things below that surface of the text, below even just the circumstances in the context that ring. So truly, you know, one I always come back to that comes to my mind is Isaac, the sacrifice of Isaac.
Read that text. You know, Abraham is going to sacrifice his son.
Isaac carries the wood on his back. You know, he carries the wood up the mountain where he's going to be sacrificed.
You know, not mention the fact that he sacrificed according to the Old Testament text on, on Mount Moriah, which would be the Temple Mount, which is Jerusalem. So he's literally sacrificed on the same mountain where Jesus is going to be crucified.
And what I love about that example is it rings so true and it really deepens our appreciation for both instances there. But the other fact is this. Some people will say when it comes to typology, well, the Bible has to explicitly state that this is a type or you can't you look at it as typological. The New Testament authors never pick up the Isaac and Jesus thing. Now they talk about the seed principle of Isaac and Jesus, but they don't talk about the sacrifice of Isaac is in any way being Christological. And I'm like, dude, that is such a slam dunk. Like it's just right there in the text. Paul goes to like Hagar and Sarah being Mount Sinai in Jerusalem, which is way more obscure to the text. That almost is. Well, thanks for telling me that one, Holy Spirit, because I wouldn't have got that one by myself. But. But yeah, I think again what we're talking about here is two very important methods wherein when you get to the scholarly aspect in our preaching schools in the, in the in depth study, you know, there's nothing wrong with taking three years to preach through Romans. That's great.
But at some point we're gonna have to zoom out.
[00:47:39] Speaker A: Thanks for, thanks for giving me a little leeway.
[00:47:43] Speaker C: Well, I knew that some. I knew, I know that knew maybe an exact instance where somebody had done that. And again, that is, you can do that with the Bible and it's important to do that with the Bible. And you're going to come out the other end just going, wow, look at that tree. That tree is so, so rich. And it's just all encompassing of all these different things. But then you can also take that zoom out, you know, and Romans would be a great example. Romans is a book you can study for three years and not plumb the depths of. And it was also a letter that was probably read in its totality to a group of people who then went, okay, yeah, we got something out of that. Like that was something that, you know, it spoke to us in that moment. And so to me, that's the both, it's, you know, the historical, grammatical, as we're saying, that does that deep dive stuff, but also has that moment of if we can take it in wholesale, if we can take these stories in wholesale, we're going to start to see things that we wouldn't otherwise. Last night in a Bible class, I was teaching some teens about Acts 22, where Paul, it's awesome scene. I'd love for them to make a movie of it. Paul's on the steps of the garrison of the temple, the barracks, and he's got these chains on and he's preaching to the mob that wants to kill him. And he makes this great defense all the way through as he preaches the gospel, how he is a Jew like them. But then he encountered the resurrected Jesus. And then he gets to this point where he says, I was in Jerusalem after my conversion and I fell into a trance in the temple and I saw him and he's talking about Jesus. Well, in broad strokes, to me, that Reminds me of the prophet Isaiah who was in the temple and he fell into a trance and saw a vision, a vision in fact, of what John. We would say God, but John would say in his gospel it was actually the pre incarnate Christ. You know, he saw him in his full deity.
And that's a typological connection right there. Paul falls into a trance in the temple and sees Jesus. Isaiah did the same thing. And that's, that's meaningful. We can't put like a pin in that and go. And that means here's the application point for that. But it gives me a huge appreciation for the text and going, man, God works in these amazing ways through his providence, through his sovereignty, he brings these things together. So that makes this beautiful picture that to me just hammers home. This is the word of God straight from heaven. This is something that only God could do across the millennia. You know, that's what it means to me and that's what I love so much about it.
[00:50:07] Speaker A: Yeah, the.
I believe it was Isaiah who said that God, or was it Jeremiah? He said God declares the end from the beginning.
So again, you see right there at the beginning of the Bible, God promising that there would be the seed of the woman that would crush the serpent's head and that, that. So God who knows the whole story, right? He knows the end from the beginning.
He gives these little, we're going to call them types. This is the typological reading. But he gives these little foreshadowings all along the way that you really don't realize. It's kind of like sometimes when you watch a film a second time and you're like, oh man, I didn't realize they were dropping these little hints all along the way. But now it makes sense in Jesus Christ because we now have the full expansive understanding of God's whole scheme. We now go back and read the things which came before it and you can see it everywhere. I was just studying in Joshua recently and I saw that the people of Israel are essentially baptized from their parents generation crossing the Jordan. This is where the gospel started. So they're baptized from all of Israel was baptized of Egypt and Egypt was washed away. But then the parents were not fully sanctified. So the parents ended up ceasing in the wilderness and the next generation was baptized of that parent generation and they moved across the Jordan safely.
And the one that was leading the way was Jesus. I mean, Joshua goes before the commander of the army of the Lord and has to remove his sandals because he's standing on holy ground, and then he goes forward with Jesus leading the way to conquer. And I. I mean, it's. It's really amazing when you go back and you see how much Jesus is integral to all of it. And if you have the. If you're going to do the historical grammatical approach, I think as Christians, it must always be in view of the ultimate antitype, which is Jesus. I heard an Old Testament scholar a while back, and I just totally disagreed with him. But he said, you know, he said, when we come to the Old Testament, we can't read it like that because that's how we would perceive it. We have to read it the way they would have received it. And my. My response to that would be, yeah, but they missed the point also. They didn't see the full picture, but a lot of times they totally missed the point. So how they would have received it is sometimes moot there. So there's got to be this constant balance of, here's what was being said and here's the ultimate, you know, overarching meaning behind it.
[00:52:38] Speaker B: Yeah, you'll see it cast as, like, the Western reading and the Eastern reading. And I think a lot of people look at it as like, oh, the Western reading is, you know, that that's just us with our. Our biases and our scientific mind approach to everything, and everything can be reduced to its parts.
Like, yeah, that can be overdone if you leave out the other. But when people kind of go to the too mystic, too typologizing everything and making everything not really mean something. And I'm pretty hard on the rabbi podcast because, again, I know a ton of people who listen to the rabbis for that Eastern reading, and you get some good stuff. Then you got other stuff where it's like, and this is not me saying this, they're notorious for just making stuff up, making up a good story to say, oh, yeah, this is what the text is talking about. Like, well, no, you got to be careful with that.
So that's where the exegetical methods of really digging down and grabbing the meaning that it seems it was intended by the author and all that keeps you grounded so you're not just drifting and making up whatever you want, but also having that, hey, there's probably more things here that are not readily evident. There's a book a guy wrote.
I haven't read it, but somebody recommended it to me, as is the case with many books where he, this scientist studied a square meter of floor on the forest floor for a year. Every day. He just went and Observed that square meter and wrote a whole book on it. He saw something new every single day. And it's like, all right, that's cool. But if that's all you ever see of the forest or the forest floor, you're gonna miss a lot. And I think sometimes when we get into the exegesis and we're just digging down and doing word studies and all that, you do miss these connections. And you guys have thrown out a couple. I came across one the other day I thought was kind of neat. I'll just run through real quick. It was David fleeing from Absalom, where he crosses the Kidron, goes up on the Mount of Olives like Jesus does. He wept above Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, as Jesus did. Ahithophel, his closest. One of his best advisor, betrayed him and then later killed him, killed himself as Judas did. David is presented with two donkeys. Of course, Jesus is presented with two donkeys, the donkey and its colt.
David, as he's fleeing, is mocked and cursed. And his companions say, I'm gonna go get him. And he says, don't do that. We're not doing that right here. I mean, there's just. Through that whole story, there's all of these things of David, his betrayal and all that he's going through, and Jesus goes through the same. And I mean, there's just these things like that of what do you do with that? What do you, as Titus said, do you make application of that? No, but it helps you understand the story better. It helps you see God's hand in history better. And those things are really neat. And it's nuggets like that that keep you digging in the text. If it was just that flyby concordance study we talked about earlier, you can get your Bible study done in five minutes.
There's really not that much to dig there. But when you realize it's this treasure chest that has all kinds of things that if you dig hard enough, you're going to find them. But also, if you take a step back and look at the whole story, you're going to.
It just trains your brain how to look at this incredible text that we've been given. And so. So we're kind of coming to the end of our time here. I'll just.
Why don't we all just give a couple minutes worth of. If you're starting your Bible reading plan, I know people are going to hit Leviticus soon. They're going to hit the later parts of Exodus, things like that. And famously, that's where These things die. Just a couple of pointers, a couple of things from what we've talked about here of how to use these approaches to get something out of it. Daniel, I'll put you up first.
[00:56:03] Speaker A: So I've always been one who has, I've, I've never done, I, I, maybe I, I think one time I did the Bible through in a year. I've read the Bible through, you know, on different occasions, just kind of just like disjointedly. But one of, one of the things that I would advise people to do is to come to a text, like a singular unit of text, maybe the book of Joshua, Joshua or something like that, or Judges, and try to do a sit down, like devote some time on a Saturday morning and just do a sit down read of the whole thing and get the full view of it. And it really is amazing how much more you understand. You don't get every little neat nuance that you're going to get by going back through. But like, for me, if I read just like maybe two chapters of it and then pick up the next day, I lose a lot of these connections that are meant to be just being hit on consistently. So come to a specific text and try to read through it in one sitting. Maybe start with a smaller text, but read through one whole section and then you can sweep back through it on a more close detail. And you're going to keep it all in its right place when you do that?
[00:57:21] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a great point. You know, for me, I think that, you know, we talked about where these things die. If you are doing the Bible in the year and as Daniel referenced, you don't have to read through the Bible in a year, just be reading the Bible people. Sometimes it's nice to have parameters and guidelines and sometimes that's helpful. So if you want, if you decide, hey, I'm going to do this, I'm going to read the Bible in the year, do it, get excited about it, make that your thing. If that's what it takes to get you through, do it. But, but when it comes to some of these texts, again, my heart goes out. Because it can be hard for the person who works a 9 to 5 job, has a family and is trying to take time to read God's word. It can be hard to get a lot of stuff out of Leviticus. And I would say on that end the church should do a better job about equipping people to read these books. This is going to be an hour podcast, but the work takes more than an hour. The church has to be training up men that can help guide people. It shouldn't be lost on us that for the majority of the last 2,000 years, people didn't have Bibles to access in their homes. Christians couldn't just pick up the word and read it. We have such a great privilege that we have it today. And I think it's the church's responsibility not to, you know, read the Bible for you or to get close to God for you, but to equip you to do that. And time and effort should be put in on the part of elderships to equip people to do that. And so if it be Leviticus or Joshua or, or the late part of Exodus, Josh was actually pretty intriguing and interesting just as is. But some of those harder passages I would just say, hey man, you know, it's good for you. It's like when you're a kid and your parents put the medicine in your mouth and they go, this is good for you. You know, it's like, well it tastes awful. Well, that's how you know it's working. You know, it's. There is an aspect at times to where yeah, this isn't always going to be fun reading but some things I would think about number one is Daniel, hit it on the head. Just try to take it in, try to take it in wholesale.
Don't get bogged down sometimes, especially if you're doing, you know, just a read through, don't get bogged down initially with every detail because in Leviticus that's going to kill you, you're gon be dead. You know, try to take it in wholesale. That's number one. Number two, without digging a hole of China because that's the weakness of the typological thing that we were talking about earlier. Sometimes we dig a hold of China and we say, well, if you add up all the numbers of the descendants of this guy, you know, in the Babylonian census and then you go to the New Testament, you look at this and Paul talks about avoid endless genealogies, avoid worship of angels and these you can go too far. So without digging a whole the china and to go so deep, look for Jesus in the Old Testament text. You know, even if you're not, it doesn't have to be again so direct. But when you're reading about the sacrificial system of Leviticus go, wow, this sacrifice in some way points forward to Jesus, you know, in some way. You don't have to have all the particulars of that down, but it Keeps it relevant. It keeps it at least relevant enough to go, yeah, this has something to do with him. And so I'm looking for him. And so foreground ground him. And I would say again, and I heard the point made the other day and I thought it was good. Foreground Jesus in the New Testament as well. It's so easy to get into the epistles and start getting into the nuts and bolts and the nitty gritty and okay, what exactly is this command? How exactly are we supposed to do this precisely? We can lose Jesus in the New Testament. We can lose Jesus in the epistles. It just becomes again, this, this rule book approach that we talked about. So definitely do that. And then number three, I would just say get excited about the Bible. You know, that's easy to say, but I find it to be a very exciting book.
Just the other day I was reading through because my plan is giving kind of a split approach. And I was reading through the book of EZ and chapter seven of Ezra. It finally gets to Ezra's kind of appearance on the scene here and it says, Ezra, son of ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. And then you finally get to the son of Phinehas, the son of Eliezer, the son of Aaron. And I go, man, Ezra's right here in this story. He's Aaron's great great, great, great great great grandson and he's playing a part here. And that's exciting to me. I just find that so exciting. Again, that goes back to the story, the narrative, the typological, whatever you want it to be.
But it's just a fascinating book.
I mean, there's no other book like it. All three of us would say the same thing. And that's for multiple reasons. And it may be that you're going to have a certain kind of reading that you're drawn to. You may be the historical grammatical guy, let that be your thing. But always be willing as you read to try to approach it maybe from a different angle than you have before. And I think if you do that, you're going to have more success getting through.
[01:01:40] Speaker B: Yeah, great stuff. I would just briefly say use the categories we've given today to ask questions. Alright, how does this fit in God's showing us his love? How does this fit? Are there principles in here? You know, the rule book approach? Are there things here that I need to obey or that teach me something we need to do?
Looking at it. Okay, how does it fit the broader story of the Bible you might be reading? I don't know Joseph in Egypt, how does it fit the broader story? But also how does this typological thing, how does this connect to other details in the Bible? With Joseph, you're gonna see parallels to Adam, you're gonna see parallels to Jesus, you're gonna see parallels to Daniel. You're also gonna see not this Daniel, but biblical Daniel.
You're gonna see. Well, there's some parallels to Daniel Mayfield as well. I'll give him some credit there.
The way the brother wars kind of work throughout Genesis. Like, these are story arcs that all intersect in one guy's life. And that's gonna happen over and over. So ask those questions. Ask the questions in the text. Okay, well, Egypt, what do we know about Egypt? What do we know about these things? Kind of the digging deeper in the moment, just use these kind of things to. Essentially what you're doing is taking a 360 view, just walking around the narrative of Joseph and going, okay, what all things are shown here and how do they connect to these approaches to the Bible? And I mean, that's just one example. On any of the Bible readings you do, just ask each of those questions and you're going to get a lot out of it. You're going to see some really cool stuff there. So I totally agree with what you just said, that it is a totally unique book. There is no end. That's kind of the fun part is like, it's not a, that's not a burden of like, oh, I'm just never going to understand it all. It's. This is a gold mine that doesn't run out of gold. And so you just keep going back to it.
[01:03:21] Speaker C: Amen.
[01:03:23] Speaker B: All right, we're going to wrap right there. I'm going to bring, unfortunately, these guys won't be able to join me on the deep end. Joe and will be back in town for that. And I'll get their ideas, their thoughts on their approach to the Bible, some tips they might have. And so any comments or questions, be sure for our Focus plus subscribers to get those in.
Otherwise, if you're watching it on YouTube, wherever else you're catching this, leave us a comment about things we might have missed, approaches we might have missed, ideas, things, feedback you have. We really appreciate everyone who watches and listens. Wherever you are, if you're watching on YouTube, be sure to hit the like button. That helps us out as well. We do apologize. There were some technical difficulties. When you fire up the old car after 18 months off, it's a little bit rusty. So that's okay. We got through it again thanks to these guys. No, it's, what are you gonna do? You know, it's, we're, we're out of, out of the habit. But I want to thank you both for coming on very much, as I said, is a treat for me, and I know it is for the listeners, too. But I'm gonna leave it right there and we'll talk to you guys on the next one.
Hey, guys, Jack Wilke here. If you enjoy our work with podcasts like Think Deeper and Godly Young Men and our books, articles, seminars, and want to support the work that we do.
