Stop Taking Jesus Out of the Bible | Theocast

Why Some Christians Resist Christ-Centered Reading

Hi, this is John, and today on Theocast, Justin and I are going to have a very pointed and lively conversation about why people find it necessary to remove Jesus from all of the scriptures. We do wholeheartedly believe that the Bible is about Jesus from verse one to the end of the book, and there seems to be a teaching and instructions today that would encourage one to not see Jesus in every part of scripture.

We possibly name names and give examples. It's a very lively conversation we hope you enjoy. Stay tuned. If you'd like to help support Theocast, you can do that by leaving us a review on iTunes and subscribing on your favorite podcast app.

You can also follow us on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Plus, we have a Facebook group if you'd like to join the conversation there. Thanks for listening. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ.

Conversations about the Christian life from a Reformed confessional and pastoral perspective. Today, your hosts are Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. I'm John Moffitt.

I'm the pastor of Grace Reformed Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee. And if you're just now tuning in and you didn't hear the introduction, you might want to go back and find out where Justin and I pastor.

I had someone email me recently, and they're like, wow, you're in my same town. I didn't even know that.

So you might even People skip the early portions of the podcast. They do. Apparently. Justin, we normally.

Just get right into the topic, and we will, so just bear with us for about three seconds. I had an experience that I had to share that 15 years ago when I was in Biloxi, Mississippi, I had, this California boy, for the first time, had crawfish.

And the last night, I went to the, oh, shoot, I can't think of the name of the restaurant right now. I went to the restaurant, and I had me four pounds, I shared four pounds of crawfish, boiled potatoes, and sausage from Cajun Steamer.

So if you're in Nashville, you live near Franklin, go to Cajun Steamer, it's fantastic. And one last thing, just gonna throw this out there. We are bringing in some fun products. We have a Truss Crest and Calm Down coasters.

I mean, I'm ready to get me one of them now.

I don't know when they'll be available, if they will, but we've got them, and it's kinda cool. Justin, that has nothing to do with what we're talking about. As a matter of fact, it's very absent from the very thing that we wanna talk about.

So please, take us right into this subject of stop taking Jesus out of the Bible.

Law and Gospel, Covenant Theology, and Christ at the Center

We talk about stuff on the show that, the stuff that's going on in our minds and hearts, like stuff going on in our churches, things we're preaching through, things we're learning, things we're studying, conversations that we're having with members of our churches or other people.

Those things often serve as fodder for episodes on Theocast. I mean, that's normal, I think, because we're Christians living the Christian life in our respective churches, and we're also surveying the landscape of Christianity in our day, and that's, I don't know, in one sense, easy to do with Christian social media.

A lot that could be said about Christian social media. But you can observe things, trends and hot topics and discussions and debates that are going on. So those things also inform us here, in terms of what we're talking about on the show.

Today's episode is really birthed out of some social media stuff and what that's produced by way of conversation and thoughts and the like. So this past weekend, one of the guys on, the other guy on our staff who was preaching on Sunday, he posted this on Saturday night.

Christian pastors, if you don't preach the law and extol the mercy and grace of Christ tomorrow, you're not preaching a Christian sermon. The gospel is news of what Christ has done and who we are in him by grace through faith.

And then he adds a little P .S., this is also what is to be found in the Lord's table. Now, I wholeheartedly agree with what this guy wrote. I know you do too, John. That post sparked a lot of controversy and debate and interaction on social media, not surprising.

And the interaction and the objection to that, that if you're not preaching law and you're not extolling mercy and grace, the mercy and grace of Christ, you're not preaching a Christian sermon, the main response is like, well, maybe we should let the text drive our preaching because law and gospel are not in every passage.

And good expositors know that is effectively the response. I'm just trying to, I'm putting it charitably. And that was, so that was that. So this obviously has sparked some conversation amongst our elders, amongst our staff.

And John and I today, when we get on, like we always do, we're talking about what we're thinking about and what we're wrestling with, whatever, what's going on in life.

So I was sharing this with him. I just have to cut in real quick. It is interesting how we both take turns. I'll come into the office super hot about something I wanna talk about and you're like, great, let's do it.

And today I literally on my drive in goes, I don't know what we're gonna talk about today. And then you're like, I got it.

And I was like, let's do it. Yeah, so I've kind of said this all in a personal sense. Like here's what's going on in our world here in Asheville. And I've shared this with John and here's what I'm seeing on social media.

I'm just an observer. I didn't put the post up, which is why I'm a little more happy to talk about it. I'm just observing this and I am struck. I am concerned and in good ways, man, I am, I'm irked. I'm indignant about the fact that so many people who are evangelicals, who are Calvinists, who would maybe self-professedly be reformed, at least as they understand themselves, who mean to take the Bible seriously and all this kind of stuff, wig out over historical reform categories like law and gospel or the redemptive historical framework of scripture with Christ at the center.

And in the name of good exegesis, in the name of a grammatical historical approach to the Bible or whatever it may be, using very pious sounding language, effectively are saying you need to be careful about preaching Christ or seeing Christ in all the scriptures.

Yeah, yeah. And I am convinced, John, that that has massive fallout for everybody that's listening to this podcast because we have all grown up and cut our teeth in an evangelical context where we have not been taught to positively go to the scriptures and read all of it in light of Christ and his work.

Read it in terms of law and gospel, right? Read it in terms of covenant theology. We've not been taught that and oftentimes have positively been encouraged or maybe I might put it in the negative, have been discouraged from doing so.

Man, there's so much to be said here. I think so people understand what we're trying to do. Part of Theocast, and you're gonna learn about this later, but GRN, Grace Reform Network Churches, we are trying to clarify and in many ways uncover what has been cluttered by evangelicalism, by modern Christianity.

And we have put us at the center of our hermeneutic, our science of interpretation, the way in which we read the Bible. We put us at the center of that and we've removed Jesus and kind of put him at the background, which is kind of the reason why we titled it Stop Taking Jesus Out of the Bible.

What ends up happening is this. I've seen this recently on the Facebook group as well. It's like, I don't have any type of tradition. I just take the Bible for what it is. Well, I am very thankful for that.

There are definitely traditions in history that have been wrong and have interpreted the scripture wrong and we shouldn't use those. Those are bad. But when it comes down to studying scripture, when you say, well, I just take the Bible at face value, I just read it in its original context of what it means, the danger in that is that you assume that you're gonna interpret it correctly in absence of the rest of scripture.

And this is what I mean by that. There are traditions that have been handed down to the church in, what I mean by traditions, traditions are a good thing, they're not a bad thing, traditions in how we have understood and interpreted the Bible.

In other words, the word trinity is a word that's been handed down throughout the ages as a very good, solid way of understanding God. And thankfully it was brought to us early on in Christianity and basically if you deny the trinity and our historic understanding of that word, you are no longer orthodox.

The word gospel, unfortunately, is a great word we use as well, but at times it can get cluttered and it can be changed. I mean, the Mormons will say they believe in the gospel. Seventh-day Advent, I mean, there's different, I would say not Christian denominations that would hold to the word gospel, but they don't mean the same thing that we do.

So one of the things that's important, and this is why we say confessional perspective, is that a confession is examinable. I can look at it and tell you right or wrong. When someone says, I just believe the Bible, there's nothing to examine there and therefore you cannot determine.

Whether it is right or wrong. And to be confessional, just wanna say this and we'll talk about it maybe another time, we hold to the confession because it's biblical. It's important that we say it that way.

We're not like, well, we use the confession in as much as it's biblical. That's actually not what we mean. We mean, no, we are confessional and we use this confession and confess this confession because it's biblical.

That's important.

It is. So to kind of capstone what I'm saying, a lot of what we learned from tradition in history about Bible interpretation, so when we interpret God's word, we aren't the first, I mean, I love this quote from Spurgeon.

We take so much great confidence in the spirit, giving us insight to interpreting the word of God, but we seem to lack confidence in others who've interpreted the word of God by means of the spirit before us.

And we tend to just throw that all out the window, which is not safe. So when we talk about a law gospel distinction or the confessions, which is where we learn law gospel distinction throughout history, that has been examined and has been pulled apart and has been shown time and time to be biblical.

And that is why it's a proper hermeneutic to use because it's not new and it hasn't been pulled apart and attacked. I'm okay with, Justin, I'm okay with people using different wording or different phrasing or different titles to help us explain theology.

I'm okay with that, right? If you're gonna say, well, this is like the internet, or this is like a car, I'm okay with that. But the thing is, is that it can't contradict what's come before. And if it is, then we should have a problem.

Yeah, and I'm just gonna do this really quickly because it might help, especially those who are newer. When we talk about, for example, a law and gospel distinction, we mean that there is law and gospel in the Old Testament.

There's law and gospel in the New Testament. And the law are in any portion of the Bible or the things that we read that we would need to do for righteousness before God. Do these things and you'll live forever.

That kind of language. Do these things and you'll be blessed. That kind of language. You'll be accepted. Right. Gospel, on the flip, is completely the unconditional promise of God grounded in the grace of God.

It's what God gives us through the person and work of Jesus Christ. We simply receive that by faith. That's gospel. And so we understand that the scriptures contain law and gospel, and that it's appropriate to go to any portion of the scripture with that framework in mind.

And that's helpful to us in understanding the scripture. The same could be said of a redemptive historical framework of the Bible with Jesus at the center. What does that mean? It means that the scripture, first and foremost, is a revelation of God's work in history to redeem, and all of it centers on the person and work of Jesus Christ who accomplished that redemption.

That's the main point. And so what we're contending for is that we would go to any passage of the Bible with these tools in our backpack so that we interpret any passage of the Bible in light of that main point, that is redemption through Christ and the coming of Christ to redeem.

And we would also go to any passage of the scriptures and understand that the law of God that is holy, upright, and good, that we can't keep as fallen men in Adam is revealed in all of the Bible, as is the gospel revealed in all of the Bible, namely the promises of God to save us through Christ.

And we want to understand any passage in the whole thing in light of these great truths. Or we are prone, as Martin Lloyd-Jones said, if you don't understand the whole, you are going to do terrible things with the parts.

That's true. So you need to understand the whole of the Bible from these historical, tried-and-true perspectives. Redemptive historical framework, law and gospel, covenant theology, those things, so that you don't blow it up.

You know, when you go to a part of the Bible and then interpret it here and do bad things with it. We don't want to do that.

Go ahead. No, that's why Paul says that the elders cannot be novices. And I think in many ways, he says they have to be able to properly defend the gospel and all of scripture, right? To be able to give a defense of the hope that lies within you, and you have to do that from all of scripture.

And so we're going to get into some dangers here and some examples of what we mean by this by multiple sources. But a lot of what Theocast is about is that we are trying to say a lot of the frustration and the confusion is happening because we're ignoring tried-and-true, sound biblical structure and theology that's been handed down to us to help us to interpret rightly how the Bible is supposed to be understood.

Yeah, and our podcast, so much of what we talked about, have talked about over the years, and so much of what people have gravitated toward over the years is we aim to herald Christ and his sufficiency, and we aim to point the center to Christ, not themselves.

And that's a historical reformed posture, extranos, right? We're looking outside of ourselves to Christ always, and that's all we're trying to do here. But we have observed, along the lines of what we're talking about today, John, you go to many, many, many evangelical church services.

You go to many church services in places or in churches that would even claim to be Calvinistic, and you go in there, and there's a lot of things said about God and his sovereignty and all of these kinds of things and his holiness and his mercy and his grace, maybe as well, but then there's a lot said about us and how we need to live and our sincerity and our reverence and all of these kinds of things.

And with all due respect, you go and you hear all this stuff, and you're kind of like, like you said earlier before we recorded, you're like, where's Waldo? You know, like, where's Christ? That's right.

We ought not have that takeaway. When we gather on the Lord's day, this is just an indication of a systemic problem, right? When we gather on the Lord's day, if you're asking the question, like, where is Christ for me?

Where's Christ for me in what we're doing today? Corporate worship. That's evidence of a real problem underneath in terms of our theological framework and grounding, because we're not understanding that the scripture ultimately, according to Christ himself and according to the apostles, is a testimony about Jesus.

Moses, the law, the prophets, the writings, it's all a testimony about Christ. And we're clearly not understanding that well when we go to church and we're having to ask ourselves, like, where is Christ for me in what we're doing?

And so that's sparking this too. And I think if you hear John and I passionate about this, it's because, my goodness, this is wrecking people. And this is why folks are exhausted. This is why people are discouraged.

This is why everybody's, like, deep down, if we're honest, we lack assurance. We're troubled. And God, oftentimes we struggle to see God as benevolent and loving and merciful and gracious because we've been so often presented with a God that's harsh.

And man, it's just not helpful, dude.

The Bible as the Biography of Jesus

No, no, it's not. So let's definitely jump into some issues here that we might show as examples. And these are just so that you can understand maybe giving some clarity on what we mean as far as preaching Christ and all the scripture.

You know, I'm okay with you one of using different titles. You know, Justin and I, when we talk about, like, if someone asked me what is the point of the Bible, I would say a covenant of redemption. It's a promise between the Father and the Son and the Spirit that they would save sinners.

And well, how do you defend that? I said, well, when God creates the world, what happens to Adam and Eve? They step into the trap and they break the covenant that God had made with them, the promise. However you want to word it, I don't care.

But there was a promise, do this. And how do we know it's live? Because later, Paul says, where the first Adam failed, the second Adam succeeded and brought many sons to glory. Where Adam would have obeyed, he would have entered into glory with the Father.

And what's the first promise that we get in Genesis 3? That from Eve is coming the Messiah, right? And how do we know that? Because of further revelation. So we know when the story begins, the promise of Jesus is in the beginning of the story.

Well, you just mentioned the covenant of redemption.

That was made before the world began. That's right. So we get the kind of flashback to before scene one. And we read of this in Ephesians one and many, many other places where even Jesus, while he's on earth, is talking about coming to do what his father and he and his father agreed on or the work, the charge that my father's given me and all this.

It's like, well, where does this come from? This comes from before the ages began. So that's, your point is entirely made. How do you guys defend understanding all the Bible to be about that? It's like, well, because God said that.

And God said that before he made anything. And then that literally, that redemption is what is playing itself out on the stage of history in time and space.

Well, it's almost like act two. You know, if you've ever seen any of the Avengers or any kind of movie that's got a part one, part two, right? What do they do at the beginning? They kind of go back and do a replay.

But they also will kind of loop in some new information. Well, when we're getting about act two, this is like the church age and the return of Christ. And, you know, Paul is introducing kind of like, all right, this is, before we get into what act two is, let me give you a reminder of what act one was.

And then he gives us a recap. He doesn't really give us anything new, but he kind of concludes it in a way where he adds in a different flavor, a different thought and perspective. And he's like, by the way, this whole thing that happened, yeah, that was predetermined before the world began, just so you know.

And his recap is helpful because then you can stop and go, oh, wait, well, let's go back and read it again because that's gonna kind of change the perspective here. It's gonna, I wouldn't say change it.

That's not a fair word. It's gonna bring some high level of clarity. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called Faith Versus Faithfulness, A Primer on Rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a Reformed confessional perspective.

You can get your free copy at theocast .org slash primer.

Reading the Old Testament in Light of Christ

So one of the charges that's often levied against us and other Reformed people is that we don't read the Old Testament the way we should. We are always reading it in light of Christ and trying to see types and shadows of Christ throughout the Old Testament.

And we're reading the Old Testament understanding that Christ is the point of it. And people object to that. And they're like, well, you know, I mean, when the Old Testament was written by such and such author, he didn't have full understanding of what Christ would come and do.

And so we need to emphasize original authorial intent. We need to deal with the words on the page and what people would have understood at the time and all this kind of thing. And we need to preach it that way to which we would say with all due respect, that makes no sense.

When Christ himself has showed up and has said it was all about me. And then when the apostles from Paul to John to James to the writer of Hebrews, make it very clear that all of this was about Christ and all of this finds it's yes and amen in Christ.

And we need to, the apostles understand the Old Testament this way. So that is our argument in reply is always that, look, we're not trying to be irresponsible with the scriptures. We're trying to be faithful to the Bible.

And in being faithful to the Bible, we need to read it like Jesus understood it. And we need to read it like the apostles understood it and wrote about it.

So sometimes people think that, we're picking this fictitious boogeyman that's out there or it's this obscure section of Christianity that nobody ever pays attention to. And unfortunately that's not the case.

So a lot of very influential. Calvinistic. Calvinistic. Evangelical guys. Are definitely leading pastors and teachers and just those who read their Bibles in this direction. And we just wanna offer just some, a perspective that says maybe this isn't being presented historically the way, maybe there's some misunderstanding.

And so we wanna try and offer some clarity just so people understand, this isn't us offering our wisdom. This isn't us offering our interpretation. We're actually trying to defend the interpretation that's been handed down for like hundreds of years.

So this is not new. We're looking to the apostles.

We're looking through the history of the church as the church has understood these things. And we're just in our generation, in our day, humbly and sincerely trying to stand on the wall and point some things out.

So just like a 30 second overview, and then I'm gonna get into some objections here. I think it's fair to say, if you're reading Genesis 3 .15, you have to ask the question, well, who's the man? Who's the seed?

Who's the promise seed? Who is he? And then all you do is you start reading about how God brings about the people and then eventually the Messiah. And then you go to the New Testament. And if you don't conclude that that's how it's supposed to be done, Jesus says, the Old Testament is about me.

The law and prophets are about me. Peter and Paul, I know. They're so big. The apostles use that very hermeneutic saying, if you go back and read the Old Testament, you should conclude that they are the progressive knowledge and purpose of Christ and his work.

That's what that is about.

I mean, you already said it. I mean, Paul connects Adam and Christ. So you have, from the very beginning with the creation of humanity, you know, you've got Jesus there. I mean, like in view, you've got the promise in Genesis 3 .15.

You've got the promise to Abraham that through his offspring, the whole world's gonna be blessed. You've got the Mosaic covenant and everything that that entails, the sacrificial system and all of it, right?

Like the priesthood and the day of atonement and the Passover. You got all this stuff. And then you got David and everything that goes. All of this, dude. It's like, how would we go to that? Having the New Testament revelation, understanding that from the jump to the end, Christ is in view.

How would we then go to any portion of the scripture and not seek to understand it in light of that reality, that Christ is in view in the whole thing? That's our

Let me just state it this way, Justin. Our position. The Bible is the biography of Jesus. That is what it is. Because think about it. When you've ever read a biography, sometimes you have to start with the back train, like where their family history is.

But you always understand, you're reading about this person. The whole thing is about this person. And I find it safe to say, the Bible from beginning to end, Jesus is the creator and sustainer of the world.

And he is the one who comes and restores all things in revelation. Everything was made through him and for him. And so everything in between is about him. And so it is safe to say that it doesn't matter where you are in the text, you can stop and say, where am I in the biography of Jesus?

Where am I in the story of Christ? It is safe to say that.

Why Christ Must Not Be Removed from the Whole Bible

All right, I'm gonna go ahead and, I'm gonna aim to not be punchy in a bad way, but I'm gonna say it. I'm just gonna say the things, right? And hope that people receive this well and that it's helpful.

Right. So I'm just gonna begin. Our biggest concern, as we've alluded to in the titles there, and we've already been kind of talking around it, is that when people jettison or object to these historical categories, what ends up happening is you, with the best of intentions, end up removing Christ from vast portions of the Bible.

And you actually end up encouraging people to do that. So like, for example, referencing back again to like the whole social media thing that started this whole thing off, what happened this weekend, and you've got people replying to posts about preaching the law and then the mercy and the grace of Christ, we need to do that to preach a Christian sermon.

And people are like, yeah, we shouldn't do that because law and gospel aren't in every passage. That's the argument. The argument is, if you guys use these tools, law and gospel distinction or covenant theology or redemptive historical framework, pick your thing, you guys are gonna end up forcing the Bible into your categories and you're gonna manipulate the text and you're not gonna be faithful to the text.

That's the argument. All right, let me respond to that really quickly. And I'm not trying to be a sarcastic guy here, but I'm gonna say it this way. If the argument is, don't preach Christ that way from all the scriptures, or don't preach law and gospel from all the scriptures because those things are not in every passage and we shouldn't read them into it or shouldn't force it in there or whatever the argument is.

If the argument is it's not in there, then you shouldn't say it. Okay, reason with me for a minute. The book of Esther, I'm just gonna pick some low hanging fruit here. The book of Esther, famously, the name of God is not in it.

So my question to these people who would object to a law gospel distinction or Christ in all scripture, because, oh, it's not in the text. So, okay, well, are you gonna talk about God when you preach through Esther?

Are you gonna read Esther and see God underneath and behind it all? And the answer is like, well, yeah, of course we're gonna see God. Of course we're gonna preach God because God is underneath and behind everything.

Exactly. Genesis 37 and following, the life of Joseph, the Lord's name is hardly at all mentioned. Are we gonna preach God? Are we gonna read God when we read about Joseph? Well, of course we will, brother, because God is behind and underneath everything.

Exactly. Today, John, I spoke in the chapel at the school that my kids go to, chapel service. I'm on the rotation this spring where every guy, each time you're up, we've divided it up. There are these topics from Proverbs that we're talking about.

And we're trying to do this in a way that's Christ-centered. That's over here. Today, I was assigned with speaking on riches from Proverbs. And I had a number of verses that I ended up reading just to give the kids an understanding of, under some headers, here's kind of how Proverbs talks about riches and poverty and whatever.

My question to a Christian person or a Christian preacher who's going to speak about riches from Proverbs, you gonna talk about God? Because his name ain't in it. You gonna talk about the good news? You gonna talk about the gospel?

Because it ain't there. Or are you just gonna literally say things about riches and poverty that any reasonable secular person would agree with, that every Muslim's gonna agree with, and every Jew on this planet's gonna agree with?

Is that what you're gonna do and call it Christian? That's right. I don't think so. That's right. You're gonna say things about the Lord, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. You're gonna say things about Jesus and the gospel.

Why would you do that? Because you understand that underneath everything that Proverbs is revealing is the God who is speaking through the scriptures and the God who planned to redeem sinners through the person and work of God the Son who took on flesh, whose name is Jesus.

And that's what we should do. And so I'm just trying to point out the irony and the inconsistency of this argument. Well, if it's not in the text, you shouldn't talk about it. It's like, well, then there are a lot of sermons.

There are a lot of passages where you should never talk about God because he's not there verbatim. He's not on the page. And there are plenty of sermons. You talk a lot about our obedience and our sincerity.

Well, that's not on the page either. That's right. And you're talking about that. And that's apparently all okay. But then as soon as we say we need to preach Christ and we need to preach law and gospel, you jump off the rooftops and scream, that's poor hermeneutics and leads to bad preaching.

Rant over. Are you excited about this? I am. I care about this, John. And I don't care what people think about me or you. I don't. No, and it's fine. I care that the saints get the good news, man.

Christ is muted, you know, and it is sad. It is sad to see that. And I understand people are trying to be faithful to the text. You know, Joseph, one of the things that happens in Christianity, all of Christianity is about responding and overreaction, right?

I deal with this in my own life. We always respond and overreact. I'll just mention this now. I mean, we just watch, I mean, I didn't watch it. It showed up on my newsfeed, but you know, Will Smith gets up and he slaps Chris Rock, right?

And then later on, Will Smith says, hey, I overreacted. Well, this happens a lot in humanity. We just do this. We just overreact and we stop and we don't contemplate what we have done until kind of the act is done.

And then sometimes we defend it because we're so arrogant and prideful, we defend our actions and we shouldn't have. So when I'm thinking about this, we had mentioned this earlier, there was a hermeneutic early on in, during the early periods of interpretation in church history, where men, faithful, godly men, were trying to understand scriptures and they were excited to see Christ in scriptures.

And so they would allegorize the text in such a way where they were making conclusions about Jesus that seemed a little far stretched. In other words Yeah, farfetched for sure. Yeah, it's like, well, I'm not sure that's the original intentions of the author or of the text in general.

And so they would make conclusions about Jesus from the Old Testament that I would say, those who criticize them had fair criticisms. Absolutely. Right, well, allegorizing the text has been an accusation against the hermeneutic of the Reformation, a hermeneutic that Justin and I hold to, that we are not taking the text literal, that we're allegorizing it.

We're putting Jesus into the text where it should not be. And that is not the truth. We do not allegorize the text. We're not trying to make applications from the text that do not fit with the whole arching story.

The whole arching story of the Bible is redemption. It's God redeeming sinners. And so our application should fit inside of that. And I think it's fair that if any part of the text we can ask ourselves, where are we in light of the redemption of sinners?

And what should be our response to that as far as faith in Christ? Two probably main sources that I wanna reach to right now that are new, so these aren't old, these are new. They're still on their websites.

We'll put the links in our show notes. One of them is from a very well-known expository seminary. Most of you who've listened to this podcast probably know this name, John MacArthur Seminary, the Master's Seminary.

One of the professors at the Master's College wrote for the seminary an article. His name is Abner Chow, and in this article, the title of it is, Is Christ in Every Verse? To which we would say, if you're going to say from an allegorical stance, then no.

We were gonna agree with you that Jesus isn't meant to be seen as far as in every word that is there as far as it's about specifically his personage. You know what I'm saying, Justin? I do. But that does not say that Jesus isn't the point of every verse, at which we would make that argument for sure, and you can go and read the argument.

But the conclusion that he makes in this particular statement and what he's arguing for, I think he's fighting against an allegorical interpretation of scripture, to which I would say that interpretation hasn't existed for a very, very long time.