Sunday Night, June 28, 2020 PM

We may know who you are and worship you correctly and rejoice in our Savior, Jesus Christ. It's in his name that we pray. Amen. All right, so tonight is Q &A. It is the fourth Sunday of the month, so in addition to having Truth Group after the service, we also have our Q &A time.

So if anybody has any questions that they have been pondering through their study of the Word of your Bible, yearly Bible reading and so on, that you would like to ask or some doctrinal question that you've been pondering, then now is the night to discuss it.

We'll read the Word together and talk about the answer. I'll start off with one question that came my way via email, not necessarily anything directly about the Bible or anything, but there was a question about Pilgrim's Progress and what version would be my favorite version.

Well, my favorite one was the one with pictures. It was the young Pilgrim's Progress, you know, and it had the first part and the second part when Christian's family also go to the celestial city and Great Heart was there to guide them, and I really enjoyed that when I was growing up.

I've often referenced the original, just because I have access to it. I can copy-paste it out of my Bible program, and there are several modern English versions so you don't have to wade through the King's English, and it makes it a little bit more clear for you.

Some of those are abridged, and so they don't have the whole content in there, but I believe there's one called the Pilgrim's Progress in Modern English, and you can buy it online. I don't know any bookstores that carry it, and I think that one does have the footnotes for the scriptures that Bunyan paired with his allegory.

So, and that to me is probably the most valuable part of the Pilgrim's Progress is to be able to kind of see what kind of scriptures he was employing in his work. Okay, any other questions? Yes? I have no idea what kind of what the furnace looked like.

The Furnace in Daniel 3

Yeah, so when it says that they were cast in, he ordered before they were thrown in that they would make the furnace extremely hot, verse 22, and that the flame of the fire slew those men who carried up Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, and then we hear that they fell, verse 23, into the midst of the furnace of blazing fire, still tied up.

So obviously this is some kind of pit, right? So they carried them up. They had to climb up from wherever they arrested these men when they were before the king, so you had the idea that they have to ascend to a certain height to be able to throw them in, and of course when you're climbing up above a fire, a flame that has been ignited and fueled to go very, very hot, it makes sense that the men would have died in that flame.

And so in verse 24, then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astounded and stood up in haste, and he said to his high officials, was it not three men that we cast bound into the midst of the fire? So somehow he was sitting when he saw the four men still alive, three men that he threw in still alive and walking around, and then there was another one, a fourth.

So this is why you see in the illustrations and people's imaginations, they're trying to take some of these visual clues and they'll have Nebuchadnezzar looking through like some sort of iron grate or something, looking into the flame and seeing figures walking about, but that they had to go up on top to throw them in.

So just because of some of those visual clues, that's what people come up with, but I have no idea. But somehow he was able to see them from when he was sitting down. The reason why he stood up was because he saw something he did not expect.

So best we can do with that. Also, in verse 26, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego came out of the midst of the fire. Somehow there was a path out of it, and usually in a pit of death you don't make stairs to get out.

So there must have been some sort of in and out on the ground level where Nebuchadnezzar was sitting to witness the demise of his enemies. That's a good question. Anyone else? Yes. Right, so in this proverb, and again, very often we have the proverbs, these sentences, as they're often called, they come somewhat standalone and they don't necessarily transfer the thought to the next verse, but sometimes they do, and then very often they're thrown together.

They could be standalone sentences, but they have a thematic connection between those that were compiled. So I believe we're in the section for the men of Hezekiah. Yes, so chapter 25 begins a new section.

These also are the Proverbs of Solomon, which the men of Hezekiah, King of Judah, transcribe. Okay, so in verse 12 we read, a prudent man sees evil and hides himself. The naive, or the simple, it's very often translated, the simple proceed and pay the penalty.

Okay, so the prudent man is going to be thinking about these things, thinking ahead, and trying to make wise decisions, and he's going to avoid evil. But the naive or the simple just go barreling straight through, and they're going to pay the penalty.

Now it says, take his garment when he becomes surety for a stranger. Now it sounds to me that it is connected to the previous verse, speaking of the simple or the naive. It could just be relative to, take the garment of the one who becomes surety for a stranger.

It could just be self-contained there in verse 13, but at least the translators here seem to connect it to the naive, to the simple one. In Proverbs, you have those who are naive and simple, they just, they don't understand, they've not been educated, they've not been guided along, and they have need to learn wisdom.

And there really is, there, obviously the naive suffer for their misunderstanding of the, or lack of understanding, but they're not the same as the fool. The fool is different qualitatively from the naive and the simple.

The fool does know. The fool knows better and does it anyway. Okay, that's the difference between a fool and being ignorant, all right? Being ignorant won't, it might get you killed, but it won't get you damned.

The fool, the fool is the one who knows better and then rejects the truth and goes dead against it anyway, okay? So take his garment, the naive or the simple, take his garment when he becomes surety for a stranger, and for an adulterous woman, hold him in pledge.

So the prudent man sees the evil and hides himself, he avoids it, but the simple just go chucking straight through. Now, what does he might, what does he do? Well, he becomes surety for a stranger. Now, what does that mean, become surety for a stranger?

Well, he's entering into some sort of legal agreement when he's liable for someone he does not know. A stranger in this case is going to be somebody whose character is not known or not well-known, somebody who's not been established in the community, somebody who is, who could be anybody.

Like, for instance, Joshua and the children of Israel became surety for strangers. After they had their victories at Jericho and the temporary setback at Ai, but then they defeated Ai, soon after that, the men of what city?

Gibeon? The Gibeonites? They came and they pretended like they were from very far away. They're dressed in rags, moldy bread, and so on, and they had done it up just to fool them. And they came and they said, we're from very, very far away, you can see by all this evidence, and we know that you're very powerful, and we're not really of this area, but we want to get into an agreement with you, an alliance with you, a covenant with you, that if we're ever attacked, that if there's ever any kind of problem, then we'll come to your aid, or you'll come to our aid, and so on and so forth.

Well, you know, Israelites are big stuff now, they've had two big victories in the land, and so now obviously it's time to start making alliances with people outside the land, they think. But they didn't consult the Lord, and they became surety for the Gibeonites, who were soon attacked by their jealous neighbors who had found out what they did.

And so Joshua and the elders led Israel to become surety for a stranger. The prudent man would have seen the evil and avoided it, but they played it very simple and naive, didn't they? And now they're legally bound to go, and God turned it for good, because they were able to destroy many of the enemies of God through defending the Gibeonites.

But still, in this case, the naive is somehow surety for a stranger. You have no idea who this person is, okay? Take his garment when he becomes surety for a stranger. Why would you take his garment? He's about to lose it.

He's about to lose the shirt off his back, right? He's about to lose the shirt off his back because he just became surety for a stranger. He's about to get taken. So go ahead and take his shirt before it gets taken from him, and then it'll come back to you after he's been robbed of all that he has, and then you can give it back to him with a little lesson.

Come on, man. Think more clearly what you're doing next time. Here's your shirt back. Aren't you glad I took it from you? Okay? Also, for an adulterous woman, hold him in pleasure. For a strange woman, hold him in pledge.

So if I understand this correctly, if he's getting involved with an adulterous woman, then somehow keep him from proceeding any further by basically arresting him in some fashion, all right? No, you're too busy to go do that, okay?

You're committed over here, and in this way you're watching out for the naive and the simple. If you don't do something to set him up for success, he's definitely going to go plunging straight into disaster.

So that's the idea. And the did say in the Levitical Law about if a man says, look, I owe you so much, tell you what, I'll work for you three days and pay off the debt. How's that sound? You say, okay, that's fine, but I need to make sure that you're going to come back and, I mean, that you're gonna actually work the whole three days.

And so you take his cloak as a pledge, okay? You take his cloak as a pledge, and so at the end of the day, when it gets night and it's getting cool out and he needs to go to sleep, you don't say, well, I'm gonna hold on to that cloak until the full, no, you go ahead and say, all right, here's your back, you can sleep, but you come back tomorrow, okay?

And so that that you're referring to is, sometimes that happens too. Yeah, yeah, some sort of signal of who it was. Yes. All right, so two different translations of chapter 4, verse 5, okay? So it says, or do you think that the Scripture speaks to no purpose, he jealously desires the Spirit, capital S, which he has made to dwell in us?

Optional translation is, or do you think he, that the Scripture speaks to no purpose, the Spirit which he has made to dwell in us lusts with envy? Okay, so there's two ways of reading this verse. Either this verse is saying that the Scriptures tell us that God breathed the breath of life into Adam, okay?

God gave us a spirit, God breathed, we have an inner man, we're alive in a way that no other creature is alive, and because of sin, it is full of lusts and envy. So that'd be one translation. The other one, another way to translate the same Greek words is, he jealously desires the Spirit which he has made to dwell in us, meaning that God is jealous, he has made, he's making us into his temple, right, and the Holy Spirit indwells the temple, and even as God was jealous that no false gods be worshipped in the temple, or anywhere else for that matter, but certainly in the temple, so also God is jealous for his Spirit who dwells in us.

Now both of those renderings would be equally illuminating to the rest of the text, which begins in verse 1, what is the source of quarrels and conflicts among you? Is it not the source of your pleasures that wage war in your members?

You lust and do not have, so you commit murder, you are envious and cannot obtain, so you fight and quarrel, you do not have because you do not ask, you ask and do not receive because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend it on your pleasures.

You adulteresses, do you not know that friendship with the world is hostility toward God, therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God, and then verse 5. Okay, so which one goes better?

I would really like to know exactly what scripture James has in mind that he's quoting, and that is not exactly clear, but he's basically saying this is the witness of the scriptures, this is what the Holy Scriptures tell us, these are the facts, and of course we do know that the scriptures say God breathed the breath of life into us, and that our inner man is evil and depraved, that God looked upon the hearts of man and there was only evil continually in Genesis and other places, so we have that.

We also know that scriptures tell us that God is a jealous God, so which one would be the better rendering? And that's basically the question. Well, having established the fact already in verses 1 through 3, that the inner man is full of envious and lustful desires, that's already been established, and then coming to a new thought in verse 4, that whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God, I think then that the rendering where it speaks of the Holy Spirit himself makes more sense, in that he's backing up the fact that there is no happy alliance between friendship with the world and friendship with God.

Why is that? Because God is a jealous God, and he jealously desires the spirit whom he has made to dwell in us. So that's why I would read it in that way, but it could very well be the other one. Sure.

And that's the reason why, so you can, so obviously it fits with the context both ways, and then you don't have a specific actual quote, and so you're kind of scrambling, and people have very good reasons for reading it one way or the other, for both are true.

I just think in the end of verse 4 where it says, you know, hey, you can't be the friend of the world and the friend of God at the same time. Why is that? Because God is a jealous God. God is not a lackadaisical, I'll approve whatever you want to do kind of God, but he gives a greater grace, therefore it says God is opposed to the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Any other questions for tonight? Yes, for the red. Hank Snow, I'd rather be on the inside looking out, so y 'all can look that up, be blessed. A little culture from red. I also got a little note from red earlier about our reading from Samuel.

The belligerent Philistine from Gath aroused the Almighty's wrath. Little Dave slung a stone through the hulker's head bone too deep for his osteopath. A little more culture for you. I want to make a couple of observations at the end of Genesis 49 so that we'll be ready for Genesis 50 next time the Lord wills for us to come together.

And as soon as we get done with Genesis, we're going to direct our attention to applying a biblical worldview to a lot of the the mess of our pressing time. So I think it'll be good for us to kind of look at some of the headlines and the summer reruns, also known as the news, and talk about what in the world is going on from a biblical perspective.

Benjamin the Ravenous Wolf and the Future of the Tribes

So in Genesis chapter 49, we left off at verse 26. So at verse 27, we have the last blessing that Jacob gives concerning his 12 sons, and it's the son Benjamin, his youngest. And it's very short, especially in comparison to his older brother Joseph just before, and it reads thus, Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, and the morning he devours the prey, and in the evening he divides the spoiled.

That's quite a contrast to Joseph's descendants in the previous few verses who are described by being blessed with the many blessings of God. And after all, Jacob put his favor upon Joseph and gave him the double portion, an equal allotment for Joseph's two sons, Ephraim and Manasseh.

In contrast to Joseph, Benjamin gets what he can however he can. We see that he's a ravenous wolf, in the morning he devours the prey, in the evening he divides the spoiled. His treasures are temporary, just morning to evening, in contrast to a more permanent, established type of blessing in Joseph's, which are described as the everlasting hills.

Everlasting hills versus from morning to evening. You can just sense the contrast there. And Benjamin indeed would be a fierce fighter throughout the history of Israel, brutally dispatching enemies. We see that in evidence by the judge who came from the tribe of Benjamin by the name of Ehud.

Ehud, Judges chapter 3, was my favorite story in the Bible growing up. It was one of the more gory, gruesome ones. I thought it was amazing the way Ehud took care of business. And Ehud was a Benjamite.

We also see kind of a negative side of the ferocity of Benjamin with the the Gibeonites and Judges 19 through 21, and how they defended the immorality of their own people, and they were almost wiped out as the other tribes rose up against Benjamin in a bloody civil war and decimated the tribe, leaving them with only 600 men left.

And interestingly, they had no women or children left, and they were on the brink of extinction. A whole tribe was going to be eliminated from Israel. And so in these days of the judges, when everyone did what was right in their own eyes, after all the people had already made a vow, we'll never give our daughters to them in marriage.

They said, well, what are we going to do? We can't lose one of the tribes. And so they said, here's what we're going to do. We're not officially condoning this, but there's this festival going on over in this particular area.

A bunch of eligible young ladies are going to be there, and you all just go raid and take whoever's available. And that's what they did. And so in the evening, they divided the spoil, and they went after the women.

A very chaotic time in the time of Israel. So when we're thinking about Benjamin, we see that he was a ravenous wolf. Again, he's set in contrast to Joseph, who was a fruitful bough. And so you have these two contrasting tribes and contrasting storylines.

Finally, we have the summary in verse 28. All these are the twelve tribes of Israel, and this is what their father said to them when he blessed them. He blessed them, every one with the blessing appropriate to him.

And we've seen that not only was this blessing appropriate to the character of the person involved, but also appropriate to what was to come. What was to come in the life of the descendants of that son, in the life of that tribe.

And we can see through the rest of Israel's history just how these things came to pass. So Jacob's last words to his sons, he prophesied over them, he blessed them, he spoke about their future, a future that was guaranteed by the promises of God, and now he's buried.

And verse 29, he charged them and said to them, I'm about to be gathered to my people. Bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hittite, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought along with the field from Ephron the Hittite for a burial site.

There they buried Abraham and his wife Sarah. There they buried Isaac and his wife Rebekah. And there I buried Leah. The field and a cave that is in it, purchased from the sons of Heth. When Jacob finished charging his sons, he drew his feet into the bed and breathed his last and was gathered to his people.

So we are reminded that Jacob, at the end, died as a man of faith. He died as a man of faith. He said, this is where I am to be buried. I'm gonna be buried where the rest of my family was buried, but it was a statement of faith.

This is the land God gave to us. This is where I want to be buried. And notice he says that he knew he would be gathered to his people before they buried him in the ground. At the very end, it says that he was gathered to his people when he breathed his last.

Well, who was he gathered to? He was laying there down in Goshen. He had not yet been buried with Abraham and Sarah, with their bones. He had not yet been buried with Isaac and Rebekah and Leah and their bones.

He was dead in Goshen in Egypt, but somehow he was already gathered to his people. So what does that mean, folks? To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord. And there he was with his people.

He was already with Abraham and Isaac. For I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Not I was, but God says he's the God of the living, not of the dead. And so Jacob was gathered to his people. He was gathered to Abraham and to Isaac and to Eber and to Noah.

He was gathered to Seth. He was gathered to Enosh. He was gathered to his people, the people of faith. So he died a man of faith. And that just reminds us that after we look at the contrast between Jacob's early life and the last bit of his life, what do we say?

But look what God did in the life of this man, this swindler, this heel-grabber, this supplanter, this cheater, this liar. And look what God did in his life to bring him to this point where, you know, 70 persons moved down to Egypt and he dies as a man of faith and gathered to his people.

And that's going to be the theme for really all of Genesis, and we'll see that next time in chapter 50. The theme is one of faith. By faith we understand that the worlds were created out of that which was unseen.

From Genesis 1 to the very end, we see Jacob die and even Joseph die. The theme is one of faith. All right, well, let's close with singing the doxology. A reminder, Truth Group, we're going to meet upstairs in my classroom since we have more folks.

Parents are invited to come along if you want for the lesson, and then we'll be gathering in the Fellowship Hall afterwards for the meal. Okay, anything else that we need to announce?