WWUTT 2400 Q&A Responding to Criticism, Pronouncing Bible Names, Chatting With AI

How can you read some of those big Bible names smoothly? What is

MyFaithChat? And is it a good idea for Christians to have these chatty conversations with AI?

The answers when we understand the text. Many of the

Bible stories and verses we think we know, we don't. When we understand the text is committed to teaching sound doctrine and rebuking those who contradict it.

Visit our website at www .wutt .com. Here once again is Pastor Gabe.

Thank you, Becky, who is not with me this week. I am flying solo, but still gonna respond to some of your questions here in a moment.

First, let's open with the Word of God. We're picking up where we left off last week, Proverbs 10, verses 15 to 17.

A rich man's wealth is his strong city. The poverty of the poor is their ruin.

The wage of the righteous leads to life. The gain of the wicked to sin.

Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof leads others astray.

Now, it's common for us to look at the Proverbs and think of every individual verse as its own proverb, especially when you get to chapter 10, but every verse still has a context.

There's a context to recognize even in Proverbs. So when we come to verse 15, it's easy to think that what we just read there is that it's better to be rich than to be poor.

A rich man's wealth is his strong city. Well, a guy who has a lot of money is able to defend himself against people who would try to take from him.

Whereas the poverty of the poor is their ruin. Yeah, a person who doesn't have anything, they're going to waste away in their poverty.

So you might make that common sense application to verse 15, but again, there's a context for us to recognize what's the verse that's right before it.

This is the verse that we read last week, verse 14. The wise lay up knowledge, but the mouth of a fool brings ruin near.

Well, we have the word ruin that shows up in both verses. So the person who lays up knowledge specifically is in pursuit of the knowledge of God, because remember at the start of Proverbs, Proverbs 1, 7, it says that the fear of the

Lord is the beginning of wisdom and knowledge. So we're seeking after the wisdom of God and those things that we can know about God or that he has made known to us through his word.

So the wise lay up knowledge, specifically they're after that which

God has revealed to us, but the mouth of a fool brings ruin near.

So this guy that's just listening to himself talk, he doesn't listen to what God says.

He thinks he is wise in his own eyes and ends up being his own ruin.

He will destroy himself because he wasn't willing to listen to anyone else's counsel. So considering this, that the wise man who lays up knowledge has stored up good treasure, but the mouth of a fool, and he's leaked out all of his good treasure.

He's left the gate open and it's all gone. And now he has come to ruin. So apply that to the next proverb.

A rich man's wealth is his strong city. What would his wealth be? He's rich because he has the wisdom and knowledge of God.

And it protects him from the devil schemes, from temptation, from somebody taking advantage of him.

Whereas the poverty of the poor is their ruin. This is the fool who would not listen to instruction, who did not seek the wisdom and knowledge of God.

And so he is impoverished. He does not have what God offers and supplies to those who would receive from him.

And so now it will be his ruin. Not being armed with the wisdom of God, he will be taken by the devil schemes and come to destruction.

So there's the relationship between those two proverbs and how we can take verse 15, which seems like a common sense practical application sort of a thing, but realize that it has more to do with the knowledge that God gives according to the context that we see in verse 14.

Now, having gone through that exercise, you can probably see the relationship easier between 16 and 17.

The wage of the righteous leads to life, the gain of the wicked to sin. And we have life show up in the next verse as well.

Whoever heeds instruction is on the path to life, but he who rejects reproof leads others astray.

Really, we have the same sort of theme going on there that we had in verses 14 and 15. So the wage of the righteous, that which he has earned by his good deeds, by doing that which is pleasing to the

Lord, it leads to life. The gain of the wicked, what has he earned?

Well, it leads to sin. And as you know from Romans 6 .23,

the wages of sin is death. Whoever heeds instruction, verse 17, is on the path to life.

Again, listening to the wisdom and knowledge of God, but he who rejects reproof, correction, or direction even, will lead others astray.

They will come to destruction and there'll be a bad influence on those people around them as well.

So there's the good word that we have from Proverbs today. Now let's get to some of your words.

You can send your questions to whenweunderstandthetext at gmail .com, or send us a voicemail.

Go to www .utt .com, click on that voicemail tab at the top of the page, and you can record a message to us either through your phone or your computer.

I believe it gives you a minute and a half to do that. I do have a couple of voicemail messages I'm not gonna get to this week.

I'm gonna wait until next week when Becky can be back on with me. But the first email that I have to get to is from Pablo, and he says, hey,

Pastor Gabe Hughes, I just found a negative review ranking high on Google under your name.

Since it's talking bad about you, I thought I'd reach out to see if you wanted someone to help you take it down or suppress it, let me know.

Well, Pablo, you may know more about this algorithm thing than I do. He took a screenshot of one of those negative search results, and it's from the

Spiritual Sounding Board. I'm familiar with this one. The headline is Pastor Gabriel Hughes and his rude tweet.

This is from January 13th, 2018. Goodness, seven years ago?

That's a long time ago. Let's see if I can remember this one. So when you go to the page, okay, so this is posted by a gal named

Julie Ann. I remember her. She has a survivor blog, and for a while, she made me kind of a hobby horse of such.

She was kind of tracking my tweets, their posts now, because it's not Twitter anymore. It's X. But she would follow my posts, and she would screenshot them and make comments about them and things like that.

So she screenshot this post, something that I said in January of 2018, and she posted it on her blog.

Now, in case you're not familiar with survivor blog, Julie Ann is somebody who went through something traumatic in her past.

Somebody did something to her. But the way that she's handling that is to lash out at usually pastors, especially those who believe what the

Bible says, that only men can be pastors, according to 1 Timothy 2, 11, through chapter three, verse seven.

It's there where Paul says, I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man.

Rather, she is to remain quiet. And he grounds that in the created order. Adam was formed first, then

Eve. When you get to chapter three, verses one through seven, and you have the qualifications for an overseer or a pastor in the church, it's very clearly talking about a man.

So only a man can be a pastor in a church, only a biblically qualified man,

I guess I should add that. So because I say that women cannot be pastors, again, in agreement with the scriptures,

Julie Ann was taking a shot at me. The post that I made on January 7th, 2018 was this, hardly any feminists who argue that women can be pastors actually want to be pastors themselves.

They all want that no one, including God, tell them what they can or cannot do.

Now, Julie Ann captioned this by saying, I'm just going to leave this here for discussion. I am very well aware that there are differing opinions on women as pastors, but beyond that, what does his tweet or his post say to you?

Now, Julie Ann has already made her thoughts about this known in the headline that she thinks my post was rude, but I don't have a problem with this.

Pablo, if you want to do something to try to, you know, take this out of the search results that it doesn't show up as high in the algorithm, you can, if you would like,

I'm not going to tell you not to, but if somebody comes across this and sees that comment, I still stand by what

I said, and I don't have a problem with that, but I appreciate you looking out for me, brother. This next email comes from Joanne.

So yeah, we were just talking about a Julie Ann, no relation here. So this is

Joanne who says the following, about my podcast, Hear the Word of the Lord, which is my

Bible reading podcast. Thank you so much for providing this wonderful resource to aid in Bible study.

First thing in the morning, I am following along in my Bible while I listen to you read.

Today's section was the genealogies of 1 Chronicles chapters one through three. I have often been amazed at the ease with which you read all the difficult

Bible names and wonder what goes on behind the scenes to prepare you for reading them without stumbling.

The second thing I've wondered about is do you ever want to stop reading and break into a teaching session over a passage?

I know that I've wanted that to happen many times. I listen to your daily podcast and often catch up on the latest what videos.

I am so grateful that God has blessed you with a wonderful wife and family and the skills to in turn bless so many people, which includes me,

Joanne from Georgia. Ma 'am, I thank you so much for sending that email. Okay, so how is it that I am able to rattle off all of these

Bible names so quickly, do it smoothly? What sort of preparation goes into that? Well, I do practice them.

So I will run through those sentences several times. And usually the recording that you hear, I've probably been through that chapter already four or five times.

So in case you're unaware, if I didn't set this up well, Hear the Word of the Lord is my other podcast, which is just Bible reading.

There's no music, there's no commentary. It's just reading through chapters of the Bible, usually about two to four chapters a day.

First Chronicles is where I am right now. This is without question the hardest portion of scripture to read, because for nine chapters, it's just these big

Bible Hebrew names. It does not really rattle off as easy as reading just about anything else in the narrative of scripture.

So these are some really difficult chapters to get through. How is it that I'm able to do that so quick and so smooth?

Well, like I said, I do, I rehearse that quite a bit. There's still a lot of stumbles though, because those names just don't come naturally to a

Western world English speaker. We're also not pronouncing them or enunciating them the same way that a

Jew would. Just take the name Yahweh, for example. So I just say Yahweh. Well, it's really pronounced something more like Yahweh.

And I'm not going to do a whole series of names in that fashion. I would wear out my throat pretty quick.

And you probably wouldn't want to hear it delivered that way either in our Western world accents.

That's not what we're used to hearing. It would be unusual to us. So I still read it in some of the

English fashion. I have certain rules that I've established that I follow, which has to do with the way that vowels and consonants are arranged.

When I see this particular arrangement, I know I'm going to pronounce it this way. So that's to establish a consistency.

Every time I see this grouping of letters, I'm always going to say it like this so that my pronunciation of the name is consistent every time.

I don't know that I've pulled it off consistently every time, but at least that's what I'm aspiring to. So there's rehearsal.

There's reading through it several times. There's also, I listen to somebody else say it.

So the ESV Bible app is really good with this. And the guy, I can't remember his name now.

I used to know it off the top of my head, but I don't have it now. Anyway, the guy who's the main reader on the

ESV Bible app, you can change it to like nine or 10 different readers, but the main guy reads slow enough that I can listen to him pronounce the words and then do it like he did.

However, I will say, I've not always agreed with his pronunciation. And if his pronunciation doesn't follow the rule that I've set for myself to remain consistency, then

I'm going to have to go with my rule instead of following the way that he says it.

There's differing opinions on the pronunciation of different things. So it's okay to take those kinds of liberties.

For example, I did a poll not long ago on social media in which I asked, how do you pronounce the name of the city

Capernaum, which is mentioned in all four gospels and was most likely the town that Jesus kind of had his base of operations in.

Whenever Jesus was traveling around Galilee and preaching, he was probably going in and out of Capernaum quite a bit.

So how do you pronounce that? Well, there are some people that say it just like I did, Capernaum, some people say Capernum, some people say

Capernaum. I think you could even go back to some of my earliest podcasts and that's the way I was enunciating it.

So there's different ways that that could be said and nobody's really wrong because the city is 2000 years old and how it was said in those days is probably much different than the way that we say it today.

So you can take some liberties with it in that sense. So there's practicing, there's listening to others say it, and then the third thing, and this is really the magic of the whole thing, editing.

There is plenty of editing. What you listened to me do when I read through that whole chapter, that was not one take.

I can tell you that right now. So thanks to the wonderful software that I'm able to use,

I can make the edits in there and you never hear my stumbles or my flubs and it just sounds like one smooth, consistent thing to where,

Joanne, even you were impressed. So I know that my editing was good. My reading through it was not as smooth as you might've thought it was, but my editing came out rather good.

Now I will say, cause I've gotten a couple of other emails about this regarding that podcast,

Hear the Word of the Lord. I have, I've gone like five days now without the latest episode.

So some people have emailed and said, what has happened? Something is going around Casa Grande right now, an allergen in the air,

I would imagine. And I am not able to hold on to my voice as easily.

Right now I'm doing actually rather well. If you listen to some of the podcast episodes from earlier in the week, you might notice probably about halfway through the episode and especially toward the end, my voice is starting to crack or it might even sound like I've increased my volume level cause

I've had to do that to compensate for the fact that I know I'm losing my voice. I don't know, again, I don't know if the air is dusty, if there's an allergen in the air or what it might happen to be, but I'm having a real hard time holding on to my voice holding on to my voice right now.

And that's affecting the Hear the Word of the Lord podcast. No, the names in First Chronicles have not been what's knocked me out.

It's been something in the air. So pray that I'm able to gain back my voice, gain enough strength in my voice that I can push through it and be able to record both podcasts.

You know, all the way up through 2 Samuel, I had all that recorded at the start of the year.

So when the year began, yeah, I was up through 2 Samuel and then I was recording 1 and 2

Kings. I did not even get to First Chronicles until last week. So this is part of the problem.

It's because of my voice having a difficulty holding onto those things. Pray for me and hopefully

I'll gain some strength back. I'm drinking a lot of water. So hydrating myself well also helps to strengthen my voice and help me to hold on to it for a long time.

All right, thank you so much for your question, Joanne. And I hope that was everything you were looking for.

This next one is from, this person's anonymous but goes by the name Outer Star Kicks.

He says, hello, Pastor Gabe. I am choosing to keep my real name private so you can just call me

Outer Star Kicks. I'm a freshman from Covina, California and I've been listening to your podcast since I was in fifth grade.

Wow, that is cool. Thank you so much for listening. I really enjoy your messages and the way that you break things down.

I wanted to get your opinion on something that I recently came across, an AI, artificial intelligence called

MyFaithChat. I've included a link to the website at the bottom of this email.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on whether you think it's a good tool or not. I understand that nothing can replace real conversations with others, but I'm curious about your perspective on it.

Well, Outer Star Kicks, I'm hesitant to click on unsolicited links. Like if I don't know exactly what it is then

I'm not gonna click on it. I went ahead and followed the root link of what you sent and it's making me log in with my

Facebook account and I don't really wanna do that. I'm not gonna log in through another social media thing.

So I just kind of went to the main page and looked at what it was that they were presenting. It says, see FaithChat in action.

Watch how FaithChat can transform your Bible study experience. So there's a video right there on the page where you can type in, it shows you like how the site works.

You can type in a question and then it's gonna give you a lesson regarding the question that you asked.

So the question that's presented here is what is the meaning of Jeremiah 29 11?

Hang on, let me move forward a little bit here in the video. Help me understand

Jeremiah 29 11 about God's plan for my life. So you're having a chat with an

AI program. This kind of goes back to what Becky and I were responding to last week about AI prayers.

Is it okay to pray a prayer that's been developed by AI? You can take the words of AI and you can really mean them from your heart, but it would be better to not use that at all.

You need to pray what is on your mind and heart to the Lord. And if you want to help in assistance with prayer, pray the scriptures, go to the

Psalms, read what others prayed in the Bible and pray like that. Follow the blueprint that Jesus gave us in the

Lord's prayer. But these kinds of prayers, you need to discipline yourself in so that you're praying to God and not just rehearsing what a computer came up with.

So this is the same sort of thing in faith chat. You're not really talking to a real person.

You're talking to a computer and it's just bits and bytes coming out on a screen. It's not a person that is actually walking you through the text and helping you learn and understand what the

Bible says. You're having a computer do it for you. And this is not too unlike when you use

ChatGPT or you use Grok. MyFaithChat is just geared toward, it has a

Christian angle to it. And I'll tell you that whatever they're gonna come up with on MyFaithChat, they're still using the same kind of algorithm, search engine,

AI, software, it's not software, but you know what I mean. The same sort of AI programming that is used by every other

AI is being used on MyFaithChat. They just set up a website where they're trying to draw

Christians in to do something that's more Bible study related. So this question that is being presented as an example here, help me understand

Jeremiah 29, 11, and not just asking that, but about God's plan for my life, okay?

So then the program lays out Jeremiah 29, 11. Here's the first thing that it says.

Jeremiah 29, 11 is a comforting verse that many people turn to when seeking assurance about God's plans for their lives.

The verse reads, and then it gives you the verse, for I know the plans that I have for you declares the

Lord, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, to give you a hope and a future.

This is actually the second most searched for Bible verse on the internet after John 3, 16. So then the

AI gives you a breakdown of the meaning of the verse and its implications. So it says context, the verse is part of a letter from the prophet

Jeremiah to the exiled Israelites in Babylon. Well, specifically it would be the Jews.

So they were facing a challenging situation, fleeing far from their homeland, or sorry, feeling far from their homeland and uncertain about their future.

God through Jeremiah is reminding them that even in exile, he has a purpose for them.

Okay, that's a very like low detail explanation for the context of Jeremiah 29, 11.

There's way more to it than that. And really you just need to go to it and read it yourself.

This isn't that complicated. You can read Jeremiah chapters 28 and 29, and you can establish from those two chapters pretty easily what it is that's going on in the text and what the context is behind Jeremiah 29, 11.

In fact, I just did this with somebody recently. Oh, it was my Bible class that I teach at the

Christian school that my kids are going to now. So I teach a Bible class there

Monday through Thursday to the freshmen and sophomores. And I showed them when

I was teaching them something about context, we went to Jeremiah 29, 11. I think I even said eight throughout a Bible verse, and that was the one they said.

So you know how popular this verse is. And we simply started reading in verse 10, Jeremiah 29, verse 10.

For thus says the Lord, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.

For I know the plans I have for you declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil.

And then you're going on into verse 11. So just reading verse 10, all we read was verse 10.

And I looked at the class and I said, what are you seeing there? And already a couple of students were like, oh, wow, this doesn't mean anything like we often use it to mean.

They could see just from verse 10 that there's more to this verse than thinking that God is going to fulfill all our hopes and dreams for our lives.

That's typically the way that we read ourselves into Jeremiah 29, 11. I want to have this career.

I want to marry this person. I want to live in this place. And the scripture says to us,

I know the plans I have for you, a plan for welfare and not for evil to give you a future and a hope.

So God is going to give me all my hopes and dreams. That's the way we'll often read that text and apply it to ourselves.

But verse 10 says, when 70 years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you.

So the thing that God is promising is not even going to be fulfilled for more than 70 years.

So right there, just reading the verses around it, we have something that's added to our context and that not even faith chat does.

So even the context that faith chat gives to you here is not enough. You would still not pass my

Bible class if you were responding with what said here in faith chat. So then it goes on to add like key points,

God's knowledge of plans. The phrase, I know the plans I have for you emphasizes that God is aware of each individual's life and has a purposeful design.

Plans to prosper. God's intentions are for our welfare, not our destruction. This doesn't always mean material prosperity, but rather spiritual and emotional wellbeing.

I can agree with that. Hope and a future. God's plans are filled with hope, suggesting that even in difficult circumstances, there is a promise of a better future.

This can encourage believers to trust in God's timing and sovereignty. So for the most part, yeah, those things are pretty good, but like I said, it leaves a lot of holes.

There's a lot to be desired there. And the answers that you're looking for could probably be more easily grasped by reading the

Bible yourself. If you need assistance in how to understand what is being said in your

Bible, well then get a study Bible. And I think the ESV study Bible is still the best one.

There are some good study Bibles out there. A lot of people prefer the MacArthur study Bible, the

NASB, the New King James, they've all got study Bibles that'll have study notes at the bottom. I just think the

English Standard Version is the best one. Reformation study Bible, I can't forget that one either. The one that is published and released by Ligonier.

Their number one translation that they sell though is in the English Standard Version, but you can also get it in the

New King James. So a study Bible can help you with some of that when you're looking for the extra commentary on understanding particular passages.

But like I said, this goes back to what Becky and I were talking about last week with regard to prayers.

Nothing beats a real person to person interaction. So this is no different than asking any other

AI to help you understand a particular passage. Another AI is probably going to give you a similar result.

But like I said, with AI prayers last week, you have to check your prayers. You have to test all your prayers.

And if you have a guilty conscience about praying something that a computer came up with, well then don't pray it and eliminate that step entirely or eliminate that question from your mind.

Is this a genuine prayer because I'm praying what a computer came up with? Don't even go there. Just pray what you would lift up to the

Lord and learn how to pray by reading the scripture and understanding that. Now, when I've talked about the commentaries that I consult whenever I am writing my sermons and putting those things together,

I am using almost exclusively older commentaries. I won't say it's entirely, but almost.

Because sometimes I'll go to my study Bible notes or I'll consult a commentary that's from either

John MacArthur or R .C. Sproul or somebody like that. So there are some modern commentaries that I will go to, but for the most part and almost exclusively, like I said,

I read classic commentaries. So commentaries written by dead guys. None of these guys are around anymore and they would have been written and published between the 17th and 19th centuries.

These are the most of the commentaries that I read. And so those commentaries are not going to change.

And the truth, since the truth in the Bible is timeless, then what they're writing in those commentaries still applicable to today.

And I don't have to do as much testing or examining regarding those commentaries than I would if I was using something modern or even

AI. Because like I said, with the prayers, you still have to test the prayers. So it's the same when you're asking

AI to give you commentary on a particular passage. You still have to be responsible to test it because the way the

AI is coming up with that answer is it's drawing from all different kinds of sources from all over the web.

What sources are they? What teachers has the AI consulted, real person teachers to give you this computerized result?

And you're still going to have to examine that and test it according to what the Bible says. So again, the better thing to do to just kind of eliminate that step is to rely on good commentaries, which you can still get for free.

You don't have to buy a whole big book set of Martin Lloyd Jones commentaries. You can actually find commentary like that.

Some of the commentaries I use include John Gill, Matthew Poole, Matthew Henry, can't forget about him.

Also Charles Ellicott, Kiel and Delitch. So you can get a lot of those commentaries at BibleHub.

Just go to BibleHub .com, type in whatever verse, click on the commentary, and it will show you different commentary notes on those particular passages.

I just don't think it's necessary to use AI. And frankly, all of the different resources, the way that I study with those methods already in place,

AI has not added anything for me at all. The only time

I ever pull it up to mess with it is for fun. I've never used it for study. I don't need to because the resources that I've already established for myself are sufficient that I don't need the assistance of AI.

It's just another step for me to consult AI and then test what AI came up with. So yeah, that would be my take on MyFaithChat.

I don't really think it's of any benefit to you. And you're not chatting with a real person, recognize that about some of these

AI programs that they're coming up with. You're not talking to anybody real. You're talking to a computer.

Do not let this replace real world relationships because it is only in the church with these fellowships that we're establishing with other believers in Christ that we're helping to sanctify one another, growing in love and in Christ likeness, growing each other, admonishing one another, encouraging each other and preparing ourselves for that day when we will be with Christ forever in glory.

Amen. Guys, if you got any questions, send them to me when we understand the text at gmail .com or again, the voicemail, go to www .utt

.com, click on the voicemail tab. Remember Jesus Christ and him crucified for our sins, buried and risen on the third day according to the scriptures, ascended into heaven is seated at the right hand of God is coming back again to judge the living and the dead.