Theological Ordination Examination of Pastor Rob Kimsey

It is great to be with you all, great to see you. It's actually my first time in the building here at Laurel Bible Church, but I feel like we're greatly attached. It's been a blessing to see Pastor Rob come and to serve you guys.

I just thought, just to sort of kick us off this morning, maybe I'll just first wanted to read from 1 Timothy chapter three, a well-known passage about the qualifications for elders and deacons. So let me read here the first 10 verses of 1 Timothy three.

It says this, it is a trustworthy statement if any man aspires to the office of overseer is a fine work he desires to do. An overseer then must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, prudent, respectable, hospitable, able to teach, not addicted to wine or pugnacious, but gentle, peaceable, free from the love of money.

He must be one who manages his own household well, keeping his children under the control with all dignity. But if a man does not know how to manage his own household, how will he take care of the church of God and not a new convert so that he will not become conceited and fall into the condemnation incurred by the devil.

He must have a good reputation with those outside the church so that he will not fall into reproach and the snare of the devil. Deacons likewise must be of dignity and not double tongued or addicted to much wine or fond of sort of gain, but holding to the mystery of the faith with a clear conscience.

These men also first must be tested, then let them serve as deacons if they are beyond reproach. And I wanted to read there through verse 10 because of this line that says, in reference to deacons, these men must also first be tested.

The testing of deacons implication is that elders are also to be tested before they serve. It's sort of a model of what we might be doing here today, just examining the new pastor of Laurel Bible Church and in his fitness for this capacity to serve as your pastor.

So we would, as a group of fellow elder pastors, want to examine him, test his theological acumen, his awareness of pastoral ministry, and then we'll lay hands on him and sort of ordain him tomorrow in the service as we install him and we'll pray at the end of service.

So excited to do that with you all tomorrow. But just as a bit of an introduction, my name is Joe Schreibweis, pastor of Valley Bible Church. This morning, Kurt Spencer, one of our elders and former pastor, of course, you know, elders are pastors, so fellow pastor alongside me at Valley Bible, next to him, Justin Peters of Justin Peters Ministry.

I know that he's preached here before. Rich Schwartz of Billings Evangelical Bible Church as well here in Billings. And then Seymour Heligar, Long Beach, he'll be preaching tomorrow, Long Beach Community, Grace Community Church of Long Beach.

He's the one who's been sort of grooming and training your pastor now, so thankful that he would come out and preach. But with that, let me pray and we'll go from there. Heavenly Father, Lord, we thank you for this time.

We thank you for the opportunity just to think about your word, think about theology, think about how you've revealed yourself to us in the pages of scripture. Lord, and also to think about the role of shepherds, overseers, pastors.

And as we think of Pastor Rob coming to serve this church and to teach God's word here and to faithfully shepherd the sheep. Lord, I pray that this morning that this would just be a time of where we examine and look into the truth that he's already known and studied and that it would just come freshly to his mind and he could share from the wealth of his studies in his time looking deeply into your word.

So Lord, I just pray you'd lead and guide this whole process. May it be edifying for each one here. And we pray this in Jesus' name, amen. So just a little bit of a note about how we'll do this. I'm gonna try my best to function as a moderator.

I'll also ask questions, but the five of us will all ask questions. Really, any question related to pastoral ministry or theology is fair game. I would like us to sort of move quickly so that we'd cover a lot of ground.

So brother, don't spend too long on any one particular question. Just kind of give us an overview of what you know. We can always ask follow-up questions. And if I feel like we're getting bogged down, I might just start waving my hand.

And if I do that, that means land the plane and we'll move on to the next question, okay? So we've got two microphones, it looks like. I'm gonna ask Pastor Seymour if you'd actually lead us off and ask the first question.

But brother, come on up and we'll swap places here.

Thank you for that disclaimer. I might be long-winded. Yeah, so I grew up Catholic. I was raised as a Catholic, I guess you could say. Spent the majority of my adult life as an unbeliever. Yeah, we were Christers.

We went to Christmas and Easter service. I went to private Catholic school. Eventually, I went to public school. We stopped attending church. And yeah, I never knew the Lord. I grew up in a secular home.

When I was 24, my father took his own life and I really hardened my heart against God and the idea of believing in the Bible. And yeah, I lived that way for a long time, just an angry atheist, hating God, hating God's people.

When I was 35, 10 years ago, the Lord graciously saved me in a church. At a Bible study, the pastor had challenged us to memorize three scriptures. I memorized those verses because I wanted to say them out loud.

The next, you know, that he had kind of said, hey, make sure you know these verses. I'm gonna call on someone. I memorized the verses because I had sort of a fantasy in my mind that he would call on me and just out of pride and just wanted to show even I don't believe and I know this better than you, just look how cool I am, look how smart I am.

And the Lord used that just prideful, just really self-exalting attitude. And over the course of that week, reading those three verses, I knew that those verses were not written by man. I knew that God was speaking into my heart and it caused me to believe that his word was the truth.

I knew that I was a sinner. I knew I was going to hell. I just searched through the gospels. Anything that the Lord said, any print in here that Jesus spoke, I just listened to everything Jesus said and God graciously allowed me to believe in the gospel, to repent, to, yeah, to acknowledge the Lordship of Christ in my life.

And so it was a really a 180 paradigm shift for me as the Lord saved me. It was sort of like, I remember making the statement, you know, the creator of the universe died for me. Am I supposed to just now go back to work and worry about getting a 40 hour work week and life is normal?

So nothing's gonna be the same. And yeah, immediately the Lord put, I think kind of an evangelistic desire in my heart and I just could not stop talking about the Lord. With everyone I could just, coworker, family, friend, sphere of influence, I just talked about Jesus and what had happened to me.

And it just never really went away. And I think through the guidance of some of the elders at the church I had got saved at, they just kind of shaped that, directed that. And then, yeah, things changed in my life.

This happened when I was an apprentice in the sheet metal worker program. I was in the end of that program, a five-year program. It happened in the fourth year of that program. And I just, you know, I went from kind of like a reprobate mind, you know, to where I just couldn't stop talking about the gospel.

I couldn't stop talking about God's word. And I had a desire to share what I, what the Lord was doing to me, what the Lord was teaching me, to tell others and to teach others. And although, you know, I have fear of man issues, at that point especially, I'm afraid of public speaking.

I just couldn't not talk about it to anyone that would listen. And I think that was, I just had a desire to tell the truth, and especially coming out of Roman Catholicism, seeing people on TV like Joel Osteen, you know, before I got saved, I thought that was Christianity.

And then once I got saved, it was like, these people are lying. Like, these people are lying to people. And I just had a really strong desire to correct that, to call that out, to say what the truth was.

And then over time, this desire just grew and grew and grew. Yeah, I had actually approached the pastor at the church that I got saved to say, I wanna be a missionary. I wanna go in the mission field.

I can't go back to life as normal. I wanna go do something with, you know, with this faith. I wanna tell the truth about the word of God. And that was the first time that someone had said, well, have you thought about pastoral ministry, or the pastorate, I think is the term they use.

I didn't even know what they were talking about. I said, what's that? And yeah, and they said, well, that you would be a pastor. And I was like, well, I don't, I just didn't, it didn't, I didn't understand what, you know, elders, deacons, what it meant to be a pastor, according to what the Bible teaches.

Just the raw, this was within probably the first two years of getting saved. And then just thinking through that, praying through that, the idea of going to seminary, getting trained. So yeah, the Lord saved me in 2013, and over two and a half, three years, that sort of desire grew, and there was a leading and a directing towards seminary.

And the elders had a high admiration for Pastor John MacArthur, and it was recommended that if I was going to go to seminary, I needed to go to a faithful Bible teaching seminary, and they directed me to go to the master's seminary.

And then over that time, you know, five years in seminary, the Lord helped me to shape what my understanding of the word of God was. But yeah, just a strong desire, and just thinking about, there's a bug up here, just thinking about, you know, this call, I would just point us back to 1 Timothy 3, and how Paul explains the office as he starts the conversation, or really the conversation about what it means to be a deacon or an elder.

It says, it's a trustworthy saying, if any man aspires to the office of overseer, he desires a good work. So for me, the call in my life was this strong desire that I just could not, I could not ignore.

And I think that over time, that was affirmed by other Christian brothers and sisters. Yeah, so I would just point us to the first book of the Bible, Genesis, and what the word says about our being created in God's likeness.

So we can go to chapter one, verses 26 and 27. Yeah, then God said, let us make man in our image according to our likeness, so that they will have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the skies of the birds of the sky, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, every creeping thing that creeps on the earth, and God created man in his own image, and in the image of God, he created him, male and female, he created them.

So as image bearers, we are not in the likeness of God in terms of God is spirit, but we have dominion over what God has created. We are made with a physical body, we have a soul or spirit, and we understand moral things, moral law, emotion.

So yeah, the makeup of our body, both physically and spiritually, our image bearers in that way, that we have been made by God, and we are to rule over the creation that God has made. Now, the second part of that was, what is the implication after the fall?

Yeah, so there are certain attributes of God that we don't have, we are not omniscient, not omnipresent, omnipotent, but we can perceive truth, we have the ability to reason and logic, and so that would be the communicable attributes that we can function with emotion, we have volition, we have will.

Now after the fall, that was damaged to some extent as being finite creatures and living in a fallen world and being under the really sin of Adam, there is an idea, the noetic effect of sin that as fallen man, there is some limitation to our understanding because we are in a fallen world and we're fallen.

So we can still reason and logic, we can think, we can understand truth, we can perceive truth, we can learn, we can grow, but there is some level of disconnect in the fallenness of our sin, where it's almost like a brain damaged, sinful mind, something has occurred, where we think of the promise of glorification, where at some point we will have right thinking, we will know without having any kind of veil of uncertainty in the truth.

What a pastor is.

Yeah, I think just some helpful passages for us to look at. I think we should go back to First Timothy and thinking about what the pastor is called to do. Of course, this is a pastoral letter written by the Apostle Paul to his ministry partner, the pastor of Ephesus.

Paul has some really, I think maybe the right way to think about this is like a public versus private ministry and First Timothy chapter four, verse 13, we see this, it says that, "'Until I come, give attention to the public reading "'of Scripture, to exhortation and teaching.'".

And so I would say that is the public ministry of the pastor. He is called to the public reading of Scripture to, and there's an implication here of teaching and preaching the word of God. And so I see this as the calling of the pastor, but I mean, just thinking about that word that you're a pastor, you're a shepherd, there's more to that.

We just, I think we could probably even think about what Peter says, and we could maybe look at First Peter five, that we're to shepherd the flock, that we're to give oversight to the flock. Yeah, I mean, Paul tells Timothy to set a good example for others to follow in his conduct, his faithfulness, that he would be an imitator of Christ and that the people that he has oversight over that he's shepherding, that they would become imitators of Christ.

Yeah, in First Peter five, it says, in the context of giving in this instruction, he uses the word exhort, he says in chapter five, verse one, therefore, I exhort the elders among you as your fellow elder and witness of the sufferings, partaker also of the glory that is to be revealed.

He says, shepherd the flock among you, overseeing, not under compulsion, but willingly according to God and not for dishonest gain. So there's an aspect of that pastoral ministry and being a pastor to preach the word of God, but to also shepherd God's people.

I heard a wise pastor say that he does his best counseling from the pulpit and caring for God's people to preach the word of God, to teach the truth, but then there's also that more private, intimate one-on-one discipleship training, teaching, drawing the biblical principles of the word of God out and helping that person to see those principles and apply them to their life.

And so, yeah, I mean, probably another place we could look is even Acts chapter 20. If we see, this is sort of the end of Paul's ministry in Ephesus as he's giving a farewell to the elders in Ephesus.

And yeah, Acts 20, you just see this really just amazing section where Paul is saying goodbye to them, but he's kind of also describing his ministry to them and the time that he spent with them, caring for them.

It's a long section. It starts in verse 13 of chapter 20, but even, yeah, I mean, just a few areas. He, even in verse 27, he says, "'I didn't shrink from declaring the whole purpose of God.'". He tells them, the other elders, as he's saying goodbye, he says, "'Be on guard for yourselves "'and for all the flock among which the Holy Spirit "'has made you overseers, to shepherd the church of God.

"'He purchased with his own blood.'". So there's just such a deep care and love for God's people to shepherd them, to dedicate your life, to sacrificing your life for them, for their own good and their benefits, shepherding them, helping them.

And yeah, bringing it back to the word of God, there isn't one thing that he shrunk away from teaching them from the word of God.

Successful pastor in what we do.

Yeah, I would, I would point to the faithfulness of the pastor to the word of God. Definitely not looking at success in terms of, you know, pragmatic issues or having a desire to have a large church. So not numbers, not a large church.

Otherwise we can say a false teacher, a heretic, really like Joel Olsteen or Andy Stanley have the biggest churches, I think, in America. So that's not a success. Yeah, I was, I went to a breakout session at the Shepherds Conference and there was a brother named Alex Montoya and he was talking to a room full of pastors.

And he said, some of you guys have churches that are about 40, 50 people and you're praying for churches of like 500. And he said, thank God that you don't have that because you can't handle that. You have the exact amount of people that God has allotted to you.

And we can even see that in 1 Peter 5 again. The Lord allots to a pastor the souls that he should care for. So I think we could look at even 1 Thessalonians. I think it's a good 1 Thessalonians. A book, of course, we connect with eschatology but it's actually a book that deals with ecclesiology.

And 1 Thessalonians chapter four, I'm sorry, chapter one. 1 Thessalonians chapter one, verses six and seven. Paul says this, you also became imitators of us and of the Lord. Having received the word in much affliction with the joy of the Holy Spirit so that you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia.

I think that's a successful church when first the elders are imitating Christ, setting a good example. And then the believers, the members of this local congregation themselves are imitating Christ. He says that they became imitators of us, referring to Paul and his ministry partners.

So to imitate the disciples of Christ, to imitate apostles. But the key is that you became imitators of the Lord. They grew in their Christ likeness. It says they received the word even in suffering or affliction with joy in the Holy Spirit.

So to have a church that has small numbers but are very spiritually mature, where you have congregants that are Christ-like in their daily living, have theological depth in the understanding of the word of God.

I think to have imitation of Christ and Christ likeness, that should be the faithfulness that we see in congregants. That should be the mark of a successful church.

And two, working outside of mobile work.

Yeah, you know, I just wanna stay in the scripture. And so if this is what Paul is telling Titus, that he should be instilling in his congregants and the folks that are worshiping there. Also just coming from the biblical principles out of Proverbs and what Solomon is saying.

I don't wanna put restrictions on the roles of women and how they are living in terms of contemporary life and thinking of the need to have a secular vocation outside of the home. It seems pretty clear from the word of God that the prescription for a wife is to be in the home, to be working in the home.

Now, if there's a situation where financial need has arisen and the wife has to work outside the home, I think that we need to stick to what the word of God says. And if the opportunity is there for the husband to provide for the family, that the wife would be at home and that she would care for the household.

And that might even be as we can kind of look at some hints in 31 that there maybe even is some business or trade going on. So she can be working at home and also thinking of ways to bring supplemental income into her home to support her husband, to support the children.

And if there was that necessity in terms of having a certain amount of finances to hold a mortgage or hold a place of rent so they have a roof over their heads, I think it would just need to be under the direction and headship of the husband so that the wife is not going and just kind of doing whatever she wants, that her husband is approving that, giving his approval, supporting her.

If there, and so I would wanna have that be sort of an exceptional case and have a desire to teach that the husband would be the provider for the home and that the wife would serve in the home, taking care of that.

And like I said, maybe even bringing in some supplemental income, sort of there's opportunities for entrepreneur type of things, but yeah, just that the house is the domain of the wife and she's taking care of business for her husband.

Yeah, the Lord has blessed me with a very godly woman and what we see in first Peter, that the husband can be saved, the unbelieving husband can be saved by a wife who has pure conduct and faith, a husband who's disobedient to the word can be saved by his faithful wife's pure conduct, even without a word.

That's my life. The Lord used my wife to save me. And so she's just very strong in the word, spiritually mature, very wise. And yeah, so to try to just encourage her continual spiritual growth, nurturing her, talking about the Bible, talking about the word a lot, having a regular pattern of prayer and discipleship and just ongoing fellowship with a, you know, it's my wife, but also my best friend and a dear sister in Christ.

And then, yeah, I mean, thinking about ministry and the wife of a pastor, she hasn't been called by God to pastor the church. So, you know, I tried to make that clear with the Pastoral Search Committee when I came here, that my wife has no requirement to serve in any capacity or in any official role or an office.

She's my wife. She's a Christian woman. She's gonna wanna serve in ministry here at whatever congregation she's at. But yeah, just, you know, encouraging her to serve, to set a good example for other women.

And in God's providence, he has used Laura to disciple and teach women. And so, yeah, she's just got the gift of counseling and discipleship. And so I just, you know, in some way, I just need to get out of the way and just help her, support her, pray for her.

She's currently in the middle of getting trained as a certified counselor with ACBC. Just a very godly woman. And the congregation that we worshiped at prior to coming here, Grace Community Church of Long Beach, she just met with several women, counseled them through difficult seasons of life, adversities and other things.

And she's continuing to do that here. Already the Lord has brought occasion for her to counsel and just to be a helper and set a good example for the other women, to teach the younger women to set a good example.

And so, yeah, I just encourage those spiritual gifts that the Lord has given to her and make, you know, it's sort of one of the, we live in a real world, we live in the fallen world, and it's kind of one of those things where the wife is gonna get a lot of flack for her husband.

The wife of the pastor is gonna get a lot of flack for what her husband is doing in the church. And she's kind of like the first line of defense in a way where it's gonna get to her ear first, probably before it gets to mine.

And, you know, just to encourage her that we're serving the Lord Jesus Christ. He's the head of the church. And to just continue to live Titus two out, to have faithful conduct, to do what she's called to do as a Christian woman, which is to serve in the local church, to help others.

Yeah, and just, you know, if those things happen, then I'll hear about it, we'll pray about it, we'll go to God's word, we'll read the Bible, and we'll move on and tomorrow's a new day. But yeah, just trying to protect her from having any kind of incorrect or wrong implied expectation that she's supposed to do something because she's the pastor's wife.

I would wanna try to make sure that doesn't happen.

She's to help the church, she's responsible for something unbroadened that we're guided to be part and parcel of those truths. And in all that, I'd like you to discuss how you will maintain the boundaries of purity to make sure that we get to that second.

What boundaries are you willing to set?

Yeah, no, that's great.

Well, I mean, we live in an age that even 10 or 20 years ago, it's almost unrecognizable in terms of just even in the last decade, I guess decade or more, and the Supreme Court acknowledging same-sex marriage and some of those things.

And yeah, what we would, I don't know what we're thinking of when we're talking about the sexual revolution, but there is a broad acceptance of immorality in society. And even the government made up of unbelievers are declaring what is moral for society to live by.

And so that's a reality that's gonna touch the church in multiple ways. And we can even think about what California is like, just the broad acceptance of sin. And there were men that said when that happened, that it's gonna be where a person that's practicing an immoral lifestyle.

And we can think of just rampant fornication where people are living together without being married as if there's no moral law to live by, the redefining of marriage. So we can think about adultery, fornication in that way, but even the sort of just pervasive lifestyle of homosexuality that is being pushed on our kids today, what is going on in the world.

It kind of has transitioned from that the acceptance of that sin in society is a right that is being fought for. And then it's sort of is almost now is if you're not participating in it, you're immoral, or you're the bigot for not doing that.

We can see that with the transgender movement, where a person is a biological male, they have an operation or they don't. And the LGBTQ community is saying that if you are not willing to have a relationship with that person, then you yourself are a bigot, because that's not a man, that's a woman.

So yeah, I mean, this is something that we deal with in life, it's just part of our lives now. This is not something that is just happening in California. I mean, society has transitioned to a point where you have sort of a softness from the pulpit that is unwilling to really come down hard on this sin.

And almost indirectly affirm a sinful lifestyle to the point that, you know, in our society, we have allowed men who are practicing a sexual fetish to perform that fetish in front of children, when you have a drag queen story hour.

This is a cross dresser. The term I grew up with, the person was called a transvestite, this is a male cross dressing, performing a sexual fetish in front of children. And it's applauded, it's applauded, this is good, we should go attend this, we wanna promote this.

And just kind of transitioning to the counseling topic, I think the reason, I guess one more comment there, the reason that we are dealing with this problem, I don't think it's just that we are seeing this change in society, of course, this is a spiritual issue.

But I think the problem is, is that we have men in the pulpit who are afraid to call sin, sin, who are affirming this activity. When we have a gospel event at the zoo, and we're inviting like-minded pastors to come and engage in the public reading of scripture, to engage in prayer, to engage in corporate worship through the singing of songs, to engage in proclaiming the gospel in a public setting.

And the reason that they're not participating is because that could be offensive to that community of the LGBTQ. There is a gross misunderstanding of sin. It's almost like we don't believe in the doctrine of hell.

How could you not want to preach the gospel? And how could you find that offensive to preach the gospel to people that are in open rebellion to God, who the word of God declares are going to be thrown into the lake of fire, but you don't want to proclaim the gospel because it could be offensive to that person?

The person is dead, they're dying. It would be like walking by a person's house and the house is on fire and saying, well, that's their choice. It's like, wouldn't you want to do everything to say, the judgment of God is coming, turn away from your sin.

I heard a sermon recently where the person said that tax collectors and sinners are the LGBTQ of today. And they were referencing the marriage ceremony that Jesus attended where he performed his first sign miracle, turning water into wine.

And the person is in the pulpit saying this, that Christians today are like the Pharisees then, accusing Jesus and his disciples. Why does your rabbi sit with tax collectors and sinners? And the person is making this proposition that we should be eating and drinking and having fellowship with the LGBTQ community, openly, openly.

And what does Jesus say? The doctor doesn't come to heal a person who isn't sick. The physician heals the person that is sick. He says, I came to call sinners. He wasn't having fellowship with them. He was calling those that would listen to repentance, to faith in the gospel.

We should do the same. We would do well to just follow the pattern or example that Christ has given us to follow. You know, even in the context of false teachers and Jude, to snatch some out of the fire.

We are called to proclaim the judgment of God. But also the forgiveness of sins in God's grace by believing in Jesus. So if the reason that we're having drag queen story hour isn't because of the society in Billings and Laurel, it's because of the men in the pulpit in Billings and Laurel over many years, not preaching the truth.

It's an abomination before the Lord. So if we're not looking at a sin like that, and we're not preaching that it is an abomination for the Lord, you're saying, well, that's unloving. Well, if you're not calling that sin an abomination, then you're not being as loving as God.

We have to tell the truth. We have to call sinners to repentance and to believe in the gospel. Sounds a little bit of a rabbit trail. But yeah, thinking about counseling and how to have good boundaries in place, even in normal communication outside of counseling, when we're texting, to try to limit that or to even include another person on the text when we're emailing, to include, I've tried to get in the habit of doing emails and I'll include some of the deacons on those emails.

I've had a few of them ask me like, oh, what about this and what about that? And I'm like, no, no, you were just CC'd on it. You don't have to do anything. I just wanted you to make sure you're in the loop.

In the context of counseling, a good practice is that I'm just not gonna meet with a woman one-on-one. There's gonna be somebody that's gonna sit in on that meeting. Even trying to avoid a one-on-one conversation with a woman outside of the congregation to, yeah, just include another person to make sure that they know that that conversation is happening.

So this example has happened since I've been here where another church was having their children's director, a woman, contact me about an issue. I reached out to the elders and was wanting to talk to them and just make sure I was okay to talk to her.

Yeah, and then when an issue comes up with a female congregant, whether it's a regular attendee, a visitor, and they're needing discipleship and counseling, then I'm gonna have someone sit in on that meeting.

Right now, being the sole elder, I would normally have another elder sit in on that meeting. Now, there could be a situation where I would ask one of the deacons to sit in on that meeting. In a more recent situation, I asked my wife to sit in on the meeting.

So we had a meeting with someone that needs help that's looking to get some counseling on a certain issue. And yeah, I invited her to the church building, set an appointment, asked my wife to attend. As sort of just an observer, but also thinking of how, you know, if the Lord would have Laura serve in that way to help this particular woman through a period of counseling and picking a good godly resource, coming up with a preliminary discipleship plan for her.

Praise God that this person is gonna be, wants counsel, wants counsel, has filled out a PDI form, a personal data inventory, wants to go through a good resource, wants to commit time. And so Laura is gonna be taking that on and counseling the person.

Yeah, so just not meeting alone is a good practice.

Into real experience to regulate external.

Yeah, I mean, you can think about external evidences. And we have to, you know, probably point to archeological data. What do we have a record of? Is this a book that was, in my foolishness as an unbeliever, I used to say the Bible was written in the 1200s or that King James rewrote the Bible, and there's not even proof that Jesus exists.

Of course, just a statement of ignorance. But understanding that the scrolls from the Old Testament exist in antiquity, that we have copies of these things really going back to the beginning of time as soon as they could essentially write alphabet, they were recording exchanges with Yahweh.

The writing of the Old Testament, even going back to the first five books about 1446 BC, later copies of that being discovered with the Qumran scrolls or the Dead Sea Scrolls, that we have external evidences that these things exist in antiquity.

These are not a new fabrication. Yeah, and I would probably point to, I mean, there's so many archeological discoveries too in different writings or scripts that then have the name of kings or the name of individuals that are in the narrative of the Old Testament.

So we can point back to this clay tablet or this rock or these things with inscriptions that show that the historicity of the Bible is accurate. So we can look back on history and look at the facts of history.

But even the, I think I would point to the preservation if we're staying in the external evidence, the preservation of God's word so that we can read biblical Hebrew and we can understand that what we have now in the Old Testament is what they had then, that even through multiple translations or really just copies being made, that there was a preservation of the word that still exists today where we can look at this scroll that was dated all these hundreds of years BC and it matches exactly what we have today, that the Lord preserved his word.