#31 UNDERSTANDING ORIGINS, LOVE, PURPOSE, & BEAUTY + Dr. Paul Gould

Biblically Speaking

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Hello, hello, welcome to Biblically Speaking.

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My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts,

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PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier. These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion.

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Now I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the

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Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our creator, better. Hello, hello.

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Welcome everybody to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino, and coming at you again with a new guest this week to talk about love, beauty, origins, purpose, all the things that keep us up at night.

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But I'm really excited to have a new guest on today, Dr. Paul Gould. Just a little bit about your background.

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You've got a, you're a professor of philosophy of religion. You're director of the master's program at Palm Beach Atlantic University.

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You're also an author, an editor. You've got about 11 scholarly books, you've got popular books, and now you're working on the intersection of science and faith.

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You're the founder of Two Tasks Institute. You're quite involved in this topic. How did that happen?

01:39

These are awesome. Yeah, I sound pretty busy, but as you're reading that list, I'm getting exhausted. But yeah, no, it's just, you know, one of the joys of being a philosopher is that you know, we tend to think about the perennial questions in life that everybody's asking and just like formalize that.

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And then in some cases we even get paid to do it, right, as I teach philosophy. And so in some ways I feel like I have,

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I'm just living my dream. Like the idea, you know, when people ask that question, what would you do if, you know, money wasn't an option?

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What would you do? And I feel like I get to do that. And money's not much of an option in philosophy, there's not a lot in it. But I get to wrestle with these like deep questions about meaning and existence and purpose.

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And so just really overjoyed to do that and to have a conversation with you today about it.

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I'm so excited to talk about it because I feel like I just take these things for granted. Like you, you discuss these things, you teach on them, you get paid to talk about them.

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How did you end up there of all the things you could have been? How did you get paid to talk about the origins of love and purpose and meaning?

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Yeah, no, yeah, it's interesting. So I do, there is a longer story, I won't bore you with the whole longer story. But my undergraduate degree was,

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I went to school in Ohio, where I know you're from as well. And my undergraduate degree was in accounting. And I just wanted to be a businessman my whole life, because my dad was a businessman.

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But God got a hold of my life when I was a college student and was confronted with the gospel, became, through a longer story, became a

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Christian, you know, in between my freshman and sophomore year. And that kind of set this completely different trajectory in my life.

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And so my wife, who I had met on a missions trip with Crew, this sort of parachurch organization in college, we got married and we both knew, because God had changed our life as a college student, that we wanted to work with college students.

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And so we worked in business for a couple of years. And then we left the business world and I came on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ or Crew, and was just a normal campus minister, actually at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

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That was our first assignment, my alma mater. And I just thought I'd be a generalist for life, right?

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That you just share the gospel and disciple people. And that's what we're going to do.

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And we'll do it fine. And that's it. But I noticed a couple things early on. I promise I won't give you the longer story.

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I'll try to keep this short. I noticed pretty quickly in my evangelism, I always veered toward the intellectuals, or maybe those who thought they were intellectual.

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And I love talking about the gospel in the context of ideas. And there's something that just sort of awoke, something that was latent in my own heart.

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And actually, I call this newfound passion to learn and to know, I called it a beach ball because of all the things you do as a campus minister, you don't have time to like pursue learning.

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And so I took that beach ball and shoved it under the surface of my life for three years, first three years of ministry.

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And as that metaphor suggests, that beach ball, it's not going to stay under the surface, it keeps popping up. And so basically, it kept popping up,

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I kept wanting to know. And so I began to develop an apologetics course as a young staff member and teach it to our students, learn some things about myself that I have abilities to communicate, learn some things about our students that they have huge needs in these perennial deep questions about our faith and about life.

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And yeah, so through sort of a long story, God just began to lead us to this path that begins in apologetics.

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And from there, it quickly goes to theology and biblical studies, and then philosophy. So that's kind of the thumbnail sketch of how we went from a

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CPA to a PhD in philosophy and now, you know, teaching philosophy. I love that beach ball analogy.

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I mean, it really what God's plan and God's way will always find a way. It's also interesting because I feel like on the topics of like, what is my purpose in life?

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And what is love? What is the right form of love? Or what does it look like? And why do we need it? Or what's role does it serve?

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I'm just thinking off the top of my head, some of the philosophical questions, the biblical basis for it. I mean, obviously,

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God is love, but it's always in my head siloed to God and that form of love.

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And then there's like all the other kind of love. It almost like, well, this is how I experienced God's love. And this is like the worldly love that like,

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I get on dating apps, I get in marriage, I get in my relationships, whatever might be. So it's why is it like finding when you were talking to these kids and kind of their needs?

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Why was the biblical basis for it so important? Yeah. So good. That's great.

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It's interesting. So I'm a little older now. And when I was a new staff member working with college students, it was like, let's see, it would have been like late 90s, early 2000s, and probably more like late 90s, mid 90s.

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And I think that the freshmen coming in during those years were largely still sort of biblically literate, right?

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And they had at least some kind of an idea of the kind of standard storyline of the Bible and the categories.

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You know, if you said something like, your soul needs to be saved from sin and you need to be forgiven, like there's all these words there that at least meant something to them, soul, forgiveness, sin, things like that.

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But I think as the years went on, what I've realized is that there's all these competing stories in culture that are basically seeking people's allegiance and, you know, whispering,

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I'm the true story of the world, right? And the biblical story is no longer viewed as credible. And so not only is it sort of no longer viewed as true, which is the most important thing, but it's not even viewed as like beautiful or desirable, right?

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So not only is it false, they don't even want it or care about it, right? And so I've just realized if Christianity is the true story of the world today, given like as we go further and further away from the

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Bible, we've got to like back up and help people reawaken this longing to live the true story of the world.

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And so one thing I do, I'll just say one thing, I'll stop here. I've noticed in like when I travel around and speak,

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I've added this little thing at the beginning of a talk. And it's something like this, I just say, just for 20 minutes, would you just consider the possibility, right, that Jesus is better than you think, right?

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Because people have this view of who Jesus is, that he's, I don't know, maybe a good teacher or as, you know, like even a

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Jordan Peterson would say today, but or I don't know, he heals people or he has a kind of spiritual authority.

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But when it comes to the intellect, right, when it comes to intellectual virtue and knowledge, you don't go to Jesus, you go to the scientist, right?

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You go to the person in the lab coat, perhaps, or you go to Hollywood, but you don't go to Jesus for knowledge, right?

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And so I just say, just for 20 minutes, consider the possibility that Jesus is actually that who you long for, that you're longing for happiness and meaning and purpose and beauty and truth, all find their sort of satisfaction in Christ.

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And I say that because it sounds kind of jarring because nobody thinks that, right? But if Christianity is the true and good story of the world, we've got to kind of awaken those longings again and help people see that.

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Yeah, that is, that's pretty cool. I like that way. I like how you like open things up to them.

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But don't you kind of get some pushback with people who are like, how is an ancient book gonna tell me anything about my life?

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Like I can go to my sister, she knows me, I can go to my therapist, I can go to my parents and my teachers. Why would I trust a 2 ,000 -year -old book?

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Like, do you ever run into that? Yeah, yeah, for sure, right? I mean, so you can go, there's a couple of ways that you can go with this, right?

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You can think of Christianity as a kind of story, right? And a lot of times they'll talk about the overarching story of the

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Bible is like four words, creation, fall, redemption, restoration. My favorite four words are home, away, and home again, right?

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God creates this place that's a place of flourishing and gives us a purpose. And then early on,

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Genesis 3, the first humans are away. And then from really Genesis 3 to the end, it's the story, this story of God pursuing us in a sense that we can come home again.

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So I think one way to access it is actually through story, because one of the key sort of buzzwords in culture today is like this idea of being authentic or being your true self, right?

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And there's this question, like who gets to name us, right? And many people today think we get to name ourselves, right?

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So you have a lot of like Disneyland -ish slogans, like be all that you can be or follow your heart and things like this.

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And really behind that is this question, who gets to name us? And behind that question is this question of which story is the true story of the world.

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And so often, and I could actually say more about that, but often I find that I just press this question of all the competing stories, which one understands you, right?

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And that's one way to access this without raising some of those suspicions about truth, just because we all long for a story that understands us.

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The other way though, is to kind of go through like Christianity makes claims, right?

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About the way the world is. It makes claims about God, it makes claims about the world, it makes claims about humans. And those are propositions that we can test, right?

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And so you could take a longer route, right? Depending on the conversation that you're in.

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And just argue that the Christian worldview in general, the biblical worldview in general is both corresponds to reality, right?

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So this is the correspondence test, it's true to the way the world is. It's coherent, right? There's no contradictions. Sometimes there's people that say, well, what about the

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Bible contradicting itself? And you can work through those if they bring up instances, right? And then there's, so there's like the coherence test, the consistent correspondence test.

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And then there's this third test that maybe sometimes people call it the existential test. And that's the test of any story, of any worldview, does it like answer the deep existential questions of life, right?

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And there I think Christianity gets it in spades, right? It answers this deep longing for happiness, for purpose, for meaning, for identity, right?

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It names us, right? And things like that. So yeah, a couple of routes that you can take as you talk with folks.

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I'm sure that's such a struggle with high school students or even like early college students. I was a freaking idiot back then.

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So you're probably just blowing their minds with all of these like larger concepts. Yeah. Yeah. We do have fun.

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That's okay. Yeah. I mean, it is like a thing to say. I mean, I think we, again, and this is just me kind of playing devil's advocate of like the

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Bible is an ancient book, so therefore it's irrelevant to today's culture. But I think kind of what you said of like, we are looking for a name and that's the whole purpose of the

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Bible is to like define the creator and align ourselves with the creator. So I feel like, you know, you're kind of already overcoming some of the rebuttals here of like, how does a ancient

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Near East document really apply to me? How does this old book, the values of when it was written 2000 years ago, apply to my life right now?

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But I mean, love, beauty, purpose, origins, those are pretty timeless. That's right. Yeah.

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And that would be the other thing I'd say, right? That the Bible is speaking to these timeless truths and these timeless questions and these are testable, right?

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So think of Genesis one, you have this claim right at the beginning. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, right?

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That's a claim about God and all things in relation to God, right? That there's God and then there's everything else and everything else is created by God, right?

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And so that is quickly, right, that gets to the question of origin. And that's a question that you can probe that philosophically, you can probe that scientifically, you can probe that, of course, theologically, right?

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And so it's not like these claims that the Bible is making, they might have been made in an ancient document, but they're claims that can be tested right now with the tools of contemporary philosophy, contemporary science.

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And the more that we find as we test it with these tools, the more that we're just confirmed, right? It corresponds to the way the world is.

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And so, yeah. Well, I mean, speaking of it, let's get into the first of our four topics today, which is origins.

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Starting right at the beginning, Genesis 1, how do you teach origins today?

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Do you approach it scientifically? Do you approach it historically? Because I'm always curious about what did people at the time this was written, how did they receive this?

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Were texts about Genesis 1, or even you sent me Romans 11, you sent me

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Colossians 1, sorry, all of these, was this news?

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Was this common? I mean, how do you approach it or understand it based off what you've learned? Yeah. Was this news?

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Maybe, right? I mean, yeah, because there was like, you know, so think of Genesis 1.

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There's this whole debate about how to interpret Genesis in general, but Genesis 1 through 11, those first 11 chapters, which are sometimes called primeval history or primal history as well.

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And so there's a big scholarly in -house debate amongst Christians about how to kind of approach those texts. And it is true that even when

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Moses wrote these words, right, there was a context, the ancient Nereus context, of which he was in some ways writing a polemic against the kind of some of the other views that were out there, where they -

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What's a polemic? Yeah, sorry. He was kind of writing, here's the true story of the world, and it's different in important ways from your story that you give about the origin of the world, right?

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So you have other ancient Near Eastern accounts of how the world came into being, and they usually would involve a deity or a group of deities that brought into being the earth or, you know, the heavens and the earth and things like that, but it would be very different.

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It would be often chaotic, it would be often gods fighting against each other and maybe even killing each other, and out of that, you know, spawns the earth.

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And so here though, in the Genesis account, you see a very different kind of account where you have this supreme being,

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God, that's responsible, and there's debate about whether you can get creation out of nothing from Genesis 1, but I think you can.

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You know, there was God and nothing else, and then God spoke into the void and brought into being these creatures, and you see like order and beauty and abundance sort of delineating.

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And you actually see in Genesis 1, you see God delineating and defining and setting boundaries and is very orderly and rational.

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And then you find him creating these, you know, on day six, these creatures in the image of the divine kind, right, humans that represent him and are like him and rule, and we kind of receive all these gifts that God has given, and then we're to steward them and re -gift them back.

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And so similar to the ancient kind of things that were going on there, but very different also in that there's one

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God who's good and creates things that are good. Those things would be probably unique in that day and age.

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So from a philosophical perspective, would you be kind of leaning into like, look, God created us with a purpose, there are origins, we're not made out of chaos, we are made with an intention with love.

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Is that the main takeaway when you're talking about like, this is the biblical perspective on origins? Yeah, I think probably the biblical perspective on origin that's going to get us to...

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So if you think about, again, back to the idea of scripture as a kind of story, right?

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If you think about stories in general, every story asks and answers three questions.

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And of course, the Bible asks and answers these same three questions. Where do I come from? Where am I headed?

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And how do I get there? Right? These are the questions of origin, the questions of destiny, and then the question of quest, like how do we get there?

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How do we journey to our destiny, right? And so of course, you have that question of where do I come from answered very clearly in scripture.

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We don't come out of material. We don't come out of chaos. We don't come out of God, even. We come literally out of nothing, right?

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God just creates us. Maybe there's a more complicated philosophical view about God having an idea of us that he creates according to that idea, and you can go there in philosophy.

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But in terms of just the straight biblical text, God creates us out of nothing. And so that's one thing, there was

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God and then nothing, and then he brought something. But then as Genesis says, the other thing

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I would want to pull out of like Genesis one that's important is that this phrase, and it is good, that many people point to that it's seven times, it is good or very good.

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So God is the creator of all distinct from God reality, and it's good. It's beautiful, right?

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And even on day six, he creates creatures like us that have abilities, right? Free will and moral responsibility, and that we have real skin in the game, and that will connect to ends and purposes, right?

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The next question, and that'll connect actually to love too, in a really beautiful way. And since we're talking about beauty, it'll connect all those things in a really beautiful way, but you get that first question answered pretty clearly in Genesis.

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Where do I come from? And you even get a little hint of where we're headed. And I can say more about that, but with respect to origins, yeah, that's what it is.

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Where do you think Genesis one hints at where we're headed? I'm kind of curious about that. Yeah, I think it's connected to what you find as you get to day six, and you get to the language of created in the imago

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Dei or the image of God. So the way that I kind of view, so here's an interesting motif that the

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Christian tradition has kind of noticed really throughout the history of the church, is that you can understand, here's the motif, all things are from God and all things one day return to God.

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So in the Latin, in the learned, they would talk about this exodus, redidus, exit and return or from God to God kind of motif.

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And you see this kind of as a way to understand the overarching story of scripture. And you see this very clearly in Genesis one, right?

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You have God, and then all these things flow from God, right? And then it's this deep order and beauty and abundance.

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And then you have this interesting beings on day six that are created in the image of God. And there's this real question, what does it mean to be created in the image of God?

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And I know that biblical scholars and philosophers debate, and even scientists debate, what does it mean to be human?

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And then what does it mean to be created in the image of God? But the one that I'm most attracted to, and I understand this is the one that most biblical theologians would land on, is that the imago

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Dei or image of God language is priestly and royal language. So in other words,

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I think like C .S. Lewis got it right in Narnia, like we're literally kings and queens and priests and priestesses of Narnia, but not

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Narnia, like this world, right? And so what that means is we're like the hinge of the cosmos, right?

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All things come from God in that exodus, redidus, from and to thing. We receive it as the hinge of the cosmos, and then we steward it as priests and priestesses, as kings and queens, and one day we re -gift it back to God, right?

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And so we're seeing a hint of the purpose of humans in general right there in Genesis 1, you know, verses 26, 27, 28, and 28 with the imago

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Dei, so. This is like the most biblical pep talk I didn't know I needed, and we're not even to the purpose section.

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Very great. Wow. I love that. Oh my gosh. I like got to let that marinate for a second. So where we come from is where we'll return, and so that literally makes us priests and priestesses.

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Okay. It's kind of settling in. Moving on to one of the other verses that you sent me was 1st

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Colossians 15 through 20. Oh, nevermind. Romans 11, 36, for everything comes from him and exists by his power and is intended for his glory, kind of like what you just said, all glory to him forever.

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Amen. And I feel like this concept of eternity, do you think it's a little early to talk about this when it comes from origins?

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Like, do you think that, or do you think like right at the beginning, we're talking about the end, which the end's not in sight, spoiler alert.

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How do you conceptualize that? I mean, it's unfathomable, but let alone to the people at the time, was that fathomable?

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Like, what do you have to say about eternity? Are you talking about God is eternal or like that we will one day exist forever in the life after life after death?

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That part more? I don't know. Is it a dumb question to be like, we're all gods, not eternal?

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I mean, was that a new concept? I feel like just eternity as a whole is pretty mind bonding, but like, well, this God is eternal.

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He always has been, always will be. Yeah, no, I think that's good, right? You have a lot of, there is a debate about like the origin of the idea of God question and whether or not like from the beginning we had this, it's sometimes called original monotheism,

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I think, where everybody just has this intuitive sense that there's one God and this God is eternal, right? And there's a debate about whether we go from like, some people say, no, it goes from polytheism and you see this in scripture to henotheism.

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There's many gods, but my God's the best to the monotheism. I don't think that that's actually how it goes. I think that there's this innate idea of God that we all have as creatures.

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But there's that interesting debate. So yeah, I think that there were like finite gods and maybe they were temporal or came into being in some ways.

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But then you have Moses, like it's interesting. So Moses writes in Genesis, Moses, of course, wrote one Psalm, right?

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And it was Psalm 90. And if you look at verses one and two of Psalm 90, actually verse two, it says from everlasting to everlasting you are, right?

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So there you have this very clear, at least with Moses, right? Not in Genesis one, but somewhere nearby,

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Psalm 90, you have this very clear proclamation, at least for the Hebrews, that God is eternal in the sense that for any time that there is,

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God is, right? There's no time that there is that God isn't. And of course, that will play into us and life after life after death as well, depending on where you want to go with it.

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But yeah, I think that at least for the Hebrews, they did have that concept of God is everlasting and eternal. The concept that like amidst that polytheism, and I forget what you call it when there was like many gods, but my

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God is the best, you know, you know, you know, like even then at that moment, the

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God that we know today existed and they were believing in something that wasn't accurate.

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But even during that time, God was looking down like, I've been here. I'm going to be here. You guys are looking at the wrong idol.

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Yeah. So like from an Israelite perspective, I always like to go into like the contextual, like the original readers, how did they receive this?

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Was it kind of shocking to be like, oh, the idol I've been sacrificing to, isn't it?

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You know, like kind of when that truth bomb hits of like the God of Israel is the one true God that always is and will be, you know, that altar that you were worshiping, that idol or that, you know, polytheistic

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God is actually was kind of a sham the whole time. I imagine that that hurt. Yeah.

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Yeah. I don't know. I mean, I'm thinking, I'm kind of thinking through in my mind, like the old Testament stories and think of like judges, right?

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Where there's that cycle of we worship the true God and then they kind of wander, right? And they erect idols to false gods and then something bad happens and then they return to the true

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God. And that's kind of like human nature too, right? Like Calvin famously said, well, you know, this is later, but John Calvin and the

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Institutes of Christian Religion says that our hearts are idol factories, right? We're just constantly churning idols. And of course, humans back then were no different than humans are today, right?

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So I'm assuming that it would be in the same way that when we realize the idols in our own lives, there's conviction of sin and maybe a renewed sense of awe and wonder.

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And that's what I love about, like I teach, right now I'm writing a book on philosophical theology and I'm teaching a class on philosophical theology for our grad students.

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And like what I love about the rhythm of doing, we're looking at the attributes of God and there's this rhythm. Like you start with scripture, right?

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The data set and you quickly move to like these, to theology and kind of what the tradition has said. But then from there you move to philosophy and all these naughty puzzles about different attributes of God.

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And as your concept or idea of God expands, it moves you to doxology, right? So there's actually this rhythm to how we do this pursuit of knowledge with respect to God.

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You know, scripture and theology, philosophy, and then doxology. And that's a really familiar rhythm for me in these classes.

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But you know, I suspect that as the Hebrews, you know, we're coming face to face with the reality of the true

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God. It would lead to worship and fall down on your face and, you know, the kind of Isaiah moments of we are not worthy kind of stuff.

24:57

Absolutely. Absolutely. Wow. So much to be said about origins. And I love just kind of bringing it back to what you said at the beginning of like where we started is where we're headed.

25:05

Like how beautiful is that? And that's always been the plan. Just that concept of eternity. I want to get into some of the other topics.

25:11

I know we can spend a lot of time on origins, but there's three other ones. And the next one, I mean, take your pick.

25:17

I've got love lined up, but how do you do that? Okay. That's a good one. Okay. So let's start with the verse you sent.

25:25

I've got three of them here. So the first is Psalms 23, six, surely your goodness and unfailing love will pursue me all the days of my life.

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And I will live in the house of the Lord forever. And then there's, there's Romans five, eight, but God showed his great love for us by sending

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Christ to die for us while we were still sinners. So that's so gentle. That's so kind.

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He sent his son to die for us, even though we were still sinners. Your unfailing love is going to pursue me my entire life.

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I mean, that level of grace and mercy, that level of sacrifice. We know that because that's what's taught today.

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That's the version of God that we get to, you know, praise God experience. Was that always the case?

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Was love kind of a changing view? Like I know we fear God and then there's the wrath of God.

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So was God's love sometimes taken with a grain of salt in the past, whereas like the one we know today, very kind, very gentle, very merciful.

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Is that godly love different when we look at ancient texts? Interesting. That's a really good question because there is, it is true that sometimes people say things like the

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God of the old Testament is a God of wrath and anger. And the God of the New Testament is, you know, Jesus, meek and mild and, you know, gentle or something is loving.

26:39

But I would say no, actually, you see God's loving kindness from the very get go and all throughout the

26:45

Old Testament is the first thing I'd want to say, and we can point to some of those places. But I would also want to say, you know, the

26:51

Old Testament was written over a period of, you know, like over a thousand years, right? If you go with like traditional views of Moses writing in the 1600

27:00

BC, and then you go all the way to some of the last things that were kind of written and included in the Old Testament.

27:05

But then the New Testament was written probably within 60 years. So my guess is if you extended out the New Testament, right, to make it comparable, it would have the same kind of wrath, judgment, as well as love that you would find in there in our interactions with God.

27:19

But you do see very clearly like God creating a place in love, right? This whole everything is good.

27:25

And he creates like the Hebrew word that you find that's often talked about, that describes

27:30

Genesis 1 is shalom, right? This is this Hebrew word that just means a rich state of flourishing, where we experience life the way that we ought.

27:39

But this will get to like meaning and purpose. That's what shalom means? Yeah, so usually we think it just means peace, right?

27:44

Yeah, it's broader than that. It doesn't mean like the absence of strife. That's maybe one way to think of peace or shalom, but it's more rich than that.

27:52

No, that we flourish in light of our nature. And so God created us to flourish.

27:58

And this connects to love. As it turns out, the highest good for humans is a relational good, right?

28:05

It's union with God, right? So we so often, as Christians, at least, we talk about what we're saved from.

28:11

We're saved from the penalty of sin, which is death, and that's all true. But we don't focus on what we're saved for, right?

28:16

There's the destiny piece, not just the origin piece, but the destiny piece. And what we're saved for is union with God, right?

28:22

This is like one of the most foundational doctrines in the Christian faith, and we have such a weak theology of it.

28:27

But this is the great relational good that we've been created for, is eternal love, right, with the

28:32

God who creates us. Maybe I'll stop there, because I lost your original question.

28:38

But yeah, it's a good start. It's okay. Love is so boundless, and everything you just said,

28:46

I mean, it's okay if we go off the track, because I don't think there's any guardrails when we're talking about love. But what you said at the beginning kind of just blew my mind, that love is relational, and that we were created from it, and that we also are meant to live to rejoin it.

29:00

So it's almost this like beginning and end. Could you just like say that again, but simply? Yeah.

29:07

So here's a beautiful way to think about that. At least it moves me. If you think about it, if the most fundamental fact in all of reality, back to the origins question, is creator, creature, right?

29:18

That's like rock bottom, baseline fact. You've got God and then creature, everything else. What that tells us is the fundamental fact of all of reality is a relational fact, because all of our lives make sense in relation to God who creates us.

29:32

And, you know, fast forwarding to like a wonderful passage in 1 John 4a, just to simplify this, it literally tells us that God is love, and that's part of his nature is that he is loving.

29:43

He's essentially a loving being. So the most fundamental fact about reality is love, right? Not as like a

29:49

Star Wars force, but love found in a person, or actually the triune persons of the

29:57

Godhead, the triune God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so we've been created in love, and we're created for love.

30:03

Like that's what we're created to enjoy, is this union with the God who loves us and pursues us and wants to be with us.

30:11

How's that? Actually - In love and for love. I love that. Yeah, let me give you my favorite.

30:17

So the last thing I'll say on this, my favorite explanation. So I wrote a chapter on love in one of my more recent books called

30:23

A Good and True Story. And it was so fun to think about love and like, look at the literature. There's actually like a lot of literature in philosophy and theology about the nature of love.

30:31

But I was reading this Catholic theologian named Joseph Pieper, and I was reading about the virtues. And one of the classic virtues is the theological virtues are faith, hope, and love.

30:40

And I love this proclamation. He says, the fundamental affirmation of love is

30:45

I'm glad that you are. I'm glad that you exist. And that has just captured my imagination.

30:50

Right. Love is this fundamental affirmation. I'm glad that you are. To me, that just grabs it all.

30:57

That captures it all when we think about God's love and love in general. Yeah. Wow. And there's different kinds of love.

31:04

I mean, the different ways that we know the agape love, the fatherly love, the all -encompassing love.

31:11

It's just like the evolution of that. How did that kind of come into play with...

31:17

Gosh, I'm not saying any of this correctly. Is that new? I mean, I just, I'm trying to think of like understanding love in all the ways that we experience it today of like,

31:25

I love my sisters. I love my father. I love my coworkers. All very different types of love.

31:31

Right. Good. And so we see that in God in all the different ways that he loves us. But do we know it on earth because God first showed it to us?

31:40

Or would you say like God is in a completely different stadium of his own? Like we, this is a low res earthly version of love compared to like what's in heaven.

31:50

Yeah. Interesting. So a couple of things, a couple of thoughts that are bouncing around in my mind based on what you just said.

31:56

I do think like if you go to the Greeks, you can see different senses or different kinds of love that the

32:01

Greeks were aware of, right? So C .S. Lewis writes a book called Four Loves. Three of those were just loves that the

32:08

Greeks would be, you know, like eros, which is like a sexual love. And then phileo, which is like kind of brotherly or sisterly love.

32:14

Storge, which is a friendship kind of love. So the Greeks were very familiar with those kinds of love. I think the unique contribution that Christianity makes clear, but of course you see this in the

32:25

Old Testament as well as the New Testament. But I should say like that Romans 5 .8, right? That makes it very clear is what in the

32:32

Greek is called agape. You mentioned earlier this kind of unconditional love that God has for creatures. You definitely see that in the

32:38

Old Testament and even God's treatment of Israel. In many ways, those promises are unconditional promises that he makes to them.

32:45

And so it's always been around because God has always been around, but it's within the confines of the

32:52

Judeo -Christian and specifically Christian religion that you get like real concrete examples of what this kind of unconditional love could look like.

33:01

Most prominently in what Christ has done for us, by redeeming us through his blood shed on the cross.

33:07

Yeah. This feels like such a dumb question, but it's just so like top of mind is like, why sacrificing a son?

33:14

Why was that the ultimate showcase of love? Because it's absolutely powerful and I don't mean to be ignorant of the impact, but it does seem in the grand scheme of how great

33:25

God is. Is this truly like the greatest loss and the greatest sacrifice or is there something larger?

33:31

I don't know. I think about that quite often, just as far as like his greatest show of love was sacrificing his only son.

33:38

Yeah, that's really good. What does that say about our faith? You know? Yeah. So what's interesting is in John, 1

33:44

John, I think it's 4, 9 and 10. If you check, it's somewhere in there. John explicitly links

33:50

Christ's sacrifice, sacrificial death on the cross as an expression of God's great love for humans, which was really cool.

33:57

There is a very real sense in which that is, in many, the greatest expression of what love can look like, laying down life for another.

34:08

Now there's more going on with the atonement, right? There's all these different models of what the atonement would look like.

34:14

And so like penal substitution. Again, if you don't want to go theology too technical, I won't. I promise. But like they'll add to it.

34:19

Let's go. I love it. They'll add like there's also the justice of God, right? So you want to balance the love of God and the justice of God.

34:26

You see that in 1 John, right? We're so quick to point out 1 John 4, 8, where it says God is love. But right before that in 1

34:32

John 1, it says God is light, right? So you have both light, purity, just. God is just and good and loving.

34:38

And so you want to blend those. And so what I see in the cross is this perfect blend. And in the atonement, the perfect blending of the love of God and the justice of God.

34:48

And you see those very clearly connected in the New Testament. Where last thing I'll say. So you have 1 John, where he connects the love of God to the atonement.

34:55

Go to Romans 3, verses 24 through 26. And Paul connects the justice of God to the atonement.

35:01

So you have both. And that's where the cross is such a beautiful expression of who God is. Perfectly loving and also perfectly just.

35:09

Oh, wow. Okay. That actually is pretty all -encompassing. And, you know, kind of.

35:15

We don't talk about the knowledge of God, the planning of God. And but obviously, like the forgiveness, the justness, the justice, the love.

35:25

Okay. This is hard to do this podcast with you, Paul. I just feel like my mind is being blown. So it's hard to react and.

35:32

Yeah, it's partly. So, yeah, it's maybe it's not fair because I'm writing a book right now on philosophical theology, and I'm like knee deep in all this literature.

35:40

I just finished the atonement. And so it's like right there. And I'll dial it down. I promise. My wife tells me.

35:47

This is my fault. You keep speaking truth. Okay, let's move on to beauty.

35:53

This was, to be honest, I love that you brought this up to me because, again, you're the expert.

35:59

You've studied this at depth. And when I think of like learning about God and when I think of like learning the

36:04

Bible beauty, honestly, like isn't one of the things that I start to question, like beauty to me seems so superficial, so temporary, so relative and just like of this earth.

36:14

I think subjectively the things that God does is beautiful, but it's not in that tangible way that I'd be like, what is the ideal image of a woman?

36:24

Let's go to the biblical perspective of it. So with beauty, you sent me the verse Exodus 31, one through 11.

36:31

And I guess it didn't focus on any physical attributes. It didn't focus on like what a beautiful woman should look like, you know, like in Proverbs 31 or like Isaiah 61 of like what an ideal wife is.

36:42

So why did you include this? Yeah, I love that. Yeah, that's good.

36:49

So Exodus 31 verses one through 11 is a wonderful passage.

36:54

If you're wondering or you generic, if any of us are wondering, like, does God care about beauty? Does God care about art?

37:01

The answer is found in that passage, because what you have there is this is the Moses and the

37:07

Israelites are right at the base of Mount Sinai, right before the giving of the

37:13

Ten Commandments. And they're kind of there and God, you know, coming out of 400 years of slavery and in their midst there are the artists.

37:21

And not only that, God knows them by name, right? He actually names them and he commissions them to create, to build the temple, the tabernacle and all the furnishings of the tabernacle, basically to make works of art.

37:33

And then if you go to like Exodus 25, there's more details on the patterns and what it should look like and what materials you should use.

37:39

And what you find as you begin to study the Exodus 31 passage and do it in conjunction with stuff before that, is that God actually,

37:47

Francis Schaeffer puts it this way in a little book called God in the Bible or Art in the Bible. He says that in Exodus 31, you have every instance of representational art known to man commanded by God to these artists to create.

37:59

And it's super cool. But what you find is that God is basically in creating the tabernacle, the language and the materials that they're supposed to use are actually pointing backwards and pointing forward.

38:10

They're pointing backwards to a time, to the Garden of Eden, when the singular joy of the

38:16

Garden of Eden was the presence of God in their midst, right? That's what the tabernacle will be. And it's also pointing forward to a future time when one day all things will be made right.

38:23

And so beauty is one of the, you know, sometimes it's called one of the transcendentals were created to be nourished on goodness, truth and beauty.

38:31

And I believe that that's true. And theologically, beauty is, as one writer puts it, a kind of the language is a theological amnesis.

38:38

But in other words, it's supposed to evoke a memory of a time when humans experienced life the way it was meant to be.

38:45

That shalom, that flourishing, the time when Adam and Eve before the fall, when everything was as it ought to be.

38:51

That's what beauty does. It reminds us of home, right? The home that we came from and the home that one day we will arrive at for the first time, but as if returning, right?

39:01

So beauty plays, like we have this really weak theology of beauty as Christians, but yet we're created to be nourished on it, right?

39:08

So I would just say with respect to like physical beauty, there's probably at least five kinds of beauty, physical beauty being one for sure, right?

39:15

There's like human beauty, but then there's other sites of beauty as philosophers and theologians would put it.

39:22

There's art, there's something called everyday beauty, there's nature beauty, and then there's sacred or divine beauty, right?

39:31

And all those beauties are meant to point us back and to remind us of God, who is beauty itself.

39:37

So I'll stop there. I love this. It's like the origins of like we're coming exactly, you know, it's where we began, it's where we'll end up, even with beauty and even with love.

39:46

It's like when we look at ancient texts, that depiction is still relevant to us today and to where we're headed.

39:52

Oh my gosh, all connected. What is everyday beauty?

39:57

It would be like the beauty of a, think of like built environments. Think of like a well -planned park, right?

40:04

You know, there's a kind of beauty there. Or like I'm looking out my window, maybe not at my yard so much, because it's landscape but not perfect, but like, you know, a landscape.

40:14

And so what that tells us is that there's like degrees of beauty, right? There can be things that are really beautiful and captivate us.

40:20

And then there's things that are, that's why they sometimes call it everyday beauty. There's a kind of beauty in order there, but it's maybe not as beautiful as the

40:27

Sistine Chapel or something like that, yeah. Yeah, that just makes me think like life imitates art. And so when you're like creating and you're creative and you have like a beautiful sculpture or a beautiful painting, the fact that you, in your creation of something that does not currently exist, that has already been named and identified at Mount Sinai, at the base in the

40:47

Bible of like me as an artist, I'm creating art to resemble a feeling or a visual that reminds me of Eden.

40:54

Mm -hmm, yeah. Would you say that's basically what you're saying? Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So that Exodus passage, what it evokes are all these questions.

41:04

Like why do we have artists, right? Who are creating beautiful things, right? I mean, you wouldn't think if Israel is like surviving in Egypt for 400 years that you'd have artists in their midst, right?

41:15

So it evokes that question. Why are there artists and there's a whole community of them that you find there? It also evokes, and the answer is, why do we have them?

41:22

Because I think they help us to see and to understand the world around us. It's as if artists, one of the roles of the artists today, and I think always, is to peel back that curtain of reality and help us get a glimpse of reality as it really is, right?

41:35

That's why we need them. They help us to worship, right? And so there's a big debate about like, oh, now you can't have art in church because it leads to idolatry.

41:44

Well, yeah, right, if you worship it. But if it was biblically, it's meant to be an aid to worship, not an object of worship, right?

41:50

That's what artists do. That's what art does, is it pulls back that curtain and helps us see. And so, yeah, super important.

41:57

And what's interesting, I wrote this book called Cultural Apologetics, where I'm asking this question, how does the gospel get a fair hearing in culture?

42:03

And one of the chapters was on beauty and the imagination, right? Because God has given us the imagination and it's on a quest for the object of its longing.

42:12

And the object of its longing is beauty, right? And then if you put your theology cap on and you say, well, what's the source of beauty?

42:18

There's this wonderful phrase in Augustine, in the Confessions, sorry if I go too academic in here, but in book three, he says this of God, he says,

42:25

God, you are the beauty of all beautiful things. And then he says, you are the good of all good things. And I would just add the truth in which all true things point, right?

42:32

So we have beautiful things, but they set us on a journey to the source of beauty itself, which is

42:38

Christ, right? And so, yeah, again, it all ties together so wonderfully, I think. It really does.

42:44

Oh my gosh. And here I was entering this conversation being like, none of these things are really related in an obvious biblical way.

42:52

Wow. Wow. Okay. Last 15 minutes. Let's get into it. Meaning and purpose.

42:57

This feels like a bigger one. Some of the verses you sent me were Psalm 35, 27, but give great joy to those who came to my defense.

43:05

Let them continually say, great is the Lord who delights in blessing his servants with peace.

43:10

So very servant leadership. Is that the purpose that we're supposed to take away is to love each other?

43:16

No. Yeah. No, it's something that you'll scan over it until I tell you what the word is. It's super cool.

43:22

This is why I love this passage. So it's Psalm 35, 27, right? That word that in the translation you read was bless.

43:31

It was right at the end there. Read the last part. He delights in blessing his servant with peace. Okay. That word is sometimes translated, he delights in the well -being of his servants.

43:42

Or to put it another way in the language I've been using, he delights in the flourishing of his creatures, right?

43:47

Of his servants. So what that tells us is that God wants us to be happy, not in the shallow sense of happiness as people think it today is like sensual pleasure, but in the rich classical or biblical sense of flourishing in light of our nature.

44:00

So God wants us, he created us to flourish, to connect to what I said earlier. God wants us to be happy, but the question is, what is happiness amount to?

44:08

And it's that great relational good, united with God and others. So actually flourishing, let me,

44:14

I'm going to expand it a little bit now, if that's okay. It's actually four great goods. It's harmony or union with God, rightly related to self.

44:22

So we're created to have its character, like integrity, that we have the virtues, rightly related to others and the world around us, and then rightly related to our end or our purpose or our telos, that which

44:33

God has made us for. That's flourishing. And the good news of the Bible and the good news of the gospel is that God created us to flourish, right?

44:40

But we've just got to understand what flourishing or happiness is. Okay. So flourishing would be rightly related to God, to ourselves, to others around us, and then our future purpose.

44:51

And then our ultimate sort of what did God make me for, that work that God created me for, this end, this telos.

44:58

So it's not just, so that end or telos ultimately is just union with God permanently, forever, and we become this ingredient in God's happiness, as C .S.

45:06

Lewis says. But there's more, right? Because God has a journey, a quest. We've talked about the origin and the destiny, but we haven't talked about the quest that God has, the journey of life.

45:15

And that's part of it too, that we journey in faith and hope toward love as we serve

45:21

God in the things that he's called us to do. Would you say that quest is kind of like that delights and blessing?

45:27

So that quest is that delight while blessing and hoping for flourishment for others?

45:32

Yeah, I mean, I think it's taking our place in the kingdom of God, right?

45:41

To journey ourselves toward God and to invite and take with us and join with as many along the way or something like that, right?

45:51

You know, so I think the other passage that you didn't mention is, yeah, you know, easy peasy, right? But the other passage is that Ephesians 2 .10

45:57

.1, right? Yeah, let's get into it. And I love that too, because it says you are literally God's workmanship, which in the

46:03

Greek is you are literally a work of art, right? So the divine artist creates us as this work of art.

46:09

And then it says, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God has prepared for us before the foundation of the world, right?

46:16

And I take great comfort in this, especially talking like, I've got, well, my kids are in college now,

46:21

I've got one high schooler still at home. And, you know, just talking to him, like there's great comfort in this fact that God has created you to do this work, right?

46:29

He has things for you to do, right? And this journey called life. And it's our job to figure out what that is. But yeah,

46:36

I take great comfort in that, that God has created me for a purpose. And there's work, meaningful work for me to do.

46:43

So we came from love. We're headed towards love. Journey in love. We journey in love and the art that we experience, the beauty that we experience is from God that we experience to remind us of God's love.

46:55

And now amidst that journey, God has already predestined us to have a purpose and have a plan and to work according to that purpose.

47:05

But one level lower is how do I know what that purpose is? You can ask that next.

47:11

Oh, it's a good question. Here's all I can say, or here's what I would like to say.

47:18

So there's a wonderful pastor slash important writer named Frederick Buechner, who was a pastor and an author.

47:27

But he says that you discover your calling, that which God has made us to do at the intersection of two things.

47:34

And this to me is super helpful. So I'll just throw it out there. At the intersection of the deep longings or passions of the heart and the deep needs of the world, right?

47:43

So for me, just to personalize that, I can remember asking

47:48

God, are you calling me to be a generalist for life as a campus minister and do everything well, but nothing excellent, right?

47:54

Because that's what we do as generalists. Or are you calling me to be this niche player and really explore these passions to know and to learn, which is kind of like to gain some specialty in philosophy and theology and things like that.

48:06

And that was the deep longing of my heart, right? So there's the deep longing.

48:12

And then there's this, well, what do people need? And as I said earlier about doing apologetics in dorms at midnight with pizza, there's a deep need to know truth, right?

48:22

And so that for me was part of the environment where God revealed to me this unique calling, right?

48:27

To be kind of a niche player, to go from a CPA and crunching numbers to someone who gets to talk about cool stuff with people and wrestle with it daily.

48:36

And that's what I would say for others. You know, at least start there and then see what

48:41

God does. I mean, the obvious answer is like, become a pastor, just serve the word. But sometimes that's hard.

48:48

Before this podcast, I would ask myself this all the time. Like, am I supposed to be like, I have a tech job outside of this, but like, should

48:55

I be working in tech? Should I be using the other talents that God has given me? Am I using the wrong talents?

49:00

So God, what do you want from me? Am I, you know, obviously to glorify him, but am I doing that with my nine to five and my 401k and all of that dumb stuff that we all have to do to live?

49:11

How do I know that it's God's, or you just God's purpose just for me to work nine to five, go to bed, get married, have kids, whatever it is.

49:17

But I do think that that, you know, in this pursuit of it, like you found a way, like you,

49:22

I mean, you changed your whole life. You went from businessman into ministry entirely. But for me, it was the podcast.

49:27

Like the podcast was a deep longing for me to know truth and also seeing that other people felt the same way.

49:33

So I was like, Oh, perfect. Two birds, one stone. We'll make a podcast, record the conversation, share them. But it is like, not everybody's going to do a podcast.

49:40

Not everyone's going to completely change into ministry. So where do you find that intersection when you are a

49:46

CPA and you're like, I have a deep longing for God and these are the needs or whatever it might be.

49:51

I think it's the purpose is very clear to worship God, but it's almost like, how does that work into the current things

49:58

I'm doing? Unless I'm doing a full pivot. I don't know. It is a little difficult when you're like, I want to make a lot of money and there's just not a lot of money and finish, like whatever you're,

50:07

I don't know. Yeah. And I would say, I think there's great freedom. Like, I'm not worried about, like, there's a kind of a debate.

50:14

Like, does God, has he created you for this one thing? Or is there like these many things that God would be happy with? And I don't,

50:20

I don't think I take a stand on that. I think I see both even in scripture, right? You have moments where God clearly calls

50:25

Paul to go to, was it Macedonia? I think, right. But there's other times when there's like, let's use our

50:30

Christian wisdom and you go this way and I go that way. And I think there's great freedom in that. I think that there's many, many worthy ways.

50:36

And so I would want to like, like you working in tech, right? Is under the banner of Christ is just to me,

50:43

I think, and I think this is, you can back these things up biblically, is just as valuable as the pastor and the housewife and the house, the dad and all these things, right?

50:52

Under the banner of Christ is like the thing that I think is the important thing. God can use us in all these contexts.

50:58

Yeah. And so at least for me, I've kind of loosened up on that worry. I think as we pursue

51:03

God, like even when, as I say with my kids, as they're looking for like, who do you date? And how does that work?

51:09

I just say, look, run for the Lord and then look to the right and the left and, and see who's running right next to you.

51:14

And those are the people you want to hang out with. And I guess I would say that the same as just run for the Lord and then see what, you know,

51:21

God is doing. He's surfacing this passion for podcasting and how does, you know, for you. And that's, it seems very natural with, with, you know, how

51:28

God has made you. And, and I would want to say that for everyone. Yeah. Oh gosh, dropping truth bombs,

51:34

Paul. Okay. Well, going the other direction, like what if you just go like way off track?

51:40

Like what if there is that instance of like unbelief and going, you know, like my purpose was to serve the

51:46

Lord, but here I am in sex work. Here I am in drug dealing. Here I am just like absolutely in the wrong direction.

51:53

Is there a, I would always worry about this massive anxiety of like, have I gone too far? Did I make that one wrong decision that just like totally screwed me in like being on the right path to have my purpose for God?

52:05

Yeah, that's really good. That's a great question. Because it reminds me of like Revelation 3 and the church at Laodicea.

52:14

And it's so interesting. That's the church where Jesus says, you're neither hot nor cold.

52:20

So I want to vomit you out. Right. And people are always like, don't be a lukewarm Christian. And that's the totally wrong way to understand that passage.

52:26

Right. If you look at the context of Laodicea, they actually literally have two springs that feed that city.

52:32

One is a cold stream and one is a hot stream. And both were useful for their own purposes.

52:38

Right. Cold is for refreshment and hot heat is for medicinal and comfort and things like that.

52:43

And so the point of that passage was you are not useful and I want to vomit you out. You're not fulfilling your purpose.

52:49

Right. So there is a kind of warning, right, that aligns with your worry, right, that we want to live a perfect life.

52:55

I'm sorry, back it up. Yeah, go ahead. Before, how does vomiting, like what was the missed purpose contextually for that hot and cold water?

53:02

Lukewarm water serves no purpose. So cold water serves a purpose. Hot water serves a purpose.

53:08

I see. But don't be lukewarm. Don't serve no purpose. So there's that interesting warning. Does that make sense? Are we good?

53:14

Yes, yes. Keep going. Yeah. And so that does come to mind on one hand, right?

53:20

God has created us for a great purpose. And it doesn't mean that everybody needs to be pastors. I think we want to be careful not to have that sacred secular split.

53:28

I think there's many, many, many worthy jobs as we follow Christ, including all the normal things in business and tech and all that.

53:35

But I would want to say to those who have fallen off in the kind of examples you gave that fall off the path of life or just do things that are stupid, right?

53:44

And are sinful, wrong, evil. The good news of the gospel is it's never too late this side of heaven to find redemption, right?

53:52

And to find God taking out of the brokenness and the mistakes that we make, including mistakes

53:57

I've made, to make something new. And that's the beauty of the gospel story, right? Is that, yeah, we do wonder and fall.

54:05

Think of like the great, one of the worst slave traders in history who finds Christ and then writes this amazing song about amazing grace, right?

54:13

That's the good news of the gospel that at least gives me comfort when I stumble and fall. And you can take that to the broader question of maybe we're involved in a sinful lifestyle or something, right?

54:24

But we're never that far from God's grace, this side of heaven where God can't redeem us and use that.

54:31

Such good news. Such good news. How did the hot, cold, lukewarm water relate to that conclusion that you came to?

54:39

Oh, I think it was just in light of part of the idea that you're getting at, that what about if I'm not living for a purpose?

54:48

And I think that scripture does give us a kind of warning, right? That we are created. We're kings and queens.

54:54

We're priests and priestesses. We have a great responsibility. And I think that that, so there's

54:59

Genesis, but you got that revelation passage is kind of reminds us, no, we've been created for this. We have real skin in the game, right?

55:06

We will be held accountable for how we live our lives. That is part of the reality of the

55:11

Christian message. But even within that great responsibility, and this is the second thing

55:17

I wanted to say. So that's the first thing is, yeah, we do want to live our life as best we can in a way that's

55:23

God honoring. But then the second thing I want to say is, but you know what? When we screw up and all of us do, there's still this great

55:28

God of grace that's there waiting for us. So I just want to keep both, if that's okay, in view in your question.

55:34

Both end, yes. Yeah. Yes. That is quite relieving. I wish you told me that like a decade ago, because that verse kept me up.

55:42

And especially like as a child, you're so paralyzed with who I want to be and what

55:47

I'm meant to be and being in good standing with God that you're like, well, if I go to the wrong college, am I screwed? You know, like you start over analyzing it.

55:55

Yeah. I don't think it is a lot of pressure. Um, okay. One of my last questions.

56:01

This was something I was considering with the podcast because I was just so scared to start it. And I definitely felt like it was from God because it was just too good of an idea, to be honest.

56:10

It's like this idea didn't come from me. And I was like, postponing, postponing. And someone was like, well, it's

56:17

God's will. It will happen. And if you don't do it, someone else will. And that absolutely kicked me into starting gear because I was like, no, it's too much.

56:25

But do you feel like someone else can be like, if God has a purpose and you don't take it up, like it can be assigned to somebody else.

56:34

Like somebody else can be assigned this purpose for God's will. It's like, we have the choice to take it on or we don't.

56:40

And if we don't, then it'll be assigned to someone else. Or do you, do you live in that stance of like, everybody has a very specific purpose and they're on their journey.

56:47

That's only meant for them. Yeah. That's, that's another really good. And also, I don't know, question I have,

56:53

I have, here's my best. Yeah. Like, I do think it's a both and, you know, I think we have instances in scripture where God very clearly calls and instances where he's like, you can do these, one of these three things and awesome.

57:05

Um, I do think so. So there's part of you. So I'm speculating. So I don't know, but let me give two thoughts, just speculating.

57:12

Um, I do think there, um, is a sense in which there are things that God wants to see accomplished and we are free creatures and that I think we can choose to not do the things that God desires of us.

57:27

Right. So this might sound odd, um, depending on like the theology, not just you, like those of you listening, but like, it seems pretty clear in scripture that God doesn't always get what he wants.

57:37

Right. He wants all people to be saved, but you know, on the traditional view, not all people will be saved and he can point to other things.

57:43

So that tells us if that's right, that we have, that we can, in a sense, we have real skin in the game and we can disappoint and do things that God doesn't want us to do.

57:52

And perhaps someone else will take up that banner. So that's, again, speculating on that part of your question. But the other thing is no one's going to, so yeah, someone might do a podcast, right?

58:02

But no one's going to do a podcast like you. Right. And in that sense, only you can do the podcast that you are doing right.

58:10

And in the way that you do it. Um, and that is something that never can be shifted. Right. Cause that's a really good point.

58:17

And so that's where, what is that thing that God has that only you can do? And that's that, that's that question that I think is helpful to ask.

58:24

Yeah, I absolutely agree. You know, while you were talking about your first point, I was thinking about like Jonah and the Ninevites of like, God needed to deliver that message and he made sure it was delivered.

58:32

So God's will was going to happen, but it happening guaranteed, whether Jonah did it, you know, with reluctance or, you know, somebody else with joy and cheer, it still was going to just maybe in different ways.

58:46

So that's again, yeah, both. And wow. Well, I'm going to have to think about this forever.

58:54

My mind has changed. Thank you, Paul. Yeah. You've dropped so many truth bombs, so thank you for your time.

59:00

If you've got, if there's anybody that's listening and they want to hear more true bombs, read some of your books, you've mentioned a couple.

59:06

Do you have like events? Do you have a big release coming up? How do, how do we get connected? How do we learn more?

59:11

Yeah, I mean, I'm pretty easy to find on social media, Facebook, well, the older ones, Facebook and X.

59:16

I'm not on Instagram and the ones that I, I'm told I should be on right now. But you can find me on my faculty page.

59:22

You can, at Palm Beach Atlantic, you can find me at paul -gould .com where I collect my writings and the books and things like that.

59:29

Yeah. So pretty easy to find me and, and yeah, and you can see all the books and go from there, from that website.

59:35

Are they on Amazon? Yeah. And you could get them at Amazon or wherever, yeah, wherever you guys access books. Cool. Cool. I'll link some in the show notes if somebody wants a quick buy.

59:44

Okay, cool. Any final thoughts that just like things that you're really excited about that you feel like need good closing thought as far as philosophical truths in the

59:53

Bible? Um, yeah, no, not really. I think we've covered some really good ones. So I guess I'll just leave you and your listeners with just, um, just the idea that we really, we, we really are part of the greatest story possible ever told, right?

01:00:09

Because we have God and we have incarnation and we have atonement and we have true happiness. So what a joy that we get to live the true story and it's actually satisfying.

01:00:18

So that, that would, you know, it satisfies all those deep longings of the heart. Some of which we've been talking about today.

01:00:24

What a blaze to end. Thank you so much. You're welcome back anytime to talk more about any of these topics and I hope to see it.