The Bible Is Not a Billy Club | Theocast

Hi, this is Justin. Today on Theocast, we are going to talk about the Bible, and in particular, we're going to talk about how we should understand it.

I think if people were honest, they would often admit to coming away from God's Word confused or even discouraged and not filled with hope.

Is that how it should be? Our answer to that question is no, it shouldn't be that way. So we're going to talk today about how to go to the

Scripture and understand it in light of Christ and what He's come to do for sinners. And then over in the

Semper Reformanda podcast, we're going to talk about the priesthood of all believers and how that's been misapplied and misunderstood. And we're also going to talk about some stuff that's happened through history that has produced the current church moment where you frankly just don't get a lot of good

Christ -centered preaching and teaching. We hope this is encouraging for you. We hope it's clarifying.

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To learn how to sign up, just go to theocast .org slash give. Welcome to Theocast, encouraging weary pilgrims to rest in Christ, conversations about the

Christian life from a Reformed and pastoral perspective. Your hosts today are John Moffitt, who is pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee.

And I'm Justin Perdue, pastor of Covenant Baptist Church in Asheville, North Carolina. John, what's up, my man?

We are recording another podcast today, an unusual day, an unusual time. And my whole podcast desk has been rearranged because we got a new mic and stuff.

And I just hope that I can make Upward and Down and Heads and Tails of the Scripture. The good thing for me, brother, is that Christ never changes.

Amen. That's right. Amen to that. Well, we're supposed to be in Knoxville today, and that didn't work out. So we rescheduled and decided to still record.

So one of the things we're doing different now is telling you a little bit about what we're preaching, since we're pastors and very passionate about what we're preaching.

Every summer, I just finished John, 97 sermons in John over the last three and a half years.

That was fun. Starting James soon. I know a lot of people are looking forward to that. I'll announce when that's up and running.

Probably we'll do a Bible study that goes with it for any pastors who want to use it. But I do a series every year called

The Purpose of the Church. And so this year is a little bit different. So far, we talked about Shattered by the

Church, just the experience that people have had not only in the last 10 years, but really through COVID. And then now we're talking about Scattered Church.

Why is it the church struggles so much to not only reach each other, but also the community around us?

So we had Scattered point part one and two. And then this week, we're talking about fellowship and how that has even been lost.

The art of loving one another has been lost. We'll talk about that this Sunday. So that's what's been in my pulpit the last few weeks.

What about you, JP? I'm still trucking through Genesis. So this coming

Sunday, I am at the end of chapter 30 through the end of chapter 33.

So the most, I guess, well -known, infamous part of that passage is when Jacob wrestles with God.

So I've got that this coming Sunday. I'm pretty excited about it. Because we were planning to be in Knoxville today,

I kind of backed my sermon prep up earlier into the week. So I did my little typically Friday afternoon bit yesterday afternoon where I'm going to verbally process my outline with some guys from the church.

It was a sweet time. So you're just going to do that today? You're going to do that on a podcast? Just verbally process with us? Say what?

We can start a whole other, we can start a whole other podcast of just you verbally processing your sermons with us. Yeah. So I don't practice preach.

I don't do any of that jazz. I just, I kind of go in and I just, I just get a lot of stuff down. And then what I do is verbally process it to kind of arrange it and get it the way

I want. And then I am ready to go. So yeah, that was good, man. The whole

Jacob wrestling with God bit is really, really gripping. Just in thinking about the

God who came down in human form and willingly lost to save his people, you know, it's pretty sweet.

Wait a minute, what you're telling me, Justin, what you're telling me is that in the story of Jacob wrestling, the gospel is there.

The gospel is there. I think it's one of the strongest pre the incarnation of Christ, like when he's born as a baby.

I mean, I think it is as strong as anything that I can think of that screams about the fact that God is going to take on flesh to save his people.

So what you're telling me is that the application you didn't make is that you need to go somewhere and wrestle with God, that you, when you're trying to make a decision that you really need to wrestle with God to make sure that you get the right answer, that's nowhere.

That's nowhere to be found. Neither is this whole business of like, you just need to take your Bible out into the countryside somewhere and you need to spend some time with the

Lord and wrestle with him and get some stuff sorted out. Like that is also not an application that will be made on Sunday.

It's going to be about God and it's going to be about his ways with us and how Jacob does leave that experience forever altered.

I mean, amen. He's humbled. I mean, I think he understands that he's just wrestled with God and the only reason that he did win is because God let that happen.

And it's just wild, man, how God limits himself and takes on human flesh and willingly loses to Jacob just like Christ will take on flesh and come and suffer and will willingly lose.

He will lay his life down, you know, and then he'll take it up again so that we might be rescued. So you didn't bludgeon people with the

Bible this last week and moralize them. The Bible's not a billy club, John. I've heard somebody say that before. Oh, there it is. There it is. And that's what we're talking about today.

We didn't even plan that transition, but it was well done. We occasionally do it well.

I don't know. Justin, let's talk about this subject, something you and I are extremely passionate about, the purpose and point of the

Bible and how it often is misused, misinterpreted, and often used as a billy club, not for necessarily other people, but people use it to beat up their own selves.

So let's give the people what they're really here for. Let's talk about Jesus. Let's do talk about Christ from all the scripture.

Yeah. The title of the episode, even as we were trying to come up with what to call this thing, the

Bible is not a billy club. I'm glad you said what you just did. We don't necessarily mean it as, yeah, you don't want to use the

Bible to beat other people up. Of course you don't want to do that. But we're talking about it even with respect to you as you come to the scripture, as you study it, as you seek to understand it.

A lot of people, if they're honest, they leave their time in the Word of God sometimes just super confused.

They don't know what to make of it. Or they leave their time in the Word of God, like really discouraged and feeling terribly about themselves and really questioning

God and his love toward them, whether he's graciously inclined toward them and like, how could

God really love me? And that's the takeaways. And so rather than the scripture being a balm for the soul, rather than it being the only thing that can legitimately give hope to a fallen sinner, it ends up being something very different than that.

And I think, I know you agree, that should scream to us that our hermeneutical tools, like the tools that we use to interpret scripture, are off somehow if we tend to come away from scripture discouraged.

I'm not—convicted? Okay, that's fine. You know, to be convicted of sin and to then take that to Christ and then say, you know,

I want to pursue righteousness. I want to flee from sin. That's great. That's wonderful. But to leave the scripture legitimately just beat down and discouraged, something's off.

If that's the case. I mean, the psalmist says in the Good King James, thy word is a lamp unto my feet, right? A light.

Good King James. A light unto my path. And it should be that. It should be in the midst of a dark, sinful, destructive, painful world, the light of God is seen in the face of Jesus Christ, or as Paul says, the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ, the light of our life, and it shines.

And yet God's word is more of a discouragement for two reasons. One, because of our engagement with it, meaning we should engage with it more and we're not.

And that's leading us to guilt and shame. And then when we do engage it, we don't necessarily know what we're doing.

And that leads to confusion, doubt, and fear. There's a phrase that I hear,

I heard it growing up, all I need is my Bible and the Holy Spirit, and that's enough to gain the truth of God and what he has for me.

And my reply to that is, well, okay, if that's true, then we have one problem. Either the

Bible's wrong or the Holy Spirit's schizophrenic, because it seems like nobody can agree on what the

Bible says if we're going to use that method, and we get all kinds of different explanations of religions and false teaching that comes from that.

Not just denominations, but I mean false teaching that comes from that type of a model. So Justin, that can't be the instructions that we are handed from the

Bible. I'm pretty sure, well, I'm not sure, I'm confident the Bible tells us how we should be handling it.

And that's really what we're going to talk about today, is how the word of God should be handled and the benefits it brings when handled properly.

Justin Perdue Yeah, absolutely. Brief comment on what you said about you and your Bible and the Holy Spirit. We're not going this way today, but I just want to say this now, especially for those who might be newer with us.

Theology, in terms of our study of the Scripture and how we understand God and man and God's ways with us and salvation and all that, it should never be done by oneself.

It needs to be done corporately. And that means not only corporately in the context of the local church that you're a in different eras of history.

So this is why things like the confessions and the creeds and the like are really valuable, because the same

Spirit of God has been at work in the church for 2 ,000 years. And there are a lot of things that the saints have hammered out over the course of centuries that we need not really address again, because the corporate witness of the church for two millennia says that this is true.

And we're going to trust the Holy Spirit that he's worked through the church in those ways. And so it's very frightening to me when people do just kind of go off by themselves with their

Bible. A lot of crazy stuff is come up with in those kind of contexts, and a lot of damage has been done throughout the history of the church.

And you even see, I know we've talked about this some lately, even in our podcast on The Rise and Fall of Morris Hill, there is a lot of danger when people end up attaching themselves to the theology of one person.

It becomes this kind of cult of personality, and somebody's confession of faith effectively becomes one man or one woman.

And that's a scary proposition, right? So it's much safer for us to do this kind of stuff in conjunction, in a corporate way, with people who are alive now and people who have gone before.

So yeah, now let's turn our attention to the Bible and appropriate ways to understand it. And these ideas, these principles, these truths, these doctrines, et cetera, that we're going to talk about today are not original to me or to John.

We're just going to be saying things that many people have said before us, but there are things that, I think sadly for many people, they're just unaware of them and don't know what they are and certainly wouldn't know how to apply them.

So why don't we start by, do you want to define some terms first maybe and talk about some different understandings and methods of approaching the

Bible? Yeah, that's exactly where I was going to go. Some various popular views, and these are what

I would conclude them to be the result of, how do

I say this? Everyone has a method. Hermeneutic literally means the science of interpretation.

So everybody has a hermeneutic, everybody has a way in which you structure the

Word of God and how you explain its interpretation. And throughout history, the various popular views are these.

First you have the intellectualist, and this is the person who is looking at it from a perspective that you aren't trying to find the spiritual meaning and application for the sake of hope in Christ.

You're looking at it as if it's pure data. You're looking at it as if, we can use the feeding of the 5 ,000 as an example, and you're looking at why 5 ,000 and is that really 5 ,000 and it's really 20 ,000 people and it's on a hillside.

They're looking at the pure data as if it's something to just be consumed for the sake of knowledge.

And that's it. That's the intellectualist. You also have the moralist or what's called the moralist exemplarist.

This is the person who looks at the text and they can't necessarily see the connection to the whole

Bible. And so what they're going to apply most passages, if we're talking specifically about the

Old Testament, they're going to apply it as a moral example, either good or bad. Daniel being good, you have different parts of David or negative positive or Joseph.

You can have all these examples, Samson being a negative one. And so every passage turns into an example of morality.

Then you have the liberal critical. This is not as popular today, but it used to be at one point where they look at the

Bible and their conclusions are, okay, we know it says that Jesus walked on water, but is that really a metaphor or is that really, you know, how do we know the eyewitness of that being true?

And then the last one is, which is where Justin and I are in a long line of history of those who are espoused of the

Reformation is a redemptive historic understanding or a redemptive historical framework of scripture, which will give an explanation of what that is here in a minute.

But I want to read you this quote. I think it's really helpful. It comes from Edmund Clowney's book,

The Unfolding Mystery, Discovering Christ in the Old Testament. When you don't understand what the point of the

Old Testament is, which we are going to say, and we've said for almost every episode we have ever done on Theocast over the last 102 episodes or whatever this is now, that the point of the

Old Testament, according to Jesus and Paul, is Jesus. It is about him and it is about not just him as a person, but his work.

This is why we call it a redemptive historic, meaning that God is redeeming sinners as it unfolds through history and that history is the

Old Testament that we have. Here's the quote. If we forget the storyline of the Old Testament, we will also miss the witness of their faith.

That omission cuts to the heart of the Bible. Sinistical stories are then told as tamer versions of the

Sunday comics, where Samson substitutes for Superman. David, meeting

Goliath, then dissolves into ancient Hebrew version of Jack, the giant killer. Note, David is not a brave little boy who isn't afraid of the big bad giant.

He is the Lord's anointed, chosen of God to be the king and deliverer of Israel. What I love just in that little point there, he actually makes the connection of the

Davidic covenant or the promise made to David. If the king comes and perfectly obeys the law, then all the people in the kingdom enter the kingdom with God.

Instead of focusing on that part of it, we focus in on this weird story about a giant and a little boy.

Part of what we want to do is convince everyone, show everyone not only the biblical nature of holding to a redemptive historic understanding, but there is massive benefits to you as a believer and your faith and your encouragement in Christ.

Justin, I laid out a bunch of stuff out there for you. Maybe I'll throw it back over to you. Sure. I suppose it makes sense to maybe contend for the legitimacy of a redemptive historical understanding for just a minute before we move forward.

John already said that's where we are, that's where the reforms have been. We understand that the point of the scripture is

God's plan of redemption to save sinners through Christ. Even maybe more pointedly than that, if we wanted to reduce it down even more, we would say that the entire

Bible is about Jesus. It's about who he is and what he came to do. We take our cue from none other than Christ himself when he was on the earth and in understanding it this way.

You have John chapter 5, a well -known section of scripture, verse 39, verse 46 of that chapter

I believe as well, where Jesus will say to his Jewish audience that you search the scriptures thinking that in them you find eternal life.

Of course, in his context, the scriptures were the Old Testament, what we know as the Old Testament. He says, but it is they, the

Old Testament scriptures, that bear witness about me. A few verses later he says that if you believed

Moses, you would believe me because Moses wrote about me. People may realize that Moses wrote the first five books of the

Bible, what we often refer to as the Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy.

Christ is saying that what Moses wrote was about him. You don't get that a lot, frankly, in the modern evangelical church.

I don't think that would be people's knee -jerk reaction if they were going to be sitting through a sermon series in Genesis, for example, maybe like I'm doing in my local church right now, or a series through Exodus or Numbers.

I don't know that people immediately would be thinking, oh my gosh, yeah, we're going to hear about Christ a lot today, sadly.

Can I interject and say that means any point of the Bible that you go to, you should have the anticipation of saying, we're going to hear about Jesus today.

No, amen, brother. Amen. Here's what's hard. If we were to go back, just to compare,

Justin, real quick, and contrast this to the ones that we said, you know, the intellectualist is going to read Genesis, and even talking about your section that you were dealing with, the battle there with Jacob, they would look at the information, and they would receive the information, and that would be the farthest they would go.

The Morris's application, we were playing around with the morality, and then liberalism, awesome, they're just going to say, well, did he really wrestle with God?

And a lot of that has to do with how they interpret things, and if they're only looking at the grammar and the context, and they're only looking at the immediate history, then they're going to get stuck.

And what I find great comfort in is that what you're arguing for from Jesus is that Jesus is saying, if you read

Moses, and you understood what Moses meant, Moses meant to lead you to me. That's right.

Can I, let me just look at another part. Go ahead. Are you going Luke 24? No, I'm going Acts. I'll let you take

Luke. All right, let me just get, while you're going to Acts, so Luke 24 is the other passage where Jesus is super clear about this.

This is after his resurrection, and he encounters some of his disciples on the road to Emmaus. Many people are familiar with this, and he does not reveal himself to them initially, and he's having a conversation with them, and they're like, you don't know what's happened in Jerusalem in these recent days, and he's like, what things?

What are you talking about? What's happened? So then they talk about how Jesus was killed and all this kind of stuff, and we had hoped that he was all these things, and he says, oh, basically he tells them, he rebukes them.

He says, do you not realize that all these things needed to happen to the Christ? You know, and then he begins, he said, it says, beginning with Moses and the prophets.

He explained to them all of, you know, all the things written concerning himself. So he goes back to Moses and the prophets and explains to them how all of that was ultimately about him and what he would come to do, and how if they had eyes to see that, they wouldn't be surprised at all that the

Christ was resurrected, that he would suffer and that he would die and then rise again and all this. And then those disciples even remark after Jesus reveals himself to them over a meal and then departs from them, they're like, didn't our hearts burn when he opened to us the scriptures?

You know, and it's like, well, what does that mean? He opened to us the scriptures. He opened to us the scriptures in terms of them being the witness about him.

So that's what we ought to be doing every time we go to the book, man, is reveal. I mean, you and I are preachers, right?

We're pastors of local churches. So when we preach every week, we ought to be doing that, revealing to our people how this is a testimony of Christ.

So good. So famous passage, Acts chapter eight, you have

Philip who's reading about Isaiah or he's reading Isaiah. And he says about whom, this is verse 34, about whom

I ask you, does the prophet say this about himself or about someone else?

He's getting it. He's reading it going. Yeah. The Ethiopian eunuch is reading it. Yeah. And it's like, what's this about?

Something, something seems like there's more in the text here. So what is Philip?

Yeah. The Ethiopian eunuch. Thank you. Asks Philip. Then Philip opened his mouth and beginning with the scriptures.

So beginning with this scripture, sorry, he told him the good news about Jesus.

So so far we've heard about the law, which is the first five books from Moses. Now we're hearing about the prophets.

And not only that, we have both of those combined later on where Jesus says the law and the prophets are about me.

So it's safe to conclude that we also know that the Psalms are multiple Psalms that point us to Christ, that the

Old Testament's design and purpose was to do one thing. I think it'd be safe to say if we, and these aren't even all the passages that we could also look at, 2

Corinthians 120 or Romans 5, 18 and 19, or sorry, 15, 8 and 9, where it talks up.

Well, let me just say, I'll just read Romans 15, 8 real quick. For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show

God's truthfulness in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs and in order that the

Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. And so these promises are fulfilled by Jesus.

What does it say here? To confirm these promises given to the patriarchs. So you have these promises given and Paul is saying the fulfillment of these promises is

Jesus. Right. I mean, so Paul over and over again, every promise of God finds its yes and amen in Christ.

Yeah. Amen. Correct. And then even, I mean, throughout Galatians, throughout Romans, throughout so much of what

Paul writes, he may, I mean, in Ephesians, my goodness, it's the mystery that was hidden for ages in God that's now being revealed, you know, that Christ came to save Jew and Gentile in the church and all of these things,

Paul constantly, I mean, he is the preeminent redemptive historical theologian, the preeminent covenantal theologian too.

I mean, if we're going to even talk about that, but then the other apostles do the same thing. I mean, think about how Peter, you know,

I've recently preached Noah and the Ark and all that. Think about how Peter connects what

God did in saving Noah and his family and bringing them safely through water. Think about how he connects that to baptism, you know, in our union with Christ.

And I mean, it's just all over the place, you know, where the apostles constantly interpret everything that happened before Christ in light of Christ.

And I mean, if I may just interject this right now, this is probably as good a time as any to say it. We're talking about various things right now, and we've mentioned various schools of thought in terms of approaching the scripture.

I want to do this really quickly. I'm going to try. I hope everybody can track. So sometimes in our context,

John, amongst like serious Bible students of a more Calvinistic ilk, sometimes people will try to pit what we would call a grammatical historical understanding of the

Bible over and against a redemptive historical understanding of the Bible. Grammatical historical meaning, we're looking at the words on the page, grammar, right?

We're looking at them in their historical setting, historical. We're looking at the syntax. We're looking at all that. We're really concerned about original authorial intent.

What did Moses mean when he wrote Exodus? What did David mean when he wrote this psalm?

What did Isaiah mean when he penned this or et cetera, right? And as though that is contradictory somehow to what we're articulating and advocating for today.

As redemptive historical theologians, we are also doing the grammatical historical thing, but we are asking the question as we look at the words and the grammar and the syntax on the page and the immediate authorial intent, we're asking the question, where does this text stand in light of Christ, who is the point of the whole

Bible? Where does this text stand in relation to the plan of God to save sinners through Jesus, which is the point of biblical revelation?

That's important. And so then I think, John, and I'm happy to let you riff on this too. This is another big observation that needs to be made.

There are a lot of people who take the Bible very seriously, who are happy to say that the New Testament needs to be understood in light of the

Old Testament. But as soon as we start to say, like we're articulating today and advocating for today, that you actually need to understand your

Old Testament in light of the new, people lose their minds. They wig out about it.

So I'm going to quote Nehemiah Cox, but he is not unique in saying this. He says in some of his writings on covenant theology that, quote,

I don't have it in front of me, but I know this is what it says, quote, the best interpreter of the Old Testament is the

Holy Spirit speaking to us in the new, close quote. To which we're like, yes and amen.

That is exactly right. And that's exactly what Paul did. That's exactly what Peter did. That's exactly what

John did. That's exactly what Christ did. He understood everything. These apostles understood everything that was written before Christ came to be ultimately about Jesus.

And if we're not studying the Bible that way, we're not going to get it right. And we're going to do all this other stuff with it. Like you mentioned, we're going to moralize it, or we're just going to gather a bunch of data.

We're going to say a bunch of like true things, but that never actually give us any good news. Give us hope.

Right. It's hopeless. It's discouraging. It's a beat down because it ends up being all about me.

And whether how much I understand or what I need to be doing. And it's like, man alive, if that's what you're coming away with from the scripture, you will be discouraged.

That's right. But if you're coming away from the scripture with Christ, Christ is the point of this. That's right.

There's hope. If you're new to Theocast, we have a free ebook available for you called

Faith vs. Faithfulness, a primer on rest. And if you've struggled with legalism, a lack of assurance, or simply want to know what it means to live by faith alone, we wrote this little book to provide a simple answer from a

Reformed confessional perspective. You can get your free copy at Theocast .org

slash primer. So I just finished John and John uses more of the

Old Testament than almost any other gospel writer. He uses a ton of the Old Testament. So this is what

I mean. And they all do, obviously. They do. Obviously. But what we don't understand is that, unfortunately, a lot of people spend most of their time either in the

Psalm, Proverbs, and then New Testament. And because they don't have a robust understanding of the

Old Testament, the Old Testament is what's shining the light on Christ, and it's casting this shadow. And as you get closer to the shadow, then eventually you get closer to the substance, which is

Jesus. But because we don't understand the light of this Old Testament that is just giving us so much information, we actually lose a lot of what this bolster,

I would say, we lose color and flavor of Jesus because we don't interpret the

Old Testament the way it was designed. Justin, let me do this. This is not a trick question. Just answer right when it comes to mind.

When I say... You want me to step in the trap? No, it's not a trap. When I say 9 -11, what's the first thing that comes to mind?

Well, of course, the attacks on the World Trade Center. Right. 20 years it's coming up, believe it or not. Tomorrow. 20 years tomorrow.

We just dated this recording. There we go. So, when you read the

New Testament, it will make references just like that. That if you don't have the context and you don't have an understanding of what's going on before,

John will say things like, this is the day of the feast or this is this Passover. And he's making connections.

And those connections are extremely important because what he's doing is he's telling you, this is what's happening and it's giving us a setup for Jesus.

And ultimately what he's saying is that whole event like the Passover or the Exodus or the

Israel walking through the divided water, all of these pictures, as the serpent was raised up in the wilderness so much the

Son of Man. So you have these events. So if you go and read your Bible from the Old Testament saying, okay, this is setting me up to see

Jesus, you'll then have this robust flavor and light and color. And then you go read

John and it just immediately pops out, oh, wow, that's Jesus. He's our priest.

Here's what's, I'll throw this one out there, Justin. Most people don't know why it's so significant for Jesus to be our

King. Why is that so important? Well, if you understand the Davidic covenant, which is in the

Old Testament, when Jesus says as King, you're going, yes, yes, yes. He's the one who earned for us righteousness and sits on the throne.

I mean, he's a King, but not only that, he's a son of David. So he's one from David's household who will represent the people, right?

Because that's what the King, as the King went, so went the nation, right? So he is a son of David who is going to keep the law, you know, because God even gives,

I mean, in the Davidic covenant when it's given in 2 Samuel 7, I mean, the Lord says you're going to have one who's going to sit on the throne forever, provided that he keeps my law, you know?

And it's like, well, none of David's sons do that. David didn't do that. But Jesus did.

And so Christ is what the Davidic covenant's all about. He's going to come. He's a son of David. He's going to keep the law perfectly.

He's going to accomplish righteousness to represent the people, and he will rule in righteousness forever. You know,

I mean, you've got the passages, I'm going to find them in Jeremiah where like talking about the

Christ, the one who would come, you can give me just a second to flip here. Well, as you're flipping there, let me,

I'll, we'll get a set up there. So if you think about Genesis 3, but go ahead. Yeah. Genesis 3 15 is the first mention of the, the first mission of the gospels, the seed promised to Eve.

And then it's further explained that that seed is going to be picked up by Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, right?

Then it's picked up by David and it's, it's passed down through the seed of David's children, which then leads us to this point, meaning from Genesis 3 15 to the final section where we have 400 years of, of nothing going on as far as what's being written.

It's all about this unfolding of how we're getting this Messiah. So go ahead. Totally. All right. So this is

Jeremiah 33, 14 to 18. Like so if you're listening to this and you can, like if you're driving, whatever, but if you're sitting there, grab your

Bible and highlight, mark, note, whatever you do, these verses are epic. So keep in mind, it's going to be quite clear, like how

Jesus is the fulfillment of the covenant, the promises that God made to David. He is even the fulfillment too, of everything that had to do with the

Levitical priesthood. It's all in one passage. This is incredible. All right. So here we go. Jeremiah 13, 14 and following.

Behold, the days are coming, declares the Lord, when I will fulfill the promise I made to the house of Israel and the house of Judah.

So we're already reaching back into the patriarchs here. In those days and at that time,

I will cause a righteous branch to spring up for David and he shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

In those days, Judah will be saved and Jerusalem will dwell securely. And this is the name by which it will be called, the

Lord is our righteousness. Moving on. For thus says the Lord, David shall never lack a man to sit on the throne of the house of Israel.

That's 2 Samuel 7. And the Levitical priest shall never lack a man in my presence to offer burnt offerings, to burn grain offerings and to make sacrifices forever.

It's like Jesus fulfills all of it. Reaching back, the promises made to the patriarchs.

It's all about Christ. God's going to raise up a righteous branch for David. He's going to execute justice and righteousness in the land.

The name by which he's going to be known is the Lord is our righteousness. Exactly. Because the Lord took on flesh and fulfilled the law for us.

Then there's this business of how David will never lack a man to sit on the throne because Christ is going to be that. And how there will always be a priest before God to effectively offer sacrifice forever.

Well, because Christ has done it. He's before the Lord. He's our great high priest. He's once and for all made atonement for sin.

And it's all about him. And so we are on the right track when we understand the scripture in these ways.

And like, that's so encouraging to go to the prophet Jeremiah and just see that dripping with gospel and the

Redeemer's coming. And he is the point of all of this. Yeah, that's right. So every part of the

Bible should lead you to hope. I mean, we can even take a crazy story like Esther. And Justin, I think all of our daughters should be like Esther, don't you?

If they want to be church -disciplined anyway. That's exactly right. If you want to be excommunicated, yeah.

No, your daughters should not be like Esther. And yet God used that entire unique situation to preserve a people that was about to be annihilated.

And think of this. If Israel is wiped off the face of the earth, guess what goes with it? Redemption. The promise, that's right, the promises from God are failed, which means there is no seed of Abraham.

There's no seed that can redeem us. We are then hopeless and God is a failure of a

Redeemer. So the whole story of Esther is one, it's super entertaining. It's completely fascinating.

But at the end of it, you read it and go, wow, God in the midst of chaos proved that nothing stops his will.

His will is going to be done. And you just read story after story and event after event, and you walk away with great hope going, if God can save his people through this promises, then he can save me.

Well, amen, brother. I mean, anywhere in the scripture you go. So obviously I'm in Genesis. I recently preached the whole

Isaac and Rebekah business, where Abraham sends his most trusted servant to find a wife for his son

Isaac. And there's a whole deal where he travels into the land and then he's praying to the

Lord, like, here's how, can this go this way? He's back in the land of Abraham's kindred, et cetera.

And Lord, let it be that the woman who comes and does these things will be the one for Abraham's son

Isaac. And of course it unfolds this way. And I made the joke even in preaching the thing, how the takeaway from this text is a lot more than we should all name our singles ministries, the well, you know, because that's what we end up doing, you know, is every, every church, every big church that has a singles ministry, it's like, you know, it's called the well or something like that.

Because of course that's where somebody goes to find a spouse and it's, but it's ridiculous, right? Because what's the point of that whole thing?

That really, really incredible story of how the servant of Abraham goes.

He makes this very interesting vow involved involving like his hands on Abraham's loins and all this kind of stuff.

And then he goes and finds this woman for Isaac. It has everything to do with God's promises of redemption because he's determined that Abraham's through Abraham's seed, the

Redeemer's coming and through Isaac shall your offspring be named. Right? And now he's providing for Isaac a wife and Isaac's going to have children and, and through Isaac's son, you know,

Jacob, the promise is going to continue. And you see it over and over again in Genesis. You have all of these like barren women and wombs being opened and all of this stuff happening.

What is all that about? Of course, we're trusting the Lord to do for us what we could never do for ourselves.

That's a takeaway. But then ultimately we're trusting the Lord to save us because that's what he's doing through all of it.

Anyway. No, this is good. Thoughts. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, and, you know, we can go like, let's take some, let's take a really though we'll do two things,

Justin. Let's take a really tough section of scripture, which is the Leviticus, the law, the specifically the ceremonial law.

And then how about the conquest of Canaan or the conquest of Canaan. And then in the

Simple Reformanda podcast, this is where I, we're going to spend some time helping people understand the failure of the church and of, and of pastors.

Some would say, how is it that this isn't handed down to me? Why is this not?

Why does not every one, how do we know this is true, but what happened? Like, why don't, why doesn't every pastor preach this way?

How did we get here? Why is it that not every pastor who preaches understands that it's not where's

Waldo, it's where's Jesus? I mean, that's the point of it. And so we'll talk about that in Simple Reformanda. But just, just for some fun,

I know that as I was talking with some of my congregants, they were talking, they were explaining to me, they're in Leviticus and they're just kind of, you know, overwhelmed.

The book where many Bible reading plans come to die. That's right. Yeah. That's right.

By the way, I did find a really helpful, I can't think of the gentleman's name at the moment, but I'll put it in our notes, our show notes.

I did find a very helpful Redemptive Historic Understand, Redemptive Historic Reading Plan where he gives you the title of where you're at in redemptive history.

And then the sections of the New Testament and the Old Testament that help you explain like he starts in Ephesians. Yeah. He starts in Ephesians one.

That's where you start your plan. Yeah. Factum Salutis. Yeah. And then as you start in Genesis one.

That's fantastic. And then John one. It's great. That's super great. I'll send it to you. Yeah. I'm interested in that. Yeah.

So let's talk about the Levitical law. Yeah. So Justin, what we know of the

Levitical law is that you have a people who have been called out by God. He's making this promise. You'll be my people.

I will be your God. And so this contract has happened. And in order for God to bless them and be in their presence, he fully can't be in their presence yet because the whole world has to be restored.

But the glory and the presence of God could be there to bless and protect Israel. And so he gives them means by which that they can purify themselves and stay pure temporarily because this is why we have a sacrificial system.

Sure. And so talk to us about, as you're reading, it is a, it is a, it is one of the most historical intense instruction manuals of all time.

Totally. When you read that. I'm going to try to do this quickly and you can please jump, jump on top of me.

And this is, I mean, John and I didn't prep for this. I mean, so we're just kind of processing this on the fly. So when we talk about God's law,

I mean, first, first thing that just needs to be stated is that God's moral law is summarized in the 10 commandments, right?

And it was written into creation, is written into humanity, sometimes referred to as the law of nature or the law of creation.

So God's moral law is, it exists and it transcends. It's been given to Moses summarizing the 10 commandments written on two tablets of stone that exists.

Then in the Levitical law though, we have what is commonly understood by reformed people to be the ceremonial law and then also the civil or judicial law.

And so what you have in Leviticus is all of the outlinings of these various ceremonial things that would include like the sacrificial system and food laws and ceremonial washings and feasts and the like.

And then in the judicial or the civil law, you have all of these things that pertain to just those matters. Like how do you handle civil things in God's nation called

Israel? How do we adjudicate things when people wrong one another, you know, and crimes are committed and the like.

And so God gives Israel a bunch of laws about all of this stuff. And so then you've got to ask yourself the question, if you're a

Christian reading Leviticus, what is the point of all that? And I think we have to say first, all right, well, what was the point of that for the nation

Israel? How would it guide them? How would it govern them when it came to the civil and judicial pieces of the law?

And then what about all this ceremonial stuff though? What was this about? What was the sacrificial system about?

What were these washings about? What were these feasts about? Go ahead. Just interject. So we live underneath.

We don't live in a theocratic nation, meaning that God is the one who governs us. We live underneath the laws of men that God has set up.

It's God's system. So we listen, we obey the leaders of our day.

Yet Israel, when they're in the wilderness, didn't have a nation that was over them. They were a nation and then themselves.

So God is setting up the theocratic nation saying, here's the laws that are going to govern you millions of people so you're not killing each other.

So ultimately, I'm just going to go ahead and cut to the chase here. When it comes to the civil and judicial aspects of the law

God gave to Israel, those ceased to exist when Israel as a nation ceased to exist.

And so the point of that was for there to be a way that this nation could exist within itself and for these things to be decided and determined.

And the whole point of the nation of Israel was to give birth to the Christ. I mean, literally, the the nation of Israel is pregnant with the

Redeemer. I mean, he is going to come from Israel. And so God is sustaining this nation and governing this nation for that purpose through the law that he gave.

But then the ceremonial law is even more significant in some ways, because you have all of this stuff that was given to Israel that they were to be doing all the time.

But what was the point of all of it? Well, if you read the book of Hebrews, most pointedly, it becomes crystal clear that all of it, the sacrificial system, the

Levitical priesthood, wholesale, all of the feasts, all of the washings, all of this was about Christ.

All of them were fulfilled in Christ and what he would do to save sinners. And so when

Christ came and fulfilled that Levitical law, it ceases to be binding on the people of God, which is why we don't sacrifice animals anymore.

It's why we don't have food laws anymore. It's why we don't observe certain feasts anymore. And people are going to be like, well, what about Passover?

We're told to observe it forever. Well, we do, because Christ is our Passover lamb, and we observe Passover as we come to his table, however often we do, and partake of the bread and the cup as we commemorate and celebrate and participate in what

Christ has done for us. And so all of that was ultimately about Christ. So when you read Leviticus, read it through the lens of Jesus crucified for sinners and Christ who came to save sinners.

And that's what it was for. So you just did something that was really helpful. You used Hebrews and read backwards.

To understand Leviticus. That's right. So once you understand Hebrews says, well, all of Leviticus is designed to point you to Jesus and Jesus is the fulfillment of it.

It even helps you when Hebrews tells us that Jesus is the greater high priest or he is our great high priest.

If you don't even know what the purpose of a great high priest was or a priest, the priestly duties to quote, sorry, to quote

Nacho Libre, my favorite movie of all time. If you don't understand why Israel looked to the priest, then you don't understand what

Hebrews is saying. So the two things happen, which is when the two play together, the

Old Testament gives you all of the background and the New Testament gives you the explanation, the interpretation of it.

And I mean, it makes sense too, because you read the gospel accounts and when Jesus comes and is saying all kinds of things about stuff revealed in the

Old Testament, or when John the Baptist will say, you know, behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

I mean, you begin to understand, oh, okay, all of this that came before was about him.

And Leviticus, instead of being this dry, like discouraging, like what is this about? It becomes encouraging as you think about all of this finds its fulfillment in Christ, who is our

Savior and our Redeemer. And that was the purpose of the entire thing. It's so good.

And that's how we should study the scripture. Very quickly, John, if you're cool with it before we go to SR, I mean,

I can do this real fast. So another passage of the Old Testament that's really hard for us to read understandably sometimes is in the book of Joshua, the conquest of Canaan, as it's so known, where God is instructing the people to kill all the inhabitants of the land.

And God even goes before them and fights for them and things and is going to give them this land he had promised to give them.

It's difficult for us to read at a human level, understandably. But what's the point of even that?

The conquest of Canaan and God giving his people this land? Well, when it's understood in a redemptive historical context, we see that the

Lord is going before his people to destroy all of their enemies in order to give them the promised land.

That is a great picture of what God does for the saints.

He goes before us and pointedly Christ goes before us to vanquish and conquer all of our enemies,

Satan, sin, death, hell, you name it. He conquers our enemies for us so that he might give us the fulfillment of the promised land, which is the new heavens and the new earth.

So even there, I think we can read how God's plan of redemption is the point.

And we see that all of this stuff has to be conquered. All of the inhabitants of the land, all of this fallen sinful stuff has to be conquered in order for God's plan of redemption to be fulfilled.

And Christ is the one who will do that for us. It's the point of the whole David and Goliath, right?

Like you mentioned earlier, Ed Clowney. It's not about a boy in a sling and killing giants.

It's about the Lord's anointed defeating the champion of the army that was the enemy of God's people.

I mean, it's a pointer to how Christ will cut Satan. He will crush Satan's head, man, you know? Exactly.

Yeah. Well, and since you gave one, I'll give one that's fast too. Give another one, John. Let's people have it. In the

Passover night when they're in Egypt and they're told to put the blood over the door and the death angel comes, this is what

I love about that story. The death angel does not go inside each door, each room and look at the character or the nature of what those people are or who they are or what they've done.

At this moment in time, they are all pagans who have fallen in love with multiple gods.

They are not serving Yahweh alone. What does the death angel look to as it passes over them?

It looks to the blood of the lamb. That is exactly what God does to us.

He looks to the blood of the lamb that is shed for us and poured over us, and God does not look to our characters or what we have done, but he looks to Christ.

You can do this so many ways in the Old Testament, and we aren't adding to the text.

We aren't changing the text. We're looking at it the way it was designed to be looked at. My encouragement to you is two things.

What Justin and I have been explaining to you is what's called a covenant theology perspective. This is covenant theology.

There are three resources I'll give you. One is called Sacred Bond. It was a great introduction to this.

Second would be Sam Renahan's book, The Mystery of Christ and His Covenant and Kingdom.

We'll put these two books in our show notes. Then Justin, Jimmy, and I did a basic introduction to covenant theology.

It's on YouTube. You can go and watch it for free. I think there are 30 minutes to 45 minutes each.

There's five lessons, and it'll just start helping you make these connections in the

Old Testament. There's nothing more than Justin and I want that our churches and you who are listening to this to start to see the glory of God as it unfolds in Jesus Christ in the

Old Testament. The glory of God in redeeming sinners through Christ, right? That's right. Justin, we're about to go to SR.

Tell them why and how they can get involved in being a part of the Reformation. Word.

So, we are about to head over to the Semper Reformanda podcast. Semper Reformanda is a group of people who have partnered with Theocast to help us see this message of the sufficiency of Christ and the rest that is ours in Him spread as far and as wide as possible.

There's a lot of things that Semper Reformanda involves for you should you decide to partner with Theocast in that way.

We have an app that you can get on where you can connect with a lot of other people who are learning the same things that you are and wrestling with the same things that you are.

We even have plans that are underway and are going to continue to unfold for groups to be meeting geographically and online and all of those kinds of things.

And yeah, you also get access to this extra podcast each week that we record. So John and I are headed over there, and we're going to continue this conversation.

We're going to talk about just how we got here and why is it that a lot of people don't preach this way. And that's what today's podcast is going to center around, we think.

You never know what we're going to talk about when we get over there. So if you're interested, if you're listening and you're like, yeah,

I think I'd want to partner with Theocast financially, I'd love to be a part of Semper Reformanda, you can find all the information that you need about SR over on our website,

Theocast .org. Should be self -explanatory. We're grateful for all of you that you've tuned in and listened this week.

We hope you've been encouraged by the conversation. We hope you've been encouraged in Christ and you're encouraged that the thought that the entire

Bible really is a testimony about Him and what He's come to do for a sinner like you. Continue to trust

Christ, and we will talk with many of you again next week. And for the SR members, we'll talk with you in just a minute, grace and peace.