Understanding Biblical Hermeneutics with Israel Wayne

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Okay, I am Terry cameras out and I'm here on behalf of creation fellowship

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Santee, we're a group of friends bound by our common agreement that the creation account as told in Genesis is a true depiction of how

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God created the world and all life in just six days, about 6000 years ago, we've been meeting in this online format since May of 2020, and we've been blessed with a big variety of speakers that are pastor scientists apologists, all sorts of different people who love the

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Lord and have a message to share those messages have spanned creation science topics, other theology topics and even some current events, you can find links to most of our past presentations by going to tiny url .com

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forward slash cfs archives that see like creation f like fellowship s like Santee.

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And while you're there you can also click on the link to see our upcoming speakers that are going to be through November, at least of this year is how we as far as we have it booked on the website.

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And you can also email us at creation fellowship Santee at gmail .com

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Santee is spelled s a n t e, and that way you'll get on our on our mailing list we promise not to spam but we will send you links to all of our upcoming speaker speakers so that you don't miss any of them tonight we're blessed to have back

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Israel Wayne Israel is the father of 11 children he's a homeschooling dad he and his wife live in southwest

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Michigan. He's also the author of several books and he's an editor for the website

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Christian worldview .net. He's also the founder of family renewal, you can find his last presentation for us which was on biblical economics by visiting our site and then you can also learn more about him and his ministry by going to family renewal .org.

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Tonight we're doing one of the other theology topics, although this is the one that we cherish the most as far as outside of creation science in our group because we understand that a lot of times misinterpretations especially of origins comes from myth from reading the

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Bible, not correctly. So, Israel tonight is going to teach us some proper ways of how to read

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God's Word. So with that, go ahead, Israel. Well thank you it's a blessing to be able to be back and to be able to share with your group.

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Once again, and to talk about biblical hermeneutics. This is a very important discipline within the

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Christian faith, very important aspect of learning biblical theology. I'm going to go ahead and jump over here to PowerPoint so that we can go through some notes together.

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I'm going to be sharing 15 principles on biblical hermeneutics, and the outline that I will be sharing is actually one that I borrowed from Dr.

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Norman Geisler. He's a former president at Southern Evangelical Seminary, a prolific author of many books, and I don't like to reinvent the wheel so there's no point in me coming up with 15 principles that are just distinct and different than what someone like Dr.

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Geisler has done. So all the commentary all the application will be mine, but I am using his outline for this.

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So this is a very important aspect because there are a lot of people who read the

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Bible, but they have a very difficult time knowing how to understand it properly, and therefore often how to apply it practically to their lives.

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I remember a number of times being in an audience, particularly with high school students or college students, and asking them the question, do you believe the

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Bible is the authoritative word of God? And almost every hand in the room goes up if it's a

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Christian audience and, you know, at least because of peer pressure, they know that's the answer they're supposed to give. But then when

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I asked them, how do you know when you read the Bible, if a particular passage or verse is something that is applicable to you, if it's something that you can apply to your own life or if it maybe doesn't apply to you?

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And they've had, in many cases, I've had audiences where almost no one will raise their hand with confidence and say that they really understand the

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Bible in its proper context and know how to apply it appropriately. So I want to go ahead and jump into these.

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The first principle is that the unexplained is not necessarily unexplainable.

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And, you know, there's so many different applications or examples, probably, that I could give of this.

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But there are times when we find a difficult passage in the scripture and we have questions about it and we don't know what it means.

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We don't necessarily know how to explain it or how to make it fit, perhaps, with other parts of the

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Bible. There are many people who have written books that claim that the

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Bible is not the word of God because of supposed contradictions in the Bible. And they say, well, this is a contradiction that can't possibly be solved or a problem that cannot be resolved.

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And so they tend to throw Christianity out entirely. But in most cases, these difficult passages can be explained fairly easily.

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In fact, there's a couple of books that I've taken my own teenagers through that have been published by Answers in Genesis, actually

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Masterbooks is the publisher. Ken Ham and his son -in -law,

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Bodie Hodge, have written a couple of books called Destroying Supposed Bible Contradictions, Volume 1 and Volume 2.

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And so it goes through a lot of places in the scripture where people feel that there are these unexplainable conundrums where the

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Bible itself seems to be contradicting itself. And in most of those cases, it's absolutely not.

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There's an explanation. One situation that comes up into my mind with this in my own personal life was

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I remember as a young man, I want to say I was probably 18 to 21 years old, somewhere in that range.

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I had always been a young earth creationist. I had been raised in that tradition.

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In fact, Dr. John Whitcomb, who was a co -author of the Genesis Flood with Dr. Henry Morris, was a guy who at one point was my neighbor.

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And we had a chance to hear him lecture at different times and he had a big influence in my early thinking on this issue.

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And so I had always believed in young earth creationism. But one day I got thinking about the question of a global flood and how we have fish that are saltwater fish and freshwater fish.

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And I began pondering in my mind that during a global flood, you would have this mixture of saltwater and freshwater.

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It wouldn't be distinct as it was. And I wondered to myself, how do the freshwater fish live in the saltwater and how do they not all die?

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How is it that you can have this delineation between the two? I thought maybe this is one of those scientific dilemmas that the

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Bible can't adequately explain. And so I began to question, can this be resolved in some way?

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Like, do I have to just kind of blindly close my eyes to what it seems to me would be a real problem for the

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Bible, for the biblical narrative? Like, how do we explain this? So there was a guy in California at that time who had written some books on biblical creation by the name of Dennis Peterson.

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I believe he may live in Texas now. I saw him in Modesto, feels like maybe six or seven years ago.

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And so anyway, I called him and just said, hey, Dennis, I'm curious about your take on this.

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And how would you describe this? How could we have fish living in the water during a global flood if they are freshwater fish and saltwater fish and all the waters just mixed together?

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And so he explained several thoughts about that. The one is, of course, that we have some fish today who are able to transition from a saltwater environment into a freshwater environment.

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Salmon do this as well as certain types of dolphins. And so there are some who have that ability, that adaptability to be able to move back and forth between the two environments.

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And he said, if you go back far enough to original creation where we didn't have so much speciation, we didn't have so much variation within the fish kind, you probably had most fish that had the capacity to be able to move back and forth between the freshwater and the saltwater environments.

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So that would be one thing. He said the other thing is that saltwater can tend to separate into layers.

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And so you would have certain places within the water that would be heavier or denser in terms of salt content and some that would be lighter.

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And so some of the fish may have sorted themselves out into those different types of layers and so on.

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And then, of course, you know, some of the fish would be eggs and so that they would be able to survive. And anyway, he just gave me several.

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I think there were more answers that he gave me. And I thought, OK, that kind of makes sense. And I hadn't thought about that.

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The fact that at that time, you know, certainly fish not having lost so much genetic potential that they would be much more adaptable in both environments.

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And so it wouldn't be a problem for them to be in a saltwater environment and then to be able to settle into a freshwater environment later.

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But that's only just one example. But it was something that to me was at that time unexplained.

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But it didn't mean that that issue was unexplainable. Dennis was able to explain it to me.

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And so for us as Christians, I think our default position when we find something in the scripture that we see as being potentially problematic, we don't automatically assume

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God's word can't be true. We assume God's word is true and we go search it out.

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And of course, today there are lots of great apologetics websites, so many and probably don't need to necessarily name them all here.

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But there are great creation ministries like ICR and CMI and AIG, as well as many independent organizations and lots of other apologetics websites that helps explain different issues within the

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Bible. Number two, point number two would be that fallible interpretations do not mean fallible revelation.

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So there are times where someone will interpret the

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Bible in a wrong way. They have a wrong understanding of it. But it doesn't mean that God's original revelation given in the

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Hebrew and Greek scriptures of the Old Testament, the New Testament are fallible. And one example that comes to my mind was a situation that I ran into as a child.

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I was mostly homeschooled as a child, but homeschooling was against the law in those days.

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And so a couple of times we got caught for homeschooling and my mother, rather than putting us back into a government school, put us into a private

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Christian school. So in second grade and sixth grade, I was in private Christian school environments.

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And in the sixth grade year, I was in a group that I'll leave unnamed that was a kind of a

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Christian group or sect. And they had some doctrinal views that I don't agree with.

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But one of them was essentially that it was morally wrong to eat meat.

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And so you had to be a vegetarian for sure, vegan if you really wanted to be holy.

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And so in their cafeteria at the school, they did not serve any meat products.

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But they served meat products that were converted into, they were made to look like meat products from soy and wheat.

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They had things they called wheat meat and they had soy meat and other kinds of textured vegetable protein.

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And so let me be very clear, if you're a vegetarian or vegan, that's fine. I don't have a problem with that.

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I have a problem with their theological interpretation of why they were and why everyone should be.

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So but at any rate, I remember asking one of the teachers. I said, so, you know, you come at this not from a health perspective primarily, but really from a theological perspective.

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But I said, if it's wrong, if it's morally wrong to eat meat, which God, of course, told his people that they could eat meat after the time of the flood.

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I said, why then do you take plants and make them into products that look like meat?

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I mean, they had like these pink hot dogs that were glow in the dark, like neon pink hot dogs.

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And there just was no way I wanted to put that into my body and some of these wheat meat burgers and so forth.

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And I said, why then do you make products that look like hot dogs and steak and hamburgers and so on if these things are bad?

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I said, what's your biblical reason for doing that? And the answer that he gave to me was that the scripture itself commands us to do this.

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I said, man, you got to tell me this. I just I'm racking my brain here. I can't think of where in the

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Bible it tells us to do this. And so he quoted from the book of Genesis in the creation story where God said, and he's quoting from the

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King James Version, he said, and I'll not be able to quote it exactly from memory. But he said that God said,

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I give you every plant bearing seed or every tree bearing fruit, something like that.

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And it shall be for thee as unto meat. And he said, so God is telling us in the

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Bible to take plants and convert them into meat. And.

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I remember thinking, wow, I just don't think that's what it means at all. And of course, if you read contemporary

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English versions, all of them say I've given you these plants and these and this fruit and it shall be for you for food, which is the more accurate translation from the

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Hebrew. So God is saying that, you know, I give you the the the plants and the fruit to be food for you.

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But they were actually taking the wording of the King James and they were trying to extrapolate something from it that the scripture itself was not saying.

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The scripture was not saying that we need to take plants and convert them into meat products. So this is just one example, but but obviously that was a fallible interpretation based on a translation error, a misconception,

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I would say, of how that term should be translated. But it doesn't mean that God's revelation was fallible.

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It doesn't mean that in the original text, God has told us something fallacious. It's just man's interpretation.

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So number three is probably the most famous of all of the principles of hermeneutics, and that's understand the context of the passage.

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It's very important that you read all of the verses around it. There is a very popular basketball player in the state of California, actually, who has a

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Bible verse that he used to, I don't know if he still does, but he used to write it on his shoe. And the problem that I have with it is that he only puts part of it.

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And the part that he puts is, I can do all things. And he writes, I can do all things on the shoe.

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Well, there's more to the verse than that. Obviously, it says that through Christ, I can do all things.

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So there's more context there. But even the verse itself sits in the context of a larger passage of scripture.

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And Paul, of course, is talking in that context, mostly about suffering and all the terrible things he's had to go through in his life, very difficult, oppressive things.

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And he says, you know, I know how to lack and I know how to abound. I know how to have little.

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I know how to have much. And he says, I can do all of these things through Christ who gives me strength.

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And so he points to Christ as the source of his strength. But in the context, some people take that passage out of context by simply saying,

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I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. That's kind of a, you know, motivational self -help type verse that, you know, gets them gets them going like, you know, mind over matter.

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And I just need to believe I can kind of thing. But in this case, like with the sports athlete and I'm not trying to throw him under the bus.

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He probably means well, but I'm just saying it comes to my mind as an example of of taking something out of total context to just say,

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I can do all things. There's much more to the context of that passage that that makes it much more meaningful.

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And to claim that in some sort of humanistic way would be wrong. We can do all things, including endure difficulty and suffering and sickness and those kinds of things through.

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We can all do all of that through Christ who gives us strength, the good things and the bad things.

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So the fourth principle would be interpret difficult passages in light of the clear ones.

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So there are many times where somebody is reading a passage and they they say, well,

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I don't know. I don't know how to understand this or I don't know how to interpret this. And yet oftentimes there are passages that are just very direct and very clear that tell us how we are supposed to feel about these issues.

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And so you can't just pull one verse out of the Bible and try to make a whole theology on it.

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You need to compare it. One of the best commentaries on the Bible is actually the Bible. And so we will look at those of those difficult or hard to understand passages in light of the ones that are clear and obvious.

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Point number five kind of ties into this a little bit. Don't base your teaching or doctrine on obscure passages.

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So there really are some teachings in the Bible that are obscure and we don't know much about what they mean.

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There's a lot of conjecture. There's a lot of things that we could hypothesize. And some people love to go down rabbit holes, chasing after those obscure passages and trying to make elaborate doctrines out of them.

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And that's unwise. It can be dangerous. A lot of cults end up starting that way.

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You know, just to give a couple of examples, I would say the teaching on the

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Nephilim in the Old Testament. Well, certainly that's fascinating to a lot of people. And there's a lot of conjecture about who these people were and what their origin or backstory is.

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And yet the scripture is not abundantly clear, doesn't tell us a whole lot about the

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Nephilim. And so we don't want to start Nephilim churches based on doctrines related to the

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Nephilim. It's an obscure teaching in the Bible. It's mentioned. So we don't throw it out. We don't run away from it.

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We don't hide from it. But at the same point, much of what Christians tend to believe is really conjecture on the

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Nephilim or in the New Testament. There's a reference just very vaguely, very briefly, briskly in the text, a message about baptism for the dead.

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Well, again, there's different interpretations of what that means or could mean. The Mormons have incorporated that as part of their theology, and there are lots of different understandings of what that might be.

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But we want to be very careful that we don't take obscure passages in the Bible and make them central.

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We certainly don't want to make them core distinctives of our church or group or denomination. This tends to lead into a very odd type of sectarianism that leads toward cult -like behavior.

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Number six, the Bible reflects human characteristics. Now, I think this is talking specifically about the writing of the text of the

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Bible. I think this is one of the aspects that gives the Bible its uniqueness and authenticity.

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We believe in, when we talk about the inspiration of Scripture, a concept that we call the verbal plenary doctrine of inspiration.

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This is the concept that God, when He inspired people to write the

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Holy Scriptures, He did not take over their bodies in some sort of possession, if you will.

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There are people in the New Age movement or the occult who sometimes talk about automatic writing, where they go into some type of trance and their hand begins writing or they just type, and they come out hours later and they don't remember anything about what they've written.

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This is the kind of thing that Stephen King has talked about having experienced in writing some of his horror fiction.

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For those of you who are familiar with the God -calling book, this concept that I'm channeling the words of God directly and God is just flowing through me as I write.

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The verbal plenary doctrine of inspiration was not that people were bodily possessed in some way by the

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Holy Spirit and controlled in such a way that they had no say over the way that these things were communicated.

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As the Bible was written, there are 66 different books, I think it's like 39 different authors.

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These authors all have a different writing style and their human characteristics, their personality was not overwritten by the

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Holy Spirit as He communicated to them what He wanted to say to them.

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The Scripture tells us that these men were led along by the Holy Spirit and that they were given direction on what to write, but their own unique personality and voice, literary voice, if you will, remained in the text.

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This is, I think, a great uniqueness of the text of Scripture that even in the

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Gospels, you just find different personalities coming through in the narratives of the

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Gospels, that they're not just robots writing down words without using their own voice or their own personality.

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Number seven, it says just because a report is incomplete, it does not mean that that report is false.

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So again, there's different illustrations that I could use of this. One that comes to mind is the illustration of when

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Jesus crossed the Sea of Galilee and He went to the Gadarenes. One of the

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Gospel narratives tells us that there was a demon -possessed man that Jesus went to meet there.

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There's another Gospel narrative that tells us about two demon -possessed men. This is a place where some people point to a supposed contradiction in the

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Bible and they say, see, the Bible is false. One Gospel writer tells us that there is one demoniac and another

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Gospel writer tells us there's two. This can't be reconciled. This is obviously a false contradiction, which

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I think is a double negative, but it's a contradiction. So they point to this as a supposed error in the

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Bible, and yet it's not an error. In reality, there were two demoniacs.

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One of the Gospel writers tended to focus on the story or the narrative of the one demoniac, and the other felt like telling the story of both.

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Both were there, both were on the scene, but one Gospel writer wanted to dive deep on the narrative of the one demoniac.

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So this story is not false simply because two different authors wanted to emphasize different aspects of it.

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So again, a lot of the fallacies that atheists in particular bring to the

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Bible are simply because they don't understand these kind of hermeneutic principles, most of which are just simply common sense.

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Number eight, New Testament citations of the Old Testament need not always be exact.

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So there are many cases where, particularly in the Episcopals, the writers reference a passage from the

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Old Testament, but they do it oftentimes as a paraphrase. They reword it, they put it in their own words.

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I think oftentimes as they're writing that maybe they didn't want to go look up that actual text or maybe they didn't have that text in front of them.

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They had often memorized huge portions of these scriptures and committed them to memory.

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They didn't have pocket Bibles like we do today. They didn't have printing presses in those days.

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They had very large papyrus scrolls, most of which were kept at synagogues.

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And so it was not likely that most of these people traveled around carrying all of the books of the

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Old Testament with them. It would be very cumbersome, definitely not easy for them to do. And so quite frequently when they cited these passages from the

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Old Testament, they're doing so for memory. And they are in many cases paraphrasing the verses.

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Now, the meaning of the text always stays the same. There's no harm done to these

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Old Testament passages in the New Testament, but on occasion they're worded slightly different.

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This is not evidence that the Bible is false. This in no way denies the authority of scripture.

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It's just a simple truism that the writers of the

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New Testament did not always just use an exact word for word quotation from the

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Old Testament. Point number nine, the Bible does not necessarily approve of all it records.

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So there are two aspects of scripture that we have to consider, particularly when we think about what is called narrative theology.

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Narrative in the Bible is story. And so particularly in the Old Testament, but also sometimes in the

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Gospels or in Acts, you have examples of things that people did. And so there are some people who try to draw or extract more out of a

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Bible story than we should. And simply because something is described in the

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Bible, it does not mean that it is being prescribed in terms of practice.

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So the Bible records many things that are wrong or that are bad.

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And it's not saying that that was a good thing. Sometimes the Bible doesn't actually come out directly and speak to an issue and condemn it outright in a particular place.

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But like, I don't know, here's one that comes to my mind. And this is always dangerous because basically I'm thinking of most of these examples off the top of my head.

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And so that can always kind of get you in trouble. And you go back later and think, oh, maybe I shouldn't use that example. But the example that comes to my mind right now is polygamy, for example.

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In the Old Testament, you had some godly men like David who had multiple wives.

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And so some people would point to that and say, well, look at these multiple wives that David had.

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And God said David was a man after his own heart. So God must be OK with polygamy.

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Well, I would say no, that simply because the Bible records and tells us accurately the historicity of the life of David and and tells us the things that he did right and the things that he did wrong.

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Certainly adultery and murder were bad. The Bible is pretty clear about that. Of course, we see the negative effects of that.

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But in the Old Testament, it seems as though there's not a real flagrant condemnation of polygamy.

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But it also doesn't mean that there's an endorsement for it. I think Jesus words on this in the

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New Testament are pretty definitive when he says when he's asked about the issue of divorce.

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But he said he kind of addresses a lot of things in his statement where he says from the beginning, it was not so.

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God created them man and woman. And he said these two will become one flesh.

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And so in that one statement of Jesus in the New Testament and the Gospels, he condemns both homosexuality and polygamy because he says these two, one man and one woman will become one flesh.

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And so you can't have multiple people becoming one flesh and you can't have man and man or woman and woman.

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He says this man and this woman will become one flesh. And this is God's original order.

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It was God's original intent from the beginning. These other things were not so, including divorce.

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This was not God's plan. Adultery, not God's plan. You know, chronic fornication.

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That's not God's plan. So, you know, and then he says what God has joined together, do not let man separate.

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So we have to be careful when it comes to narrative in the Bible, because not everything that some of the heroes in the

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Bible did were good. And so we can't necessarily assume that, well, you know,

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Abraham lied and deceived. So it's okay for me to do it, right, because we have other passages in the

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Bible that tell us how we should think about some of those issues. Number 10, the

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Bible uses non -technical everyday language.

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It uses non -technical everyday language. So here's one that some people raise against biblical creationism.

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The atheist scientists sometimes say the Bible makes false scientific claims.

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And here's one example that I've heard them use. In the Psalms, it says, from the rising of the sun to its setting, the name of the

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Lord shall be praised. And so some atheists say, see, the

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Bible is factually inaccurate because it is claiming that the sun moves.

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Well, no, it's not. You have to remember the genre that you are reading and the

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Psalms is a poetic set of books. And of course, you know, when you go through the scripture, you have all these different genres.

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You have historical narrative. You have wisdom literature. You have epistles.

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You have the books of the prophets. You have apocalyptic writings. And they're all supposed to be read very differently.

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They're supposed to be read in their own genre and understood within their own genre.

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And so the book of Psalms is poetic, and it's using poetic language.

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But it uses the same kind of language that we use every day. In fact, I will bet those atheist scientists who try to claim that the

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Bible is factually inaccurate, when it talks about from the rising of the sun to the setting of the same, the name of the

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Lord will be praised. I'm guessing that they ask their wife in the morning, hey, did you see the beautiful sunrise this morning?

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Or did you see the sunset last night? And they're using this kind of non -technical everyday language.

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They're not trying to make a scientific claim there, and neither is the Bible. You know, in the same way, you can get kind of silly with this, like especially with the poetic language.

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There's one psalm that says, the trees of the field will clap their hands.

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It's talking about how they praise the Lord, how they rejoice. Even nature itself rejoices and glorifies

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God. But the Bible is not making a scientific claim in that psalm.

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It's not claiming that trees literally have hands and that they literally clap literal hands.

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It's not doing that. And the reason we know this is that it is poetic language in a poetic book.

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So when the Bible tells us that Jesus died and that he rose again, that's not poetry, because the gospels are not a poetic book and it is not making a poetic reference.

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We believe that is historical narrative. It's telling us what actually happened, that Jesus died on a cross, was buried, and that he rose again from the dead.

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And so you have to understand, again, the genres in which you are reading the Bible, because we don't read them all the same.

35:28

Here's another one. The Bible may use round numbers as well as exact numbers.

35:33

I think we see this sometimes in Book of Chronicles, like Samuel, Kings and Chronicles.

35:39

There are particular descriptions of battles. And sometimes they give very specific numbers.

35:48

I'll just make up some, but they may say, you know, thirteen hundred and twenty four people died in this battle.

35:56

Whereas you go to another book, maybe it references that in Kings, but you go over to Chronicles and it tells the same story.

36:02

But it may say thirteen hundred people died. This is exactly the same kind of methodology that our journalists use today when they give accounts of important events.

36:14

And so you may see a news story that there was a an earthquake somewhere in Dubai or someplace, another part of the country.

36:27

And they may say, you know, thirteen hundred and twenty four people were injured during this earthquake.

36:33

And another newspaper may say thirteen hundred people. This is not an intent to deceive.

36:40

It's not an attempt to lie or to cover up. I think there's a case where there's a question about the number of chariots that Solomon had.

36:55

And some of these can just be typographical errors. But oftentimes the

37:00

Bible uses round numbers as well. So we have to keep in mind that sometimes there can be in copies typographical errors, which does not mean that there was an error in the original.

37:13

But there also can just be the rounding of numbers. This is this does not mean the

37:18

Bible is not is not true or that it's inaccurate. Just for some writers, they felt it was important to give the exact number in a census or whatever, and others round up.

37:28

We do it all the time. And so this is what I was talking about earlier. Number twelve is note when the

37:34

Bible uses different literary devices. This is one of the problems

37:39

I think that we have with the creation story is that there are many Bible teachers who like to make the book of Genesis appear to be apocryphal or to be poetic.

37:52

And they say that the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not historical narrative.

37:58

They're simply trying to teach us moral lessons to try to give us some sort of spiritual meaning that we can apply to our own personal lives.

38:10

I remember reading a book some years ago. I won't mention it just because I don't like to give heretics free advertising.

38:16

But this guy was talking about how Genesis was just a collection of stories or myths or narratives that were told by Bedouin shepherds around campfires to help them understand the story that they found themselves in.

38:33

And it's been passed down through oral tradition to where today we have these recollected stories and then we have to try to figure out how to transfer them into our own postmodern culture and figure out what they mean to us today.

38:48

And so he was saying, for example, he doesn't believe that Adam and Eve were literal historical beings.

38:56

In fact, no one before Abraham in the book of Genesis in this author's view is a historical person.

39:04

This is a fairly commonly held view, even by people who are supposedly scholarly.

39:11

And so he said that you have these early primitive people represented by Adam and Eve who, again, are not real, but they're just types of early primitive humankind.

39:25

And they had offspring. And so the Cain and Abel story and their struggle and Cain killing

39:31

Abel is not an actual historical narrative. It simply tells us about the struggle between the agrarians, which would be, you know, represented by Abel, and then the hunter -gatherers represented by Cain, and how the agrarians were beginning to chop down trees, and they were creating fields and valleys to plant their crops.

40:00

And so this threatened the livelihood of the hunter -gatherers who needed the woods for the animals that they hunted for game.

40:10

And so they became angry at the agrarians. And so they killed the agrarians and they fought and there were battles.

40:17

And so the Cain and Abel myth is simply to help us to understand these early struggles between the agrarians and the hunter -gatherers.

40:25

And then, of course, the agrarians, as they lived in these low -lying valleys, would oftentimes in the spring have melt from the snows.

40:35

And there would be flooding in the valleys and it would destroy their crops and their homes because they hadn't learned at that time as primitive people how to build where it was safe.

40:46

And so they were constantly living in fear of the destruction of their plants and their homes.

40:53

And so this is where the flood narrative came from. The flood myth came from their fear of being destroyed by local floods.

41:04

Anyway, this author just goes through and reinterprets all of Genesis 1 through 11 as just being mythology because he does not believe that Genesis is historical narrative.

41:20

So this is why it's so important that you do understand the different literary devices that are used within the scripture.

41:28

Okay, so an error in a copy does not equate to an error in the original.

41:36

So again, this goes back to potential copyist errors. And this is something also that gets addressed in the supposed

41:45

Bible contradictions book by Ken Hammond and Bode Hodge. Again, I think one that comes to my mind is probably being a copyist error.

41:54

Again, I think is the story of Solomon with his chariots, because I think maybe one of the books says he had 1200 chariots, one says 12 ,000.

42:05

I'm going, this is all off memory. So I'm probably wrong on the numbers, but just there's a discrepancy like that.

42:10

But you can see how it's very easy for a zero to be added or subtracted somewhere in the copying.

42:16

But it doesn't mean that the original manuscripts had these copies, error copies in them.

42:23

And really, again, these things are so few, they're so minute, and none of them change

42:28

Bible doctrine. There are none of these copying errors that appear in places where any significant

42:35

Bible doctrine is actually called into question. Number 14, general statements don't necessarily mean universal promises.

42:46

I have here, I don't know if everybody can see this because we have some video on the side here on the screen, at least on what

42:52

I'm looking at. But I picked this Chick -fil -A cup and it says good things come to those who don't wait for lunch.

42:59

Well, you know, maybe that's a good motto, but these are not necessarily universal promises. Right. So the

43:05

Book of Proverbs is one in particular that I think is very important for us to understand properly. And many people develop that theology based on the

43:15

Book of Proverbs because they claim the verses in Proverbs as being universal, absolute promises of God for all people in all places at all times.

43:26

They are not. They were not intended to be. That's not what a proverb is. A proverb is a general statement that is generally true.

43:34

And so they are true. The statements in Proverbs are the word of God and they are true, but they're true in the way that they're intended to be understood.

43:43

And that is general principles that are generally true, not universal promises that are absolutely true for all people in all places at all times.

43:52

One of the ones that I think gets abused the most is Proverbs 22, 6, where it says train up a child in the way he should go.

44:01

And when he is older, when he's grown, he will not depart. I know a lot of parents who actually live with false guilt because they have viewed this as a covenant promise from God for their children.

44:15

And it's a proverb. And there's a lot of things. I actually wrote a book called Raising Them Up, Parenting for Christians, and I deal with this whole concept in the book.

44:25

There's a chapter where I dive into this particular verse and really get into the root of it.

44:33

There's a couple of issues with that verse. I don't want to go too far in the weeds here, but I think I have time. The actual

44:40

Hebrew, as it's rendered in the original, is different than how it appears in most of our

44:47

English translation. So the original Hebrew actually says something more like train a child in his way.

44:54

And when he is grown or when he's older, he will not depart from it. Now, that makes it a little more vague, a little more ambiguous as to what it's actually saying.

45:04

And there's different interpretations on how we should understand that. I think in my mind, the original

45:11

Hebrew actually gives us both a hope and cause for concern, because it just seems to be saying if you train a child in his way when he's older, he'll tend to continue in that.

45:27

So what does that mean in his way? Well, I think in whatever way you incline a child, they're going to be inclined to continue that way.

45:38

So however you bend the twig, that child is likely to continue in that path.

45:44

So if you raise a child to be willful, to get their own way, to not have restraint, if they're never told no, if they have the ability to rebel against their parents with no consequence and they're raised with pride and arrogance, they're going to probably continue in that way.

46:08

If you raise a child in his way, he'll continue in that way. This can be good or bad. It can be positive or negative.

46:15

If you raise a child in a wrong direction, they're probably going to continue in that direction.

46:21

If you raise them in the right direction and the way they should go, then they're probably going to be inclined to go in that direction.

46:28

These are not absolute promises. I mean, we see people who go both directions that are raised by really bad parents who come to Christ and change direction and trajectory.

46:37

We see people who are raised in wonderful, godly Christian homes who go against the way that they were raised.

46:45

I don't believe that's the fault of the parents in those situations. And I don't think that it means

46:51

God didn't keep his promise. These are general principles that are generally true.

46:57

And we do find those things to be statistically true. I don't want to fault the translators again.

47:03

The original King James translators just added this phrase is not in the Hebrew at all in the way he should go.

47:09

I mean, that's not in the Hebrew. They added it, but they added it to try to make some sense of what they thought the passage meant and what the passage was trying to say.

47:17

And, you know, I think in one sense it is, you know, what we should do.

47:22

Right. That, you know, train a child in the right way, train a child in the way he should go. And when he's older, he'll he'll tend to stay in that direction or he won't depart from the way that he was trained.

47:34

So so I'm not trying to just throw rocks at them for adding that part. But just, you know, it's important to know that that was added by them, probably for clarification, hoping that we would understand the meaning of the text better.

47:47

But but all throughout the Proverbs, I mean, there are these statements that there's one that says, if you see a man who's diligent in his work, he will not serve lowly people.

47:58

He will work for kings. So I guess a question that I would have for those of you who are watching, you know, have you or your spouse been diligent in your work?

48:11

Well, if these are absolute promises of God, then you're going to work for a king.

48:16

And if you haven't worked for a king, a literal king somewhere on this planet, then apparently you're either lazy or God did not keep his promise to you.

48:26

And there are just so many others. Again, there's a lot of generalization about wealthy people, wicked people end up losing everything.

48:36

And and and people who are honest and diligent and hardworking, they become wealthy.

48:41

Right. There's just so many of these principles that are put out there in the Proverbs. And yeah, they are general principles that are generally true.

48:50

These are not absolute promises of God. There are lots of wicked people who gain a lot of wealth through duplicity and lies and unethical behavior, and they get away with it for a very long time.

49:05

And so and there are other people who are very diligent. And yet, like Job, they have a lot of catastrophe and they have a lot of things that happen in their life and medical needs and health setbacks and disabilities physically.

49:18

And and they don't prosper financially. And it's not that they're lazy. It's because life is difficult and we live in a sinful, fallen world.

49:28

And so the whole book of Proverbs hermeneutically needs to be understood as a book that provides general principles that are generally true.

49:38

And yes, it's the word of God. And yes, it's true. But it's true in the way that it is intended to be understood, not in the way that it's commonly promoted, which is that these are absolute promises of God that are true for all people in all places at all times.

49:54

Number 15, the final one, is that later revelation supersedes previous revelation.

50:03

So, again, we have things in the New Testament where God is giving people greater revelation that has to be understood as giving us context or showing us

50:17

God's heart related to the to the previous. The one that's coming to my mind right now is when the apostle

50:23

Peter sees the vision of the sheet coming down from heaven with these animals in it that are unclean.

50:30

And he hears this voice that tells him to get up and kill and eat. And he says, no,

50:35

Lord, I won't do that. I've never done that. I've been raised to not eat anything, any meat or any animal that is unclean.

50:43

I'm not going to do it. And yet three times he gets this command that he's supposed to rise and kill and eat, and he just says, no,

50:50

I'm not going to do it because he's got a really firm understanding of the Torah, of the law that tells him that these animals are unclean.

50:58

You shouldn't eat it. And so he understands later that this is

51:03

God giving him new revelation, that God is doing a new thing with the Gentiles and that he is not to see them as unclean because God has accepted them.

51:13

And so he goes to Cornelius's house and he sees that they receive the Holy Spirit in the same way that the

51:19

Jewish believers did. And he ends up baptizing Cornelius in his house and God's work with the

51:26

Gentiles begins. And so there's later revelation. Now, this later revelation is actually consistent with passages in the

51:35

Old Testament where God talked about how the nation of Israel was to be a light to all of the other nations, even promises that God made to Abraham in Genesis 12 and Genesis 18, where he says that I will bless you and I will make you a great nation.

51:51

And through you and your descendants, meaning the Israelites, all the nations of the world would be blessed.

51:58

And so God's ultimate purpose was to include us. We see this in Romans.

52:05

Paul talks about this. I think that's in Romans chapter 10. We see it in the book of Hebrews that God always had a plan to include the

52:13

Gentiles in his redemptive story. But that revelation became so much clearer in the

52:19

New Testament. And you have new teaching that really brings what was already in the

52:25

Old Testament to light in a much greater way. And so the later revelation in the

52:31

Scripture supersedes the previous revelation. Now, we also believe that the canon of Scripture is closed, that Scripture is not continually being written to this day.

52:42

So we do not believe that that new revelation given today supersedes the revelation of the written

52:50

Scriptures. This is, again, where cults come in. This is where the Mormons and the Jehovah's Witnesses and many of these groups that have esoteric and false theology, they believe that God spoke to them directly or that an angel came and delivered a message.

53:07

But Paul's very clear on that. He says, even if an angel from heaven comes and gives you another gospel that is not this gospel, let that angel be accursed.

53:17

That is not an angel from heaven. We are to trust in the revelation of the

53:22

Scripture. And there is no revelation that supersedes the

53:27

Scripture as it has been canonized in the 66 books of the Old Testament and the

53:34

New Testament. So this is a little bit outside of hermeneutics, but there is a another

53:40

Bible doctrine that I think is important. And it is the concept of the perspicuity of Scripture.

53:47

And this is the idea that God wrote the Bible for the purpose of it being understood.

53:52

He wasn't trying to write it so that only scholars could understand it or only scribes or only priests could understand it.

54:00

He wanted the common everyday person to be able to understand the Bible. And so for truly born again believers who are dwelt by the

54:10

Holy Spirit, they have the capacity to understand the

54:16

Bible. It doesn't mean that we understand everything omnisciently. We don't understand it all in exactly the same way that God understands it.

54:23

We don't have to. But the things that are necessary for salvation have been given to us.

54:29

The Bible tells us His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness.

54:36

And so we have the ability to understand what we need to understand about the gospel, about salvation, about how to live the

54:43

Christian life. We have all of that in the Scripture because what God has written in the

54:49

Scripture can be made plain to us through the illumination by the

54:55

Holy Spirit. So the Bible sometimes is difficult to understand for people who are not

55:00

Christians. Oftentimes, in fact, the Bible tells us the spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

55:06

And there are many passages talk about how it seems like foolishness to the unbeliever. And, you know, it's like they have these blinders on their eyes and they just can't see the truth that's contained in the

55:18

Scripture because they don't have the Holy Spirit helping them and revealing it to them.

55:23

So for unbelievers, oftentimes it doesn't make sense and it is just foolishness to them.

55:30

But for the believer, the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture says that we can understand it.

55:35

We won't understand all of Scripture omnisciently or in its totality, but we can understand it truly.

55:44

I just want to give a couple of a few quotes here about the uniqueness of the Bible and how it's special.

55:51

And one quote here is from George Washington, our first president of the

55:57

United States. He said, it is impossible to rightly govern the world without God and the

56:04

Bible. Patrick Henry, a statesman, said the

56:09

Bible is worth all other books which have ever been printed. Abraham Lincoln, U .S.

56:17

president, said, I am profitably engaged in reading the Bible. Take all of this book that you can by reason and balance by faith and you will live and die a better man.

56:28

It is the best book which God has given to man. There's historical evidence that Abraham Lincoln was not a

56:37

Christian when he became president. But after his son died, there is some evidence that he began reading the

56:45

Scripture. And it is very possible that Abraham Lincoln did become a Christian prior to his death, even during his presidency.

56:53

Immanuel Kant, the philosopher who spoke about reason, and in many ways during the

57:01

Enlightenment, helped to lead many people away from the importance of Scripture towards reason and rationality through his

57:10

Enlightenment philosophy. But he said this, the existence of the Bible as a book for the people is the greatest benefit which the human race has ever experienced.

57:22

Every attempt to belittle it is a crime against humanity.

57:28

So he saw that the Bible provided a lot of social benefit. And he felt that it should not be dispensed of or thrown out because it did so much good for society.

57:39

Thomas Huxley, who was an atheist, in fact, if I remember correctly,

57:45

Aldous Huxley, his cousin, I think it was, wrote the book Brave New World.

57:51

Thomas Huxley, I believe, was a big fan of Charles Darwin, very influenced by Darwin's writings.

57:58

But he said something similar about the social benefit of the Bible when he said, the

58:03

Bible has been the Magna Carta of the poor and oppressed. The human race is not in a position to dispense with it.

58:12

So he saw that it was the Christians who are the ones building the hospitals, and they were building the orphanages, and they were caring for the poor and the sick.

58:19

And he saw that there was so much benefit that had come out of the teachings of the Bible, especially the

58:25

Gospels, that even though he was not a Christian and he did not believe in God, he believed there was a social benefit to people following and living according to the scriptures.

58:34

Sir Isaac Newton, one of the founders of our modern physics, he was a

58:41

Bible -believing Christian, and he said there are more sure marks of authenticity in the Bible than in any profane history or what we would call secular history.

58:52

And Napoleon Bonaparte, who proclaimed himself emperor, certainly not a fundamentalist evangelical

58:58

Christian, but he said this, the Bible is no mere book, but a living creature with a power that conquers all that oppose it.

59:08

So I have written a Bible doctrine curriculum that is called

59:14

Foundations in Faith. And this is a new Bible doctrine curriculum for teenagers. It is written for the ages of about 12 through 18, although I would love to have adults go through it.

59:25

I think it's not written in a childish way, but it's a 36 -week course, five lessons per week.

59:33

And it's, I would say, an overview of systematic theology. We deal with the primary doctrines predominantly.

59:42

We talk about the things that Christians have always believed for 2 ,000 years of church history.

59:50

It is not sectarian. It's not denominational. We're not pushing anybody towards a particular slant, particularly on the secondary doctrines.

01:00:00

We do talk about the fact that the primary doctrines define Christianity. The secondary doctrines are things that are important.

01:00:06

The Bible speaks to them, but Christians do sometimes have different viewpoints on the secondary doctrines.

01:00:12

It's much more informational than polemic. We're not trying to go around parents and teach their child a particular slant on the secondary doctrines.

01:00:21

We point the students back to their parents, back to their local churches, to help them to be able to understand these doctrines in terms of going to their own church's statement of faith or their denomination's statement of belief or to a particular creed or confession that their church may adhere to.

01:00:42

But then we encourage the family, after doing that together as a family, to go back to the scriptures and ask, does this confession, does this statement of faith match up with what the scripture itself teaches?

01:00:53

Because the scripture is the final authority for all of life and doctrine. So you can get this at our familyrenewal .org

01:01:01

website. If you go to forward slash store, you can look at a lot of our resources.

01:01:07

Foundations in Faith is a really powerful resource that's just come out this year.

01:01:12

I think you will find it to be very helpful. And if you like theology, I've actually written a couple of books on theology.

01:01:19

Here's one that I've written called Questions God Asks, Unlocking the Wisdom of Eternity. This is based on 19 different questions in the

01:01:28

Old Testament that God asked people. And as I was doing my own study through the

01:01:33

Old Testament a while back, I noticed that there were many occasions where God would ask a question of a person.

01:01:40

Like he asked Abraham, where is your wife, Sarah? And he asked Balaam, who are these men with you?

01:01:47

And he asked Jonah, do you have a right to be angry? And he asked Cain, where is your brother? And asked

01:01:53

Moses, what is that in your hand? So many questions. And as I studied these questions,

01:01:59

I started thinking there's obviously something that God is wanting these individuals to stop and think about and consider and assess about their own presuppositions, their own biases, their view of God, their view of man, their view of themselves.

01:02:13

And so there's a lot of just amazing things that are there in the text that we sometimes skip over.

01:02:19

So I outlined this and I found 19 different theological doctrines that were explored in these questions that God asks.

01:02:29

And then I got thinking about how Jesus was the master of asking questions. And so I wrote a sequel called

01:02:35

Questions Jesus Asks Where Divinity Meets Humanity. And these are 20 questions in the

01:02:40

New Testament that Jesus asked people. And I love how Jesus often when he was being pushed into a corner, if you will, by a group that was antagonistic toward him or they're trying to trap him, rather than answer a question directly, he would often answer the question with a question.

01:03:01

One of my favorite questions that Jesus asks is when the man asks him, good teacher, what good thing must

01:03:08

I do to inherit eternal life? Jesus asks him, why do you call me good?

01:03:15

He has so many probing questions. He met that man who had been a paralytic for 38 years at the pool of Bethesda.

01:03:22

And he asks him, do you want to get well? Just so many fascinating questions.

01:03:28

Why do you call me Lord? So many other questions. But I think you'll find that these two books, Questions God Asks, Questions Jesus Asks, will be a great personal

01:03:38

Bible study for you. Maybe a good family read aloud as a supplement to your family devotions.

01:03:43

Between the two, there's 39 completely different topics that are addressed. If you get them from FamilyRenewal .org

01:03:51

forward slash store, there's actually a combo deal where you can save money by getting both. And if you order any of our books from our website,

01:03:59

I'll actually personally sign them for you. So that's something Amazon won't do for you. So we appreciate your support of our family renewal ministry.

01:04:07

And that's a way that we can say thank you. I mentioned this book earlier, Raising Them Up, Parenting for Christians.

01:04:13

This is the 30 ,000 foot view of how we raise and disciple our children with the fear of the

01:04:20

Lord and biblical admonition. This book is actually our bestseller.

01:04:25

My wife and I wrote this together. It's called Pitching a Fit, Overcoming Angry and Stressed Out Parenting.

01:04:32

If you are a parent with children, you know something about stress and anger.

01:04:38

And this book really is a biblical theology of what God says about this topic and a lot of practical application about how we as parents can overcome these addictive, habitual behaviors of anger and stress.

01:04:52

This book, Education, Does God Have an Opinion? A Biblical Apologetic for Christian Education and Homeschooling, is

01:04:59

I believe one of the most comprehensive books on a biblical philosophy of education on the market today.

01:05:05

So if you are a Christian school teacher, if you're a pastor, just someone who has an interest in education, maybe a homeschooling parent,

01:05:12

I think you will find this to be a fascinating read. And I think it will explode a lot of your preconceived ideas.

01:05:18

A lot of people think, well, the Bible doesn't really speak to the issue of education. In this book,

01:05:24

I demonstrate that it does. God has spoken voluminously on this topic. He is not without an opinion.

01:05:29

He has very definitive views on how we're supposed to be educating our children. And then this book is more practical.

01:05:37

I take the top 25 objections that people have raised over the years against homeschooling. Reasons why people say that homeschooling is a bad idea or not everyone can homeschool.

01:05:48

I always get the question, what about the single parent or not everyone is cut out for that? Or I'm not patient enough or how most parents aren't qualified to teach their own children.

01:05:58

Or what about socialization or what about salt and light? Shouldn't we have our children in the schools to be missionaries and evangelists?

01:06:04

Or won't they miss out on things? Won't they have gaps in their education? What about all the opportunities that they won't be able to partake in like prom or football or band or whatever?

01:06:16

How do you choose a curriculum? How can you afford it? How can you live on a single income? Literally every question that's ever been asked about homeschooling.

01:06:24

I address every one of them with research because we actually have studies on most of these things. And so I point people not just to my opinion, but to actual studies on all of these topics, including socialization.

01:06:34

We actually have research studies on homeschool, private school and public school.

01:06:41

Socialization might be surprising you to find out that students are the least well socialized and who interact with the worst social skills as adults are actually public school students of all the different educational alternatives.

01:06:55

So there's a lot of preconceived bias that people have against homeschooling. That's just they don't know where they got it.

01:07:01

They think all homeschoolers will be unsocialized. Actually, the research shows that that's not the case.

01:07:08

So we also have a book bundle on our Web site. If you just want to get all of our books, they retail for about seventy nine dollars.

01:07:13

But if you go on there and look for the book bundle, you can get all six of my books for sixty dollars.

01:07:19

Again, we can sign each one of those for you when you order from our Web site as a gift for you listening to this podcast.

01:07:26

You can get a free MP3 audio download of your choice from our Web site.

01:07:32

Family renewal dot org for such store. Just go find. I think it's like a three ninety nine value.

01:07:38

So look for one of our standard audio messages, select it and put promo code gift.

01:07:44

And when you do that, you will get that audio for free simply by visiting our

01:07:49

Web store. So our our thank you to you for listening to this presentation. So, again, my

01:07:54

Web site is family renewal dot org. Christian worldview dot net is my Christian apologetic site. I also have a new

01:08:00

Web site. I don't even have that linked here. But if you can remember my name, Israel Wayne dot com is my speaker site.

01:08:06

If you would like to have me speak to your group, to your church, if you're part of a conference or a family camp, something like that.

01:08:14

Keep me in mind as a speaker. I speak on a lot of different kinds of topics. The topics endorsement, statement of faith, all that stuff's on the

01:08:21

Israel Wayne dot com Web site. And I'd love to connect with you on social media. I'm on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, wherever you are.

01:08:29

Look me up. I'd love to connect with you there. My wife and I also have a podcast. It's called

01:08:35

Family Renewal. You can listen to that wherever you stream your podcast. Just type in Family Renewal podcast. We also have a

01:08:41

YouTube channel. Go to YouTube, type in Family Renewal podcast. You can listen to the video, watch the video versions there.

01:08:49

And so we would be glad to connect with you there. And if you have any questions where you want to communicate with me personally, private message on Facebook is actually probably the best way to actually reach me personally.

01:09:00

So I would love to have you drop me a question. If there's any way we can serve you, please get in touch with us again.

01:09:07

Our website's Family Renewal dot org. And I appreciate you taking the time to listen to these thoughts on biblical hermeneutics.

01:09:17

Yeah, that's how I invited you to come and speak for us was through Facebook Messenger, so I can vouch for the fact that you definitely are responsive and I'm glad that you listed all of your products.

01:09:31

I hope that people like our goal is in having our speakers come is to help support their ministries, too.

01:09:37

So and then you had mentioned these two books, the demolishing supposed Bible contradiction.

01:09:43

So I do recommend those. Those are from answers in Genesis. I've gone through them and taught them to homeschoolers.

01:09:49

And that was a great resource. Dr. Lyle, one of our frequent speakers, Dr. Jason Lyle, has a similar book that's called

01:09:56

Keeping Faith in an Age of Reason. I don't have a copy on me to show everybody, but those are some good books.

01:10:04

So in the Facebook comments, I did link to those and also to Dennis Peterson's ministry that you had mentioned earlier on, too.

01:10:13

So we have a couple of questions. Let me ask mine first. Oh, yeah.

01:10:20

OK, go ahead. Are any of your kids twins? No, we have 11 children.

01:10:25

We have no twins, no adoptions. Most of our children are about two years apart.

01:10:31

So we have six girls, five boys. Our oldest is twenty three and our youngest is two.

01:10:38

So we're actually going to be involved in the parenting process for quite a while yet, which is a good thing.

01:10:44

Well, job security for me as an author talks about parenting. If you have one more, you could be the 12 tribes of Israel.

01:10:52

You know what? That is a point. I'm going to have to maybe I'll start a petition online and you all can talk to my wife and see if it really comes down to whether God wants to give us another one or not.

01:11:05

But yeah, 12 would be a nice round number, wouldn't it? I mean, your name is Israel.

01:11:10

That's right. That would be apropos. I think so. So Robin actually had another question earlier on.

01:11:18

You had mentioned something about baptizing the dead, and she wondered if you could expound on that.

01:11:24

She's never heard of that before. I don't know that I have either. And I read through the

01:11:30

Bible every year now for the last three years and I have not come across that. Ah, OK.

01:11:37

Yeah, well, you can do a Google search. As I said, it's an obscure passage and there are some commentaries.

01:11:46

You know, honestly, I don't have a take on it. It's not one that I have have decided that I have to weigh in on.

01:11:53

But, you know, I don't think that. Yeah, let me let me just say,

01:12:03

I think one one place probably to go with a lot of those types of questions is actually got questions,

01:12:08

And I haven't even looked up to see what they say, but I found that that Web site is usually just a very good, well -balanced, well -reasoned argument for, you know, sharing the, you know, sharing the different perspectives.

01:12:25

I was just going to look and see if I could find the reference on this as to where where it was mentioned.

01:12:31

But it looks like First Corinthians 1529. It looks like First Corinthians 1529 is where it's mentioned.

01:12:39

And I know that the the Mormons have created a big doctrine out of it.

01:12:45

I'm looking here, seeing articles on baptism of the dead from like Grace to You, John MacArthur's Web site, gty .org,

01:12:53

Christian answers dot net. They would be a site that I would trust. First site.

01:12:59

Well, no, not the first site looks like it's Mormon. Second site that comes up on my search is got questions dot org.

01:13:07

I would trust that. So certainly Christian answers dot net got questions dot org gty .org.

01:13:14

I would say that those would be, you know, pretty sound ministries,

01:13:20

Ligonier ministries, Ligonier dot org. That's R .C. Sproul's former ministry, even

01:13:26

Desiring God, John Piper, Desiring God dot org. They all have articles on it. So I'm going to stay out of it, but I would recommend you go check out what those organizations have to say and get their take on it.

01:13:40

But but again, the point that I was making there was that there are some passages in the scripture that are mentioned like one time like that.

01:13:48

It's just one passing reference and it's just not terribly clear what is meant by that.

01:13:54

And so we have to be careful. We don't, you know, build a church or denomination or around an obscure doctrine.

01:14:02

Thank you. And I did find it here and I don't I I never thought it to be something like that.

01:14:10

Thank you. Rachel was familiar with that.

01:14:15

She was here in Zoom. She was posting the reference and could because she said that's one of her favorite chapters of the

01:14:23

Bible, except maybe not for that part. Yes.

01:14:30

Well, we are pretty much up against our time. So go ahead one more time.

01:14:36

Tell everybody where they can find you to support your ministry. I know that you went through the list. What's the one best website and the one best method of contacting you?

01:14:46

Yeah, so Family Renewal .org is the best website. And again, you can contact me on social media.

01:14:55

Private message on Facebook is probably the best way to reach me. But you can search for social media pages under Family Renewal or Israel Wayne.

01:15:04

Would love to connect with you there and and keep in touch. I'm pretty active on social media, on Twitter and all that stuff.

01:15:10

OK, that's great. And Family Renewal is also where you have your bookstore so people can buy the books there.

01:15:18

That is correct. Family Renewal .org. And then we are Creation Fellowship Santee. And again, you can find links to most of our past presentations by typing in tinyurl .com

01:15:30

forward slash CFS archives. And also while you're there, you can click on the link to see our upcoming speakers.

01:15:37

We're going to be taking next week, October 12th off. But we'll be back on October 19th with Dr.

01:15:44

Job Martin. This is kind of a special treat. Good guy. Yeah, he's a he's kind of a big name in creation science and especially when it comes to animals that defy evolution.

01:15:58

And he was Ronald Reagan's dentist. Yeah, we've been trying for a while to get him in.

01:16:04

And so we're really excited about that one. He will actually be our 80th speaker.

01:16:12

So since we started three or three and a half years ago. So. All right. Well, with that, we're going to go ahead and turn off our our live stream and recording for tonight.