#42 UNDERSTANDING TORAH LIVING + Dr. James Sedlacek

The Meaning of Torah and Why Translation Matters

Welcome to Biblically Speaking. My name is Cassian Bellino, and I'm your host. In this podcast, we talk about the Bible in simple terms with experts, PhDs, and scholarly theologians to make understanding God easier.

These conversations have transformed my relationship with Christ and understanding of religion. Now, I'm sharing these recorded conversations with you. On this podcast, we talk about the facts, the history, and the translations to make the Bible make sense so we can get to know God, our Creator, better.

Hello, hello. Welcome everybody to Biblically Speaking. I'm your host, Cassian Bellino, and today I am so honored to have Dr. James Sedlicek back again, this time to discuss the Torah living and which parts of the Torah in the Old Testament are we supposed to still live out today as Gentiles within the new covenant of Jesus, the shellfish, the linen clothing, all of these rules.

Which ones do we keep? Which ones do we not? Is it an all or nothing situation? I feel like I've never gotten clarity on this. So Dr. James Sedlicek, you are an honored guest. You are always welcome back.

Every time you come back on, we have such great conversations. You were just here talking about Revelation and understanding of other Jewish texts. I'm so excited to see what we uncover today. We've got a great list of questions, but how are you doing?

I am doing great. I'm always excited to get clarity in my faith, especially with the way that you simply lay out all of these explanations. To give you a little bit of background, the reason that this is a topic that we're going to talk about today is because in this journey, I started discussing with all types of Christians and somebody pulled me aside and we had a long conversation on living biblically.

Here we are biblically speaking, but are we biblically living? And if I am to truly follow the Bible, doesn't that mean I should still obey what's happening in the Old Testament? And this includes all of the things listed in Exodus, in Numbers, the types of festivals, the types of food that we are and aren't supposed to eat.

I feel like it always goes back to Leviticus, man shall not lay with another man, but also should not eat shellfish. So it gets a little muddy as an early Christian on, well, what do I not obey and what do I do obey?

If I'm going to do this, I'm going to do it well. And I think that I've heard whispers that there's a new covenant. So I've had discussions with people and they've defended both sides of, you know, this is what the church tells us to obey.

We're not even supposed to go to church. We're supposed to obey the Bible. So let's stop, you know, getting wrapped up in the Christianity of it all. Let's just focus on the raw text. But I've also heard that, you know, there's a new covenant when Jesus came around.

So we're here today to get answers. So how do you feel about this topic? Have you been teaching on it?

What Torah Means: Instruction, Not Just Law

There's several things I'll explore tonight. One is the, first of all, the idea of what is the Torah? What is it for Jews and what is it for Gentiles? Second thing is the law of God universal and the law of God specifically for the Jews.

And then another theme to explore is the value of the Jewish rituals, festivals. And thirdly, that question, did Jesus or Paul take the Torah and pitch it? What am I supposed to do with those statements?

And, you know, and I want to suggest a few things when we get to that topic. Amazing. I'm prepared to talk about all of those things.

Perfect. Beautifully laid out. Thank you for that. That really sets us up nicely. So Torah living, you amazingly, we had a moment a few episodes ago where you were the, the light bulb moment for me, that the first five books of the Bible are the Torah.

And for me, that really bridged my religion with my Jewish brothers and sisters. And so right now I'm rereading the Bible starting at the beginning and it is crazy. The God that they experienced then, you know, and I understand they had to bring them out of slavery and paganism, polytheism, all the things, but the God that we experience in the gospels is, it's like night and day.

So how are we to approach, use, apply the Torah.

As Gentiles and Jews in general? Yes. And a lot of things get put in Jesus's mouth. So I want to start with something that the gospel of Matthew has in his mouth. Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.

I have not come to abolish them, but to fulfill them. So whatever we land on in our understanding of the Torah, we should not go to the understanding that Jesus somehow abolished it. He was clear that that was not what he was doing.

And when you say abolish the law, you mean like come in and say, forget everything that God told.

Moses. I'm writing new rules. He's not saying that. He's not saying that. And he's not saying pitch the Torah. That has been an interpretation. And I understand how some of this develops theologically, because, you know, if you understand Galatians a certain way, you're going to want to say that about Jesus in the gospels.

And we'll talk more about that text later. I do teach Galatians as a course. I teach it as a Greek exegesis course as well for a different institution. But there's some terms in there that are often translated one way when there's a range of ways to translate them.

And when you consider Paul within rabbinic milieu, he more likely would.

Have been using that word a different way. So it's a translation issue.

Yeah. There's a translation issue in the heart of Galatians that causes people to misread Jesus in the gospels. Now you think, why does Galatians impact Matthew? Well, if you get into a habit of translating something a certain way, you're going to misread it in other texts too.

All right. First of all, let's talk about the Torah, what it is, and how does it shape Jewish life and faith? A lot of people will, when you see the word Torah, it's a Hebrew word. A lot of people translating it just write law underneath it.

That isn't the best translation. In Hebrew language, Torah is law, not Torah. Torah is instruction. And as soon as we realize the distinction between instruction and law, then we stop misreading all those New Testament references to law.

Whoa. That's the first time. Wow. That's the first time. So Torah is instruction. Think about it. Is the story of God creating the heaven and the earth a law? No, it's a story. It's in the Torah. What about the story of Abraham coming from Ur of the Chaldees over to find the land he does not know?

Is that a law? No, it's a story. Well, it's even hard to call that.

Instruction. Yeah, right. I would call it a story versus like God wrote out the Ikea instructions.

Right. It's not a kit that you put together with a little instruction manual, but there are probably the best place where I have seen this in modern practice is people who do something called narrative theology.

And what they do is they look at the story and tell you what's going on in the story through a theological lens. And that is the way that the stories are instructions for us. A lot of times we read them as if they're flat stories and we want to hurry past them to the exciting parts.

It's like, well, this is a boring story. What am I supposed to get out of it? Well, a lot of times it is if you're asking the right questions in the story, you will learn things from it. Abraham has a choice.

What does Abraham choose when he has multiple options? And this is how you understand the beginnings of something called faith. Because when you get down to it, how do you define faith in a mosaic environment to Israelites in the wilderness?

How do you define faith? Well, you can define it by noting Abel's sacrifice, noting Abraham's journey, noting Isaac's faithfulness, noting Jacob's obedience, and you start building a case for faith. What is faith?

Otherwise, you don't have a way to explain such a theological concept.

So you're instructing them by using these case studies, these examples. I like that you said.

Case study. Most of the stories in the Torah can be case studies for developing theological thought. Not just revealing God's character? Not just, no. Even human, God's expectations of humans are as well.

We can determine these from the stories. And we can also determine things that are good against what is best. In other words, there's characters that do things in the story they shouldn't have. And one person's reaction is, well, that's in the Bible, it must be good.

No. What happened to them in the story? It was bad. You mean like Jonah, for example? Yeah, running away to Joppa, or Sarah not trusting God's promise that she was going to give birth, sending her maidservant in.

You know, we often misread the stories because we're not analyzing them in the lens of faith and faithfulness. And when we see the failure in faith or faithfulness, that is part of that story, and whatever we pull from it.

But the instruction books, there are some laws in them. I think there's 613 total commandments. We think of the Ten Commandments, so there's a total of 613 in the Book of the Torah, in the five books at most.

But the Ten Commandments are kind of like a gold standard on morality. And then all of the other instructions and laws related to the instructions are specific to governing how Israel is going to move forward.

So including civil practice, legal practice, religious practice, and there's a whole list of things that go into religion because you've got the worship, and then you've got sacrifice and atonement, which is different.

And so you've got a lot of laws on how all of these things are done. Dress code, food, and a lot of very specific things. So just kind of want to think a little bit about the Torah is more than just one category of literature.

It's got stories, it's got laws, it's got some step-by-step instructions too. Particular sacrifices have multiple steps, and they're told in a step-by-step fashion so you don't get the steps out of order or mess them up.

Yeah, I think it's a little difficult. Again,.

This is my Sunday School mind that takes things literally, so you kind of expand it out with these explanations. But when I read that Aaron's sons were cast ablaze because they lit some unauthorized incense, to me that seems like a, you must follow this rule, not a suggestion.

Yeah, I would say these are not suggestions. Okay, so when you say instruction, I definitely interpret that as suggestions, but you're saying when they say Torah means instruction, that means a spectrum of.

Legalities versus suggestions. Yeah, I would say there's a spectrum in there as well, because there's some wiggle room in places, but there's not wiggle room for one area, and that is bringing unclean into the presence of the holy.

So anytime you mix those two, it's command. Got it. It's a big problem. So God sets boundaries, and we didn't think of this being part of tonight's thing, but the thing that goes wrong in the Garden of Eden is a disruption of the boundaries God put in place.

And so God sets more boundaries and more fine-grained boundaries within the Torah, within the Mosaic Code, and so thinking about God and holiness is a system of interconnected boundaries between things.

So there's a boundary between the Levites and the rest of the Israelites. There's a further boundary between the ordinary Levite and the priest, and then there's boundaries in the Temple between where people can be and where just select people can be.

And so you've got those boundaries. Mixing those up is a problem.

So there's like inner circles within the inner circles that God, and that's like from a purity standpoint of like God wants the holy to remain holy. Like he's very strict about what seeps in.

And what seeps out. There are certain things that cannot seep at all. Yes, and it's very specific about the ritual that must be performed by the priest prior to doing their priestly duty. They cannot bring uncleanness or filth into the Temple.

They cannot. Yeah. So all of that is part of it, and the place where we see this in modern societies outside the zone of religion is in medical practice. Oh, that's a great point. You don't contaminate a wound.

You don't contaminate one patient with the other patient's disease. Oh, that's a great example. Most of the restrictions in the workplace for the medical field are very parallel to this kind of thing in the Torah.

You don't mix things because it causes harm. It causes destruction or it causes some kind of.

Problem. That is such a good headspace to put this in because for me, I'm like, what can I not do and do or else I'm going to be set ablaze? Like it seems like a very restrictive baseline for how to live and be a Christian that you almost don't want to even follow it.

But then you look at the.

Practice and you have to follow those because I'm not about to get MRSA. Yeah. And if the medical personnel are caught not following those rules, they are not treated lightly. Yeah. So they must. They must prevent contamination and they must prevent infection any way that they can.

Do you.

Think that speaks to like the, I want to say like the contagiousness of evil, of sin, of commonality? Like what is being taken off the way that you were trying to avoid a viral contagion in your home that is being also taken off to avoid any contagion in the tabernacle?

The contagiousness.

Of sin and evil is a big theme in Jewish literature. So the idea that evil can spread through immunity is the same as uncleanness. So let's say someone's a leper and they are unclean. Well, they can't go around to all of the social gatherings shaking hands and hugging each other because what's going to happen is the whole village is going to have lepers.

This is a necrotic skin tissue problem and it's very contagious. So there were rules to separate those people on the outer edges of the town. Their family members would cover up carefully, go set food down nearby, step back so that the lepers could come out and get their food and go back into their tent or wherever they're staying.

There would be things like lepervilles, little villages for lepers to live. And if they got better, then they came out, they showed themselves to the priest, they were declared clean, and then after a few days, that's the quarantine period, they were allowed to reenter society.

And you couldn't be more similar with people who had COVID and then waited the seven days post-fever and then began getting back into society and declared safe again. Was all of it accurate? Everybody's always in a fizz whether it was exactly accurate.

Well, we don't know, but we know it helped some people and it worked in many instances. When you say, did it work like the leprosy quarantine period? I was thinking about COVID. A lot of people were arguing whether the seven day quarantine actually makes sense.

Does it really work? I think I was fever free at three days. You might have been. We don't know all of the things. Trying to tell people don't go out until you're fever free means that 30 of the people won't bother to pay attention.

So that's why they came up with seven days or in some nations, four days. I forget who did seven and who did four. Anyway, it's because of that, they're trying to really trim down the numbers and those went away.

So thinking about the specific things, well, first of all, let's think about universal things, because the Torah doesn't begin with Jews. It begins with Adam, the father of all humanity, the mother of all humanity.

Of course, obviously, yes. And then it takes us through humanities, sin, multi-generational problems, the free Noah's flood society and the mess that was there, and then judgment. So that we understand that there's a problem in the human race called sin.

There's a moral thing that it's contagious and multiple generations, it gets really out of hand. And then when judgment comes, it's inevitable. Then there's always, well, presumably always, but generally a way to escape it.

But there's not many people that found. It was Noah and his family and his sons and their wives. It was 80 people. It wasn't a lot of people. So anyway, Noah and his family come out and they're still not Jews.

This is still the human race as a whole. Then you go to Babel. This is still all of the nations. And then there's a mistake made there by the humans and God scatters them, their languages, and we're still not Jews.

And then God calls Abraham, calls him to a place where he does not know. Technically, he's not a Jew either, but he becomes the forefather of the Jews. Until we get to Jacob, whose name was changed to Israel, then we can say, okay, he's the first Israelite.

But Abraham is the father of faith that leads him there because he goes where he doesn't know. God shows him, he goes to the land of Israel. Isaac grows up there. Jacob grows up there. And so then Jacob eventually moves with his family to Egypt.

Once you get into Egypt, a new problem is there. The Israelites were connected to Joseph originally, who was famous, who helped a lot of people, but there came along a Pharaoh that didn't really care about this Joseph.

He decided to enslave all of the Israelites. Then there's the Exodus story, the great escape. And so when you get through here to the story, so far you haven't had very many laws. You're all the way into Exodus.

Abraham got some commandments. They were a few. That is a lot of history with no official Jews. Yeah. And so when you're in Exodus and they come out of Egypt and Moses begins writing the Torah, we can always quibble whether he wrote Genesis from older sources or whether he was putting his own spin on the Genesis events.

Those kind of quibbles do happen. But the thing is, is when Moses compiles this thing, Jewish identity is in these texts, but the earlier stories simply set it up, but their earlier individuals are not Jews.

They are part of the world population. So what would you call everybody before, sorry,.

With the Israelites, you said Joseph was, or yeah, Joseph was the official Israelite. And then Moses kind of wrote the laws for the Jewish instructions. What would you, everybody with Tower of Babel and Noah, you just call them the first humans or do they even have like a...

They didn't have names that stayed in history where their name got recorded. Well, Genesis lists a few tribal names related to the nations, but they're just called the nations. And so the term in Hebrew is the nations.

And this was what existed. After Babel and everybody scattered, there were a certain number of nations formed. And these nations were just always called the.

Nations. You wouldn't call them ancient Near Eastern cultures? Some of them would probably.

Be the ancient Near East cultures eventually, but not all of them. Some of them would have moved far beyond what we recognize as ancient Near East. Some of them would have been moved into South Africa.

Some would have moved to what we call Asia. Some would have moved to Russia and across to what is now Europe. So the peoples moved from the different nations that came from Babel. So the way to understand the Torah is it is some specific instructions to Jews because they are being called out and separated from the nations.

And then there is some connection points back to the nations. So this document that we call Torah has two components. What is specifically to those called out from the nations, and then what is back to the nations.

And so this is one thing that I don't see verbalized much in the New Testament debates, whether Gentile Christians need to pick up their Torah and read it and live by some of it or not. You know, those debates don't usually bring this up, but within the Torah there was always things that were for Jews specifically and things that were for humanity as a whole.

Because the story has come down through all of humanity until God began to call out Abraham. So you've got two pieces to the Torah, and it's tricky deciding as you read through it what belongs to each part.

So I'm relying mostly on Jewish scholarship, what they would see as central to their own necessity and what was central to humanity as a whole. There are many ways to decide what pieces go to whom. I couldn't begin to unravel all of the different ways.

There's not just one, so that's good to know. Yeah, and it can be tricky wading through what does a Gentile need to do in the Torah. It isn't a clear-cut subject. That explains my confusion. Yeah, sure.

It's not a clear-cut subject. However, I think two extremes should be avoided. One is to do everything that's in the Torah, because some of the things in the Torah are specific to Jewish identity. If you're not a Jew, unless you're going to go join a Jewish synagogue and become a Jew, you probably ought to leave those things for Jews to do.

What Gentiles Should and Should Not Take Up from the Torah

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So obvious, but I needed you to say that to understand it. Yeah, so for example, I'm not sitting here with a yarmulke on. I've got my headset on. Now, there's a difference if you're going to go fellowship at a Jewish synagogue, because you don't do un-fellowshipping things while you're having fellowship.

Romans 14 is a good instruction manual for that sort of thing. But if you decide you want to go fellowship at a Jewish synagogue, learn something about Jewish practices, and adhere to those practices in order to have fellowship, wearing of the yarmulke would be ordinary for me if I was in a synagogue.

But as a Gentile follower of Christ, I wouldn't want to... I've even thought, what about show-and-tell? You know, people don't know these things. Maybe I could put on everything and show them what it's like.

Well, that can be fine, but there's also some context where it can be offensive.

What do you mean show-and-tell? Like you put on the yarmulke?

Like if I go to a church and show people what a Talat is and show them what a yarmulke is.

Like a Christian church and show them the Jewish.

It could be a helpful culture exposure. But then the question is, if I'm in a class teaching world religions, am I going to do that for every faith group? And I probably am not. So this is one of those honesty check questions.

If you're not going to dress up as every faith group on the planet to explain them to somebody, you probably shouldn't do it to just mimic Jews. It can be offensive. Not all Jews are offended by it, but there have been incidences where some offenses have been understood from it.

So don't just go doing everything in the Torah and trying to pass yourself off as Jewish if you're not. Be honest. Be honest with yourself, what you are, who you are, and what you're trying to accomplish.

If you decide to have fellowship at a synagogue, then a deeper level of practice is culturally necessary. So certain clothes, certain attitudes, certain statements you should say, that kind of thing. If you went to visit the Queen of England when she was around, you wouldn't go in saying all kinds of nonsense.

You would need to learn the proper decorum in the court to speak with the Queen, right? So the same thing would happen to any member of any other faith. So you learn what is typical and socially acceptable and how not to be offensive.

It helps to have a guide. You know somebody, you get to know somebody, and you can learn how not to be offensive. So that's the first thing I would say. The other extreme is to take the Torah, put it on a shelf, never open it, never do anything inside it.

Which as a Sunday school Christian, I did. Many, many have. And I have had excellent teachers teach me that the only thing I needed to worry about was Matthew to Revelation, and they weren't sure about Revelation.

Okay. It's common. It's commonly taught. And I tried to make sure in my own education path that I gave equal attention to both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New Testament, both in my language preparation and in my understanding of the contents of what's in it.

I just did that because I thought, why not? It seemed to be a good thing to do.

Double the workload. Why not?

Yeah, there's that. But the payoff is that I immediately and repeatedly was able to connect dots between the two that a lot of folks who were just in one or the other weren't talking about. So that's the other thing.

And just to reiterate, because we talked about this a couple episodes, like a while ago, is when you go into either becoming a pastor or a theologian, you only study the New Testament, or you only study the Old Testament.

Because I think a common churchgoer thinks that a pastor knows the entire Bible and how it works. And that's just not how the education is set up. Hey guys, Cass here. Are you feeling like your faith life is on buffering mode, waiting for that next level, but stuck in spiritual dial-up?

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No. In seminaries, most seminaries anywhere, a person goes, let's say they take the gold standard while they're there. Not everybody does, but let's say they take the gold standard. That is a Master's of Divinity.

That is the degree for pastor preparation, probably for 500 years. And that's the gold standard. In the Master of Divinity program, you would typically be an Old Testament major, a New Testament major, a theology major, a practical ministries major, a counseling major, more or less lately.

Those five things are not the same thing. And depending on which track you did, the other four are almost foreign subjects to you. Oh, in a Master's of Divinity, you only pick one of those five? One of the five.

That is standard. And probably 96 or better of our pastors in training, that's what they had to.

Choose from. And do you think they typically go towards like the ministries route? It depends.

Because practical ministries is very appealing because it helps you do a lot of functions of a pastor better. So that one's appealing. And you can divide that one further into adult ministry or youth ministry.

They have tracks for both, which is fine. So in that case, you're not even touching the Old Testament? Not much. You may touch on topics that are contained in the Old Testament, but you're not learning the biblical languages or how to explain the Bible as a whole.

That piece of the educated process or content area is missing. So to bring.

Us back today, we can't take all of it and we can't take none of it. But as a Gentile today, I still want to be obedient. And as you said at the beginning, Jesus came to fulfill the law. So which part do I need to obey?

Do I need to start doing my Jubilee? Do I need to start.

Planning for that? Or my Festival of Firstfruits? Let me go into what's specific to Jews and what is universal first. The Mitzvot, or the 613 Commandments, as we mentioned earlier, are primarily understood as part of the covenant between God and Israel.

So these are covenant stipulations. In other words, there's an overarching covenant, and these are the amendments—that's not the best word—the line items that belong to that covenant. So we have to understand that individual laws are elements of a much bigger covenant.

So it applies uniquely to Israel. So within this, there's the ritual observances, the dietary laws, Sabbath specifics, the circumcision. And for an issue that comes up in the New Testament, this is one that does.

Circumcision versus uncircumcision is a big thing. And so paying attention to the whys that Paul and some others are suggesting to the Gentiles not to go get circumcised, it's because in Jesus' body, he made a way for both Jews and Gentiles to come to God.

That's the language that's there. And so if a Gentile is saying, oh, let me go get circumcised, it's as if he already has a way to God this way. So why is he trying to go this way when he doesn't.

Have to? Is there a way to read the scripture and be like, okay, shellfish just for the Israelites. Okay, homosexuality, universal. Or my reading goes wrong, and I'm characterizing that the wrong way.

Well, there's a couple of things that several scholars have used. For example, if it's addressed in the New Testament and the Old Testament, it probably still matters. And I know most people aren't comfortable with probably, but that's the way that it's verbalized in scholarship.

And that's because nobody wants to be 100 certain they're right, at least not scholars, not the real ones. So they would say it's most likely. Yeah, it's most likely still matters to Gentile Christians.

Now, some things that rabbis through the centuries, we're talking about pre-New Testament and post-New Testament for Gentiles to do. There are seven Noahide laws. We can find traces of them in the stories of Noah, which predate the Jews, which predate Babel, which means it applies to all human everywhere.

Okay. That's a good way to put it. No idolatry. This was given to Noah. Yeah. In other words, the stories of Noah provide examples of doing these things well. Okay. Okay. I'm back with you. Yeah. And so no idolatry.

Worship God and God alone. No idols. That one is universal. We see it in stories before there are such thing as Jews, and we see it come up again and again in the New Testament. Most of the little phrases we have trouble understanding in Revelation have to do with mixing idols with the new Christian fellowships.

Get them out of here. Don't have anything to do with idols. Stay away. Prohibition of murder. Murder was a problem in Cain and Abel's story, and murder is a problem in the Abraham narratives as well. And you can see that it isn't the right thing to do before you ever get to Exodus and Moses and the Ten Commandments.

So this is a command that's understood for all people everywhere. Theft. Prohibition of theft. Prohibition of sexual immorality. Now, this one is tricky to define outside the Torah, outside of the Mosaic formulation, because the way people used to be married in antiquity is different than how people are married today, and how divorces were in antiquity is different from how they work today.

There's some muddy areas there that are not easily solved. But at a minimum, it meant faithfulness to somebody, as opposed to unfaithfulness. And that's the thing that rabbis from antiquity all the way to the present have been linking with idolatry.

Unfaithfulness in marriage, unfaithfulness to God. And they've been linking those two discussions. Some of the exact nitty-gritty details are not always brought up, but the basic idea of unfaithfulness in marriage, that one is, that's the piece of it that's emphasized the most heavily.

Blasphemy. The prohibition of saying that God is evil, or that something about God is unholy. Mixing what is holy with the profane. That's the two things that you've got to keep separate, the unclean and the holy.

Wouldn't that mix with idolatry as well? Yeah, it's a problem with idols, that's mixing the unholy with the holy. It goes back to that system of boundaries. And so, whatever boundaries God has created for his own being, we should respect those, whether we're Gentile or Jew.

And whatever boundaries God has created for our own behavior next to our fellow man, we should respect those, because we should respect that our fellow man is made in God's image, just like we are. So, if I say, I'm worshiping God, I don't need to worry about the Torah, but I can go murder my neighbor, well, then you can go killing off the image of God, and you still worship God.

It's like, there's something at odds with yourself here on this. So, it really doesn't work.

It's interesting, it seems like almost the idolatry, the murder, the blasphemy,.

The adultery, you can do all of those actions to God. You can. Spiritual adultery is often the bigger theme when you start seeing it in rabbinic literature. So, I think maybe I'm looking for.

Clues on how to navigate this when you read it. Like, okay, which one applies to me? Can I do.

This to God? Do you think that's a good tag for me to use? Yeah, I think that's a good principle. A lot of times in theological reading, I've used this thing, there's a specific application here, but there's an underlying universal principle.

And as soon as you identify that universal principle, it's much easier to know what to do with each specific circumstance. It's the universal principle. And for me, it's, you don't mix the holy with the unholy.

If you got unholy going on, you need to get that stuff cleaned. Now, go be in fellowship with holy. We have to think about spending time with God the same way we do with going to grandma's dinner. Everybody set out the nice tablecloth, the plates, and you're not going to go in there with your muddy boots and put them on the table.

It's not going to work. And so, you have a holy event to go to or be part of or be in fellowship with. Get ready. The other one is a marriage metaphor. You see the marriage and the wedding feast, which is part of the marriage ceremony in Jewish custom.