Round Table

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the saints.

Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast. Thank you.

I'm Dylan Hamilton, and with me are Michael Durham, Chris Giesler. And we had a question that we finally settled on that we were gonna do for this episode starting out, and then we're gonna go kind of a round robin with some other questions, but we'll start with this one.

In Ephesians 5 .14, Paul appears to quote an Old Testament reference. My study

Bible says this is a combination of quotes, but I can't really find the last one. Christ will shine on you in the

Old Testament. Is this a misquote, the Septuagint translation issue, or something else?

And I'll go ahead and read the text. It's Ephesians 5 .14, and this is coming from the

New King James Version. Therefore he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

Michael. Yeah, so it's always great to note, try to find where the authors are quoting from previously written works in the

Bible. You'll find the prophets quoting Moses, the latter prophets quoting the earlier prophets.

You find Jesus quoting the Old Testament. You find the apostles quoting the Old Testament and Jesus. Revelation quotes everything.

And so it's a very profitable exercise to go back and say, okay, where was this quoted from? It's a good thing to do because we have a confidence that the

Holy Spirit does not take Scripture out of context. And so by looking at how one biblical author is using other passages in the

Bible, we're instructed on how to properly interpret the Scriptures, and by proper interpretation, then we're led along to proper application.

So it's a great question, Ephesians 5 .14. I'm reading from the New King James Version, and it says, therefore he says, awake you who sleep, arise from the dead, and Christ will give you light.

Now, it is a combination of quotes. The question says, well, this last line, and Christ will shine on you is their translation.

Mine says, and Christ will give you light. Like, where does that come from? It doesn't appear to be an actual quote from anywhere.

But if you back up to some of the previous verses there in Ephesians 5, we read in verse eight, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the

Lord. Okay, and down in verse 14 it says, Christ will give you light. And in the context, when we're thinking about salvation,

Paul describes being saved as being in Christ, being in the Lord. So you are light in the

Lord, okay? So walk as children of light. And again, in verse 10, we're told to find out what is acceptable to the

Lord. Well, who is that? We'd say, well, you could say God, and think of the triune

God, God in his full godness, and that's great. But we also, I think in the context, are supposed to be thinking about Jesus as our

Lord, in particular, the God -man, Jesus Christ, who is King, who is our Lord, and he has some things for us to do, and for us to follow him.

So again, the word Lord, the title Lord, is being, I think, particularly used of Christ. And so when we come down to this quote in verse 14, where it says, and Christ will give you light, it is a quote.

I think it's coming from Isaiah. I think it's coming from Isaiah chapter 60.

So in Isaiah 60, we read, verse one, arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the

Lord is risen upon you. Now, it doesn't say the glory of the Messiah, or which would be in the

Hebrew for the anointed one. In Greek, it would be Christos, or Christ. It doesn't say the glory of Christ will rise on you.

It says the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. But in the context in Ephesians five, Jesus Christ has been identified as Lord.

So I think it is quoting from Isaiah 60. The context there, of course, is speaking about the new

Jerusalem, and the new city that God makes, filled with not only

Jews, but also Gentiles. As we keep reading in verse two of Isaiah 60, for behold, the darkness shall cover the earth, and deep darkness the people, but the

Lord will arise over you. So again, we hear that. And his glory will be seen upon you. The Gentiles, the nations, will come to your light.

The Hebrew, the Goim, the Greek, the Ethnoi, they will all come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.

Okay, and then when you read, if you've been reading Ephesians all the way through, that's a major theme in the letter of Paul to the

Ephesians about how Jew and Gentile are brought together into the new temple, the new Jerusalem in Christ.

So I think that Ephesians 5, 14 is quoting there from Isaiah 60 verse one, using the title

Christ to gloss the title Lord, but that's very consistent with what

Paul has been writing. So would you say there's some sort of equivocation between light and glory that you're seeing from Isaiah into Ephesians?

Yes, so the use of the term glory as it's developed throughout the

Old Testament and the New Testament, kabod in the Hebrew and doxos in the

Greek in the New Testament, light is a huge component of that word, and light and weight, weight, heaviness, preciousness, somewhere in between the both of them.

So glory and light are operating together. I would say that light is a property of what glory is all about.

Well, we wanna move on to our next question then. I'm confused about what a biblical covenant is and how many of them are in the

Bible. How does this apply to us as New Testament believers? I'm stuck between dispensationalism and reformed worlds and don't know what to think.

You're not alone. Yeah, it's a good question. So when we read about covenants, if somebody is systematically trained with systematic theology first, and sometimes it's easier, it feels a little bit easier to get into knowledge of the

Bible through systematic theology because somebody has done a lot of hard work for you.

And it's good to have teachers. It's good to have folks to disciple you. So if you're reading a dispensational theology or you're reading a covenantal theology, one of the joys of that is that you're constantly coming into connections.

You're seeing connections in the scriptures, seeing how the Bible fits together. It's very encouraging.

It's faith -building to see the way in which God's word is coherent and even beautiful.

And so a lot of folks gravitate towards that. But the challenge is, of course, when we're reading through the scriptures or even teaching through the scriptures and having to come to firm conclusions in the scriptures, the systematics sometimes lead us into dead ends, blind alleys, and what do

I do with this now? And that's the signal that all those systematic theologies are helpful and they can be part of our discipleship that they have to be submitted to God's word and they are there to be corrected by the scriptures.

So a biblical covenant. When we talk about biblical covenants, we're not talking about what the covenantalists would talk about, covenant of works or covenant of grace or covenant of redemption.

We're not talking about those. Biblical covenants show up with Noah. God tells Noah in Genesis 6,

I'm gonna make my covenant with you. I will make my covenant with you. He doesn't make that covenant until the latter part of chapter eight moving into chapter nine.

All of a sudden now God is making his covenant with Noah. And there's a sacrifice, there's promises, there's warnings, there's direction, and God cuts a covenant with Noah.

And then he does so as well with Abraham in Genesis chapter 15.

Even though he's made his promises to Abraham in chapter 12 and reiterates those promises in chapter 13, showcases his faithfulness to Abraham in chapter 14, the covenant's not cut until chapter 15.

And then the covenant is upheld by contrast in chapter 16 and by sign of circumcision in chapter 17.

And not really even confirmed again until chapter 22 when

Abraham takes Isaac up the mountain, Mount Moriah, and is prepared to sacrifice him.

And in all these different chapters, we find God reasserting his promises to Abraham and reaffirming his covenant with him.

So we have a covenant with Noah. We have a really big emphasis on God's covenant with Abraham and then we have

God forging a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai in the wilderness about almost halfway into Exodus.

Really the covenant is not really cut until really properly chapter 20 when

God gives the 10 commandments. Chapter 19, chapter 20 is when it all comes down. Everything prior to that, we're seeing

God working out his promises to Abraham without respect to that covenant at Sinai. And then truly, that covenant that God makes with Israel at Sinai bears a lot of weight, a lot of glory, and it is in some sense condensed, streamlined into God's covenant that he makes with David concerning David, the son of David, the heir of David, the person who, the king of Israel, who would stand in for the sake of all the people.

Now, when we think about these biblical covenants, and sometimes they're called the covenants, but they're all in the same bag.

And then sometimes they're just called the old covenant in the New Testament, but they all have something similar about them.

One flows into the other. All of them are shaped.

They all have creation's shape, okay? And they are all Christ's shadow. And it's the bulk of the

Bible that we read about these covenants. Prior to the covenant that God makes with Noah, that's just a few chapters in Genesis.

And then the covenant that God makes with Noah on all the way through the whole Old Testament until we get into the

New Testament, all the new covenant promises that we have in the Old Testament. And then the New Testament itself, all dealing with the new covenant in Christ, which has been spoken about so long and in so many ways by the

Old Testament that we're constantly being referred back to all these shadows and types and promises so that we can understand who

Jesus is. So the Bible is just full of covenant language and covenant artifacts and specimens of covenant.

And so it's an important way, it's an important thing to recognize when we're reading the Bible, the theme of covenant.

But essentially, the way that biblical covenants work is that they address what was lost in creation and anticipates what will be won in Christ.

I've been reflecting a lot about the relationship between creation and the covenants in Christ. And I would have to say this, that whatever is creational and covenantal is ultimately

Christological. He's the one who brings about creation and he's the one who makes creation new again.

He's the one who forges the covenant. He's the one who reveals God to mankind.

He's there in the covenants and he's the one who fulfills the covenants. So whatever is creational and covenantal ultimately is

Christological. Everything there is to point forward to him. And so I think that's how they function.

They recognize that, hey, we're made in God's image and we're to love God supremely, love others rightly, steward creation righteously.

And every covenant that God makes in the Bible addresses what it means to be made in God's image. Thus, all those covenants are pointing forward to the image of the invisible

God, Jesus Christ himself. So the second part of the question was how does it apply to us as New Testament believers?

And so the way that, yeah, and I think you're actually getting a lot of the meat on the bones there for that because you're talking about how it is

Christological and it applying to us from the Old Testament how we're supposed to be reading those things.

Application is not a one -to -one. Let's take Sinai and let's bring it forward into a new covenant context, but more of let's look at it through the lens of Christ.

And then that's where we're gonna find our application at. Yeah, well, I was saying in the Abrahamic covenant, it's to you and your seed.

The New Testament then tells us what is meant by that. As you go through these covenants,

David is a king, but there will be a king that'll be a king forever. The New Testament fleshes that out.

You pointed out whenever we first started coming here to this church, you pointed me to this verse and you're like, oh, covenant, okay.

I think an agreement between two parties. But in Isaiah 42 in verse six, it says,

I, the Lord have called you in righteousness and will hold your hand. I will keep you and give you as a covenant to the people.

And he's talking about a person here. He's going to give a person as a covenant to the people.

And then we see that in Christ. It's repeated again in Isaiah 49 as well. Yeah. You mentioned earlier about systematics being helpful, but leading to dead ends.

Is this something where we're taking a theme out of the narrative or a device out of the narrative, say covenant, or I don't know what you would put on the dispensational side, but you're taking it and you're hoisting it up and you're saying this is the main point of the text or this is the main thing that we should read through this lens, through the whole text.

But you're giving us a third way, or I say third way. You're giving us a different way to look through the covenants.

Well, to be fair, folks like Stephen Wellam, who is a progressive covenantalist, used to call himself a

New Covenant theologian, they have used that term third way before, not in its

Hegelian dialectic leftist idea, which they quickly had to stop using that word because it triggered so many people, for good reasons, for good reasons.

I want people to be triggered by that, that's good. But yeah, so the dispensationalism ultimately is an acknowledgement of the absolute sovereignty of God in which there is full confidence that everything in the

Bible is true and God is absolutely free to change up how he deals with people.

And he's righteous in everything he does. And so dispensationalism is like there's this word in the

King James Version, dispensation, and so they took this biblical word and tried to use it to talk about the differences that happen when

God's dealing with people in different times and they see these separations and that they see

God righteously separating things out and dealing with people. But ultimately it's an affirmation of the sovereignty of God and, oh, hey, who can be against that, right?

And then covenantalism, covenant is a far more common word and I think a far more fundamental word to the

Bible's story than dispensation is. But covenantalists will talk about, will also try to be affirming the sovereignty of God, the faithfulness of God to always keep his promises as well.

So they're trying to affirm the very same things the dispensationalist is. They're talking about it in terms of covenant, which is a very biblical word.

But the dispensations that are drawn out, the framework of dispensationalism is not native to the

Bible itself. It's not native. You don't find it out of the Bible, though the claim is that it's there.

The framework of covenantalism, the covenant of works, covenant of grace, the covenant of redemption, all of that, those systems are not native to the scriptures itself.

They say, well, no, we can observe it here, here, and here. It's like, well, what's happening here is that you've constructed some spectacles through which to read.

These spectacles are done in good faith, wanting to honor God, but they lead us into some dead ends.

And it's more of a deductive reading of the scriptures rather than an inductive reading of the scriptures, saying, all right,

Lord, build me my spectacles as I go. Now, in doing so, we should not be throwing off the labors of our brothers and our spiritual forefathers who have done a lot of really solid work.

But nonetheless, when we read in the text and we see that there's so many elements in the creation story in Genesis that have similar symptoms and signs and parts to it that we would find later on in a covenant that God made, it's the covenantalist who reads covenant back into the creation story.

It says, oh, look, there's a covenant there. Well, but if you don't have that system already in place, then if you're reading through the

Bible, you say, well, here's all creation. And look, after there's the fall and sin, now in these covenants that God makes, because of all the sin that happened, these elements of creation are reaffirmed.

And at the same time, they're pointing forward to the one who comes who saves and makes all things new.

New creation. Right, so to me, I'm not saying that there's not a orderliness to scripture. There is. And everybody who is a dispensationalist and a covenantalist or somebody in between, like a new covenant person like myself, or if you're a little bit more educated than your progressive covenantalist.

But if you're someone like that, everyone's trying to affirm the Bible is harmonious, it is orderly, it is true, it's supposed to interpret itself and go together.

And we certainly will disagree about the proper lens to read it through. I'm just, when I think about the biblical covenants,

I see them being very much filled with the language of creation, the meaning of what it means to be made in the image of God, and they're all pointing forward to Christ and fulfilled in Christ.

I think one of the key texts is Jeremiah 33. In Jeremiah 33, as God is saying, in that day when

I do this good thing for Israel, he's talking about the new covenant that he's already established and talked about in chapter 31.

But in chapter 33 of Jeremiah, he walks through and uses all the distinctive language of his covenant with Noah, his covenant with Abraham, his covenant with Israel, and his covenant with David, and all four of those biblical covenants are sewn together into one mantle, into one cloak, if you will, and it was all laid upon Messiah.

And to me, that's just an affirmation. All of God's promises in Christ are yes, and this new covenant that Christ brings is one that fulfills, doesn't tear away and do away with and wad up and throw into a corner all that God has done, but Christ satisfyingly fulfills all of it.

And so that's why I see the biblical covenants coming in. They're all pointing forward to Christ. I was gonna say, you've mentioned the shadows, and if you follow that shadow back, you get to the shadow being distorted and it looks weird, but if you follow it to its source, it's

Christ there. Yes. One way is, we're talking about lenses that we see through things, but we get help in the

New Testament by seeing how the apostles pick up those themes. How do they describe the covenants?

How do they interpret the covenants? And they pick up that creation language and they pick up Christ.

For example, I was thinking of firstborn of creation. Firstborn of creation. They're talking about Jesus being the firstborn of creation and you get charismatic circles saying, well, he's the first Christian and he's the first, all these different things, but it's that creation language.

You have creation in Adam and then the fall, and you get these covenants all pointing to a new creation and then when you get

Jesus being given as that covenant, you have this new creation and he's the firstborn of that creation in the new covenant.

And think about all the most important terms that deal with what's creation, what are the central focal points in creation and in all the covenants?

What about these terms? And we could think of the terms like seed, son, we could think about terms like servant and all these key terms that we think about that would describe

Adam or describe Israel, all of them are used of Christ in a heightened way that is unlike what came before.

That's like what came before, but it's unlike what came before because he fulfills these structures, these titles, these promises in a satisfying way.

You're not gonna find fulfillment in a dissatisfying way, but a very satisfying way. Yeah, and that's what

I was gonna say before you were mentioning that, Chris. It gives so much more thrust to the one greater than phrases, one greater than Adam, one greater than Moses.

That gives so much more thrust to that that I didn't see before we started kind of talking about this,

I don't know, over the last couple of years. But having those types be he is greater than the types and having it wrapped up and summed together in Jeremiah 33 and you're saying it's laid upon him, yeah, it just gives it so much more weight.

Someone pointed out, is the marriage greater than the symbol of marriage, the wedding ring?

The wedding ring is a symbol of marriage, but marriage is so much greater, it's so much more than that.

It's meant to point to something, it's meant to signify something. I don't get rid of my wedding ring whenever I get married, but that isn't the same as the marriage.

So when we're thinking about what's the use of the Old Testament, it's profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness to equip the man of God for whatever work we have to do.

Well, our good works are following the lamb wherever he goes. We can take up the Old Testament and if we're reading it with unveiled face, as Paul would say to the

Corinthians, if we're reading it with unveiled face, then we're looking for Christ and seeing Christ and then we're supposed to be having, we're supposed to be interacting with the text along his light.

So if I'm reading Leviticus, I don't say, well, this has all been fulfilled in Christ so I don't need

Leviticus anymore. That's not what we're saying. We're saying that the way in which this text becomes rich and meaningful and life transforming is to see what it actually says, what are the words being used, what's the context, see the holiness of God on display, but don't stop there, see how that's fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

And then after seeing that, follow the lamb wherever he goes. He's not going to lead you to get rid of all of the yeast out of your house, because then he's saying that he's not satisfyingly fulfilled that.

He's not saying, for the ceremonial and the holy, so in what way has he fulfilled it?

And we're told how he's fulfilled these things and we're given those signals and those directions from the apostles in the writings and so on, but we are gonna be led into holiness.

We are gonna be led to getting sin out of our lives. We are gonna be led to doing the thing. What is the meaning of this? We don't know the meaning of it unless we look to Christ.

Once we know the meaning of it, then we know what the application is. All right, well I think we've sufficiently covered that question.

We'll move on to the next one. The question reads, I've seen some churches call people down to the front of a service to offer prayer.

In two different churches, I've seen pastors use small bottles of oil in which they put a drop on their finger and either touch the forehead or the spot that people are requesting for healing.

What is the purpose of anointing oil? Is this merely a practice of a specific denomination? Is prayer any less effective without it?

Is this part of an old covenant or Eastern cultural practice that has simply been passed on?

Thanks. Michael. So in James chapter five, it says, is anyone among you suffering?

Let him pray. Is anyone cheerful? Let him sing psalms. Is anyone among you sick?

Let him call for the elders of the church and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick and the Lord will raise him up. And if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

Confess your trespasses to one another and pray for one another that you may be healed.

The effective fervent prayer of a righteous man avails much. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours and he prayed earnestly that it would not rain.

And it did not rain on the land for three years and six months. And he prayed again and the heaven gave rain and the earth produced its fruit.

So in this list of instructions that James is giving to the church, we see this pattern.

Here's a situation or a need. Here's the approach that you should take.

So one to one, one to one. And so in the very first thing he says, is anyone among you suffering?

Let him pray. Now this is something that we need to remember. Jesus, when he was teaching us how to pray in the

Sermon on the Mount and Matthew chapter six, tells us to pray like little trusting and to pray like little children to a heavenly father.

What else are you gonna do? If my kid is suffering, he's gonna come to me and tell me. Why? Because he's expecting me to do something to help him.

That's the approach that we're supposed to have as the Lord's children, trusting that he is good. Are you suffering?

Pray. Are you cheerful? Let him sing psalms. All right, here's a great way to express your confidence, your zeal, your boldness.

Sing psalms. Give praise to God. Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church.

So what's the difference between suffering and sick? Now we're seeing that there's a, is

James saying the only way to express your cheerfulness is by singing psalms? No.

No. And so James is not trying to restrict everything the Bible says about cheerfulness and joy to only one allowed expression.

Sometimes I smile. Yeah, yeah. Don't get too out of hand. Yes, exactly. So this is kind of saying there's an appropriate response to certain things and they need to be responses of faith.

Right, this is James' point in his letter, right? Our responses need to be that of faith and faith is expressed in practical actions because we are actually believing these things.

So if you're suffering, pray. Why? Because you believe that you have a good heavenly father. Is anyone cheerful? Then sing.

Why? Because you believe God is the one who gave you this happy moment in your life. Is anyone among you sick?

Let him call for the elders of the church. I have the sense that this sickness is something like this is too much for me to bear, right?

There are burdens that are too much for people to bear. That's why God gave us to one another in local church to encourage one another.

Let him call for the elders of the church. Let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. Now, the anointing with oil, okay, we read about that in the

Old Testament. We read about that in the Old Testament and we find parallels in the

New Testament with the gift of the Holy Spirit, right? But the Holy Spirit has already been given so this is not about putting some special oil that activates the

Holy Spirit, okay? It's been properly paid for and prayed for by some TBN person somewhere, okay?

This is something that is practical, right? Like singing a psalm, like praying, like gathering people together.

This is something that is practical. I would say this, anointing him with oil, there's nothing sacred about this anything different than hit him with something else, right?

For example, we just said, let him sing psalms. Can he not sing spiritual songs?

What about hymns? Is it okay to sing hymns? We don't read that part restrictively, sacredly, correct?

Because we have other scriptures that show us that we can sing. Okay, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. You know what Paul told Timothy when Timothy was feeling bad? He didn't say, call for the elders and have them anoint you.

He said, drink a little wine for your stomach's sake, right? So this just could have been as easily written as anyone among you sick, let him call for the elder of the church, let him pray over him and give him some wine to settle his stomach, okay?

This is not some sort of sacred, what would you call it? Some sort of sacred right or action that has a special endowed grace from God.

This is something practical. James is saying, you believe? Okay, great, live that faith out.

Well, you know what you believe that God heals? Live that faith out by giving some medicine to somebody.

Hello. Okay, so this is something that's supposed to help them. Okay, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. Notice that whatever we're doing to try to help the situation is in the name of the Lord, singing psalms, what?

We sing psalms in the name of the Lord, right? It's to the praise of God. Praying, we pray in the name of Jesus Christ, right?

Elders of the church, the church is named by who? In the name of Jesus Christ. Okay, I'm gonna get someone medicine, something to help him, how?

In the name of the Lord. Do we see that we're acting in faith? There are practical actions that we take, but always in faith in the

Lord. Yeah. Okay, so I'm not against folks wanting to be really obedient to the

Bible, and they love Jesus, and so they say, okay, you're sick, James says use oil, let's get the special oil out.

I don't begrudge them that, but it's not a special move, right, that has something extra to it.

I had a question about this passage specifically, coming out of Charismatic Circles. I hear this one claimed a lot, and there's another one, and I'm wondering if the context is different.

So here it says, if anyone among you is sick, let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the

Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the sick, and the Lord will raise him up, and if he has committed sins, he will be forgiven.

Confess your trespasses one to another. So there's that. There seems to be some context about sin, forgiveness, being cleansed of sin.

Another one that we hear quoted a lot is in Isaiah 53, by his stripes we are healed.

And people will claim that by his stripes I've been healed, and they typically mean physically healing.

But when I read the verse in the context, it says he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement for our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed.

They read the healing as physical, but all the other things, the wounding and the bruising, that seems to be dealing with sin, sickness, like a soul.

Yeah, I would say that there is a greater appreciation in the Bible for the connection between the inner and the outer man than we generally live with.

And so for our peace, that's shalom. And shalom in the Old Testament is everything. It's what's going on in the inside and on the outside.

So this thing in James too, there's a thought almost immediately, like maybe one of the reasons why this guy is sick is because he's committed sins, right?

Paul talked about those who were sinning in the Lord's Supper getting sick because of it, and some dying. So maybe

James is pointing to, hey, when we trespass against the Lord, there is chastisement.

Hebrews talks about chastisement. The Lord chastises those he loves, like his own children, and this can manifest in physical ailments.

David in several places talks about, my bones are wasting away or aching because of the sin.

Yeah, so I think the idea here is very biblical that if you are harboring sins, let's pick on the easy one, bitterness, right?

Bitter people start wilting outwardly. Yes. That is not nonsense.

That is absolutely the truth. Bitter people wilt on the external, and that's something that we can see in the

Bible, and we see in this text. Confessing of our sins to one another, praying for one another that you may be healed, that particularly reminds us of Matthew 18 and other passages where we're not supposed to be at odds with one another.

We're supposed to be reconciling with each other, and we are to be praying for each other to be healed. Now, we notice that a form of medicine is involved, asking for other people to pray is involved, but we also see that the sick are not always sick because of sin.

That's another category. Right. So that dispels that myth of third -wave

Pentecostalism. You can be sick and not be in sin, right? Anybody remember Job?

Right, so in this, James is just saying live by faith, and that means that we're gonna take practical actions based on our trust in the

Lord, and the life of faith is lived through hard times and difficult times, and we're gonna be suffering, we're gonna be sick.

Times are gonna change. Sometimes we'll be up, sometimes we'll be down, but at all times, live in faith, and we're going to attend that faith with actual practical actions.

As far as the Isaiah passage is concerned, Jesus is an every way, every day Savior, so yes,

I think salvation from our sins is the weight of significance and importance, but do

I think that if I pray to the Lord and he heals me or heals somebody in my family, do

I think that that blessing comes outside of the cross? No. No. Well, I think specifically, I think it's in Matthew where Jesus physically heals someone, and he says this was to fulfill by his stripes, we've been healed.

Good point, good point. So the weight, like you said, is on sin, but that doesn't completely discount that God does give physical healing.

Oh yeah, I agree. Okay, well, I think we've got time for just one more in this episode, and we'll wrap it up after that.

Our next question reads, when COVID 2 .0 arrives, should you leave your church if the pastor chooses to meet online instead of in person?

Yeah, so the next publicly mandated emergency in which our beneficent overlords tell us that we are too stupid to be allowed to be in public, and for our own safety, stay in home, and we don't know what it'll be.

Maybe it'll be everyone has to wear x -ray goggles, everybody has to wear certain wristbands.

While we're on that, let's throw out our predictions of what COVID 2 .0 is gonna be before we hit this.

What's yours, Michael? I'm a fan of the technological virus theory in which some great, horrible virus that's going to destroy your phone, your smartphones, and your computers, and your tablets, and everything, it's on the loose.

And so everybody must now download onto all your devices this special government program that will protect you from this rampant hacker virus that is affecting everybody.

And if you don't, then you're gonna lose all your money, and your life will be wrecked and ruined, and you're not gonna be allowed to go to work because if your phone connects to some network at your work, you're gonna spread this virus.

So you have to have the special government antidote, which, of course, will never be used in any fashion whatsoever to try to gain more control over anybody.

So you're going with the, they're taking the virus, and they're just gonna make it digital. Yeah, I think people are so attached to computers and devices and so on because we live in the technological age that we do that this will cause the most fear.

Okay. And so I think that's what we'll go with. What's your prediction, Chris? I don't even have one.

Everything they've thrown, it's like, well, okay, what's next? So I don't really have a prediction on what to, but he just said,

I mean, there's some truth there. I've already been contacted about, you need this thing because, yeah.

Mine's kind of a combo of that where that's kind of latent and baked into it, but it's gonna be more of like a friends -enemies thing to where they're going to say the virus, they're actually going to tell you the virus is from China this time.

It's just, they're gonna go ahead and say that it's the digital one from China instead of the physical one, but they're gonna make sure that it's attached to enemies and it's gonna be probably

World War III type of scares to go along with it. Like if this breaks out, it's going to be an enemy attack rather than just like some nebulous hacker virus.

It's actually gonna come from somewhere, it's gonna identify enemies, and it's going to work us up into a froth of some form of, we make a distinction and we try to go to battle with these people.

The Russians newt some teddy bears and now they're sending a virus on your phones. Exactly.

Therefore, if you're a patriotic American, download this government file. There we go, that's about right.

All right, back to the serious conversation. Should you leave your church if the pastor chooses to meet online instead of in person because of this virus and the

Russians? Is this online app government approved for meeting in?

Yeah, because if it's a digital virus next time. Right. You can't meet online now. Well, you can, but as long as it's.

A government approved. And your sermons are government approved, have to be government approved now too.

Yeah, so I think that if there is some sort of sequestering and some kind of Caesar is overreaching,

Uzziah is raiding the temple, some kind of problem, okay. And the pastor says, well, we can't meet, or if we do meet, we have to meet under these government restrictions.

In this sense, the church has done left you. So in the history of Christianity, we've always had this decision to make.

Christians sometimes met in the catacombs, sometimes met in secret. Our secret code is that everyone knows the fish symbol.

So we can't use that anymore. We'll have to use some of our secret code. But sometimes Christians just wholesale packed up and moved away and fled the tyranny and said, we're gonna go where we can worship freely.

Yeah, pilgrims did that. And so Christians have often made a lot of decisions, but ultimately their decisions were meet in secret, leave and meet elsewhere.

But Christians maintained this obedience to Christ by continuing to meet.

And the claims of, oh, this is only temporary and it's for your safety. We know better for you than you know for you.

We've already been through that. So fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

And so that's no, there's no reason. If that happens, you need to find a flock to gather with in obedience to Christ.

Remember that we are a kingdom among nations and some nations that the kingdom of Christ is in, such as Iran and places like Indonesia and some places in Central Africa, it's not easy for Christians to meet and they're still meeting.

And so the kingdom is continuing and we are a brotherhood amongst families. And so there is persecution within families, wherein a mother and children want to go be a part of the church and the father will beat his wife if he catches her going to church, right?

Why would she ever risk that? And what's going on there? A very tough, tough thing. And not only are we a kingdom among nations and a brotherhood among families, we're also a priesthood among churches.

And so we owe it to serve Christ and to love Christ and to praise Christ and do so together with one another.

Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together as is the manner of some, but all the more as you see the day approaching. So we ought to still be gathering.

And if for some reason you can't find a church that's open, well, start your own.

Start with your family, get it going. So the gates of death and Hades will not prevail against the church that Christ is building.

Amen. So I think there would probably be, I think it'd be much harder if they try it too soon. Well, that's sort of my position too, is there's been the cat's out of the bag type of a thing now.

And everybody has some form of a knee -jerk reaction, or like a gut level understanding that anything that comes out now, take with a grain of salt.

I think there's a lot of people like that. But for people who don't have Christ and are ruled by fear, it just keeps going.

And they'll always be a boogeyman that they can pin it on. And if there is some type of legitimate crisis, well, they're just gonna use it.

They'll capitalize on it to try to divide. Whether they create it or not. Right, if it's manufactured, or if, oh, here's this thing happening, let's spin it this way and get people fighting.

Yeah, but for the Christian, I mean, we know where our hope is. And we've been told how to live, so that continues.

And within bodies of churches, especially if you've got, there are faithful churches all over the globe. And usually within a drive of you, or sometimes within a brisk walk of you.

I think there's enough of that too to where you're gonna find like -minded believers to be able to go and worship with them in defiance of ridiculous mandates or ridiculous orders that have come down from on high.

I am hopeful and not too black -pilled on the idea that there's just gonna be the same exact reaction as we saw last time.

I think a lot of guys and church, like full church bodies saw what happened and said, never again.

Yeah, I think in the Christian world, there was a lot of like scattering and trying to figure it out. I think for Christians, right, if something goes down, we know the drill.

Well, the sift happened. Like you talk about sifting all the time with this. I think the sift happened. And if they try it at all in the next, within our generation's time,

I think there's gonna be people with enough of a nose to it to be like, no, not gonna happen this time. Well, I think we probably hit that pretty well.

So we'll go ahead and go into our recommendations, Michael. My recommendation is the

Ligonier Statement on Christology. It's a, sometimes statements come out and have really bad timing and they have really bad wording and they're not really well thought out.

The Ligonier Statement on Christology came out when there was no crisis about Christology. And so everyone kind of looked at it kind of oddly, but it was very well done.

It was very thoughtful. It didn't try to reinvent anything. It just gave affirmation to the doctrine of Christ in a very fresh and worshipful way,

I would think. It's devotional reading. It would be great for family devotions, great for personal devotions.

And if you don't wanna read a really long book about Christology, I highly recommend starting there, Ligonier Statement on Christology.

Okay, Chris. I would recommend a book called Reforming Marriage by Doug Wilson.

Some of his stuff, I'll avoid with the covenantal flavor on how to do families and that type of thing.

But Reforming Marriage, I found very encouraging, very practical as well.

Yeah, I did too. No mentions of Nabal in there? No. No. Well, I will recommend

Catechids. It's the New Covenant Catechism for Little Ones. We're taking our boys through this.

It's by Joel Sedeckes. And it's really easy language, very good questions, stuff that you can answer kind of in the negative, or you can ask in the negative too.

Like, the Lord can't be God, can he? Yes, yes, he is God. I like you can kind of reverse engineer it on kids and voice it in the negative, and then they'll be able to respond against it more of as a defense.

But we've been, every now and then, we kind of have like sections of the twos and threes class where we have, we're gonna read our scripture for the day, we'll talk about it, we'll have a song break, is what we call it, about four or five times a class.

We'll do our snacks, and then I'll ask a couple, I'll try to ask a couple of questions out of the Catechism as well, and just to get them hearing the questions, whether they answer or not, and then repeat the answer for them.

And we're trying to work through it that way, but it's a very good, helpful, small Catechism for kids from a

New Covenant theology perspective. So Catechids by Joel Sedeckes. So we'll move on to, what are we thankful for,

Michael? I am thankful for my fourth born son. He's just about to turn 12, tomorrow in fact, and I really enjoy watching him grow up and seeing his interests, and just kind of learning who he is in a lot of ways contrast to his other three brothers and two sisters, and we are just enjoying

Emmeth right now and rejoicing in his life. Awesome. Chris? I'm thankful for the wisdom found in Scripture.

It's how it's so much better than what the world has to offer. Even like great thinkers, and I'm thinking of modern people who espouse all these different practical things and ways to live and interpret the biblical stories as though these are great helps, but the wisdom there, particularly in Christ, and how it's applied to families, to individuals, to children, to parents, to people in the church, all types of situations, poverty, riches, you name it, and there's just wisdom there, and how it not just improves your life, but it reconciles, it's redeeming in what it does.

So I just encourage people, teach it to your children, discuss it to people around you.

Whenever you're going in the way, whatever you're doing, talk about the Scriptures and the wisdom that's found in them.

Yeah, like drop a line from the Scripture, but don't get the Scripture reference. Someone's like, oh man, that's deep, and then you do the

Bible reference, like oh. I just agree with the Bible. Well, I am thankful for a new baby that was born into the

Horner side of the family. My brother and sister -in -law had their second girl last night while we were all asleep, and she's healthy, mom is healthy, everything went really well.

She's about 14 or 11 days, I can't remember now, but she came out eight pounds, 11 ounces, and 23 inches long, so that sounds like a full -term baby to me, but she's doing well, mom's doing well, and they've got some help with Nana there with the first one and everything in the house, so I'm hoping that these first couple of weeks go really, really well for them with that new baby girl, because we know how it is at our house.

The first couple of weeks, it's a new world, and you gotta get to adjusting with the new set number that you have in the household, so I'm very thankful for that little baby girl that they had, and we're looking forward to meeting her.

And that wraps it up for today. We are very thankful for our listeners, and hope you will join us again as we meet to answer common questions and objections with Having Not Read.