We're Back!

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 Deere and David Kasson and Andrew Hudson. And we are happy and back to bring you another season of Have You Not Read.

We're actually gonna go around the horn to begin with and talk about how our summers went and we'll start with you,

Michael. Well, I spent a lot of time cleaning the pool. I put in 77 days of pool cleaning.

And that represents about an hour and a half to two hours every day of work. And I was very glad to put that thing away.

It was our third season and we decided to go ahead and gut the pool and be done with it because there was a variety of problems.

You know, it's one of those temporary pools you put up, put down, and so on. The kids loved it. We had a lot of people over and they all had a great time.

And I'm not really complaining because I got to get in the pool every single day, but that's what

I spent a lot of my summer doing. And near the end of the summer, as that was winding down, kind of shifted gears and worked on doing a late summer clean.

So we cleaned out all manner of stuff. Somehow we didn't have to rent a dumpster, but got a lot of stuff cleaned up and lifted many, many burdens by throwing many things away.

And it feels good to get everything organized and out of the way so that I can get on to other projects. So that's kind of what we did.

We had a great vacation to start this summer. And we really enjoyed having

Ben, our oldest around a little bit more because he was out of school. And he only worked three days a week instead of five.

And so we had a little more extra time with him and a good time together as a family.

So overall, it's been really good. Awesome, Dave. So because I'm in the travel industry, you can imagine my summer was -

Not busy at all. It was nuts. I mean, that's good.

I mean, business is good. So it's a double -edged sword, but man, by the time we got to Labor Day, all the other kids go back in school unless you're homeschooled or whatever, but most of the time, the kids are back in school.

People are no longer traveling as much. And you can just kind of take a knee. So over the last two weeks,

I've been kind of taking a little bit of a knee, which has been good. But we worked a lot over June, July, and August.

But a couple of great things that happened, even though I was working all the time, but the time that I did have off, my daughter got to go spend about three weeks with her grandparents.

She calls it grandma camp. It's fantastic. And they're wonderful, godly people. My wife's brother and his family live in town.

So Elizabeth got to spend time with her little cousins. Then she visited

Liberty University there, got to kind of see the campus and stuff. So her grandparents are pushing that really hard so that she'll come live with them, which is an enormous compliment.

They just, they love her and they're great people. My niece, Jenna, graduated from high school, as did my niece,

Landry. So we got to go to their graduations. Jenna was in Virginia. So we got to celebrate with her when we were there in June.

That was a lot of fun. Then in July, my wife and I celebrated our 20th anniversary.

Just got away for a couple of days, which was really very nice. So I was able to take a couple days off for that.

And then August, it was just hard and fast. But it was a busy summer, good summer, lots accomplished.

And September is, now that everybody's kind of getting back into school, we're getting back in the season of podcast, and it's like everybody's kind of ramping up and I'm kind of ramping down.

Yeah, so I'm enjoying a little bit of a respite, which is what we have. And I'm trying to encourage

Amy and Elizabeth maybe to come with me on a trip or something while the hotels and other places are a lot less crowded.

No refund. No refund, yeah. It'll be fun, it'll be fun. What about you, Andrew? Well, I was blessed with the opportunity to have an internship with a large corporation here in Oklahoma.

And it was a blessing in many ways. Financially, it was a blessing. It also helped my IT skills, putting into practice my software engineering degree, which

I'm going towards. Still on track to graduate in spring of 26. It seems like I'm still a long way out.

But very appreciative of the internship. It was also, my previous life, I did 20 -ish, yeah, 20 years in the

United States Air Force. And I never really had to think about my colleagues being compensated more or less than me doing the same job that I was doing.

You know, they had the same pay grade that I did, right? They had the same set of responsibilities and things like that.

So coming into the corporate world, it's very interesting to think about being compensated fairly, or what

I believe to be fairly, for what I bring to the table. And throughout this time frame with the current spenders in Washington, the monetary situation has forced people to move out of homes that they used to own, which

I can't think of any other reason to be disappointed with the way that they treat the monetary policy here in the

United States and something along those lines. But anyway, the erosion of your purchasing power and the constant speeding up of the treadmill, being a wage worker for someone else who

I see as making an additional billion, and yet they're not hiring or promoting, really, it chapped me.

And I didn't like it, but at least I got to see what the truth was. And so I'm very appreciative of that.

But afterwards, after I finished the internship, my family and I, for some reason, we had watched

Ken Burns' documentary on the Dust Bowl and learning a little bit more about my ethnic people group and how they came from the

East and wanted to make a go of it in the panhandle of Oklahoma, but at the time it was no man's land, right?

That area had about 20 years of really good weather and it produced a great harvest.

But then the crash, the Great Depression, combined with the weather, the climate during the time, produced a really bad situation for the people in that area who tried to hang on as much as they could to next year, maybe to be better next year.

There were a lot of lessons learned and perseverance in adversity and also fleeing from adversity to preserve life.

Many people died in the Dust Bowl. Anyway, we ended up going to Boyce City and experiencing what

Boyce City was like. And we climbed up the Black Mesa, which is the highest point in Oklahoma.

I did that with all my children and Hannah was on my back. And let me tell you what, I had been training for two weeks prior to that and it was still tough.

But it was a great time. Going out to see what God has made always gives me an appreciation.

So all the tiny things in life, I know He can take care of those things. What'd you smell going through Guymon?

We didn't actually. Oh, you didn't? The wind must have been right because there's pig farms out there, man. It wasn't bad.

Yeah, it was a great time. It's good. It was a great time. That's good. Well, we have had so much going on this summer between work, our schedule with the boys, but the biggest event that we had this summer was having a new baby girl in August.

The best news, it's great. Yeah, Little Meadow and she is doing well. She's, it's a different world like I was talking about off mic.

And first of all, she's prettier than the rest of them, but that's to be expected and it's good.

And we're so thankful for the delivery. We're so thankful for the health that she has been given by the

Lord. And we've been able to bring her here and show her to everybody, introduce her to everybody. And everybody prayed for us for the whole pregnancy all the way up until delivery and they're still praying for us.

And we're so very thankful for all of that. Experiencing that from our church family is it's one of those privileges and delights and blessings of adulthood that as a kid, you don't realize that people are praying for you.

And even if you do, you don't know, maybe the full extent of what that means. But when you're a parent of a child to have other parents and grandparents and church family members and family members praying specifically for your family and asking the

Lord to bless you and protect you. It has been something that we have truly adored here.

But yeah, our summer has been, I picked up, I guess, toward the end of last season. I didn't have much work.

It was famine and now it is feast because I not only have one full -time job,

I also have two other part -time jobs and I might be trying to pick up a third part -time job depending upon the time and how it works with scheduling and stuff like that.

But the Lord has blessed us this past year to truly put in the hours and produce.

And I do love producing. That was probably the toughest thing about not having work is feeling that feeling of being unproductive.

Knowing that you have life and energy and time to do things but not finding something to put the hands to that's bringing bacon in, right?

Like, you can do whatever you want around the house and there's millions of things that could be done on your property but feeling as though things are just bleeding out from your household.

Purchasing power, going away, being one of those things. Not being able to save because just bills or wacky things happening.

But having work and being able to cover things now without any form of financial strain has been a great blessing on our household.

And that's what Heather and I have talked about pretty continuously over the summer is how weird it feels to come out of that when we were in it for so long.

But we are so very thankful for that. But we would like to go ahead and dive right into some questions now that you've heard about our summers and our breaks.

The first couple of questions that we wanted to tackle this season deal with scriptural interpretation and hermeneutics.

So I'll start by reading the first one and I will follow up with the second one directly afterwards. The first question reads, does the differing interpretations of scripture ever trouble you?

How do you deal with it? There are so many issues that some make more out of than others and it can be difficult to know where to take a stand with conviction.

That was the first question. The second one is more of a request. It says, describe and apply your hermeneutic style.

Give us a few examples of your approach. My pastor says that you should first take the Bible literally or the text says to take it symbolically.

Why should I take your view instead of his? Michael, you wanna start us off? The differing interpretations of scriptures and what do you do when you encounter that and the way to interpret the

Bible, that type of question is at the heart of why we started this podcast.

The name of our podcast is this question from Jesus often repeated in the

Gospels, have you not read? The idea that the differing interpretations of the scripture are some kind of evidence of the deficiency of scripture, that it's not clear or you just can't know what it means and therefore this undercuts the actual authority of scripture.

That didn't bother Jesus. He simply responded. There were many different interpretations of scripture when

Jesus was alive. The Herodians and the Sadducees and the Pharisees and the

Essenes and the Zealots all disagreed with each other and each one of those groups, if you press into each one of the groups, you don't find a monolith, you find disagreement within the groups.

That was going on during the days of Jesus. Then Jesus did not then avoid scripture but he time and again appealed to it as ultimate authority and said, have you not read?

Look at what the word of God says. To the Sadducees who denied the resurrection, he said,

God is not the God of the dead, he's the God of the living. I am the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.

See, present tense, not past tense. So it matters down to the very conjugation of the verbs and what we find time and again is

Jesus affirming scripture, appealing to it, it's authority and then saying, have you not read?

And then he interprets the scripture and of course he interprets it correctly. He spends a lot of time teaching his disciples how to interpret the scriptures correctly and blesses them, opens their understanding so that they can read it correctly, interpret it correctly and so we have a lot of different scripture passages that talk about that.

Second Corinthians, the first three chapters, very helpful. Luke 24, very helpful. Sermon on the

Mount, that's a wild ride. Matthew chapters five through seven, very vital and what you find time and again is that Jesus Christ is the authority here.

He interprets scripture a certain way and we know that it's correct. He's the word made flesh. So we need to interpret scripture the way that he does and every

Christian says amen and we still disagree with each other. So what do you do now? And so it doesn't bother me, it doesn't trouble me.

How do you deal with it? Sometimes when I hear interpretation of scripture, I chuckle, it makes me laugh.

Sometimes I hear it and it makes me cry. As a pastor, when I hear someone interpreting scripture, I'm always trying to engage with,

I wonder why they're reading it that way. What has gone on? Who tried to disciple them? Have they come to that conclusion?

There's a lot that goes into somebody's interpretation of scripture and in trying to determine which issues are most important, again, we have all those guidelines about what's most important.

What's the bullseye, the incarnation, the trinity, the gospel, so on and so forth.

So if somebody wants to disagree with me on what did Paul mean when he mentioned the baptism for the dead, it's not going to bother me a whole lot.

But as far as describing and applying my hermeneutical style, hermeneutics, the question about this person's pastor, you should do your best to learn more about your pastor's view, you really should.

I think he probably is trying to affirm the truth of scripture and affirm the reliability of scripture and the accuracy of scripture.

And he's probably trying to increase your trust in the reliability of scripture and your dependence upon it and that you wouldn't question it and that you wouldn't begin to interpret it in a way that would be inconsistent with the nature of scripture.

So I would say learn more before you consider why you would switch. I would get more into where did he get his hermeneutic from, how did he learn it, who taught him, what are the principles behind it, get more details.

How would a person go about doing that, approaching their pastor and saying, you have said that we should interpret things,

I think the way this questioner said was interpret it literally unless the text says you have to interpret it symbolically.

I think that's an equivalent from saying interpret it literally unless you must interpret it symbolically, I've heard that one a couple of times.

So if your pastor says things like that and your advice is to learn more about their view, how do you approach your pastor and ask them about that?

I've been interested in hermeneutics for 20 years and that guideline, take it literally as far as you can until you just can't and you have to take it symbolically,

I have no idea how to execute that principle. That itself would be subjective, right? Yeah, I don't know how to do that.

I wouldn't know where to begin or end with that. So I, like the questioner, would be interested in learning more about how does it actually look and how do you actually pursue that?

Who developed that hermeneutic? What are the principles that were used? I need to know more about it because I don't see how that can be done well.

It would seem to me if I was, and I'm always concerned because I wanna try to pastor folks and preach consistently,

I wouldn't know how to do that. So what I understand from it though is the desire to take the

Bible for what it actually says and to not interpret it with a hermeneutic of suspicion, but a hermeneutic of submission.

And in that, I think I and this pastor would be 100 % agreement, we need to submit to the text, not be suspicious of the text.

We should be okay with what the text says and not try to read it differently to make ourselves feel more comfortable with it and with our modern sensibilities.

I agree 100 % with all of that, with all of that. But my hermeneutical style would basically, it's running the bases.

So first base, I wanna know about the grammar, I wanna know about the etymology, the definition of terms,

I wanna know about the context, I wanna see how it fits in literary context, the immediate context, the greater context,

I wanna see how it fits within the analogy of scripture and so on. I want this passage to be well grounded with what it actually says and how it actually is said in context of what everything else is around it.

And at some point, as I'm reaching for what all the word of God has to say, I'm rounding first, I'm going to second base.

And second base is I wanna see the full biblical witness about these themes.

I wanna see what the Bible has to, if the text is about forgiveness, then I wanna hear about all kinds of forgiveness and why we can and what that actually entails and so on.

So that's the biblical theology leading to big systematic truths that stand the test of time that are true whether or not

I had this passage. This passage is part of that bigger picture, but I'm not done because the clearest light for whatever

I just read in the Bible is gonna be Jesus Christ. I'm on third base now, I wanna see what this has to do with Jesus Christ.

What is forgiveness in his light? There I'll see it most clearly, there I'll see how to live out this forgiveness if I can see my savior and see my shepherd and follow him, which then leads me to home plate, which is application.

Because I'm not somebody who is a moralist, it's nice to be nice, so be nice.

I'm a follower of Jesus Christ, so I want to know what it's like to follow him. So if I've rounded my bases appropriately and the interpretation is ultimately controlled by the light of the person and work of Jesus Christ, then

I have a course forward for making application because I wanna submit to the text. And so then

I'm going to make application in regards to that, and so then that's how I come home.

So that's my hermeneutical approach. I'm gonna summarize what you said, make sure that I understand your approach because I've seen you make a couple of diagrams before and it's a lot easier to see it too.

But you start with the grammar, the actual words, and their original language, how those words are used throughout scripture, but the original grammar, syntax.

Then you go to the context and the greater context, not just for the words themselves, but the principles this passage is teaching.

Then you say, what does this have to do with Christ? Is the person and work of Christ, because the scriptures are about him, and once you've done that, then you can apply it.

And it can be applied in a variety of ways. But would you agree with the principle that there's one interpretation and many applications?

Is that an appropriate way to describe your view? I think that the one interpretation qualified yes, because when you interpret a text and you're getting at the meaning of the text, for example, if I'm reading in the

Old Testament and God says, out of Egypt I called my son, he says that in Hosea, as I interpret that text, he's saying that about Israel reminding through Hosea and his dealings with Gomer about how

God originally had redeemed Israel out of Egypt and that he called Israel his son and all of these things that are associated and connected.

So I'm making interpretation about what that actually means, but I'm not done by stopping there because the

New Testament takes the very same passage and says this was to fulfill. So I'm gonna go on beyond, why does

Matthew say this is the fulfillment of Jesus Christ being rescued from Bethlehem, taken down to Egypt and then on his way to Nazareth?

Why does Matthew say this was to fulfill that? And then I'm still working on that interpretation because why would

Matthew say that's a legitimate reading of Hosea's account unless Jesus Christ is

God's son in the fulfilling way that Israel was in the shadow way?

So there's a whole lot going on. I'm moving forward in my interpretation and there are points where you can stop and you have to stop and say, this is what this text is saying, but wait, there's more, but wait, there's more.

And why would I take that approach? I would say is because scripture models for us time and again how to interpret scripture.

The latter prophets interpret the former prophets in light of the coming new covenant and Messiah. And then

Jesus Christ and the apostles take up the former prophets and the latter prophets and interpret it in light of his glorious person and work.

And we're given a model in which the words matter, the grammar matters, the context matters, have you never read matters.

And the writers of scripture keep on quoting scripture and alluding to scripture and combining scriptures together.

And what they're doing is they're doing that systematic look, that biblical theological look of bringing together the entire theme from these different parts of scripture.

And then we're told time and again, have you learned Christ? Are you following Christ? He's the king, he gets to command us, we get to follow him.

So these four bases, this rectangle is something called the Clowney rectangle. Edmund Clowney was a teacher of biblical theology at Westminster and these ideas are not original to him, but that's where I first learned about running those four bases, my hermeneutical approach or style, that's where I first learned that.

And I've been testing it against the word of God time and time again and I find that it's native to the text.

It's that hermeneutic is native to the scriptures. That's how the scriptures interpret the scriptures and so that's how

I roll. And it's more than just saying the New Testament interprets the old. While true, it's overly simplistic and it doesn't allow for the nuances that you just alluded to, that you can read some in the local context, local interpretations that are still true in the

Old Testament, but take on a larger and fuller meaning when you look back at it in the

New Testament as well. And both need to be respected, but there is a point.

There is a tell us, there's an end. That's right. So you can easily read the David and Goliath story and come away and say

David believed in God and Goliath was an idolater and David put his faith in God and he went out there when

Saul should have done it and he put his total faith in him and he was the anointed one and this is proving that David was the chosen king and not

Saul and you can say all of that and you would be absolutely 100 % correct, accurate to a

T and you've not left the shadow, but we have the joy of not living in the shadow.

We live in the light. We can say more and I think we should say more. So you're saying I'm not David? Wait, you are

David. That's, I know, that's what's confusing me. You are David, but you're not David.

And even David wasn't David. There you go. David wasn't David, that's fabulous.

So I have a kind of a question on the framing of the question and I'm not gonna like put words in the questioner's mouth, but I'm glad that you pointed out learn your pastor's view better.

That is extremely important in these sort of discussions, especially when you are comparing and contrasting views when it comes to hermeneutical stances or styles or principles that we're trying to lay out whenever we read scripture, but why should

I take your view instead of his was the direct quote. The framing there, should we view other pastor's views, hermeneutical views as something that we should always have in competition with our elders or with our pastors that we're under?

I appreciate that. Because it sounds like competing authorities and the questioner has been placed under a specific authority and a specific church and I'm wondering about the framing.

I would say that in a case like this, if somebody were to ask Jesus this question, you know, this pastor over here says one thing and then it has one hermeneutic and says it like this and then there's this other guy who has some podcast and he says this.

How many people don't have a podcast, right? Right, so that's like. That's just some guy. It's no merit badge.

Technology is cheap, everyone can do podcasts now. But when they ask that question, they're asking, once again, that old side

A versus side B question. I think Jesus is gonna say, no. No, it's not you take your pastor's view over the podcaster's view.

The answer should be that you as a church member ought to be like a wise

Berean, joyfully receiving the truth of the word, searching the scriptures to see if these things are so and rejoicing in the clarity of the scriptures and praying for the

Holy Spirit's guidance, looking to your Savior in the scriptures and that that should be the way that you approach your pastor's hermeneutic and a podcaster's hermeneutic or anybody else's hermeneutic and to be led by the scriptures themselves.

It's easier, far easier to settle for a system or to settle for some slogans and just say, just give me that study

Bible, whatever it says in the notes below, that's the right view, fine. Oh, that's a relief.

I don't have to think, I just have to read and there's the interpretation and I'm just gonna ride that horse and I'll be fine.

Well, if you're interested in why one person interprets differently than another person, you should be laboring to understand how does the

Bible teach us to interpret the Bible. One thing that I think that this pastor and I would agree on is the sufficiency of scripture and the authority of scripture and the reliability of scripture and the trustworthiness of scripture and so he and I would be sitting down at a table where there's all manner of agreement all over this table.

So when push comes to shove at the end of the day, when we're all together in heaven, we're gonna find out how much agreement we really had but the point is it's not him versus me, it's what does the

Bible have to say and I think we can all agree on that. So there's, it's not something that in this question, it says doesn't it trouble you that there are so many different interpretations and that people really argue passionately about certain topics that some seem more important than others.

Yeah, there are a lot of issues but I've watched people argue passionately and come to blows over sports.

I've watched people argue passionately about some stupid movie or fandom.

The reason why people argue over this stuff is because it matters. It really is, it's worth arguing over, not fighting necessarily, not coming to blows but really having a cogent argument for what you believe and why and being able to articulate it and if you're going to, as I've tried to teach my family, if you're going to agree or disagree with something, you have to be able to articulate it.

You have to be able to articulate the other side. You have to be able to frame it from their perspective so that you then, now that you understand it, now you know enough about it to whether you can agree or disagree with it.

Maybe there are points of agreement, maybe they're not but I think just the fact that there are some differing interpretations, that shouldn't give you too much pause because it's important and you had mentioned you have the

Athenians and you had the Pharisees, the Thracisies and Christ's response shut them all up. So they all had a similar reaction to the response so Christ just used the authority of the word as written and that was enough.

I guess it's a little ironic that the same people who say, you know, take it literally, take it literally and then until you can't take it literally anymore and you must take it symbolically, they're trying to do that because people have gone off the rails.

Yeah. Remember early 20th century, you're dealing with German higher criticism and you're dealing with people that did not take the

Bible seriously, it was not sufficient, it was filled with fairy tales and we're trying to get to the real

Jesus and the heart behind it. So there is a little bit of an overreaction to it. So culturally, especially in the fundamentalist circles and I say it in a good way, you know, adhering to the fundamentals of the faith, they're, you say not taking something literally, the immediate reaction is, oh, this is liberalism creeping in again and then we have to fight against it.

So there's a little bit of a cultural hurdle to get over because this is the safe place.

Just always take it literally, literally, literally. Well, define literally. That's a very difficult thing to do.

So if one says, well, it's according to the literature, literature is different, literature is rich, vibrant, there's beauty, there is metaphor, there's symbol and these things mixed with history, the telling of history, but the telling of history in particular theological fashion to bring certain truths home, the levels of richness in scripture are astounding, but it's something wherein, there's a lot of false dichotomies, right?

Where it's not historical versus theologically rich metaphor.

It all happened at the same time. It's written in a certain way. The gospel writers wrote what they wrote because it was historically true, but they wrote it in a fashion because it was beautifully true.

It was stunningly true. It was harmoniously true. And it's the best literature that has ever been written.

We haven't even plumbed the depths of the beauty of scripture and it's beautiful. And taking it in its literary genre and its literary form and its literary context is taking it,

I think, truly literally in the way that the author intended and knowing that there is a meta author that's superintending all of these individual books.

And as soon as he said that the Bible's not a book, the Bible's actually a library, it's a collection of books and they all work together.

And I think it was Vody Bokum who may have said that. And they all work together harmoniously, moving towards a point.

And some people have said that using a grammatical historical method is the best place to start and you can add to that grammatical historical redemptive.

There's a point. And you alluded to that when you talked about the clowny rectangle. There's a point, it's moving towards, it's all pointing towards something or someone that is the whole point of scripture and in creation itself, the person and work of Christ.

When you were speaking earlier, you were combining both questions together, which isn't a problem at all, but I was looking at it because I was wondering what you were doing, but you first pointed out this is trouble you, right?

And the rest of the question, or they make a statement, there are so many issues that some make more out of than others, which you mentioned, and it can be difficult to know where to take a stand with conviction.

You were talking about sports earlier and behind the arguments in sports, there's deep, deep conviction, right?

And the more time that we spend either in certain hermeneutical areas or interpretations, we're gonna build more conviction, the more time that we spend in those areas.

That becomes your team. Yes, it becomes your team. And you start to put on the dispensationalist uniform when you go out and read your

Bible every day, or you put on the covenantal uniform when you go out and read your Bible every day. Usually with a beard. Usually with a beard.

And that can be troublesome in some ways, but if you're continuing to read scripture, if you're going back to scripture all the time,

I think one of the good things that we can tell this questioner is that conviction is built, faith is built, and so is hopefully wisdom the more that we're in the scriptures.

If we have a team that we're on, if we have a hermeneutical position that we're in, we can deal with it wisely with other people who have differing hermeneutics and not come to blows.

That is a part of the beauty of scripture is how it is working on us as long as we're staying in it, building conviction in it.

Whether you're into looking up the economics behind what's happening right now with us, is it giving you conviction about certain things that you're doing?

Of course. Of course. And so it gives you... It leads towards implications that I need to do.

Right, there's a sense of urgency, there's an impetus that's driving you towards certain actions.

If where we need to probably be careful, we're talking about going to blows or the fighting, and fighting is if we're not building wisdom in our convictions and dealing with one another,

I think that's maybe where we would be going off the rails. So convictions, I would say, in the question is not a bad thing.

Right? If the question... Does everyone need to be convinced? Yes, and I think, I'm hoping the questioner wasn't worried about differing convictions.

Because I think that's what I'm saying. Build up conviction. Don't back away from conviction. Build up good conviction.

Be more convinced of what is good, beautiful, true. And when you're talking about plumbing the depths of beauty of the scriptures, man, you talk about conviction building.

Like how in the world, if you think this was written by Bronze Age goat herders, how in the world did they make it this complex?

How in the world did they make it this beautiful? No, this is something that is spirit inspired.

And the more you come to it, the more you realize that. So just the combination of both those questions,

I think was good. But I was seeing conviction there and you pointed it out very clearly with arguments outside of theological discussions.

And I just wanted to point that out there. I appreciate that. This topic can become, well, complex.

It can. You can drown in it. As I've been, as everybody around this table knows, in being a father, you're trying to take these issues and simplify them to a child.

And something that I've taught my family over the years is that God only has to say something once for it to be true, for it to be important.

But when you see an idea or a theme repeated multiple times, multiple different authors, multiple different contexts, multiple different languages,

God's saying, pay attention. When he repeats something, it's like, yeah, so there are areas of focus the scripture gives us, but that's just looking at the text itself.

The text tells you, this is an important theme. But if you come across someone who takes one particular verse or a particular textual variant of a verse, we were talking about that earlier because Andrew's so good at that stuff and I'm really wanting to learn some of the books that you're going through on that because that is so neat.

But if they take one verse and they built a theology around it, you can pretty much rest assured that they're not submitting to the text in general, to the

Bible in general. They're telling you, we're just doing what the Bible says. See, it says it right here, this one verse.

Well, you know, there's a lot more to that. And that's the only place it says that. I'm not saying that the

Bible isn't true here, but I think you're missing the point. What is the general theme? What is the greater context?

Let's look at the grammar. Let's look at the greater context. What does this have to do with the redemption of Christ? Then we can apply it.

I think that's important because the Bible, of course, is our authority. That's why it matters so much.

That's why the disagreements can become so sharp because we hold to the fact that the

Bible is our authority. It really comes down to the question of hermeneutics as these two questions highlight.

For me, the question always is this, by what light, through what lens are you reading everything in the

Bible? Because the way that you're reading the Bible is the way that you're reading the room.

It's the way that you're looking at the entirety of your life. And if your interpretive lens for reading all of scripture is, let's say, covenant, you're gonna see everything in terms of covenant.

It's very rich. It's very rich. It's full of gospel themes, but then everything becomes covenant, everything.

Even the places where it doesn't say covenant? Yeah, but my main concern in scripture is what is the light or who is the light in scripture?

Who's at the right hand of the Father? Who gets to say what everything means? By Christ, God has reconciled all things, whether on earth or things in heaven.

He's made peace through the blood of his cross. Everything comes together in Christ, even the Old and New Testaments.

Christ is the light of the world, so he's the light of the word. And when we have Christ at the right hand of the

Father and we have the light by which we see everything in the world, including God's precious gift of his word,

I don't think this is something that Christians are gonna disagree about. I think we can all say a hearty amen to.

And even if somebody is really a big fan of Israel and someone's a really big fan of infant baptism, if they're bigger fans of Jesus Christ and his glory, you're gonna find all manner of unity in the room that grows over time.

That's my perspective. I like it. Well, I think we can end on that question having fulfilled the answers that they were looking for.

Maybe not completely, but. Oh, kind of an already, not yet. Yeah, right? Oh, grief.

Oh, man. But we'll go ahead and move on to our recommendations for this week. My recommendation is

The Law of Christ, A Theological Proposal by Blake White. It's published by New Covenant Media, put out a little while back.

I think it's a good read. It's not overly difficult. It's afforded by John Reisinger and lots of footnotes.

So it really helps with finding other resources to read as well. And if you're interested into the topic of why should we live the way we should live?

And it's a way of looking at ethics, Christian ethics, or the fact that we as Christians are not antinomian.

We do not live without authority over us, without instruction, without commandments.

But we also don't live under Sinai. We live under Christ. And so Blake White's proposal is that justification by faith alone and Christ alone is the starting point and heartbeat of Christian ethics.

And having read a lot on the subject matter, I find this a refreshingly Christ -centered and freeing way of looking at the subject matter.

So, David? That's great. That is really neat. I'm gonna have to, I think I'm gonna have to get in line because I think

Dylan's already called dibs. No, you got it. I have a reading list at home and it needs to be finished.

You go first. I buy books two at a time now so I have a fresh one on my shelf. I don't know about that. So I've had the opportunity to work with one of my daughter's teachers.

She's doing an aviation class and that's my career field. I get to work with her. But she was interviewing a guy today on Zoom and his name is

Jim, Jim Falkenberg. He's president of Bible Literature International. And she sent me this pamphlet that they've been putting out for a while.

It's called From Pearl Harbor to Calvary. And if you guys have never heard of it, and I hadn't, and I am a little ashamed that I hadn't heard about this.

So one of the guys. That title has me, I'm like, what? I'm the same way. So one of the guys who was part of the

Doolittle Raiders. So if you know the story, Jimmy Doolittle takes out these B -25

Mitchells and they take off out of, just off the aircraft carrier and bomb the homeland in Japan during World War II, which caused almost no damage, maybe a little bit.

But it was psychological that we could reach out and touch the homeland. You are not invincible. Your god emperor is not invincible.

And then they crashed in the jungles of China and some of them died and some of them were captured. One of the guys that was captured was

Jacob de Sazer. Jacob de Sazer hated the Japanese because of what they had done in Pearl Harbor.

And then he had another reason to hate them because he spent like 40 months as a POW under the

Japanese and during torture. So hating them even more and even more and even more.

And he, I think his last year in captivity, they kept asking for a

Bible. All of them kept asking for a Bible. He was an enlisted guy. So when they eventually got a Bible for all of the prisoners to share and they're in solitary confinement, he got the

Bible after a lot of them, after the officers, and then he got to have it for three weeks. And then at three weeks, reading the scriptures for himself, he was convicted of the sacrifice of Christ on his behalf and it changed him.

And when he read about what Christ endured on the cross and the torture that he endured and he says, forgive them, they know not what they do, that changed him and he did that for his

Japanese captors. And when he came back, he lived through the ordeal and he becomes an evangelist and a missionary and God convicts him to go back to Japan in the 50s and become an evangelist to the

Japanese. And one of the guys that is what were the fruit of his ministry was

Mitsuo Fuchida, who became a great evangelist throughout

Japan. And he was one of the lead attackers on Pearl Harbor. Wow.

Oh my. And just this full circle story. And I just learned it from this. So read about these guys.

So that's Mitsuo Fuchida, who was in Pearl Harbor to cavalry and Jacob Deschazer.

He's the one that actually wrote when he was a prisoner in Japan. You can find it Bible Literature International.

Jim Falkenberg is the president there. And this has been around for a while. This is decades old, but you can definitely find them online.

So it was a very compelling story. And I appreciated Denise Webb sharing that with me.

So Deschazer is basically like the St. Patrick of Japan. Yeah, you know? Sure, yeah.

I mean, it's a little bit like, was it Louis Zamperini, who Unbroken was the movie, then the book that came out.

And he went into the BW camp and he ended up being saved out of a Billy Graham crusade in Southern California.

So it's an amazing stories have come out of that. Awesome. Andrew, what's your recommendation?

Well, I just want to say how great is our God? Right. My goodness. That was a faith building story right there.

I can't imagine what the full text would read like, wow. I think it may be I'm a little bit more practical in the way

I'm doing things in the sense that I have training that I'm going through. And one of the classes that I've been very surprised by, liking is my cybersecurity class, which we're talking about cryptography right now.

And with the threats towards people's ability to communicate and conduct economic transactions,

I have found great appreciation in learning about what cryptography is. And there's a website called

Pixel Privacy which has like a really good primer or primer on what cryptography is. But I would say it was check it out.

It'll help you to understand the cornerstone of what secure communication is about. It's also very helpful for understanding the underpinnings of Bitcoin and understanding what is a hash?

What are public keys? What are private keys? How does this all relate when they communicate with each other and how does this all work?

It'll help you to understand. And I have found that the more I understand something, the more comfortable

I am with it becoming part of my life. At one time, people didn't like online banking, right?

They weren't comfortable with it. They didn't understand it. They wanted to go walk into their banker's location.

In fact, I was just going to Sam's Club earlier today and I drove past a federal credit union that had just recently been built.

And it was like, who's going there? I was like, I just, I don't understand it. That's the new paradigm that's ahead.

And to become comfortable with something, learning about it is, for me at least, very helpful. So I'll make sure you have the link in the show notes.

Could you repeat the site as well? Yeah, it's Pixel Privacy. Pixel Privacy. They specialize in all things privacy, but this is like a brief blog post about what cryptography is in about a 15 minute read.

Okay, awesome. Well, my recommendation for this week is American Lion by Jon Meacham.

While I was in the hospital with my wife and new baby girl, I had a little bit of time to listen to a biography about Andrew Jackson, General Jackson, President Jackson, and it was rather a fun -

Old Hickory? Old Hickory. It was rather a fun listen because it was on my brother's Audible, so he lost a credit on that one.

But I'm sure he'll end up enjoying it as well. He usually likes my spontaneous buys or spontaneous downloads on his

Audible. It usually just takes him a lot longer to get to him than me. But American Lion by Jon Meacham, it threw me back to a lot of comparisons to other kings of history and even tells about other kings of history.

And I think I mentioned before in the group chat, Jackson reminds me of like a Henry V figure from the

Tudor line in England or the, yeah, I guess it would have been Plantagenet line going into the Tudor line in England and really a fun and wild personality.

Just sounds like a man that is an absolute force when he walks into a place or comes into a place.

Even they talked about at points when he was sickly and really looks feeble, but whenever things needed to get done, it was like you were being dragged along by his coattails and it was going to get done.

And I really liked the way he handled the Second National Bank, so go him for that. But that's my recommendation.

I heard that was a folly of his. Wait a second. Well, there needs to be a play written in his honor to counter that travesty that we call

Hamilton. And I'll argue with anybody about that. And my last name's Hamilton, so. And we'll just say he was a feeble -handed

Federalist that didn't know how to handle his pistol, so. You're right.

But we'll go ahead and go right into what we're thankful for. What are you thankful for, Michael? I'm thankful for our elders here at Sunnyside Baptist Church.

Thankful that I do not shepherd alone as we've been interviewing and working with and counseling folks that are coming to our church.

You know, I've just been blessed and reminded time and again about the grace of God, that we have plurality of elders here and that I don't have to shepherd alone.

And I'm just very thankful for that and thankful for a future in which I know that God will provide more elders and that God has already been at work preparing those men, whoever they are.

So I'm just, that's what I'm thankful for. Amen. David? I'm thankful that in the job that I have,

I get to meet a number of different people and I'm gonna be thankful for a man named

Jeff who shared a lot of struggles and things family -wise with me.

He would have been celebrating 30 years of marriage this year and probably was just battling some addictions and just has to make the choice to separate himself and his kids from that.

And they're grown, but I could see pain in his face as he was making a hard decision and he said that this is the woman

I'm supposed to grow old with. And I think there's still hope. I mean, I can still see it, that he wants her to get the help that she needs and then they can come back together.

That kind of thing, that I think she's dangerous until she can get that help.

So I wanna pray for him and his family. I was very thankful that we can be open with stuff like that.

And so I'm thankful for the opportunity and he's not a man of faith in any way.

He's not a Christian, but some of the things that he said, we could tell that he's had some bad experiences maybe with some people who called themselves

Christians. And I just kind of kept silent. And if I can ever have the opportunity to work with him again,

I'll dig a little bit deeper. But I'm thankful for those opportunities. I wanna continue to pray for him and his family and for reconciliation and healing.

Amen. Andrew. Well, speaking of opportunities, because I'm at UCO quite often, there are religious groups who come to UCO to proselytize.

And I am thankful for God giving me the opportunity to love my enemies. And recently, throughout,

I've had conversations with the Jehovah's Witnesses on campus for I think going on three or four semesters now.

But I'm finally getting to the point where I'm talking to them and they don't have answers any longer.

And it's been a road of a relationship with these people to let them know who I am, why

I'm talking to them, that I wanna hear from them. I wanna hear why they sincerely believe what they believe so we can engage in a matter of like,

I sincerely disagree with you and we can talk about the scriptures. It is a beautiful thing to be able to share the scriptures with your enemies and for them to not have an answer against the truth of the scripture.

And it's not because of like cleverness or anything like that. It's the word itself is testifying.

And when you bring up like, well, you have to defer all of your opinions to these people and then they change what the interpretation is all the time.

And over time, it's been helpful to have this conversation with them because it just keeps wearing at them these constant questions about the text that they don't have answers for.

It's a remarkable thing to be able to share the good news with people that need to hear it.

And in some ways, the other day, I was walking past them after talking to the witnesses and talking to them about the scriptures and I see the

Mormons on campus too. And I had to get back to the house to be able to do some homework, but I thought to myself, don't

I love them too? Aren't you supposed to love them too? Shouldn't you go over there and make the same effort with them? And then there are times that everyone's time is limited.

You have to know, don't let what you think oughta happen with what needs to happen conflict.

There will be opportunities to speak with them on occasions that make more sense.

And there are also ways to specialize in apologetics too. Not everyone's ministry is going to be to all the different cults.

Someone's ministry may just be to one specific cult, but I do plan on talking to the

Mormons as well. But I thank God for giving me the opportunity to talk to them.

Amen. Well, as we talked about before, we have a new baby girl at our house, so I'm eternally grateful to the

Lord that he has gifted us with yet another child, another gift, another blessing for me to love, for my wife to love, and for her older brothers to love on as well, and for everybody here at Sunnyside.

We are very thrilled with having her and waking up with her.

And all the struggles become very, or the difficulties with it become very endearing towards her and towards all the boys as well.

I find myself wanting to deal with their issues, not that I'm just feeling compelled.

And I do think the light of the word helps us to do that. But I find myself more and more not just knowing that I have to help them, but wanting to help them.

So I'm very thankful to the Lord for building our household that way, blessing our household that way.

I'm also thankful that we're back for another season, another round of questions, another set of offline discussions that should not be recorded or ever published,

Joel, for my safety. No, but I'm very thankful that we're back and we're able to receive questions from anybody out there who's wanting to know our perspective on things and to also know what the

Bible's answers are to those questions, because that's what we try to do. We do try to not just give out opinions, but we do try to take the word for all that it is, the whole counsel of the

Lord, and then apply it to the questions that have been asked to us. And we may do so imperfectly, but the effect that it has on us as well to go out and search the scriptures because of the questions you ask, you're making us better when you ask questions.

You're causing us to dive into the word. And you may be asking questions that we've never asked before. That is a good thing.

And we are very appreciative for those questions. So I'm very thankful for all those things. 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 Happy Not Red.