Matthew's Strange Little Story

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Turn with me, please, to Matthew, chapter 27,
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Matthew, chapter 27. Most of you know it is the week before the celebration of the resurrection of Christ.
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For many years, I would have been gone on this evening out in the
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Mesa, standing and passing out tracts. I missed that, but I think most of you know why we don't get to do that very often anymore.
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I'm not sure we'd still be doing it even if those folks hadn't shown up. The Mormons don't like to talk about stuff much anymore.
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It's an odd thing. But be it as it may, much discussion, even though it's been sort of pushed to the side by other important issues, we certainly could have profitably addressed other topics today in light of what's going on in our world and our land.
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But certainly at this time of year, we hear much from skeptics. The media loves unbelievers and rarely gives true believers, at least knowledgeable true believers, an opportunity to give a meaningful testimony to a belief in the resurrection of Christ and what that would mean in their lives and really mean to everyone's life in light of the fact that when the
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Apostle Paul stood on Mars Hill, he specifically asserted that God would judge every person by this man,
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Christ Jesus, whom he raised from the dead. And so the resurrection of Christ is not just relevant to believers.
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It is relevant to everyone. It is part and parcel of the reason that we proclaim the
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Lordship of Christ and say that he is Lord to all people, that he is Lord of all people, including the many in our day that do not submit to his
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Lordship. There is a little brief text in the story of the crucifixion of Jesus that is frequently the focus of a great deal of speculation and in some instances, mockery.
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It's Matthew chapter 27, verses 52 and 53.
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It is stuck in the middle of the narrative of the crucifixion.
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You will notice that it is placed right at the point of Jesus' death. Verse 50, and Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit and behold, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom and the earth shook and the rocks were split.
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The tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection, they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
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And then it just sort of moves on and says, now the centurion and those who were with him keeping guard over Jesus when they saw the earthquake and the things that were happening became very frightened and said, truly, this was the
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Son of God. And so you have this story. It almost seems like a little fragment here and in many instances
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I have experienced in my own ministry a number of times when various opponents of the
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Christian faith, either atheists or Muslims in particular, have made reference to this particular text and in essence referred to it as the zombie apocalypse, as the zombies stumbling into Jerusalem.
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And they would say, how can someone believe these things? How can someone accept these things?
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You've got people in grave clothes stumbling about in Jerusalem and how can anyone believe this because Mark doesn't mention it.
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Luke doesn't mention it. John doesn't mention it. Paul doesn't mention it.
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There's no other reference to it other than these two verses. There's certainly nothing recorded in ancient history, though, of course, there isn't a whole lot of ancient history being written around this time, especially about events here, but Josephus doesn't mention it and none of those external sources that once in a while one might be able to look to.
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It's not like you had Fox News or CNN around in those days, so you can't exactly look in the archives, but only
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Matthew makes reference to this. And just a couple of years ago, actually
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I don't think it's a full two years ago, quite a controversy broke out amongst conservative evangelicals here in the
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United States. A man by the name of Mike Lycona, a Christian scholar and apologist, author of a huge tome on the resurrection of Christ, in that very large 700 -some -odd -page work, identified this particular text as possibly being somewhat hyperbolic or mythical, that it might not actually be narrating a historical event, but it might be somewhat more apocalyptic or something like that.
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We don't necessarily have to take it as a historical rendering. And a rather well -known individual by the name of Dr.
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Norman Geisler asserted that Mike Lycona was abandoning the doctrine of inerrancy, that he really wasn't holding to that doctrine and that he was abandoning it in giving this kind of interpretation of this text.
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And people lined up on both sides of that particular issue and fought it out for a while and really, as far as I can see, no particular conclusion was ever drawn from that particular situation, as is often the case, unfortunately.
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What are we to think of this? What are we to think of this particular text? And given that there's so much skepticism expressed in our day, if someone were to express to us an objection based upon this text, how might we think through what
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Matthew says here? Well, first of all, notice the chronology of what is said here.
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It says, the tombs were opened and many bodies of the saints, so these are holy individuals, these aren't just plain old folks.
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These are individuals who evidently died as maybe we would think of Simeon or someone like that, someone who was well -known to the
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Lord. Many of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection.
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Now, this is interesting. There seems to be a process here. You have the earth shaking and the rocks splitting.
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The tombs are open. And yet, these individuals do not come out of the tombs until after Christ's resurrection and they entered the holy city and appeared to many.
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So, we have many bodies of the saints and they appear to many. Now, how many is that? I don't know.
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We're not told. We're not told. But there is something that actually has to be recognized here that unfortunately in most of the discussions is not recognized and is not brought forth and that is, it would seem to me that what you have here would have to be something parallel, something similar to what happened in John chapter 11 with Lazarus for one simple reason.
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If they enter into the city, and I don't think there's any reason here to think that this is, that the picture here should be of a bunch of people that are doing like this, going, that type of a situation.
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Even though that's what some people would like to try to picture it as. These individuals are recognized.
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Well, how are they recognized? I would suggest to you they're recognized because the same way that Lazarus is recognized.
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That is, that this was someone who had died recently and hence there were still people who could recognize who they were.
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Not everybody walking down the street would go, all right, I know that guy. He died about three years ago, something like that. I think that they would obviously go to individuals that they knew and obviously since they had been buried there in the district of Jerusalem, they were local individuals, local godly people.
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The process of their coming out of the tombs begins with the death of Christ, but they do not precede him.
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It is not until after his resurrection that they enter into the holy city. Now, if they come out of the tombs before that, they've got the same amount of time period here.
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That's why the idea of the zombie apocalypse thing doesn't work. I mean, there's, and I doubt that they're alone either.
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So, if this is similar to the Lazarus situation, then these would be individuals who either they appear for a period of time as a witness to the resurrection of Christ, because they would have known, just as the demons knew who
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Christ was, these saints would know who the son of God was and hence this is an auxiliary testimony to what
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God has done in Christ, just as Lazarus was a preview in a sense.
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Here you have one that accompanies that. I think the best possibility is that's what is really going on here is that they appeared to many.
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Why would they appear to many? So, either they're there for a brief period of time and then the Lord took them back to himself in some way.
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I mean, it's a supernatural event one way or the other. Or, like Lazarus, they lived however much longer you would naturally live given their age or something like that and passed away again.
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They don't live forever. This isn't a resurrection like what you're going to have at the end of time where death is no longer the issue.
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These are individuals who are not still running around Jerusalem today witnessing for Jesus or something.
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And I think it's obviously a limited number as well. But the question still remains, even after thinking it through and realizing that most of the wild objections are to wild readings of the text rather than to what it's actually saying, we still have to ask the question, well, why is it that only
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Matthew records this particular situation? Why is it that Mark does not or Luke does not?
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This is the only place that we know anything about this. Why would that be?
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Well, unfortunately, a large portion of the Christian academy today is not in a position to answer that question very meaningfully because they have accepted overwhelmingly and not so much on the weight of the evidence, but because there's just so much to know anymore that you have to trust other people.
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And unfortunately, it becomes real easy to just sort of go with the flow. I mean, that explains, to be perfectly honest with you, why 80 % of American voters between the ages of 18 and 29 support gay marriage.
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It's not because the arguments are overwhelming. It's go with the flow. Be in the in crowd. Well, if it works in society, it works amongst the academics as well.
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And so the majority view is that you have Mark writing first and then Matthew and Luke both have
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Mark and they're editing and changing and using another source called the Q source. We've talked about this in Sunday school for years and sort of reworking stuff.
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Well, if that's the case, then you're really in a bind here because Matthew's coming up with stuff that Luke's never heard of and Mark's never heard of.
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And you just wonder where in the world it came from. Now, I have always held that the most the only meaningful way of looking at the relationship of Matthew, Mark and Luke is that they are drawing from the same well of the oral tradition of the church, the retelling of the stories, the eyewitnesses in the church, but that they're not writing in the same place.
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They're not in collusion with one another. They're writing to different audiences. And as such, each one as an author has a choice of including what he is going to include.
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Matthew is writing to the Jews. And so he has a particular connection to Jerusalem.
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And so within that context, here is a a portion of the story that was told, a portion that came down from those eyewitnesses, a portion from those people who lived in Jerusalem that Matthew was aware of.
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And you'll notice there is you could take verses 52 and 53 out.
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And it would just continue to flow. The earth shook and the rocks were split, skip down to 54.
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Now, the centurion and those who are with him keeping guard over Jesus, when they saw the earthquake, the things were happening, they get afraid.
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So it's not like Matthew had to put this in here. It's not like this is a key element of my story.
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Now, listen carefully here. So why would he do so? Why would he really sort of interrupt the narrative?
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Because he he sort of skips out of the timeline. He's talking about the centurion is about to be a witness to Jesus, the son of God and things like that.
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And he sort of skips out of that to tell this strange little story. Well, why would that be? Well, it seems to me because it was a part of the tradition that he himself received.
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It was a part of the gospel message, the preaching of the church that he himself had received.
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And this was the best place to put it, because this is the tombs are open.
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Many of the bodies of the saints who had fallen were raised at that point, but they did not come into the city until after his resurrection.
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And so this seemed to him to be the best place to put it. So in other words, I don't see any evidence that a
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Matthew sat back and said, you know, I need to come up with something that's going to make my gospel better than Mark's and Luke's.
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You know, I think they might outsell me, so I need to come up with something cool. And so I'm going to come up with a story about a saint popping out of graves and wandering into Jerusalem.
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Doesn't make any sense. There's there's no there's just no reason because he doesn't tie it to anything else.
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There's no reason for this to be here outside of this is what had been proclaimed to Matthew.
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This is what the the eyewitnesses of these events had communicated to him as well.
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And so unless you approach the text as a person who wants to just filter out all the supernatural, and we're talking here about the very story.
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Well, that's at the center of God's entire purpose in the universe. And we're talking about the the self -giving of the
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Son of God upon the cross of Calvary trying to read this whole thing as a as a naturalistic materialist.
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Well, you're going to have some problems. You're going to have to you're going to have to really Thomas Jefferson this thing until you've got nothing left but a little pamphlet because you're just hacking out all of the all the supernatural stuff in the process of some of you may not know that Thomas Jefferson did that to the
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New Testament. He didn't like the supernatural stuff either. He's embarrassed by it. So that's what I refer to there. But anyway, so unless you're going to approach it from that direction,
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I'm still left wondering, aside from the fact that you want to say, well,
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I don't like it when just one gospel says something. And we've already asked the question, why?
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Why would why would even have four gospels if each one of them has to be merely a repetition of the other?
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Each one is drawing from a different element of the oral teaching that has been passed down to them.
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And so it doesn't mean that each one has the exact same thing in front of them.
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As far as we know, Luke did research and interviewed people and stuff like that.
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But if Luke's in a completely different place, Luke's probably in in a number of different places because he travels with Paul.
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But but more toward Asia Minor, Matthew seems to be in the land of Israel itself.
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And so it makes perfect sense why they would be drawing from different sources and including different things.
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So other than that one objection, I don't see what the objections are outside of the fact that people misread these texts.
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And so there are a number of passages and we eventually, believe it or not, will get to these texts in our synoptic study.
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It might be still a few years in the future. But my goal is really to get done within 12 years.
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How long was Pastor and Matthew? I forget how many years it was, but plenty of them.
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So I'm not quite there yet. So we eventually will get to these. And we will struggle, honestly, when we put them in parallel, to search for that proper harmonization while still allowing each of the authors to have their own point of view and say the things they want to say.
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But in application, as we think about the resurrection this coming weekend in a special way,
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I mean, obviously, every weekend is Resurrection Sunday in a true sense. It does seem that what you have here is maybe in Matthew's mind, one of the reasons he wants to include this is that it does seem to show the connection, the bridge between the old and the new, because this is right at the time of Christ.
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And yet you have individuals. And Luke had already shown this to us in the encounters in the temple and Anna and Simeon and those stories and things like that.
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And maybe this is Matthew's way of doing something similar as well, that there were old covenant saints just as on the
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Mount of Transfiguration, which Matthew does record for us. Who is it that appears in the Mount with Jesus?
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You have Moses and Elijah. Why Moses and Elijah? Moses, the one through the law came.
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Elijah, prophets, the law and the prophets testifying of the
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Messiah. And so you have this this concern, especially on Matthew's part, to demonstrate that Christianity is not some rejection of what
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God has done in the people of Israel. It's a fulfillment of the promises that are even given to them.
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And so here in the resurrection of Christ, you have these individuals who come out of their graves.
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They receive new life. But who were they? They died before the crucifixion of Jesus.
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And so you have this connection. God had been saving the saints. And as Paul says in Romans chapter three, he he did not count their sins against them.
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Why? Because the certainty of the cross. It's not that he was just winking at their sin, but because the certainty of the cross, the faith that they had in him because of what
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Christ is going to do still brought about their justification. And so it seems that possibly it is that one of those links that that helps to keep us from doing what many
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Christians have done over the years. And that is breaking things apart and just just saying, ah, that it's just it's all the old law of the old.
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It's all new to new and seeing the connection that is there, obviously having to keep the balance because you've either got those people who just try to smush it all together and there's nothing new in the new covenant or those who just chop it in half and check the one side and and all you've got is this.
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You have this connection that is provided by this testimony to the resurrection of Christ.
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Someday we're going to find out someday I'm going to. That's one of my questions.
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I'm not sure how that's going to work. None of us knows how that's going to work, but it will be something that certainly if we if we need to ask those questions in glory and it's not something we just somehow automatically know, then it certainly is one of those questions that I think
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I'm going to be asking as well. And so an interesting story, an interesting segment, something that someone might throw at you as an objection, but hopefully having thought through it now, you'll be able to give a testimony concerning it and maybe help someone who might be struggling with it.
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Maybe their objection is because they've never heard a meaningful discussion of it. Hopefully that will be helpful to you.