TiL- Sin Debt/College Debt, Hermeneutics

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Hello, good evening. This is the Truth in Love podcast. Tonight, we're going to be talking about the sin debt that was canceled by Jesus and college debt.

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Are they the same thing? And then we're going to be talking about hermeneutics, the art and science of interpreting

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Scripture. I forgot to use my new one.

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Back to the old one. I'm going to have to delete that one and use the new one, try to find it and use it.

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So I apologize for that. This is Truth in Love podcast. Thank you for watching. We really, really appreciate it.

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Would you give us a like, follow, share? We love doing ministry with you, reaching out to our community with the truth of God's Word and doing that in love.

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Again, this is Truth in Love and we get that from Ephesians chapter 4 verse 15. So speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into him who is the head, even

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Christ. So that's our aim and that's our goal. And Dan and I enjoy doing that together.

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And tonight we have a special guest from Bread of the Word podcast, Tyler Noe. What's up, brother?

01:37

Happy to be here. We're glad to have you with us. We've been trying to get together this week and decided just to do it together.

01:47

First off, we're going to talk about this. You may have seen it on social media, on your feeds.

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I don't know which social media that you have, but on your feeds or whatever, you may have seen some of your friends share this or make this comment, this comparison to the debt that Jesus paid on the cross for our sins, which if I'm not mistaken, guys,

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I don't think that there's an actual verse that words it like that, that says

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Jesus paid our sin debt. I think that may get that from the verse that says, the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is the eternal life.

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Are you guys familiar with an actual verse that speaks to that? I can't think of one.

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Aside from Matthew 6, forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Okay.

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Okay. But that's as close as I can think. You're right.

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I think that's about as close as we can get. But we've got some of our friends out there that are trying to compare apples to apples with the sin debt that Jesus canceled on the cross and the college debt, forgiveness, cancellation, whatever you want to call it, that's happening right now in the

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US of A. So can we make that comparison? Yes.

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Oh, we can. Not well, but we can do it. I think we're going to,

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I think we're going to say some, some things that may surprise folks on both sides, but, um, ultimately people probably know we're going to come down on this.

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So, uh, where do you guys want to start? Should start at the beginning.

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Yeah. Well, it's always a good place to start. That's right. If you, if you want to compare apples to apples, starting at the beginning, you got to start with God.

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Right. Do that. Okay. Well, if we start with God, um, and I like to use pictures because pictures help me in my mind.

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Um, and I was looking at the ratio between the earth and the sun and, and I wish I had a picture of something that we could compare it to, like a grain of sand, how big something is compared to the grain of sand.

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But you could fit 1 million. If this, if this was accurate, what

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I read, you could fit 1 million, 300 ,000 earths inside the sun. Now God is cosmically beyond that in comparison to the cancellation of college debt.

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Um, God is beyond that cosmically beyond that compared to the knowledge that we have of him, the understanding of his love and forgiveness, his character and nature.

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Um, he has revealed himself to us, the things that he wants us to know, but that is,

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I mean, that's it. But what we do know of him is that very fact that he is cosmically beyond what we could ever understand and all of his characteristics.

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So there's no way in this entire universe that we could make this comparison apples to apples.

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Now, I would say I kind of understand where they're coming from guys, because, um, if they're sincere in this endeavor to make this comment, if they're actually sincere, then

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Christianity is in fact the religion of forgiveness.

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In fact, it's the only religion where you can find true forgiveness of sin and it encourages to forgive one another.

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So explain, um, this reality of the cross. And so we started with God and let's go to the cross next.

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Uh, one of you guys talk about the cross and what, um, the plan was, what happened, what was fulfilled on the cross.

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Well, first Peter chapter two tells us that Christ bore our sins in his body and that we, uh, by his stripes, we are made whole, that we are healed.

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And we once went astray and have now been brought back to the shepherd and overseer of our souls.

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And so that's, I can see that logical progression of likening our sin to a debt that he paid with his blood.

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That there's this, this idea that we couldn't settle the account without it costing everything.

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But Christ interceded on our behalf and he did what we couldn't do. He lived the perfect life that you and I couldn't live.

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And he satisfied God's justice, his own justice for our filth.

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And he paid that in full. He settled that account. He, he bore our sins.

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He bore my sins in his body. And that wrath that should have been on me was transferred to Christ's account.

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But because he's God, he didn't stay dead because the wages of sin is death. But because he's

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God, he didn't stay dead. And he rose from the dead, demonstrating that he has, he holds the keys of life and death, to put it one way, that he has authority over even sin and death itself.

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What would you add to that, Dan? Nothing. I enjoyed that.

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The, the, the nature of the two different types of debt,

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I think is, is where it's where the, the, the, the analogy kind of goes off the rails.

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Cause there's, there's some, there's some right understanding and knowing that there's a debt that needs to be forgiven.

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There's a lot of the same language used in forgiving student loan debt as there is in forgiving sin, a sin debt or forgiving sin.

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There's a lot of similarities in language, but when you actually look at what is being forgiven, that's where the, the big difference is.

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When you look at the forgiveness of sin, that is a moral thing.

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That is a, a sin thing, something that has been incurred or produced from a heart that is going to be punished by, by the creator of the universe.

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Whereas a student loan debt is something that is not inherently sinful to get into.

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Maybe unwise at times, most of the time, depending on how much, maybe unwise, but not inherently sinful.

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And so you, you, you've willfully gotten into a business contract with someone else to repay something in order that they give you money, that you can go out and get a degree or some education with that.

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So really the, the forgiveness or the nonpayment of that debt is, is more that the forgiveness of that debt makes it a moral issue because the one who was supposed to repay, the one who entered into the business contract in order to repay a physical amount of a certain amount of money, when that's not repaid, that's an issue is that is a breach of contract between the person who signed the promissory note and the one who gave the loan in the first place.

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Now, I understand what the government's trying to do. They're trying to go back on some predatory loan practices and fix things.

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They're not necessarily doing a lot to keep this from happening in the future. And so, you know, next election cycle, let's just forgive some more debt and get some more votes or whatever.

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But, but the nature there is that when one is forgiven with no repayment, then there is, it's, it's a moral failure.

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But when a sin debt is not forgiven, it's still going to be paid. It's just not going to be paid by, by Christ.

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It's not going to be forgiven. It'd be paid by the person who will pay for it through their, through their punishment at the judgment day.

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So the sin debt will be paid, but there's a breach of contract that comes along with, with forgiveness of student loans that makes it more immoral.

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Right. And the immorality is not necessarily, and it can be, and it does happen, but the immorality is not necessarily coming from those who took the debt or took the loan.

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The immorality is coming from those who are giving the debt because number one, they are mishandling, first of all, money that's not even theirs because they're, they're giving out the loans with taxpayer money.

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That's first and foremost. And then second, they're canceling that debt and taking, taking money from the taxpayers again to pay off that debt.

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It's transferring it to someone else. So it's stealing. Right.

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And if anybody who has a wife understands what they're doing, let me explain. Have you ever gone and done something where you, for instance, will go to say the ice cream store on the way home and you pick up an ice cream cone and you come home and your wife finds the receipt or the little napkin.

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And, and she says, well, now I have to get one or say,

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I bought a firearm or I bought a whatever, you know, something where you only had enough money to buy the one.

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But in order to make it even, now we've got to get you one too. It's kind of the same thing because it doesn't really forgive anything.

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It doesn't really make anything better. What it does is it just takes the money out of the pool of money twice.

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Yeah. Once in giving the loan away the next time in making the, making that purse pay for the debt that was taken from the person, the it really doesn't make sense.

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Yeah. Well, one conclusion that we can draw from all this is that we need different people managing our money.

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But the, the other thing is, is going back to being, being understanding to where people with sincerity are, are coming, coming at this, you know,

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I think of Ephesians chapter four, verse 32, forgive others as God in Christ has forgiven you.

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And, and as Tyler reminded us in, in Matthew, forgive us our debts as, as we have been forgiven.

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And so that's the gospel. That's, that's a result of, of the cross that once God has saved us, we remember the gospel.

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We preach the gospel to ourselves that because we've been forgiven so much, then we should forgive others.

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We have no right to hold a grudge. We have no right to seek vengeance or withhold forgiveness because of what we've been forgiven.

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I mean, that's preaching the gospel to ourselves. That's living out the gospel, but that's on the, the moral spiritual level.

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And this, this debt forgiveness, it's on a monetary physical level.

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So there, there's no way that we can make this an apples to apples comparison without really blaspheming.

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Right. Now I would say this, looking at the concept of forgiveness, a, a wiping away of 10 to $20 ,000 of, of stuff, you didn't deserve that forgiveness.

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Looking at that at the surface level, it should cause us all to remember that we have had a sin debt removed that we,

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I mean, they, they can pay it back, but we couldn't pay back that sin debt.

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It was something that we didn't, we didn't deserve to have a forgiveness, but God provided that forgiveness for us.

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So I understand where they're coming from. It's just the sincere ones, I know where they're coming from because other people are just, they're just trying to get, they're, they try to get

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Christians to shut up at any point that they can. And it's, it's interesting.

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But in the same token, the redemption that's in Christ isn't just a $20 ,000 forgiveness or a $10 ,000.

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It's the whole enchilada. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying, when you see the theme, the theme of forgiveness ought to cause us to remember the real forgiveness that we have found in Christ.

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But yeah, you're absolutely right. Cause with a little bit from the government is not full, free and clear.

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There's still somebody else who's out there having to pay it. We're probably never going to pay that back. It's just going to float around unforgiven forever.

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At some point, it's just going to be transferred over to the public coffers. No tacked on the end of the, that big, huge number that keeps on growing and growing over there,

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Washington DC. Um, whereas you're absolutely right. When Christ forgives it, it's zero white as snow.

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You have absolutely nothing on your account. You are 100 % free and clear forgiven.

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So yeah, you're absolutely right. And that's another one of those reasons why, well, it looks right on the surface.

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Well, it should cause us to remember Christ and his forgiveness. They're not the same thing. Yeah.

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It's a cheap substitute. Absolutely. And you agree that that's the cheap substitute is what we get fed a lot, you know, empty, empty calories, so to speak.

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And then often with, uh, the idea of debt in the old Testament and the new Testament for that matter, often in that culture, you had this understanding of debt in terms of servitude, that if you owed money, money, you became literally a slave, a servant of the person you owed money to, which is radically different from the way we view debt now.

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In fact, the word redeemed literally means to purchase out of bondage, that when

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God redeems us, he is literally buying us out of our own slavery, which again is radically different from this, this idea.

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And while we are forgiven and absolutely there are principles here that carry over the forgiveness that is in God is radically greater.

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Yeah. The language is the same, but the substance is not. The substance of forgiveness of sin is much more deep and rich and real than any sort of student loan forgiveness could ever pretend to be.

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And I would just encourage everybody to, to wrap their mind around this relationship that Dan and Tyler are talking about, because where Tyler started out is, is that cosmic, um, beyond cosmic event that happened, uh, that the

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God of this universe came down and gave himself to forgive sins. So there's, there's nothing on this earth that we could compare it to make an accurate analogy.

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Just like with the Trinity, we, we can't describe the Trinity without being blasphemous. There's, so there's no way we can compare anything to what

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Jesus did on the cross and get away with it. But the relationship that we do need to remember what these guys were talking about is it reminds us how we need to behave in our relationship with others.

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And so that's a wonderful relationship. I think that we need to remember it and what helped us in, in this thought process.

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Um, I did want to go one more place with this, uh, before we move on and I'm going to be a bad

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Baptist as we were talking about earlier, but I mean, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, but if you did want to, uh, compare this thing, apples to apples, what, what these same people who are making this claim don't want to do, they don't want to go back to the old

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Testament because the God of the old Testament is the God of hate and war and killing and, uh, is against certain things that, that they're for.

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Um, but if they do want to make an apple to apples comparison, then they're going to have to go back to the old Testament. Um, because in the old

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Testament you've got, um, verses like in Deuteronomy 23, 19,

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Exodus 22, 25, Leviticus 25, 21. If you lend, don't charge interest.

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And then you have the year of Jubilee, which you find in, um, in other places too.

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Every seven years cancel the debt. And every, was it 49 years you return all the property that was sold?

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I think it was every seven, seven, you return all the property that was sold off. Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, and the reason why the year of Jubilee and student debt aren't anywhere close to each other is that the, the year of Jubilee was meant to, um, was meant to, to show a

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God's covenant faithfulness to his people, the things that were promised to them and given to them. Right. Um, even if it looked like they were being taken away, we're going to be returned to them.

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So the things that, that were God and given to them are their possession because they were given to them by God.

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Right. Right. So, you know, however, if they did want to go there with that principle and say,

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Hey, every once in a while we should, you know, forgive all the debts we should have loan, which actually

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I was talking about this with some people at work the other day. I said, you know, if we really wanted to do something that was on the up and up for the, for the country, um, we want our people to be educated.

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Then why are we charging people interest on student loans? You know, if the government's going to give out money, give it out and then pay it back dollar for dollar.

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Why are you paying them back more? It's just enslaving your people. Um, everybody, everybody in my office was in complete agreement.

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Well, that was a great idea. Well, the Bible, that's church. That's right. That's right. Well, and the way, the way that we could use this to compare it to, you know, the student loan debt or any debt is that just like you were talking about, it's, it was meant to point to something.

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If we were to obtain the, or start using this practice, we're pointing to Christ, you know, what he did on the cross.

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Um, it, it will be a reminder of what Jesus dealt across to, to, you know, because the old

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Testament points to Christ, the law points to Christ, everything points to Christ. And he, you know, and that's one way that we could point to the cross.

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If we, if we did that, yeah. That's something that we usually get, get, uh, accused of cherry picking versus, um, to prove a point.

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And then they come out as to something like this. It's like, no, no, you just need to be a full on theonomist. If you're going to pull that one on me.

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Right. Right. But one of the, the guiding principles of the old

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Testament law with like the, the year of Jubilee is a focus on restoration on making restitutions as opposed to reparations, which is a radically different.

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That's a radical difference here. Um, Leviticus 19, um, which is just a couple of chapters before the passage on Jubilee is a little very similar.

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This is lay out of principles and it starts off with be holy as I am holy.

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I'm the Lord, your God. And then he lays out this, all of these principles kind of rapid fire covering all these different areas.

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But in verse 12 it says, do not oppress your neighbor or rob them. The wages due a hired worker must not remain with you until morning.

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Do not act unjustly when deciding a case. Do not give, do not be partial to the poor or give preference to the rich.

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Judge your neighbor fairly. We have this understanding of restoring each other and keeping things just.

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And it wasn't a, I deserve this. I am owed this because I exist.

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It was, this is what's just. And the God who is just has shown us this.

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Right. And so as an act of worship, let us do what God has told us is just.

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That's right. Well, and Deuteronomy 15 also says that, um, there's in all those stipulations that you just read

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Tyler, it says that there should be no poor among you. And it gives credit.

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Um, I want to find that verse real quick. Um, it says, this is the

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Lord's. Let's see. I'm going to have a hard time finding it without a lot of dead air, but, uh, it says, this is, this is the

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Lord's, um, command. Uh, if, if only you listen obediently to the voice of the

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Lord, your God, to observe carefully, all this commandment, which I am commanding you today, um, is giving credit to, to the

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Lord, but this is his thing. And another thing, um, that I wanted to point out too, it may have sounded like I was commending something that I was condemning earlier, but if I'm not mistaken, guys, and correct me if I'm wrong, these things are more on a personal level.

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It never calls for the government to be doing this. Is that right? What do you mean?

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Well, if the, the lending is speaking to the individual in Deuteronomy 15, the lending of money, the counseling of money, uh, or the counseling of the debt, um, let there be no poor among you.

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It's speaking to them as a nation, but it's that they, um, they lend them money individually, uh, because it says in verse nine, uh, the seventh, uh, seventh year, the year of remission is near and your eyes are hostile towards your poor brother and you give him nothing.

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Then he may cry out to the Lord against you and it will be a sin in you. So, you know, once that debt's canceled and then you start having hard feelings towards your brother, looking at him hostilely, that he could crowd out to the

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Lord against you because of your sin. Um, so it seems to be more on an individual basis, more than a government stipulation.

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It's a personal investment in another person as opposed to a heavy handed mandate from the political state.

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Yeah. Yeah. I would agree with that, that this is more about people than numbers or bank accounts that there, there's a personal element here that we're investing in people.

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We're investing in relationships. We're making restitution as individuals. Absolutely.

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How about, how about you, Dan? I don't know. That one sounded weird to me.

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Okay. I don't, I don't even know how it just did. I don't know. Maybe it's just my brain not at this point.

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Um, I don't know if there's, if there's much difference between a government and a person.

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And I mean, there is, there's tons of it, but in the, in the sense that if it's immoral for an individual to do it, it's probably going to be immoral for a government to do it.

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Um, no, unless it was something that was given to the government by God, you know, to say, wield the sword and do stuff like that.

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Stuff's obviously different. So, um, so it's kind of, kind of like an argument from the lesser to the greater.

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If, if a individual shouldn't be charging interest and if an individual should make sure that they're paying back their debts, they should honor the contract.

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Then a government also should be paying back their debt, should be honoring the contract and shouldn't be charging interest.

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And that's true. That's true. But as a, as a post meal, post -millennialist as a theonomist, um, we're, we're looking, we're looking at the earth, the globe, the world to be, to be

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Christianized over time and then the nations to eventually flow to Mount Zion to cry out for his law.

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Um, so we, we look for that day, but do you, do you think that the stipulations or that are given to governments in scripture will, will carry out throughout that whole time, even as the world is more and more

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Christianized, the, the Bible describes a limited role for government.

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Sure. And so, and, and that's kind of where I was coming from and they, they need to stay within their boundaries, even as the world becomes even more

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Christianized. Well, government's job isn't education anyway. That's the job of the family.

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That's right. So for the government to, to step in and create a department of education, number one, that's wrong.

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That was the sphere of the family to engage in predatory loan practices where they, they basically lie to folks and say, the only way you're ever going to get ahead is by taking out this loan for them.

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The state universities that come behind them as they, well, how much in loans are you giving out? And then jack up the price of their tuition, that amount, plus giving out programs and jacking up that amount.

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Now they're going to increase Pell grants and doing all sorts of other stuff. The, the, the government is not only overstepped their bounds in, in engaging in education in the first place, but they're also stepping, overstepping their bounds by trying to turn a profit off of the naivete of, of kids coming out of high school who, whose parents probably should have taught them better.

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But parents also lived in a different time where the cost of education was less and they had a better opportunity with their degree once they got out of school.

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So the parents still operating on that old paradigm where, Hey, your degree is actually worth something and it's going to be worth it to pay.

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And it's also not going to cost us the percentage of the cost for the degree has gone up.

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The worth of the degree has gone down, making it not a wise investment anymore anyway. So it's just messed up all the way around.

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What we need to do is we need to start having family institutions that come back and, and start providing solid

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Christian education. It should come through family, through the church. Harvard was a fantastic school for a period of time, left their roots and now look at them still at high academics, pagan as the day is long.

29:59

Yeah. Um, so I can bring it on some more. I don't think you were asking. Well, we've, there's, what we're saying is there's a lot more correction that needs to be made.

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Tons. Number one, let's call Christ the

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Lord of our nation first. Yeah. Very purposefully left that out.

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That's right. So, and one last thing, I guess, on that, uh, that topic, depending on, depending on what state you're in, watch out.

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If you accept that loan tax days coming, they're going to expect that money back.

30:37

Yeah. If you live in a solid blue state like yours truly, um, need to remember, um, to think this through and talk with your pastor before you take any forgiveness.

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Cause if we're thinking of it as an immoral thing, you don't want to get caught up in something that you shouldn't.

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Right. Um, at first, when, when I was thinking they were going to just automatically just deduct it from your bill, it was like, cool.

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Now, I mean, I've got a, I'm going to think this through this, something that I actually want to take. Um, if this is truly a moral, this is something that I have any business jumping in on, um, questions to ponder.

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That's right. Those are hard questions, but good questions. Yeah. Especially when there's like,

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I mean, I could cut it down by how much there's a temptation and temptation is, is, is real.

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And it's, it's, you know, it's life changing for some folks, but what's more important is that we remember who our

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God is and remember that whatever we do, we're going to have to stand before him and to have an account for it.

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That's the most important thing, because no matter how you, it'd be a shame for you to, um, have to give an account for a, um, for, for accepting something that you shouldn't.

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And when you're standing there to receive the forgiveness of God, you know, do you thin against the one who's going to forgive your very soul?

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You need to think it through. If this is, if this is, you got to think it through.

32:28

Absolutely. Well, let's switch gears. Um, hard, hard.

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Well, Tyler had a good segue point, so I'm going to let him make his segue point.

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Um, but before he does that, we're going to do our, well, I think we're going to have another guest next week and then we are going to, we're going to take a break.

32:53

Yeah. Hopefully next week, uh, if all goes well, the Lord willing. Um, and then the next week we're going to take a break, but in this next series of truth and love podcast, we're going to follow

33:04

Dan through, um, writing, writing a paper for school.

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And so, so Dan, tell us about where we're coming from in this series. Yeah, I, um, on the last section of my master of arts and biblical studies, all

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I have left is to write a thesis that's going to end up being somewhere between 60 and 120 pages.

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I don't know how I'm going to do it, but we're just going to buckle down and keep writing until they tell me

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I graduated, I guess. So what I'm doing for this paper, I'm trying to examine the,

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I was trying to look at hermeneutics and Bible interpretation. Some people say that if you interpret the

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Bible literally, or if you interpret the Bible through a grammatical historical method which we're going to talk about, um, if you do that, you're going to end up always a hundred percent of the time coming to a pre -tribulational, dispensational, pre -millennial understanding of the end times of eschatology.

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I, on the other hand, disagree with that, which is interesting, especially because the school

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I go to is extremely dispensational. In fact, I had to take a course called dispensationalism where they were very positive about the doctrine of dispensationalism.

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So I am, my whole thesis is that a literal grammatical historical hermeneutic or Bible interpretation when consistently applied will lead you to a post -millennial understanding of scripture.

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It's going to be fun because I've got people lined up to like take shots at my paper and poke holes in it and stuff.

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So we'll see what happens. Um, but along the way,

35:12

I guess what we're going to kind of do here is we're going to look at the, basically the outline of my paper.

35:17

We're going to look at what is hermeneutics? You know, what is a literal hermeneutic?

35:23

What is a grammatical historical hermeneutic? What are some other Bible interpretation principles that we ought to think of and understand and know?

35:33

Um, when we finally, uh, get back in a few weeks, we're going to be looking at post -millennialism, partial preterism, the different types of post -millennialism, um, what post -millennialism says, what it doesn't say, what its opponents say that says what, how they're wrong, um, basically.

35:54

Um, and then we're going to look at how, uh, and then I'm going to go through several different texts from the

36:00

Old Testament and the New Testament, applying that, that method of Bible interpretation to those texts of scripture and showing that when you apply them consistently, you'll reach a post -millennial understanding of scripture.

36:17

So if you didn't understand what I said, we're going to try to explain everything that I just said, uh, throughout the next few weeks and we'll do it in smaller words.

36:28

But right now I'm still thinking in master's mode. So when we actually get down to the nitty gritty and start talking about these things, we're going to explain all of those words, what they mean, how they interact together, how they move them, you know, live and move and how they're being in a, interpretive method.

36:48

And Rob's going to cough. Oh, excuse me. So basically what you were saying is we're, we've got a, our starting point is going to be hermeneutics.

36:57

Yeah. Bible interpretation. Who in the world is Herman? Who's Herman? Herman who? Herman who?

37:04

I didn't mean to plug somebody else's product. So what was your segue from our debt forgiveness to hermeneutics that you were mentioning earlier,

37:16

Tyler? Well, um, if you're following along in the Bible, um, this is coming out of Luke 18, um, picking up in verse nine,

37:27

Jesus is telling a parable. It's a, it's a story with a point. And he says, he told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and looked down on someone else.

37:37

Two men went up to the temple to pray, one, a Pharisee and the other, a tax collector. The Pharisee was standing and praying like this about himself.

37:46

God, I thank you that I am not like other people, greedy, unrighteous, adulterers, or even like this tax collector.

37:53

I fast twice a week. I give a 10th of everything I get, but the tax collector standing far off would not even raise his eyes to heaven, but kept striking his chest saying,

38:04

God have mercy on me, a sinner. And I tell you, this one went down to the house, to his house justified rather than the other, because everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.

38:22

And the segue that Robert was referring to is, it is very easy for us to read that text and look at the

38:29

Pharisee and think, that guy is so full of himself. I am so glad I'm not like him.

38:35

And that we're doing the exact same thing that he was doing. And oftentimes when we look at different texts of scripture, it's easy to put ourselves in one spot rather than another.

38:48

Like what we've seen with some of these passages about debt and forgiveness, that we have a tendency to twist things and put ourselves in one spot rather than another.

39:00

One famous pastor said, you're not David. That we like to think of ourselves as the hero of the story, but in every story,

39:09

Christ is the hero. Christ is the centerpiece. And so we are not center stage here. Wherever we fit into the principles of what's laid out in the narrative of scripture, we are not the supporting cast.

39:27

So let's jump into this podcast guideline that we've got here that Dan gave to us.

39:35

And I'll go ahead and define what it is since I've already did it, I think a couple of times. But in my mind, really the only reason we need to know this term is if we're in school or if we happen to be overhearing some biblical eggheads having a conversation and they use the word hermeneutics, we'll know what they're talking about and we can jump right in with their conversation.

40:04

But the word is hermeneutics. And as I stated earlier, it is the art and science of biblical interpretation.

40:14

Simply that's what it is. Nothing more, nothing less. How we interpret scripture.

40:21

Yep. There's a guy named Mortimer J. Adler wrote a book called

40:26

How to Read a Book. If you apply his principles to scripture, it's actually pretty solid based on how to read the

40:38

Bible is hermeneutics. How to read the Bible. How to read the Bible. That's right. That's right. So it's hard to say, it's even harder to spell.

40:46

I still have to look it up sometimes. Oh, you just throw down the letters that look like it's right.

40:52

Find that little red squiggly line, click on it and let it fix it for you. That's how I spell it.

40:58

That's right. Lessons from the master. What are some guiding principles that should determine our interpretation of scripture?

41:16

Whoever wants to jump in. I've got answers. I was going to let Tyler go first.

41:21

I think the first question is what is God revealing about himself? What's being revealed about Christ?

41:30

Like I said, it's easy to make ourselves the hero of the story and we get into this very self -centered view of looking at these stories of the

41:39

Old Testament where I'm always David. I'm always Joshua. I'm never a scared

41:44

Israelite. I'm never the Pharisee that needs grace. I'm never a lost sheep.

41:52

I'm always the shepherd. I'm always the hero. Yeah. And so one good principle is what does this tell us about Christ?

42:01

What does this tell us about God and what he has done to bring us to him, to make us near him?

42:11

How does this tie to the glorious wonders of the cross? You know how

42:17

I said earlier that I like to have pictures in my mind and the picture that come to my mind when you were giving us those principles is we're going to bowl more strikes when we've got

42:28

God -sized gutter guards. And I think that's what you were describing. If our boundaries in interpreting scripture are what is it telling us about God?

42:37

What is it telling us about Jesus? Then we're going to be bowling more strikes. We're going to get it right more often.

42:43

Absolutely. I think that was perfect. Perfect parameters, perfect principles to start off with.

42:48

You need to remember that the scriptures are God's revelation of himself to us.

42:55

It's his revealing who he is to us. So to read ourselves into anything where we're not put there by God is misguided.

43:06

So if God doesn't say, hey, you sinner, then probably not about you.

43:13

That's right. Unless it's like you who believe in Christ have hope or you who believe in Christ have this to look forward to.

43:22

You're there too if you believe. That leads us to two other big words that I didn't know if you wanted to bring out tonight, but you're describing exactly two things, two other principles that we need to know about.

43:35

And that's exegesis and eisegesis. You guys were kind of describing those without using those words.

43:42

So Tyler, tell us what exegesis is. So exegesis is simply put,

43:50

I'm looking at the biblical text with the intention to draw out what it means and basically let the text speak for itself.

44:01

I can't ever say this word, authorial intent. Authorial, yes.

44:07

Authorial intent. What the author wanted it to say. What the author wanted it to say, yes.

44:12

There you go. North Carolina definition. Dan, that's the one that we want to remember.

44:20

That's the one we want to practice. The one that we don't want to practice is eisegesis. Yes, that's when you read

44:26

Bible outdoors in the wintertime. No, it's not.

44:32

It's when you read the Bible and you take an idea with you to the text and see it there.

44:42

They say something like, if you look for zebras, you're going to find them. It's probably just a horse, but if you're looking for a zebra, you're going to think it's a zebra.

44:52

If you go into a situation looking for chocolate smudges or whatever, you're going to find them.

45:04

Anything that looks like one is going to be one. Yes. We don't go into it with any preconceived notions from outside of ourselves.

45:12

We'll remember what we read in other places in the Bible and see how they mix, match, and come together.

45:20

Eisegesis is the idea of taking something with you to the text and then putting it in there, seeing how it's there.

45:28

Usually, that's a bad thing because 99, 100 ,000 times out of a million, you are going to bring the wrong thing to the text.

45:43

Right. These principles are so important for any topic, but specifically talking about the topic that you're doing your paper on is extremely important because as we go through this series, looking at the paper that you're writing, talk about eschatology, end times, end things, and we look at postmillennialism versus premillennial dispensationalism, pre -trib rapture, that side of things, we're going to be able to evaluate and see which eschatology is the one that is exegeting, drawing out what the author intended, or is eisegesis, having a preconceived idea and trying to squeeze it into the text.

46:31

We'll be able to evaluate and see which one is practicing the proper hermeneutics.

46:39

What is a literal hermeneutic? Do you have any thoughts,

46:45

Tyler? A literal hermeneutic basically is we read as much of the

46:52

Bible as we can in a literal fashion that if it says that God walked in the garden,

47:01

God walked in the garden. There are spots that are very much literal, should be read literally like that.

47:11

When it says that there was a flood, we don't look for allegory necessarily and miss the fact that there was a flood.

47:19

There was a beginning. But then when we get to poetry and we get to the

47:25

Psalms and it says, he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that's not literal in the same way that when

47:33

John Donne said, no man is an island, we don't go, duh. There's a certain poetic flow that is missed by reading everything literally.

47:45

Right. There's another guiding principle that we should interject here that's talking just what

47:53

Tyler's talking about. It's called literary genre. We think of genre, we've thought about that since we were little kids.

48:02

You're reading a fiction book or a nonfiction book, you're reading a novel, you're reading poetry, you're reading a letter, a newspaper, the back of a cereal box, the underside of someone's shoe.

48:15

Each one of those is a different genre. It's its own context.

48:22

Certain genres like poetry are meant to be more flowery. They're supposed to use more figures of speech and they're supposed to be more metaphorical at times.

48:33

Other things like a scientific journal on the isotopes of different...

48:42

I don't know, I'm putting myself to sleep, but that's extremely literal.

48:47

There's numbers and facts and everything that they say is supposed to be exactly what they're laying down in the text.

48:54

But you come across something like Dr. Seuss and Dr. Seuss is going to use flowery language all over the place and you don't expect him to be writing in the same style or for the purpose as the person who's writing in the academic journal.

49:08

Likewise, you wouldn't expect someone who's writing a book of history, something from the

49:15

Old Testament, Joshua, Judges, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus numbers.

49:21

You wouldn't expect them to write in the same style as you would somebody writing the Psalms or somebody who's writing poetry prophetically or somebody who says, hey, this whole book is going to signify things are going to take place soon.

49:39

If it says it's going to be signified, taking place soon, then everything that comes after that or a large portion of what comes after that should be viewed as something that's going to be symbolic of something else that's coming up.

49:52

One of the main things is to identify which genre of literature are you reading?

49:59

And then once you do that, a lot of what Tyler was talking about, as long as you understand what the genre is, will fall into place.

50:07

That's right. And this is the question, this is the place where I wanted to interject something in the conversation. Since I'm the

50:13

Baptist here, I wanted to speak to Baptist in particular. I think there are two ditches that we have fallen in, in recent history.

50:23

One of them relates more to our first topic, and that is there's been this push and this preaching,

50:31

I don't want to call it brainwashing, but it's driven into our heads for so long that we as Christians should not be involved in government, that there should be a separation of church and state.

50:46

And so Baptists are typically not theonomists, and so now as a result, we have people who don't want to get involved in the fight against abortion.

50:58

You don't want to have people, people don't want to get involved in moral issues, political issues, they don't want to run for office.

51:05

Because we've been taught for so long that we don't want to get involved in government, we're not supposed to.

51:11

Church is one thing, government is separate, and I think Dan and I have talked about that several times on other podcasts in the past, but that's one pitfall, one ditch that we've fallen into in our recent history, which has probably been, you know, in the past 50, 100 or so years.

51:31

The other ditch is more related to this one. Southern Baptist, Baptist, my heritage, my background, you know, it's been driven into us that we are to interpret the

51:44

Bible literally, we are to have a literal hermeneutic, and so what that means is exactly what these guys are talking about.

51:52

You look at the scripture and you read it for what it says, and so if it says the sky, the stars, and the moon are going to fall in the sky, and you go outside and look outside, and they're still there, that means that that means they haven't fallen yet.

52:08

And so we take things, we read it literally, and so one of the warnings that they will give,

52:16

Baptist preachers will give, is against post -millennialists or against Presbyterians or other denominations, yeah, when they start allegorizing passages or saying that it's figurative, they'll call it, well, those guys are spiritualizing the text, and we interpret the

52:36

Bible literally, and so I think that's a ditch that we've fallen in, and one of the many things that I've learned from Gary DeMar is he says, yes, we take the

52:47

Bible literally, but the definition that we need to work with is literal according to the literature, and that's exactly what

52:57

Dan and Tyler were talking about, the particular genre that we're looking at. If it's figurative language, we take it literally as figurative language, and we need to be students of God's word to know which is which, and so if we're looking at stars, moon, and the sky, the sun, whatever, falling to the earth, do we take that literally, or do we understand scripture enough to know that we're looking at judgmental apocalyptic type literature and read it in that way?

53:31

Right, and here's the thing, when the Bible says that there's sun, moon, and stars falling, we could read that as sun, moon, and stars actually falling if the context says that we should.

53:47

Now, if you look in Isaiah, for instance, and it talks about sun, moon, and stars falling, and then it's put into a context where it's talking about the destruction of a certain nation which it was, then we realize that this is figurative language that's saying that just as if the sun, moon, and stars were to fall on the entire earth, it would completely obliterate it.

54:16

The destruction that's coming on that nation is going to be as full and final as if that were going to happen, so it's something that we pull out of the text by recognizing that the author is using imagery to try to teach us something.

54:30

They're trying to show us something in a specific instance, and they're using figurative language to do so, so Rob's absolutely right.

54:39

So, I think we touched on in that answer the next question, and you guys may want to go after that.

54:46

The next question was, what about stuff that isn't literal? So, summarize based on what we just talked about,

54:53

Tyler, what do we do with those things that aren't literal? Well, the early church and even some of the theologians of the medieval times,

55:07

I think some of what they did is helpful in navigating that. I'm actually reading a book on this right now about how there are layers to the text, not necessarily different interpretations, but there is what it means in the moment, and then there's a deeper spiritual way that ties back to the gospel.

55:26

And so, when we're looking at the poetry, for example, when it says that in Psalm 147 that he gives the beasts their food and to the ravens that cry, there is a sense where it says he feeds the animals.

55:41

He feeds the beasts their food and the ravens that cry. Well, on top of that, you have the fact that these are on some level representative of our relation and dependence on God to sustain our needs, to fill us with what we need, to sustain us, to feed us, to nurture us.

56:03

And that's something we can apply, that there's a literal sense and then there's a spiritual sense that complement each other and then draws to a deeper and fuller understanding of what

56:16

God is illustrating in the text. Right. And Jesus actually brought up kind of close to what you said.

56:25

There was an issue of an animal that was being taken care of by God. And Jesus then goes back and says, not a sparrow falls to the ground that God doesn't know, so don't you think that God is going to take care of you?

56:41

I paraphrased a lot there. But Jesus was reading the scripture and teaching in a way where he says, here's the truth.

56:52

God takes care of the animals. Won't he also take care of you? It's funny.

56:58

I was reading a sermon from Spurgeon this week and he was preaching out of that Psalm about the ravens.

57:05

And then he actually took that bit from Matthew about the sparrows and said, consider the ravens.

57:12

No, he's almost Presbyterian. He was very close.

57:17

He smoked like one too. You can't take our man. Come on now. We can and we will.

57:28

So the next question, which you said that we've been touching on too, how do I know when to understand something as figurative?

57:37

Here's another place where I wanted to throw something. Go ahead. This actually brings up another interpretive principle that we should keep in mind, that while we're interpreting something, if say we come up with these and we just don't know, like,

57:52

I don't know how I should take this. Should I take this figuratively? Should I take it literally? It's pretty hard to understand.

57:58

One of the guiding principles we should take with us is that texts that are easier or more clear to understand should guide in our interpretation of texts that are harder to understand.

58:10

So one of the things that we do is when we come to something that I don't know if I should, I don't know if I should believe that this sun, moon, and stars are supposed to mean like those, like Ursa Major and the moon are going to hit me in the head, or is it taking it figuratively where there's going to be a judgment that's as if the world is ending, coming upon the nation.

58:34

I don't know which one I should take. What should I do? Go to a different place in scripture. See how it's used there.

58:39

See how other more clear things are written out. If prophecy was made of sun, moon, and stars falling, and you don't know what that means, look in a portion of history.

58:51

It says what happened to that nation. If it says that that nation was destroyed, which Syria was, then we know that that particular portion was meant to be taken figuratively.

59:04

So a more clear section will interpret a more unclear section.

59:10

That's a really good perspective. Oftentimes you could navigate that with like a concordance in the back of your Bible that if you were looking at one of those passages we went through about debt and forgiveness, you can go to the debt section and queue up every verse in both the

59:26

Old and New Testament about debt, and you can pit those side by side and look at that bigger picture.

59:33

Right. The only thing I would caution on that is that you may, you will, if you do that, come across instances where a certain word is going to be used different ways at different times.

59:47

Just because you can find a major or majority way that a certain word is used doesn't mean it's going to be used that way all the time.

01:00:01

It could be used in a different way. So you're right. That's a great place to look.

01:00:07

It gives you all the references. You can go through there and sift with it, but you still need to use a bit of discernment and not try to flatten out the meaning of a singular word in order to say that you're being literal.

01:00:19

I think that's done sometimes and it gets pretty hairy. But yeah, absolutely.

01:00:25

That's a great way to, great starting point. Lot is a fantastic resource. You can go in there, check it out, put it up side by side, compare, contrast, see what

01:00:34

God's saying. Are these things talking about the same thing? This makes a lot more sense to me. And I think they're on the same topic.

01:00:40

So let me interpret this one the way that this clear one was. Yeah, it's a great, great tool to use.

01:00:47

So if anybody's taking notes or writing things down, that's another great one to write down to help remember and help you interpret scripture.

01:00:57

Interpret the more difficult in light of the clear passages. That's a great principle.

01:01:03

And this is one that I pondered this week because this has been a question of mine for a very long time. So I pondered a lot on it this week, trying to come up with an answer, trying to help me understand it and help other people understand how do we know which is figurative and which is literal?

01:01:20

How do we know the difference? How do we understand that? And what I come up with was similar to what you were talking about,

01:01:26

Dan, but I'm not going to make a blanket statement and accuse all pre -millennial, dispensationalists of it.

01:01:34

But I heard one say that in answering this question, the things that are obvious, if it's obviously figurative, which is funny because they're the ones that claim to be the literalist, but then they have to eventually admit, well, there is some figurative language.

01:01:54

That's beside the point. They'll say if it's just obvious that it's figurative, then you take it figurative.

01:02:02

If it's not obvious, then you take it literally. I would caution using that.

01:02:09

And my suggestion is do the hard work and remember what these guys have already been talking about.

01:02:18

To know which should be taken literally and which should be taken figuratively has got, you've got to do the hard work.

01:02:27

You've got to know what the genre is. You've got to know what type of language is being used.

01:02:33

Is the New Testament borrowing language from the Old Testament to help you understand what it's talking about?

01:02:41

It takes doing the hard work to understand. There's no easy path, no easy principle.

01:02:48

But once you begin to study God's Word, you're a Berean and you begin to dive into the text, things will come along a bit quicker.

01:02:59

But it does take the harder work to study God's Word as a whole, to understand the text, understand the context, understand the genre, the language, and all that.

01:03:09

Does that make sense? Good deal, good deal. What is, and this is going to be our principle, both sides will claim,

01:03:21

I think, will claim to use this particular method. But what is the grammatical historical method of Scripture interpretation?

01:03:30

Well, the grammatical historical method is basically you take the text and its grammar and seek to understand it in a way, in the way that was understood by the original audience.

01:03:52

So you look at the historical context in which it was written and you look at the grammar that was used in order to make the point, which oftentimes means that you're going to need to look into Greek or Hebrew.

01:04:07

Not always, but sometimes it means that you may have to, if something's ambiguous, you just don't know what it says, it may be more clear in the original language.

01:04:19

It's just the nature of reading a text that's been translated into another language.

01:04:28

It may be more clear in the original, but the grammatical historical method, you seek to take the words as they sit in front of you and understand them as they would have been understood by the people who were the original audience, which should lead you to putting away some of your own biases, some of your own cultural understandings of your own day, and then trying to place yourself in the culture of the people who would have been reading this work originally.

01:05:01

Because if I were to write something to Tyler or you, Rob, and I was mentioning stuff that was happening in current events, and I was using common day language, and I was using the terms of phrase that we use all the time, that when you really look at it, don't make much sense if you take the actual words, then you have to enter into that historical context in order to understand, if I was a

01:05:32

Jew in the first century, how would I understand what's being written here?

01:05:38

So that way, you don't pull in some of your own biases, because they had a way of talking amongst themselves that unless you know the culture, you're not going to pick up on that.

01:05:51

So a lot of what you read, you're going to be able to understand, but there are some nuances and some other stuff that you'll miss it.

01:06:00

You just won't understand if you're not pulling it from their context.

01:06:05

I was reading a hermeneutics book one time, and it said to do it like this, to imagine it like a bridge.

01:06:14

You're in your town, and they're in their town.

01:06:20

And I don't remember who wrote this book. It's a really famous analogy, though. But you take the text from their town, understand it in their context, and then once you have it grasped over here, then you can start taking it across the bridge, over the river, back to your town, where you can then apply it.

01:06:43

So you understand it and interpret it in its historical context, but when you apply it, that's when you bring it back over the bridge and try to see, what would this look like in my day and time?

01:06:57

And that's where you can get your application. Because a lot of people will just jump straight into the text with all of their cultural understanding and all of their historical stuff from their day and try to pull out an application directly from the page without seeking to understand what the text itself is saying first.

01:07:16

And that's where a lot of people will get in trouble. They'll see something that says, you're going to prosper.

01:07:23

God wants to make you the head, not the tail. He's going to do this, that, and the other thing.

01:07:29

And then all of a sudden you're like, well, God's going to make me rich and he's going to give me everything I want and he's going to set me up for success.

01:07:35

And then you end up going down the road for a few years and you're poor and nobody likes you and you stink a little bit.

01:07:43

And you're like, what happened here? Why am I, why did God's word said this?

01:07:48

This didn't happen. I quit. I'm not even going to believe anymore. When really you didn't understand that that was written to a certain people at a certain time that God had said that here, you're going to go in and take over the land.

01:08:00

When you are, if you're faithful to what I say, I'm going to give you the land, you're going to be the head and not the tail, but that's not you.

01:08:07

You're not an Israelite taking over the land of Canaan. So therefore you missed the point.

01:08:13

It's not that God wants to give you money. It's that God was faithful to his people then.

01:08:18

And God will also be faithful to what he's promised you now, which is salvation through Christ to everyone who believes.

01:08:26

Well, that's a perfect example why we're having this conversation about hermeneutics outside of seminary.

01:08:34

That's a perfect example why everyday Christians, every person in the pew needs to understand that, you know, hermeneutics, big word, we don't have to use that big word, but how to interpret scripture.

01:08:49

Everybody needs to know that part because so many of us have fallen victim to stuff that you're talking about for too long now.

01:08:57

We've been in Bible studies where we go around in a circle and we say, what does this verse mean to you?

01:09:05

How does this make you feel? How does this make you feel? And so we've all fallen victim to that.

01:09:10

And that is a wrong way, as Dan was saying, to interpret scripture. And that has led to so many problems in the church.

01:09:19

I'm about to queue up a rant on discipleship in the church, because that is absolutely something that we should know.

01:09:28

Spiritual formation and discipleship should not be a process of osmosis.

01:09:33

It needs to be intentional and repeatable. And I don't know if maybe

01:09:40

I've just had a string of bad luck, but most of the churches I've been a part of, that's not been the case.

01:09:47

You show up to maybe a Sunday school class, maybe a Bible study. You're always in a group, always what you can hide behind not knowing something, and they don't teach that stuff.

01:09:57

This needs to be something that goes on one -on -one with you and your elders. You need to find the church where they're going to teach you this kind of stuff.

01:10:05

And then they use it in practice in their groups. Just today, I was able to run through a passage in Joshua.

01:10:13

We went through verses five through nine or something like that in chapter one. And we just read it.

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And I was like, well, guys, one of the things that we're supposed to remember from Bible interpretation is that if the author repeated something, it was probably important.

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And we ought to try to see why he put it in there sometimes. And so we went through and saw that God had spoken to him, be strong and courageous, be strong and courageous, be strong and courageous, be strong and courageous.

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He said it four times in four or five verses. So we pulled it out and looked at what they all meant.

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And then we saw it again later, a few verses beyond. And we were able to recognize that God was giving

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Joshua a charge and a command to be strong and courageous. And one of the ways that God was able to give him a sense of hope, a sense of seeing what

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God had set out in the world around him was that the people's response to him when they said, hey, you,

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Ruben and Gad and Manasseh, you're going to go over the river too, and you're going to lead the charge. They said, cool, we're going.

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We'll leave in three days. Only make sure that you have God just like Moses did and be strong and courageous.

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He heard the same words that God said. So the repetition was able to help us understand what the text was saying to us.

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So if you're people, if you're, you need to find a church where those sorts of things are being done.

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And if they're not, nine times out of 10, if you're at a good church, you ask your pastor, ask your elders, say, hey,

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I'd like to know some more about Bible interpretation. I bet you some of them would just cut a flip being so excited, but they would just go ahead and they'd go ahead and do it.

01:11:58

That's right. If I could add to that, there was a study that Ken Ham with Answers in Genesis had commissioned back in,

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I think, 2005, trying to figure out why millennials were leaving the church, like that older millennial side of the generation.

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And one of the primary reasons they found in that survey over, I don't know how many people they interviewed, one of the primary reasons young people were leaving the church was hypocrisy and hermeneutics, that they were taking an allegorical, it doesn't really mean that approach with specifically

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Genesis, with the flood and creation, that those don't mean what they say. And then flipping the script and getting staunch literal with verses about morality and homosexuality and some of those things, that it felt like they were using the

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Bible as some kind of club to beat them with and not really looking at what it was trying to say, what it did say.

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I think that ties directly into what you were saying about discipleship and about getting into hermeneutics, that hermeneutics and discipleship are interconnected.

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The word disciple, where we get it from in Greek, mathetes, means student or learner.

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And we ought to be making disciples on the study of God. We should be training up students of Christ.

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And part of that, we should be teaching people to study

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Christ. We should be teaching ourselves to study Christ and looking for Christ in every page, every word, every paragraph.

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I've made the joke more than once. I want to get a Bible that's all in red because it's all about Christ.

01:13:55

It is all the words of God. Yeah. Yeah. And if anybody wonders where Tyler got that, that's actually in the

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Bible. Jesus said it himself. He's walking with some people on the road to Emmaus at that latter part of Luke and says, starting with Moses and the prophets, he explained to them all the scriptures and how they're about him.

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And so maybe Tyler's not just pulling this out of a hat.

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He's got some backing up. He's got some substance to it.

01:14:31

That's right. Let's go to our last question. Tyler, I'm going to give it to you because I think it fits you very well because you've been diving into the poetry and wisdom literature.

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So we talked about the grammatical historical method of interpretation. How do you do that in the poetry and wisdom literature?

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Well, one of the things we have to recognize is it is poetry. And so there's a certain way that poetry operates, a certain way that we go about reading poetry and not just biblical poetry, but like I used the example of John Donne earlier.

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I'm a big fan of some of the poems of John Donne and he famously wrote, no man is an island entire of itself, but a man is a piece of continent, a part of the main.

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And in the next stanza, he says, every man's death diminishes me for I am involved in mankind.

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So do not ask for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee. And we all know that people are not islands.

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We know that people are not continents. We're not these land masses that just kind of float in the ocean. That's obvious to us.

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But what we see there is that he's drawing some kind of principle from the illustration of an island to describe humans, to describe people, that there's something he's attributing to people or is dis -attributing to people.

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No man is an island. That there's something about an island that is not shared in people.

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And the Psalms do a very similar thing. Like Psalm 88, I believe it is, says I'm like a sparrow on a rooftop.

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We know it wasn't a bird writing this, but there's something about that image of a sparrow on a housetop that the author of that particular chapter is using to illustrate how he feels to God.

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Because the Psalms are their prayers. They are expressions to God from some of the most deepest, innermost feelings and circumstances.

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And this time and time again, we see illustrations like that in the Psalms that are very honest, that are hard to read sometimes, but they draw on these images to convey feelings, to convey the hard parts of how we feel.

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And so those are things we take into account. What is being represented in this image?

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Not in a strange numerology way of, like there's this decoder key, like it's a treasure map, but what do we mean by the

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Lord is my shepherd? What is being implied there? What is the image of a shepherd?

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What does that, what should that draw to mind? And how does that point me back to Christ?

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And Jesus himself said, I am the good shepherd. That he's in some,

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I'm sorry. And so we can identify some of those characteristics of a shepherd as being shared by God, that he is like a shepherd in certain ways.

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This is an image that Christ himself uses in John 10 to describe his relation to his people through his sheep.

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And so we can see that God is like a shepherd, but he's not a literal bearded guy in a cloak standing in the mountains with a stick, but his character is like a shepherd.

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All I need is a stick. Well, Tyler, if you would, if you'll just carry on that thought process that you were on right there and share the gospel with us.

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And when he finishes, Dan, will you close us in prayer? Absolutely. So we were, like I was just saying that God is like a shepherd.

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And one of the tasks of a shepherd is to keep watch over his sheep. And sometimes the sheep go astray.

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Sometimes the sheep wander off. Sometimes they don't stay close to the shepherd. And sometimes they will wander so far away that they can't hear the voice of the shepherd.

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And in that moments, as Christ himself illustrates more than once in scripture, the shepherd will go out looking for the sheep, and he will call them out by name.

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And if necessary, he will grab that sheep and he will carry it on his back, back to the flock.

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He left the entire flock for the one that went astray. And every single one of us is like that sheep that has gone astray, that has left

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God's path to follow our own. And we have walked away from God.

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We have decided we didn't need him, that we were sufficient on our own, that we could do what

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God couldn't, that we could provide better than he could. And in that rebellion, there is distance.

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But God came in the form of a man, and he suffered on a cross to bridge that gap, to bridge the chasm created by a rebellion, to satisfy his own justice for our rebellion on himself.

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And he was hung on a cross, and the weight of that sin that should have been on me was cast upon Christ.

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And he was buried, and he rose from the dead three days later triumphantly, demonstrating that he wasn't just a man, he wasn't just a shepherd, but he was

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God himself, and that he had power over even the things of sin and of death.

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And like a shepherd, he continues calling us to him. He beckons all the sheep to come to him, to return, to be reconciled to him.

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And as ambassadors of Christ today, the three of us implore you to be a reconciled to God, the shepherd and overseer of your souls, to come to Christ with faith and repentance and be made whole.

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Amen. Beautiful. Let's pray. Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this evening, for your word, for your goodness, and for your gospel.

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Pray that as we go, that you would cause a change in the hearts of each one of us, so we would hate our sin more and more and love you with a burning fervency that just would not die out.

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God, we pray that we would be bold proclaimers of your word and your gospel, and that you would be honored and glorified through us.

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God, we pray that you would keep us, protect us, and continue to look out for us.

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We love you, Lord. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for joining us.

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We really, really appreciate it. And as always, we want you to remember that Jesus is King.

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Go live in the victory of Christ. Go speak with the authority of Christ, and go share the gospel of Christ.