Why the Bible Feels Like a Fairytale? | Kingdom

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Welcome to the Kingdom podcast. I'm your host, John Moffitt. I'm the pastor of Grace Reform Church in Spring Hill, Tennessee, and also the host of Theocast.

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We're our co -hosts for that podcast weekly. It's about Reformed theology from a—the Christian life from a

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Reformed perspective. You can check that out anywhere that you listen to podcasts. Why the

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Kingdom podcast? Why a podcast called the Kingdom? Well, ask yourself this question. What does it look like to seek first the

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Kingdom of God? That's what this podcast is about. To clarify God's Word by means of the Gospel and reclaiming the purpose of the

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Kingdom. How does the Kingdom affect my everyday life? So that's what we're going to talk about.

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Now, the particular topic of today is why does the Bible feel like a fairy tale? There are parts of it we love.

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We love the Gospel. We love the parts about God being our Savior and justifying us and we can pray to Him.

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But everything else about the Bible feels like it's—well, just to use illustrations, it feels like it belongs in Narnia or Lord of the

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Rings, right? We hear about the Flood, but it doesn't impact my daily life.

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We hear about giants. We hear about waters being divided, but I don't know why that is important to me.

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And in the past, we've moralized it. Be like Daniel. Be like David. You know, be like whatever.

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And that even doesn't even help us because we realize doing those things doesn't make us any better.

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We've tried it. It doesn't work. And it doesn't lead to rest. It leads to anxiety. Some of you have been traveling with Theocast for quite a while and you're excited about the doctrine of rest.

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But the rest of the Bible just feels like it's—we won't want to say this out loud, but it's kind of of lesser values.

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It's like, well, I have the sayings of Jesus, and I know about resting in Christ.

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So the Old Testament kind of just feels, well, old, you know?

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My daughter is—there's a local record shop in town, and she's really good friends with the owner, and he always gives her free stuff.

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She came home the other day with two 8 -tracks. She had never seen them, didn't know what they were. And so I had the privilege of teaching her about how it works.

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Now, that was even a little bit before my age. I knew what they are. My grandparents had them. My grandparents' car had them.

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And I grew up in tape deck world, so I was able to explain that to her. But she had—we don't even have—I don't even know where do you buy.

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I guess you'd have to go on eBay to buy something. But it's old and useless, and you know what she really wanted to do with it?

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She wanted to hang it up on the wall as a relic. That's what we do in the Old Testament. We pick out Bible verses that are meaningful, and they fit well on Instagram, and you can put it on a canvas on your wall.

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But that's about as far as we go with it. Especially—I've been doing this lately, quoting fascinating parts of the

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Bible where the physical realm and the spiritual realm meet. It terrifies us.

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We don't like this. But if you face passages like Ephesians 6, when

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Paul says, we wrestle not against flesh and blood, you read that list that he describes next. He's not just giving you different words for Satan.

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He's describing an entire ecosystem of warfare that you're facing, and he's so concerned about it, he says, you won't make it unless you have armor.

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And then goes through and describes every part of armor and how it protects you. You have to kind of just step back and say, what am

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I missing? Or when Peter says that Satan is a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, we were just kind of like, yeah, that's how it was in Jesus' day, but not today.

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All that stuff's gone now. And John, you're starting to sound charismatic.

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You're starting to sound like you're going to believe in speaking in tongues and healings and all that kind of—no, I'm not. Those are prophecies that have been fulfilled.

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I've done lectures on those. There's a YouTube video. You can go listen to it. I am not advocating for a continuationist view.

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I just want us to stop and ask the question, why do we struggle with the miraculous side of the

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Bible? And there's a long history and explanation for it, but I want you to wrestle with that for a while.

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I mean, believing like an angel that comes to Daniel and says, hey, Daniel, I haven't been here because I've been held up by the

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Prince of Persia, and I had to ask Gabriel to come help me. That's not in the Bible. Yes, it is. It's in Daniel.

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There are all kinds of things that are in the Bible that are hard for us to wrestle with.

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Like, why are they in there? Why are the Nephilim in there? There's this story about angels and demons, and we don't know what to do with it.

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There's an entire arc of the Bible. There's an entire story of the Bible where you have the different realms are collapsing upon each other.

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Let me just go back. Do you guys remember the story in Exodus where the children of Israel are being brought out, and Moses is standing there, and for every miracle he does, the magicians of Pharaoh respond, being able to do the same tricks?

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I mean, obviously not one for one because we know that God ends up humiliating the gods. But that's the part of the

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Bible that if you're sitting down having lunch with an unbeliever, you kind of squirm. So you really believe that Moses threw his rod on the ground and it turned into a snake?

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Yeah, I mean, that was just a different time. That answer just doesn't work, does it? It's just a different time.

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And that's hard for us, for our brain. But if you fast forward to the New Testament, there are crazy things going on in the New Testament as well.

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All kinds of crazy things going on. And you can't just keep relegating it to times of old.

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And the reason why I'm mentioning all of this is that God says everything in His Word is profitable.

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Everything in there. There's nothing that's not profitable for us. And we like that when it relates to our feelings, but we don't like it when it doesn't relate and there's these miraculous things that are happening.

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So I just want to drop a challenge in here. It's not going to be a long episode, but I just want to drop a challenge in here on a series of episodes that we're going to be doing of reclaiming the supernatural side of the

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Bible. You see, your God put in a book and said it was perfect.

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And He says, if you know everything in this book, you'll know everything you need to know about me, about how to live in this life and what it is you're supposed to do.

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I'll just give an example why this matters. People ask me all the time, yeah, but why those stories matter? Why does the flood matter?

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You know, this whole interaction between Satan and the demons, like Job, why does that story, why does that stuff matter?

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Answer this question. Do you feel like there's a legitimate disturbance within you, like Paul says you should have?

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Like when a doctor comes over to you and says, unless you take this medication in six months, you will die. But if you take this medication, you can heal it yourself.

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Immediately you're asking how much, where do I get it? When can I start taking it? Because you feel the threat.

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When Paul says, you don't get it, you're not wrestling what you can see. It's worse than that.

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You're wrestling what you can't see. And it's not just one person, because if you go through the list of what he describes in Ephesians chapter six, he's describing layers of which we are going to be wrestling against and fighting against.

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And he says, if you do not put on all of Christ, which Justin and I just did an episode, you can go listen to it.

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It came out a couple of weeks ago on the armor of God. So go listen to that episode. But he says, if you do not put on Christ and all of who

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Christ is, because Christ is our armament, you're going to be taken out. Not you're going to lose your salvation, but you're not going to be effective for the kingdom.

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You're not going to be the very thing that God has designed you to be, which is an ambassador for him and to take the kingdom of light.

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Look, I'm just going to tell you this way. For thousands of years, the kingdom of darkness has been destroying people.

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Jesus said that he would do that. He's come to steal, to kill, and destroy. I firmly believe that the movement of abortion is a demonic movement.

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It's spearheaded by everything that reeks of supernatural powers. And if that makes you feel uncomfortable, that's the part of the

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Bible I want to bring back into your heart and into your mind, to embrace the world that it's not

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Narnia. It's not Lord of the Rings. Those aren't myths. If you read your Bible, you realize very quickly there is a physical realm and a spiritual realm, and they're at war with one another, and they are interacting and crossing each other all of the time.

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And that side of you that's kind of like, I don't want to believe that, that's because you're afraid of what people might think about you.

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Paul said, if you embrace this truth, they're going to think you're crazy.

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You mean that you fight an invisible enemy named Satan, and you believe in an invisible

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God named Elohim, and he's saving you? And yeah, it sounds nuts.

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It sounds like something you write in a fiction book, except for it's not fiction for us.

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It's reality. It's real. So I know I just kind of introduced this. I don't want to leave you in a panic.

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We need to take our books, sorry, we need to take our Bibles, and you need to ask yourself one question.

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If I believe that the God of this Bible saved me, then I need to be willing to believe everything that's in it.

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I'm going to start to introduce you to some things that is going to cause you to really question what you've been taught before.

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But that's kind of what this podcast does. It's really what Theocast does, is we go back to things that are so old, they're new.

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Everything that I want to share with you is not new. It's just so old, it's been lost. It's been lost to modern technology.

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It's been lost to modern thought and liberalism, where we are taking all of the miracles of the

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Bible, and we're trying to explain them scientifically. The word miracle means it can't be explained.

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It's supernatural. And the Bible is living, sharper than any two -edged sword, right?

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Piercing our soul. It's not just information. It's an actual supernatural book.

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I'll leave you just with one other thought, because I think this will help you. If you're a Christian and you really believe in the gospel, and you believe that Jesus died for you, you have a

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God living inside of you. Stop and think about that for a moment. You have a

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God living inside of you, right now, who actually controls you, because that's what we're told, be controlled by the

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Spirit. He gave us ears to hear and eyes to see. He gave us faith to believe, and He sustains and protects us inside of you.

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You are one with Him. It's unreal when you start thinking about, you don't just live in a world full of truth, and that truth is just based on science.

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Science can't explain a God living inside your body, while you live in your body at the same time.

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Science cannot explain that. And it takes you back a little bit to think that that's the reality of the world that you live in.

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Not only that, that you had a soul inside of you that was a dead soul, and that now you have a living soul.

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Just stop and contemplate that for a moment. You are walking around as a zombie. You are walking around as a person controlled by its passions of the flesh, and God comes in and opens up your soul to life, lives inside of you, and then says, hey, here's a book to explain kind of how all that happened.

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So you're going to embrace that side of it, but you're not going to embrace the rest that's in the book. We have a fun journey ahead of us.

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I can promise you this. Your love for Christ, your love for the Bible, and the purpose of your life is going to become very clear if you keep listening to what

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I'm trying to tell you. I'm just going to start in Genesis and walk through it, and show you how God from the beginning has been drawing us into his power, and into his joy, and into his purpose.

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And when Jesus finally shows up and says, be a part of my kingdom, it makes total sense, because his kingdom is fighting back against the kingdom that is destroying this world.

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So you can either sit back and let the world continue to destroy it, or you can use the weapons of warfare that Paul is talking about and fight against it.

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Well, that's a quick introduction. I have a whole lot more to say, but I want you to just think about that for a moment.

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Are you willing to take the Bible at face value for what it says? And if you are, come join this journey with me.

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If not, there are plenty of other podcasts out there that you can go and listen to. I'm sure you've already found one.