Be God's Family

BONUS Episode: Live Old Testament Q&A

Today's bonus episode was recorded live before a congregation at Fishers United Methodist Church. Pastors Mark Ellcessor and Ben Greenbaum answered randomly selected questions about the Old Testament. These questions were submitted by parishioners earlier in the week.

Duration:: 40m
Broadcast on:: 06 Dec 2024
Audio Format:: other

Welcome to the BeGod's Light Podcast. My name is Doug Collins, and I am the producer of the show. This bonus episode features Pastor's Mark L. Sesser and Ben Greenbaum as they answer questions about the Old Testament live in front of their congregation. Let's take a listen. Well, welcome to the BeGod's Light Podcast live. We've been spending this past year looking at the Old Testament and there's a number of components that people in our congregation and others have the ability to engage with. There are the podcasts that we do each week. There are the sermons that you can either get here or online, as well as a couple of other components. One of those are the daily scripture readings and devotionals that go with those. And finally, there are the Bible studies that many people do along with their Sunday school class, small group, or maybe even individually they do those. And we're grateful to be able to kind of merge some of those together today. We ask for you to submit questions related to the Old Testament that you would like for us to kind of have a Q&A session on and boy did you submit questions. I mean, lots of them. There are probably 30 or 40. There's no possible way we can go through every one of them on this day, but we'll tackle some of them. We're grateful for the opportunity to do that. And the grace that you have with us as we are like you, we're journeyers, like you are, trying to sort through what does God have to say to us in the Word of God. What do you have for starting us off, you know, like words of wisdom? - Wow, that's been a lot on the day. - Just one word of wisdom. - One word of wisdom. This one I would say obviously there's no possible way for us to answer all the questions that were submitted. And with that, the questions that we will deal with, there's no way to give a full answer in the time constraints. There's some of these questions that we could take hours, literally. - Some of them could be a series. - They really could. - They really could. - And so with that, I want to encourage you. If you're like, hey, I want to talk more about that. Feel free to take one of us or both of us out to lunch. Or if you like, if you're in a small group and you're like, hey, I want you to come and we'll pepper you with some questions in the small group or follow up on some of these questions. I invite you to do that as well. Because to Mark's point, this is a journey, a lifelong journey as we give ourselves over to the scripture as we learn, as we dive deeper into God's word. - Yeah, that sounds good. So I started it off last time. You pick a card first this time and we'll just go for it. How does that sound as we try to figure this thing out together? - I'll start with the one that seemed most pressing that we started with last time. - It's pressing. - Will IU make the college football playoff? - Yes. - Beat Purdue and you're in, okay? Mark my words, sorry. - I have to tell you, I have been for IU all year except next Saturday. So that's just the way that's gonna work, so. - Beat Purdue, you're in. - No, what is your favorite Old Testament book? Favorite Old Testament prophet? Any of the Psalms speak to your heart? - Yeah, there's got anything. - I do a lot. You know that, the favorite Old Testament book, that it kind of varies from season to season in my life, same with New Testament books. I think right now, in my own particular life, it's Nehemiah, Nehemiah was a cup bear. He tasted the king's wine. It was his job, make sure the king didn't get poisoned. And he had to go back to a place he'd never been and rebuild a wall. He had to become a construction engineer and a leader of people and a resistor of people who were trying to stop them. And I just identify with him sometimes. I was never equipped, I didn't think to be a pastor. I was raised in a blue collar family and kind of given a good work ethic. I didn't feel like I was kind of up to snuff to do this job. So I identify with him and called to something, bring people along, recruit help. There are people resisting you. Find a way to fight through that, endure, trust God, see it through, complete the task. I love the book of Nehemiah and I relate to it a lot, at least in my life. Yeah, what do you got on? - For me, Jeremiah, favorite Old Testament book and I am my favorite prophet. And part of it is, is Jeremiah encounters constant persecution. People are constantly coming after him, trying to get him to change his tune. And yet we see Jeremiah's faithfulness to God's word throughout time. And it's just a constant reminder to me that in those moments where you do, you experience potentially some pushback, there's always the opportunity to dive deeper into God's word and to seek to be faithful to him. And at the end of the day, that's all that God has called us to. It's called us to be faithful to his word and to engage in conversation around it. - Yeah, one of those questions on there too was your favorite psalm or a piece of the psalm. There's a bunch of them. One that stands out to me is Psalm 4610. Be still and know that I am God. I think this one relates to me for maybe an opposite reason of Nehemiah in that it reminds me of something I'm not good at. My mind is never still. It's always working, always it keeps me awake. I mean, literally. And I'm always thinking into the future. I'm thinking a year, five, 10 years into the future all the time. This has been true of me, all of my life. I'm always thinking deep into the future. I'm a bit concerned about what happens when I get to a nursing home. It's like, what's there to play in for? So it reminds me that my ways are not God's ways to slow down, to trust God, to still myself. He's God. I'm not to trust him. It's a good reminder, you know? - Yeah, it is. And it's one of those things where we work really well together 'cause I don't think like that. I'm just kind of day by day. It'll be all right. And so when I look at the Psalms, the two that have always stood out to me and part of it was, you know, I came to faith in the midst of grief for, you know, wrestling with my dad's death as a teenager. And then a lot of other, we had a multitude of like family deaths and other things that came into play. And so early in my Christian walk, Psalm 13 and Psalm 73, which are Psalms of lament. But also as they offer, as the psalmist, offer their lament, they're always mindful of God's unfailing love. God's covenantal love toward us that he cannot violate. So learning to rest in that and to entrust myself to him. - Here's one we didn't take last time. So I'm gonna just jump at one of those, man. There were so many. We've got like, there are a dozen cards up here and each one has two, three, four questions 'cause that's what you guys did, if they were incredible. And this is what key takeaway from this study, do you hope our church family incorporates into their lives? That's a brilliant question. The reason I love the question is, I always begin when I think about a study, like we've been doing year long studies here, or even a message or a teaching. There's always a couple of things in my mind. What do I want them to know? And what do I want them to do? What do I want the people to know, to learn? And how should it change their life? What do I want them to do? And so what's the key takeaway? To me, another question here, what's the main message of the Old Testament? They're tied together. This key takeaway is that our lives are to be in alignment with God. And there's such a temptation in life for it to align ourselves with other worldviews. There's a lot of worldviews out there, right? Sex, they're humanism, tons of worldviews. And it's a temptation for us to align ourselves with those worldviews, but to bring ourselves under alignment with the biblical worldview from Genesis to Revelation, Old Testament and New Testament, is my hopeful takeaway. So not only that you have learned something, what do you want them to know, but that you will do something different, I will do something different in my life based upon who God is, God's character, God's calling, God's purposes, the character God's developing in me and you, and that we will live differently because of it. That's good, that's pretty good, right? - Yeah, that's good answer. - You could preach a sermon on that, probably. - Probably, yeah, probably do that, okay. - Yeah, I think one of the things for me, and I would echo everything that Mark just said, but also the consistency that we see throughout scripture and God's overarching message of grace, which we see from Genesis to Revelation. I mean, in the immediate aftermath of the fall and the immediate aftermath of sin, we see God what, pursuing His people, calling His people to Himself. We see God's provision, we see God's promise, even of a future seed that will come from the woman which points to Jesus Christ, we see God's, as they're exiting the garden, what does God do? He clothes them, He covers their shame, which images what Christ has done for us. And so we see this message, this consistent message throughout scripture of God's grace, of God's pursuit, of His people. The other part of it for me as well is that having spent a lot of time, obviously, in God's word, someone who at one point in His life was an atheist, one of the things that scripture communicates to me is God's divine hand over it. Because I marvel at how the 66 books of the scriptures, how they fit together like this perfect puzzle piece, which again, shows God's divine hand upon it all. And so that's one of those things it just does. As I've studied it over the last 25 years or so, it just blows my mind. - Another place where you and I are really different is that you grew up and spent your early years as an atheist and I'm just the opposite. I've never had a moment when I wasn't in the church, ever. I don't think I've ever missed three weeks in a row of going to church, except when I was in the hospital. I mean, it's, and so our world is different and I have the same conclusion as you, which is I think pretty cool, that to see God has given us His scripture from on high and it's for us, it's for our benefit. That's a, that's a pretty cool connection. I mean, 'cause we do come from really different backgrounds and it's just a testament that you don't have to all be the same, we don't have to come from the same spot that God has His purposes worked out in our lives from day one. And also seeing too from Genesis to Revelation, God's redemptive narrative woven through the scripture. It's just amazing. - Hey, let's take this one. This question is a pretty cool question and it was a three part question somebody submitted. The first time I read part of it, I said, Ben, what's this mean? And then he explained it to me. But then I just love the question. Why is God still rebuking people after exile? So I was a little puzzled, like, does that mean like the exile, the Old Testament? And then it got clearer or better, why are people still doing what is wrong after the exile? Or even, why do I keep forgetting God? Take it away. (congregation laughing) He explained it, he's got to give the answer, isn't that fair? - Oh, that's cute. - He calls me that a lot, by the way. - Yeah, I think it was Calvin who said that the heart is an idol-making factory. And Jeremiah says that the heart is deceitful above all things in Jeremiah 17. The reality is is that our hearts, outside of God interacting through the spirit upon our heart, we will chase after the wrong things. We will chase after the idols of this world. We will chase after that which we find culturally edifying. And so that's where there is this desperate need for all of us to have God's objective truth, which stands outside of us to provide a light into the darkness of our heart, to confront the errors of our way. Because without God interacting upon our heart and ripening our heart toward the things of Christ that we would increasingly love that which God loves and hate that which God hates. Without God interacting on us, we will chase after the wrong things in this world. It's one of the reasons why God gave us his self-revelation because it acts as a corrective upon us. And it reveals the depth of our need for God's word. - So when we recognized that those things are true, how do we, then in our lives, turn it around and say, okay, I'm going to realign myself with the places where there's this, what you described, an awareness that my heart is, Luther's a curved end on itself. You said it not. And Calvin, idol-making faculty, my heart is in the wrong spot. What do we do with it once we recognize it? - Apparently we continue to quote church fathers. - That's true. - For our Protestant Reformation guys. But anyway, yeah, I think there's two things I think. One of them is to pray. To pray and recognize our dependence upon the Spirit to refine our heart, right? We are dependent, I cannot make myself more Christ-like. But I know the Spirit can. And so praying for the Spirit to refine me. The other part of it is, is our desperate need to be in community with one another. One of the greatest transformative aspects within my life from a communal standpoint is that I've got three dear brothers in Christ, two in particular. Tom Overton, Travis Taylor, if I am wrestling with things that are opposed to God, and I recognize that through prayer, through confession, I'm increasingly wrestling with these things, I'll confess those things to those guys in order to pray for me, to act as an accountability source for me because the ultimate goal is to become more like Jesus Christ. And so I will expose the, I mean, vulnerably expose the darkness of my heart to those two guys. I'll expose the darkness of my heart to my wife as well. But as a means to grow in Christ's likeness. So I know that I can be free to confess those things to them, recognizing that they're not gonna look at me and be like, man, green bomb is really messed up. But instead they will look at me through the lens of God's gracious work, through the lens of God's redemptive love, recognizing that Ben has confessed this to me because his only desire is to grow in the likeness and love of Jesus Christ. - Yeah, that last part of that question, why do I keep forgetting God? I think you kind of summed that up. I think my simple answer to that is isolation. When we isolate ourselves from Christian community, isolate ourselves from people who can speak hard truths into our lives, isolate ourselves from the sovereignty and the truth of God through scripture, prayer, fasting, you know, go in church. When we do that, it's easier to construct our own world rather than saying, how am I living into God's plan and God purposes from my, we could spend three hours in that question. Let's go to, you pick another one instead because this is only a one hour worship service. - Is it? - Well, it goes until they all leave. - I don't know. Well, here's one that's good that I think will relate. About Old Testament accuracy. And so it deals with, you know, is Jonah a true story or a fable with a moral? Was Job a real person or is the book written as allegory? You can start. - Thanks. - You're welcome. - First of all, I don't spend a lot of time looking at scripture and wondering which detail happened exactly like it was written down and which one did not. Which word was spoken exactly that way or was not. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about that. But I will say on a bigger picture, I take scripture to be true, to be accurately given to us. When I first got to seminary, one of my professors started off by saying, "Get over it, Adam and Eve were not real people. " Jonah was not a real person "and just kind of went down the list." You know, these weren't real people. And fortunately he wasn't the only prof that was there because others disagreed wholeheartedly with him. There's a tendency in scholarship to dismiss these people as not being real. And the interesting thing is that archeology keeps proving that the people in the Bible were real. People from many years thought David was not a real person, make believe king. Archeology proved he was real. Time and time again, we've had archeology discover things which show, yep, the Bible says and how the Bible said it happened is very accurate. So I think it's a tendency for us to sit back and this began in the 1800s, really big time and went through the 1900s when we began to question which parts were real and which parts were not. And it's been disproven, but the bigger question is why? Why not trust God for his word that's been given to us to shape us and guide us. So that's sort of the umbrella answer to that, that I trust God, that God's word is real and true for my life. - Yeah, I think it's important too, when we come to Scripture, we need to make sure that we're putting whatever we're reading in the genre of that it was written as well. And so like Jonah is written as historical narrative. And so starting from that point, we look at Jonah through that lens, recognizing that Jonah was a historical figure who's also testified to, I believe in Second Kings where the prophet Jonah is mentioned. And so we see Jonah as a historical figure. The other part of it too is within the kind, 'cause the big piece of Jonah is he, well he got swallowed by a big fish, right? And so we're like that's impossible, that can't happen. Some people as a means of trying to back up the story of Jonah will go like Google stuff about, you know, to find some Japanese fishermen who got swallowed by a fish and somehow lived or whatever. That's not how Scripture presents it. Scripture presents what happened to Jonah as a miracle, which we are a people who believe in God's supernatural work in this world. The center point of our faith exists or rests in Jesus walking, who was killed on a cross, walking out of a tomb. So if Jesus can be raised from the grave, I'm pretty sure that God could appoint a huge fish to swallow some dude and preserve his life. One of the things too, within the context of Jonah, is Jonah actually makes that point. The book makes that point. So in verse 17 of chapter one in Jonah, it says, "But the Lord provided or appointed "a great fish to swallow Jonah." The term that's there for appointed or provided is the term manna in Hebrew, and it actually points to this being a miraculous work of God, because guess what? People do not get swallowed by fish and live. They don't make it out. And so God has performed this miracle and the story of Jonah is very open about that and presents it for what it is, a miracle. In New Testament, I think even speaks to this little bit. In second Peter, chapter two, it says, "Above all, you must understand "that no prophecy of Scripture came about "by the prophets' own interpretation of things." They didn't just make it out. "For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, "but prophets, though human, spoke from God "as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit." Scripture, speaking of New Testament, Scripture speaking of Old Testament, saying these prophetic books are not just made up. God's Holy Spirit is the one who delivered them to us today so that we can have them for our understanding and our clarity about the nature of God and the purposes of God for our lives. So my short answer is, I trust the Bible. - Well, and to that as well, allowing Scripture to interpret Scripture, as you've just done, Jesus uses Jonah as a historical figure and uses what happened to Jonah as a, he uses it to point to his coming resurrection as well. - Yeah, that's really good. Why are the first five books of the Old Testament called the Books of Moses? And what were the criteria for the prophetic books to make it into the Old Testament? Some made it and some didn't, why not? And would you recommend Protestants read the Apocrypha? Well, there's a lot of, there's three different people submitted questions, kind of all related to what books are in the Old Testament. Wow, there's no way we can cover all of that here in this time period. The first five books call the Books of Moses because from tradition, Moses is the one who wrote them down up until his death at the very, very, very end. So he wrote them down and brought them to us. And they're also known as the Pentateuch, Torah. They're these books that are the foundation, the law that were given in the Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, given and sort of the rest of the Bible is built on the foundation of those books of the Bible. And then there's the other question about the canon of scripture. It's a word canonical, the canon of scripture means that which books made it into the Bible and which ones did not, there were great, great people, great scholars, great people of faith who really debated these questions about which ones should be in there and which ones should not. I'm gonna hold off on the part of that and the apocrypha question until I go through another one here in a minute. So what do you got on these books of the Bible that made it in at this point in time? - Yeah, I mean, if we're looking strictly at the Old Testament, what we consider to be Old Testament scripture was the Hebrew canon. And so we accepted that as being truth. The vast majority of them are testified to in the New Testament. There are 10 books in the Old Testament that are not quoted from in the New Testament, but the rest of them were. But of those 10, many of them are referred to though. And so like judges isn't directly quoted from, but yet you see characters from judges mentioned in the New Testament. One book that does not come into the New Testament is Esther, but again, is a piece of Hebrew canon or Jewish canon. We treat that as scripture. - So tied to that were a couple of people asked about this period between Malachi and Matthew. There's 400 year creative of silence is called by some where we have no books of the Bible after Malachi and the Old Testament before Matthew in the New Testament called the intertestamental period. And then somebody said, I'd like to hear our readers digest version of the intertestamental period. Like, okay, so I'm gonna do 400 years in the next four minutes. You good with that? - Chop, chop. - Okay, let's have at it. So there were the four major periods of history took place there. One was the Persian period. The Persian period was at the time of the end of the Old Testament and it carried over beyond the time of the Old Testament when the Persians were in charge. During this time period, there was the conflict rising up between the Jews and the Samaritans because the Samaritan people were people who were Jewish people who had intermarried with the people who came in and conquered and took over the land. And so they were seen by the Jews as being half breeds and not trusted. So this carried on for 400 years and beyond. And we see it coming in the day of Jesus. Beyond the Persian period, the next period was called the Hellenistic period. Hellus is the Greek word for Greece. So Hellenism is this idea that the world can be made beautiful. Alexander the Great conquered that part of the world and when he did so, he didn't say, "We're going to force you to remain in our empire." He said, "We're gonna give you things so you want to remain in our empire." So Hellenism brought in modern medicine and education and the arts and entertainment and hygiene with water that flushed away sewage and all kinds of things were brought in and people said, "Hey, it's a better world." So Alexander the Great was pretty smart in how he was introducing these things to the world except he wasn't very smart and that he didn't have a succession plan. And when he died, there were four generals that fought each other way too much information for this. But two of those guys, one centered in Egypt and one in Syria and in between there is Israel. So they fought over who was going to have power over Israel and the people in Syria, they won the day. They're called the salutids, they won the day. And finally, one of these people in this salutid empire up in Syria said, "We're going to wipe out Jews." Have you heard that story before? Like every time he's running around, we're going to wipe out the Jews and he just wanted to put an end to Judaism actually. Just stop it. So he forced the Jews to eat pork. You know, that's not a good thing. He ended the Sabbaths. He stopped the Jewish feasts and holidays. And worst of all, he took a pig, this guy did and Tychus Epiphanes, took a pig and went into the altar and slaughtered the pig in honor of the false Greek god Zeus. Just to bring as much offense to the Jewish people as he could do. Well, the people started revolting against him and against the salutids. And finally, that leads to the third period, the Maccabean period, with this guy named Justice Judas Maccabias, that is, he led this revolt and Israel won independence, relative independence for about a hundred years, right before Jesus, about a hundred years before Jesus, they had relative independence. And during that time period, there was massive conflict between the Pharisees and the Sadducees. So we already get the Jews and the Samaritans, like they don't like each other. Now you get the Pharisees and the Sadducees and they don't like each other 'cause the Sadducees backed the Hasmonians, back these Maccabean people. They backed the people that were in charge. And the Pharisees said, they can't be the right people 'cause they don't come from Levi, they don't come Aaron, like they're not the right, they don't come from David, they're not the right people. And so there was massive conflict bubbling right up to the time of Jesus. And then just 60 years before Jesus, the fourth empire was the Roman Empire. Pompeii comes in Wednesday, the Roman Empire gets established and then the Romans start establishing who the king of the Jews is going to be. And they picked Herod to be the king of the Jews. And they picked who the high priest was gonna be in the religious side and they picked Anas and later his son-in-law, Caiaphas, both those names show up in the biblical story. And so all of this is happening at the birth of Jesus. It only been 60 years since Israel was independent. And so it wasn't like nothing happened during this 400 years. There was a lot taking place. It's just that none of us in our Bible. Now, seven books, I think it's seven books are part of the, what we call the Apocrypha and they are in the Catholic Bible if I'm not mistaken. And someone asked, should we read these books? Should we read these books of the Apocrypha? And I wanna say, sure, after you read this and study this, it's not like there's a ton in there which we would disagree with a little bit, but not a ton. But get familiar with this before you go into that so that you can have a deep knowledge of that. That's way too much info for this kind of thing, but it's a great question because it wasn't like nothing happened to the Jewish people in 400 years. In fact, everything happened so that when Jesus was born, it was bubbling over. People were waiting for a Messiah, not the religious Messiah, but a military Messiah to kick the Romans back to Rome and bring back the independence that they had just 60 years earlier. Add something to that. - I'm exhausted. - Yeah, two things with that. One, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory derives from the Apocrypha as well. Also within the context of the Apocrypha, again, not part of the Jewish canon, there is no statement of thus saith the Lord. Thus saith the Lord, we see throughout the Old Testament, except for a couple of books. Esther, obviously, 'cause the name of God is not mentioned, also Song of Songs, but again, those two books were included as part of the Hebrew canon. Obviously with the Maccabees, the Maccabean period, that's where Hanukkah, that's the festival of lights. And the rededication of the temple, after the temple was cleansed, after Antioch's epiphanies, it slaughtered the pig in the temple. And Hanukkah is mentioned in for a hot second in John chapter 10, when Jesus goes to the feast of dedication, that's what that is in reference to. That's all I got to add. - All right, we're just about out of time. So pick one that closes out. - That's how I'll pick this one, 'cause I know it's always on the minds of others. And again, can't fully address this question in a hot second. And so if you want to talk further about this, I beg of you, like call one of us. - What was it by me lunch? And you'll answer the question. I think that's how-- - Yeah, that's fine. We can do that too. - That's how it went down. - We can do that too. But how can our loving God do such harsh things to his people in the rest of the world? When we see these things happen in the Old Testament, specifically on here, it was quoted a part of Deuteronomy 28, verse 63, the first half of the verse actually deals with God's blessing upon the people, that it pleases God to bless his people. The back half of the verse, it says, "The Lord will find pleasure in destroying you." And great question, I don't take pleasure in punishing others or seeing others suffer. And then with that, there was another question related to it that I'll bring in here too. Like how does God's commands or approval of war against the Canaanites square with the New Testament's great commandment? Those are awesome questions. And again, if you want to talk more about this, call me, I'd be more than happy to talk with you about it, no mark with two. A couple of things on this, just briefly. One, I'm assuming that the question relative to the New Testament's greatest commandment is actually is pointing toward love thy neighbor. We have to remember that the greatest commandment is not love thy neighbor. The greatest commandment is to love the Lord our God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. And the second is like it to love thy neighbor. Love of neighbor flows out of love for God. We cannot fully and rightly love our neighbor if our heart is not positioned where God would have it to be, where if our heart is not centered in the things of God. As it relates to God's destruction of the Canaanite nations, we recognize a few things, just really quick. One, we see God's patience in carrying out his judgment against these Canaanite nations, recognizing that love and justice are not separate from one another. True love is bound up and truth is bound up and dealing with the issues of injustice. These nations and justice ran rampant in these nations. We see God's patience in bringing his judgment to bear on them though, when we look at Genesis 15 where God tells Abraham 400 years from now your people will return to Canaan. But the wickedness of the Canaanites has not reached its full measure. And so we see God's patience with the nations and tribes in Canaan and bringing judgment to them. The other part of this is we look at God's command, we think about God's command to Saul, to go into the Amalekites and basically kill them all is what God communicates. We look at that and we're repulsed by that. I believe that God has instilled that repulsion in us because for us we recognize that there is no human on this planet that has the moral agency to make that command. The reality is though God has the moral agency, we don't. When we look at what happens in the Old Testament, when we see these moments of just what we might consider to be harsh judgment, we need to begin not with the action or the command, but the person behind the command. And we recognize that God is perfect, that God is perfect in love. He is perfect in truth. He is perfect in justice. And God has the moral agency then to make the command of the Israelites to go in and to be his hand of judgment against those people. Because God sees things through the lens of eternity, we don't. God does not see things simply through the lens of the temporal, which is where we are limited. And so a lot of times our moral judgment is centered in that. And so just real briefly, which we probably don't have time for, but I'll just mention anyway. I had a social ethics class in college. And we used to deal with the idea, you know, social ethics deals in hypotheticals. A lot of times it's a social philosophy class on ethics. So a lot of hypotheticals, but one of those hypotheticals was if if you could kill baby Hitler, would you kill baby Hitler? Which I'm like, I don't have the moral agency to make that determination. Because I cannot see into the future. I can't make that moral judgment. But guess what? God exists outside of time. God sees into the future. God knows what is right and good. God could, if he had decided to, made that moral decision. We can't. And we can rest in the reality that God is perfect in all of his ways. - That's really good. - Again, brief statement. If you want to talk more about it, let's talk. - Yeah, I mean these questions are so phenomenal. And each of them probably could be an entire sermon series that what you just said reminds me of this passage out of Isaiah 55. For my thoughts are not your thoughts. Neither are your ways. My ways. Declares the Lord. As the heavens are higher than the earth. So my ways higher than your ways. And my thoughts than your thoughts. The bottom line is that I'm not God. You're not God. Only God is God. And we live under his provision. His love, his authority, his commands, his truth, his wisdom, long list goes on. Because we understand that his ways, his thoughts are so far above ours. We only see a snippet, just a little bit. God, we bring this to you right now as the one who's above us. The creator of the heavens and the earth. We can't even just dismiss that thought. Modern scientists believe there are more stars, more suns in the universe than there are grains of sand on the earth. You created that. So we understand that you are so far beyond us. And yet you want to deliver your truth to us. And so we are privileged to have a book, The Bible. We're thankful we have 39 books in the Old Testament, 27 books in the New Testament, 66 books all together. And when we take them and read and study and meditate on their truth, we begin to understand a little bit more of you each day. And that is our hope. I thank you for this time that we've had together just to share some reactions to these terrific questions and pray that the people of our congregation, really of Christianity, would continue to ask questions and seek answers. We entrust ourselves to you, and we do so in the name of the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit. And all God's people said, Amen. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]