Miscellaneous
SFC. Sean Miller. May of 2023
So about 10 years ago, I was teaching a class at a Christian University in Rockland. Some of you might know it. my alma mater William Jessup University. The class was called the Art of Biblical Interpretation. And it was a required class. If you were a biblical studies studies major, then you took hermeneutics, which is basically the same thing we call permanent light because these were the non biblical studies majors. But it was a blast. I loved doing this. And one day after class, I decided to go to their chapel service because they had this nationally known speaker that was that he came out with a book and doing the tour and a former pastor of a mega church in Southern California. So I went over to listen hundreds of students and professors and all of that listening. And at one point in his lecture, he looked at the audience and he said, no need all of this scholarship to understand the Bible. Just read it. It's clear, I mean, just read it. It's plain and I looked around at the puzzled looks on the faces of the students that were paying lots of money to go to school. I looked at some of the professors, a couple of them, like they were my professors when I was there in the late eighties and kind of a, you know, what, what are you saying? And in the faculty there was, at the time, I don't know if she's there anymore. There was a leading biblical archaeologist, a scholar in biblical archaeology. There were incredible Hebrew and Greek professors. There were New Testament and Old Testament professors that had their specialties, there were theology professors of different kinds, systematic theology, biblical theology, brilliant people. So it was really odd to hear this coming from the stage at this institution of higher learning. And I was thinking to myself, why am I giving all my kids, these kids, my students, these tools, they just need to pick up the Bible and read it and it all makes sense, right? Not so much, not so much. However, what I've noticed for 30 plus years of being in leadership in the ministry and teaching ministry is that very intelligent people will approach the scriptures oftentimes just in that way. And not only that, but they're taught to approach the scriptures in that way, talk about deep study and this sort of stuff sometimes. And oftentimes where it ends up is what does that mean to you read that? What does that mean to you and what does it mean to you? And what does it mean to you? And then we're all sort of just left with sort of this surface meaning. Now there are some places in the Bible, plain reading makes sense. And it is pretty clear, but more often than not, it doesn't make the sense that we think it makes. It's like that movie Princess Bride where the guy keeps saying the word over and over and the one guy goes, you keep saying that word. I do not think it means. What do you think it means? And oftentimes this is where we end up with the Bible. And you even have a lot of that in the pulpit. You have a lot of Christian authors that kind of give the lip service to context and cultural study and all of that stuff. The interesting thing about that lecture that day and the book that that guy was on a tour promoting is that in the book. And it was, he wrote a book on a really hot topic. And in the book, he said that he's not responding to this other nationally known Christian author and mega church pastor speaker that came out with a book on the same topic in the book. He says I'm not responding to that author, but in live lecture, he said he was responding to like he said, I had to write something. And so I thought that was a bit hypocritical. But what was ironic was that this speaker's book was written in partnership with a biblical scholar in our country, one of the big ones. And I'm just like, are you kidding me? Like your book without biblical scholarship? I mean, quite frankly, we can't even read the Bible in our own language without scholarship. There were some times in history, some points in history, we were having the Bible illegal and to translate the Bible, you could be put in jail, you could be killed for it. And so what I want to do in this series that we've been in called Deconstruction. When faith falls apart is we want to create space to talk about some of these challenging issues. And if you haven't listened to the first two talks, the series builds on itself. And so go back and listen to those. I think it's critical if you have friends, kids, grandkids that have left the church, maybe they've been wounded, maybe there's been some spiritual abuse, maybe they've just deconstructed and they're just staying there and they haven't reconstructed into a more beautiful faith, send them the talk and just say, hey, these are things I've been thinking about. I'd like to know your opinion. And so these are, these are conversations where we want to open up more and more, not shut them down more and more. But the reality is is that in a lot of faith communities, these types of complicated conversations get shut down and you can go onto their website and you can see like their doctrinal statement and if you don't agree, Lock, lock Stock and barrel with every single little point, then you're not a part of the tribe, go find another tribe and that's not SFC, that's not our ethos, that's not how we began over 100 years ago. And so what we're trying to do is walk into these conversations and into the tension that they sometimes create and find depth and beauty and strong and new faith in these conversations. And for some of you, the Bible has been a big hurdle in your life for some of the people that aren't here, some of the people that you know, it's been a big hurdle in their life. And so what I want to do today is something really simple. I want to give you a very long definition of the Bible and I'm sorry, but not sorry. And I've given you pieces of this definition in the past and I've actually did a whole message a couple of years ago about the Bible using part of this definition. But what I want to say up front is that I believed down to my toes. What Paul said to Timothy, what he said was all scripture is God breathed. And it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, righteousness. We've talked about that a lot. It just means to be in a right relationship with one another so that the servant of God will be thoroughly equipped for every good deed so to live out the Christian life to be more like Jesus. For me, the scriptures are like a non negotiable thing where it gets challenging though is when we start digging into things like, well, what did Paul mean by all scripture? I mean, what scriptures did was he referring to? Was he referring to the Greeks of, did he, was he referring to the Hebrew scriptures? The manuscripts that came before that? Was he referring to his own letters? Did he think he was writing scripture? Some people think he did? Some people think he did it? I mean, so you can see how just the first word, all the first word is, you can start pulling this apart and there's differences in Christian brothers and sisters that love Jesus have differences about this into more of that or more of that verse God breathed that word is a very strange word. It's a unique word. It's a compound word and it literally means God spirited or some people will just translate it, inspired God inspired. But the word, this idea of God spiriting or God breathing his spirit, it really takes us all the way back to guess where, where do I always go back to the garden to the very beginning? Well, actually I'm not in Genesis one with this one. We're in Genesis two and God forms humanity out of the earth. And um but he, but he doesn't stop there forms humanity. There's humanity but he has to do something, he has to breathe his spirit into them. And then it says that they became living. And so maybe that's how inspiration works. You know, there's the scriptures that we have and as we engage them, God breathes, he breathed that into us. When the writers who were writing, a lot of people think that inspired means that, you know, it's just sort of dictated like the biblical authors are like robots and just sort of like writing the letters. And what I want to tell you today is that it's a whole messy and beautiful than that. So I want to give you this really long definition. Let's put it up on the, on the screen and we'll sort of work through it. Um You too. Well, I'll get to it, but I'm just going to mention really quick and other parts we will dive into. And so here's the definition the Bible is culturally, yeah, divine. This course its Jewish and Christian meditation literature that communicates a united story leading to Jesus. And what's the purpose? It's for the shaping of the Christian community, the church and the transformation of the world. So I know that that's a lot. So we're gonna start at the very beginning and work through some of this. So uh right off the top in the Bible, culturally located when we read the Bible, it's a little bit like getting on an airplane and flying to a distant country where the culture and the language and all the customs and the people and everything is just different, the smells are different, the food is different and you get off the plane and if you've ever had that experience, it's a bit disorienting. And what we need in those situations is we need wise guides that can help us through those things. When Sally and I went to Malawi, we had a very wise person guiding us through. When we went to Kurdistan, we had a very wise person guiding us through. And so that's really helpful and this is where the scholarship comes in. This is where we need those that have gone before us. And so the Bible is culturally located. The Bible is written over a long period of time. The Hebrew scriptures took more than about 1000 years to come into their final form. This is not controversial by the way in biblical studies between conservatives, traditionalists and progressives. It's not controversial only if you're on the very end of the spectrum. And I don't advise going there. This is not a controversial thing. It took a long time for the final shape of the Hebrew scriptures to come into being. Now, there were, there were the verbal telling of stories and then people were writing things down and then more people and really it came into its existence the way that we have it after the Babylonian captivity. Just a few 100 years before Jesus, these total Bible nerds, these rabbis and these scribes were putting all of the final touches and making sure this is here. This is here, this is here. And by the way, they included things that included it in a completely different order, which I think makes way more sense than how we order our Old Testament. That's a whole other class. I'm in first chronicles right now in the first nine chapters of chronicles. This is like my daily reading. It is just like genealogy, genealogy, genealogy, but it all has a purpose and chronicles is actually the last book in the Hebrew Scriptures. And it makes sense that it is anyway. Again, it's another class I digress. How would you like to live in the year 10, 23 instead of here? Would you, would you go back? Yeah. This is the drop anchor in the year 10, like 1000 years ago. I mean, it's before the great schism. So you can kind of see what was happening and everything was falling apart in Christianity, East versus West and all of that. We don't want to go back 1000 years and live there. I mean, maybe we want to visit. Let me ask you this. What do you think people 1000 years from now? What are you gonna say about us? Do you want to go back 1000 years and have their science, their medicine, their way of treating things. Their way of treating even like cognitive and like learning disabilities and social issues or anything like that. And I don't think we want that. I wonder what people 1000 years from now are going to be saying about. It's really interesting. So the Bible is written over a long period of time. And one of the things we have to realize about it is that it's ancient and one of the most helpful things that we can remember is that the Bible, while it was written for us, it was not written to us. The Bible was written in its own context. We have to do that context justice before we take it to our context. When we take it to our context, that's called re contextualizing the scripture so that it's helpful and understandable and it applies to our life. It was written for Christians of all ages like the ages, but it wasn't written to us. And so we have to pause and humble ourselves and respect that about the scriptures. John Walton is a biblical scholar out of Wheaton College. If you don't know anything about Wheaton College, it's a flagship university for evangelicalism and it has been for a long time and John Walton leans conservative on a lot of issues. He's a traditionalist on a lot of issues, but he's a brilliant biblical scholar and his views on Genesis one and two and three, as well as the whole Hebrew scriptures might blow your mind a little bit. I encourage you to get this book the last word of Genesis one, if you haven't read it already, and he's got a whole series of these. Here's what he says. The Bible's message must not be subjected to cultural imperialism. That's strong language. In other words, we don't superimpose our culture on top of the biblical culture. In fact, we have to be aware of our culture. One of the first things that I do when I teach biblical interpretation, it's either in the first or second lecture is I talk about the gaps. You made gaps, like there's a distance, there's a great deal of distance between the world of the text and our world. The world of when it took place in our world, the world of when it was written down in our world, the ancient world and our world, there's a huge gap, there's language gaps, custom gaps, there's, there's cultural gaps, there's world view gaps, there's all of these gaps that we have to somehow bridge and deal with. Another problem that we have when we come to the text. And one of the reasons why we kind of impose our thinking on top of it before we get the thinking of the scripture is we have presuppositions that we all walk with. I call it baggage, we all have baggage and sometimes we're blind to the baggage. So we come to the text already presupposing certain things about it because they've been handed down to us because we've been taught to read at a very surface, not a very deep level. And so we bring certain thoughts and opinions to the text instead, instead of letting the scriptures speak to us and allowing the spirit of God to use the scriptures to speak to us. And on top of that, we also have filters that we put on. This is not a presupposition, but it's a filter. And what I mean by that is oftentimes we will come to the scripture but there will be a filter that we're looking through. And sometimes that filter is a political filter. Sometimes it's a social filter and there's all sorts of different filters. And sometimes we say, well, the Bible has made my filter but we got to check that and that's why we need to read in community with one another and live in a place like Saratoga Federated Church. That isn't like way we're in the extreme extreme or way we're on that extreme. But we're willing to live in the tension of wrestling with these things together and I'll say more about. So let me go on with this quote by John Mo. He says, its message transcends the culture in which it originated. So it's for us, its message is for us. But the form in which the message was embedded was fully permeated by the ancient culture. If you read his books, it will blow your mind if you could, if you could read one old Testament scholar. Well, there's two. If you could read one, I would say read John Walton. If you could listen to one, I'd say listen to Tim Mackey, New Testament scholar. Who would I suggest? Right. All right, lucky. So, get into the early parts of Genesis one. What do we have going on in this chapter in this poem? And Genesis two? That's part of what you'll discover in this book. And one of the things that John Walton Caos and believes is that the authors of Genesis one and two weren't so concerned about material origins. They were very concerned about functional origins. What I mean is that they weren't so concerned about how the world was created, how the cosmos was created. They were very concerned with why it was created. Now, they thought about material origins, but guess what? They're ancient people. How do you think they thought about the cosmos in a very ancient way? They thought about the cosmos in the same way because it was just the water that they swam in as the other ancient, near eastern peoples around them. And you can read creation epics from the Egyptians, from the Babylonians, from the Samarian, from the Assyrians. They all have versions of their creation epics. You see these biblical writers, they just had an ancient cosmology and we have to accept that I want to put a picture up for you and go ahead and put that picture up of the four pillars. Yes. So this one, so this is, this is sort of an illustration of ancient, ancient cosmology that the biblical writers had in their minds when they're writing Genesis one and two. And so, and you can even find there's a whole bunch of verses in the Bible to support how they viewed about the world. But you see that the earth is flat, the sea is sort of next to it. And it's kind of kept in by these mountains on each side. There's waters below, there's waters above, there's a fin above and it's kind of like holding everything, eats everything in, there's the sun and the moon and that sort of thing. They have this little floodgate that's going to open up and that sort of thing. You have the grave, she means grave, that's what it was. All the dead people go there. And, and so this is their ancient cosmology. Let me ask you this. I was looking at Cory Davis in the first service and I didn't say this, but I should have said he's a science teacher by the way, right down the street. And I should have said, hey, Cory, if your students submitted this for a test, would it be wrong or right? Like is this, is this true cosmology from what we know today? Is this accurate or inaccurate? Do you want your teenagers or your grandkids or whatever to submit this to their teachers. No, not unless we're talking about ancient cosmology. So, what do we have? We have some tension here. The biblical writers are writing something is scripture that we believe is God breath that's inspired. But they're writing from their ancient location. The Bible is culturally located and it's ancient, it's not ours. And so they're writing something, the bits inaccurate that they're telling God's word, they're telling truth, they're telling something that I believe is infallible. It's a message that succeeds and lives on and goes. So I know that this is hard for us to wrestle with. And so, you know, when you think about the ancient world, they had a lot of viewpoints that were quite regressive and inaccurate for us as we look back, we're like, no, that was wrong, that was wrong, that was wrong, that was wrong. And somehow in God's wisdom, he allows his truth to be communicated through people that had these inaccurate views on things, whether it was science or, you know, taking marriage and roles in the world between the sexes and stuff like that and take slavery. That's a huge issue in the ancient world. A third of the ancient world are slaves. And some people say, oh, this is a different kind of slavery and they say yes and no, yes and no. There was the brutal ethnic slavery in the ancient world and there was also indentured servitude. So it's just more complicated than just reading across the top. And see, I think the Bible Wars of the last 150 years when it comes to like Genesis, one are misguided and actually they're harmful, they divide people and they're pointless. And so we have to be able to humble ourselves and pause and see through the lens of the ancient writers and then asked, what is the spirit of God trying to communicate here? Why is this written? What is the purpose of it? Now, John Walton, who again, I encourage you to read. One of the things he says is that the ancient writers were in conversation with the other people groups around them when we read Genesis, one and two especially and three but one and two especially, they're in conversation with them. And this is what he says, he says in the ancient near East, people were created as slaves to the gods. If you read any of these creation ethics, this is what you'll find. And a lot of other, here's some weird stuff too. The world was created by the gods for the gods and people met and people met the needs of the gods. Now compare that to Genesis, one where people are created in the very image of God and they're invited into a holy space to become kings and queens and partner with God to fill the world with good things. Do we feel a difference in that conversation? They had the same ancient cosmology as those other people groups. But the reason for writing was completely different, they're telling a different story is what it comes down to. And so I got to spend the most of the time 11 other thing about Genesis one and at some point I hope to do a series maybe eight weeks long just through Genesis one. It would be super fun. I've been doing some periodic deep dives on it and reacquainting myself with it. So we'll see, I don't know. But Genesis chapter one, John Walton says is about a temple inauguration. It's a text that talks about a temple being inaugurated. So the first six days of creation are talking about this cosmic temple. A temple was a space where God's space and human space overlapped so that there can be fellowship. When you worshiped, you would go into the temple. And after you constructed your temple, the very last thing that you would put into it is an image of the God that you worship. Now, by the way, side note image and idol in Hebrew is the same word. So God creates this cosmic temple, this overlap of heaven and earth. And what's the very last thing he puts into it? His image you make us. That's a whole different story. OK. That's the first one I'll spend less time on these as I go. But this next one is also critical. So it's culturally located. But it's also divine discourse. It's divine human discourse. When we read the Bible, we're reading somebody else's mail is what we're reading. But we're reading a conversation. Sometimes we only get one side of it, but we're reading this conversation between God and people, people and God and people in one another. And they're working out how this story that God has given them is supposed to play out in the world in their personal lives and their community lives. We're listening to a conversation. There's another biblical scholar that's really challenged me. His name is Peter ends and he likes to say that God lets his Children tell the story. Now, let me ask you if you're writing a family history, which of your kids are you gonna allow to write it? Do you want, do you want your kids to tell the family history when they're teenagers? How about when they're in middle school? Is that when they write the family history? How about like elementary school? You let them write the family history. It's messy. Yeah. God. God lets his Children tell the story and over the last 150 years, what we've tended to do with the Bible is we have tended to emphasize the divine nature of the Bible over and above and sometimes to the exclusion of the human nature of the Bible. It's both, it's human and divine. And what do you think you're going to get when God lets sinful broken, not knowing at all, inaccurate, people tell the story, you're going to get something pretty messy. I think what this means is that when we read any particular text, we are hearing a perspective that from our vantage point, me or me not actual, but it still communicates sole truth. Are you with me? The biblical authors lived again in that world that was flat and so can we receive God's word with these twists and turns? That don't really seem right to us. And quite frankly, in some cases, are just inaccurate and still receive it as God's word. I think you can, I think you can. So it's culturally located, it's divine discourse. There's a conversation going on and we have to accept humbly the human side of the Bible. I think you can fully trust it. But if you just read it on the surface and say, hey, what does that mean to you? Well, it means this to you and this to me, then you're probably not going to get down to the beauty of the scriptures. And you're going to have some pretty bad interpretations, maybe even some harmful interpretations. So culturally located divine discourse. Here's the next part and this is really critical. Uh The next part is of our definition is a mouthful. But, but I, I think it's, it's super important. The Bible is Jewish and Christian meditation literature and I don't have this part on there, but it was in the original definition that communicates a unified story leads to Jesus. Now I get this unashamedly. I just, I pull this right from Tim Mackey in the Bible project and I encourage you, there's so much there. You can take seminary level classes for free. And I've watched some of these and they blow my mind. They were better than some of my seminary classes that I paid for. They're amazing. And so they have what they call the seven pillars at the Bible project. I I kind of call them seven affirmations about the Bible. And here's what they say. Some of these we've gone over. So it's divine in human literature, it is literature. You know, that God chose for whatever reason to communicate through a literary device. It's cool, it's OK. That's what God decided to do. He speaks in a lot of other ways too, but he decided to use literature. It's united literature. In other words, the Bible is United, not necessarily in all of its details, but in the meta narrative, there's one overarching story, a meta narrative that continues to move forward. And there are no contradictions in that story. Get into some of the details like the ancient cosmology and different things like that. You're like, wait a minute. That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. But the overarching story is united and the biblical authors were very careful in making sure that they were all telling the same story. And the spirit of God inspired them, I believe, to do that in such a remarkable and beautiful way. It's also Messianic literature. And so what do we mean by that? So it means that the literature is leaning towards some one, the star of the show, the anointed one, the Christ who is to come and change everything, not just change everything for ancient Israel, but for the whole world and really for the whole cosmos. Now, Christians believe that's Jesus. And so it all leads to Jesus and your best Hermana, your best biblical filter is Jesus. So go to Jesus and ask, does this make sense? Would Jesus say this when you're interpreting the scripture and if not need to wrestle with it, you need to wrestle with, well, where is this coming from? What is this supposed to mean with me or to me it's meditation literature. And so by that, I mean that the Bible isn't a book that you just sort of, it's not designed this way. You can just pick it up and read it. I read it every morning, sometimes I listen to it on the Bible app. Um And I do that, I try to read a lot of chapters at once so that I'm getting the whole story and I'm reminded of things, but the Bible isn't designed to just pick up and read a few verses and then that's it. Devotional reading is good. And I'm not saying that do your devotional reading do like our daily bread stuff and all of that. But the Bible is not designed primarily to be engaged in that way. It's not, it's designed to sit with for a long period of time, like years and years for a lifetime. It's designed to have you sink down into it to stay there. And that's when you start defying the beauty is when you sit for long periods of time and you dig down and you go back, even in your frustration, sometimes you go back and you keep digging, the biblical writers were brilliant and they were nerds. But the way that they designed it was not to give everything away. It's like, well, why didn't God just say it plain, like plain to us? You know, and that's also a cultural question, what playing to us might not be playing to another culture. But besides that point, he designed it so that as you see, you find and you seek more and you find. But if you don't seek, you have to find and only that, but you could have some really bad interpretations that you're walking with. And so because it's designed that way, we to slow ourselves down and sink down into the scriptures and we need a lot of help to do that. Sometimes we need great men and women of God that are scholars that love Jesus and want to help us. It's ancient, you've talked about that. It's also wisdom, literature. What do I mean by that? What do they mean by that? Well, here's what I mean by that wisdom in the scriptures means to live life skillfully. It means like when you read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and different things like that or when you read any of the scripture, it's trying to give us wisdom and what it's trying to do is it's trying to help us live life in the way that it was meant to be lived. And sometimes I call it the Jesus humanity, the scriptures are helping you, they're helping us, they're leading us to a place where we can understand what humanity is supposed to be like. What are we supposed to be like with one another? And we find that ultimately again in Jesus who is the ultimate perfect human. And this last one, of course, I put it really big in yellow because it's special. It's communal literature. Now, it's not necessarily better than any of the others. But here's the deal. The Bible was designed to be in, in community. And so it's OK to go seek solitude. Like don't go into isolation because that's harmful, but go into solitude. Study, read, read widely as I always say, but then come back to your community and wrestle with these things because that's the way it was designed. And when we're used in it, the way that it was designed, we're going to find the beauty in the scriptures we're going to avoid some of the pitfalls of bad interpretations as well. Last part of the definition, the Bible is culturally located divine discourse, Jewish Christian meditation literature that's told in a unified story that leads to Jesus. But it's also for the shaping of the Christian community, the church and the transformation of the. So when we read the scriptures, we don't primarily read for information, we read for transformation. And so that's, that's what God wants for us. And this is where I think the spirit works his power and he meets us where we're at and he pushes us and he challenges us and he beckons us forward to be able to walk through even the challenging times that we have because he wants to shape our lives. He wants to shape this community because he wants us to be a light to the world. And ultimately, he wants us to live out the scriptures in the most beautiful way so that world as well can be transformed. This is not a secret, it's not just for us, right? It's so there can be transformation in, right? And so I have some questions here and if you have the Bible app, there's a bunch of other questions and we'll have some small group questions online that you can download for your small group. But here are some things that you might want to wrestle with later on today at lunch. Just some light conversation, you know, which part of the definition of the Bible interested you the most or resonated with you? What is the biggest difficulty you personally have with the Bible? Or if you could ask one question about the Bible, what would it be? You might want to write some of those down and put them in the basket? And on May 21st, we're going to be having sort of like a panel discussion where we're wrestling with the different questions that have come in throughout this series. So if you want to do that, that's great. Well, but I think the most effective place to work that out is with your friends and with your family and your community, your small groups. So do that. In John chapter five, Jesus had a healing encounter with a man sick for 38 years. Can you imagine 38 years and heal him? And then he tells them pick up your mat to go home? Ok. And if you were sick for 38 years and got ill, you would pick up your mat and go home as well. But he did it on the Sabbath day in the Pharisees who had a, a jaded interpretation of the Sabbath that's putting it lightly criticized them. If they wanted to kill them. If they were done with them, they didn't like Jesus. Jesus, you're breaking the rules, you're breaking God's word. And here's what Jesus said to him. And I think this speaks to one of the main problems that I've seen in the tribe of Christianity that I've come to faith in and have grown in. We won't admit, but I think it actually has become a major problem. Jesus says the Pharisees, hey, you study the scriptures diligently and some of you do that. We do that. I, I do that. I, I try to do that. Probably not as diligent as I should be. But I, I, I go for it. You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them, you have eternal life, the Pharisees had made an idol out of the Bible. They're putting the Bible above God can go to some churches and read their doctrinal statement. And the very first thing is the Bible that's problematic. It's like, doesn't the Trinity like go above the Bible, like isn't God bigger than the Bible? Uh Who are we worshiping here, Jesus or the Bible? So we can get things really out of whack and nobody would ever admit that and nobody wants that to be true. But I think we have gotten lulled into this. The Bible has become something that was never meant to be and that needs to be deconstructed so that we can engage with it in a more productive way and we can rebuild our faith in a stronger way. So here's what Jesus says. These are the very scriptures that testify about it all leads to Jesus. Yet he refused to come to me to have what to have life. He's the giver of life. You don't wanna be like that. You want to receive the gift of God's amazing communication. His word to us. And we want to handle it as accurately as we can so that we can be effective with it. And that takes a lifetime of work and it takes all of us working together. But at the end of the day lead to Jesus and that's where we wanna go. Amen. All right, let's pray together, father. Thank you for your amazing care. And God, I, I just feel so much dignity in what it means to be human in the very best way that you would allow your Children to tell the story that you would engage with people from their location and time and history and all of the Brokenness that they have and that you would use them in an amazing way to craft the scriptures. God that's so powerful and so beautiful to me. And so God, I pray that we would um be authentic with you that our hearts would be real with you. We have real struggles with the Bible from time to time. And it's really easy to just ignore those or take the pat answers or the surface, the answers. And God, we don't want to do that. We want to dive in and at the end of the day, we won't cross the finish line until we see you face to face. We've been saying in this series, Lord that now we see in a mirror dimly one day we will see you face to face with all clarity. And until that happens, I pray that we would roll up our sleeves and wrestle with these things. Um At the end of the day, I pray that we would love you and love one another as you have loved us. And so we give this, this church is yours. We give it to you. You are the Lord of all of it. And God, we praise you for that because we don't have to be the Lord. And that's really, really good. And so we thank you. We praise you this morning in your name. And then man, he stand and sing a closing song as you rise. Please feel free to join us as we sing. Hymn 5 26. The Solid Rock.
So about 10 years ago, I was teaching a class at a Christian University in Rockland. Some of you might know it. my alma mater William Jessup University. The class was called the Art of Biblical Interpretation. And it was a required class. If you were a biblical studies studies major, then you took hermeneutics, which is basically the same thing we call permanent light because these were the non biblical studies majors. But it was a blast. I loved doing this. And one day after class, I decided to go to their chapel service because they had this nationally known speaker that was that he came out with a book and doing the tour and a former pastor of a mega church in Southern California. So I went over to listen hundreds of students and professors and all of that listening. And at one point in his lecture, he looked at the audience and he said, no need all of this scholarship to understand the Bible. Just read it. It's clear, I mean, just read it. It's plain and I looked around at the puzzled looks on the faces of the students that were paying lots of money to go to school. I looked at some of the professors, a couple of them, like they were my professors when I was there in the late eighties and kind of a, you know, what, what are you saying? And in the faculty there was, at the time, I don't know if she's there anymore. There was a leading biblical archaeologist, a scholar in biblical archaeology. There were incredible Hebrew and Greek professors. There were New Testament and Old Testament professors that had their specialties, there were theology professors of different kinds, systematic theology, biblical theology, brilliant people. So it was really odd to hear this coming from the stage at this institution of higher learning. And I was thinking to myself, why am I giving all my kids, these kids, my students, these tools, they just need to pick up the Bible and read it and it all makes sense, right? Not so much, not so much. However, what I've noticed for 30 plus years of being in leadership in the ministry and teaching ministry is that very intelligent people will approach the scriptures oftentimes just in that way. And not only that, but they're taught to approach the scriptures in that way, talk about deep study and this sort of stuff sometimes. And oftentimes where it ends up is what does that mean to you read that? What does that mean to you and what does it mean to you? And what does it mean to you? And then we're all sort of just left with sort of this surface meaning. Now there are some places in the Bible, plain reading makes sense. And it is pretty clear, but more often than not, it doesn't make the sense that we think it makes. It's like that movie Princess Bride where the guy keeps saying the word over and over and the one guy goes, you keep saying that word. I do not think it means. What do you think it means? And oftentimes this is where we end up with the Bible. And you even have a lot of that in the pulpit. You have a lot of Christian authors that kind of give the lip service to context and cultural study and all of that stuff. The interesting thing about that lecture that day and the book that that guy was on a tour promoting is that in the book. And it was, he wrote a book on a really hot topic. And in the book, he said that he's not responding to this other nationally known Christian author and mega church pastor speaker that came out with a book on the same topic in the book. He says I'm not responding to that author, but in live lecture, he said he was responding to like he said, I had to write something. And so I thought that was a bit hypocritical. But what was ironic was that this speaker's book was written in partnership with a biblical scholar in our country, one of the big ones. And I'm just like, are you kidding me? Like your book without biblical scholarship? I mean, quite frankly, we can't even read the Bible in our own language without scholarship. There were some times in history, some points in history, we were having the Bible illegal and to translate the Bible, you could be put in jail, you could be killed for it. And so what I want to do in this series that we've been in called Deconstruction. When faith falls apart is we want to create space to talk about some of these challenging issues. And if you haven't listened to the first two talks, the series builds on itself. And so go back and listen to those. I think it's critical if you have friends, kids, grandkids that have left the church, maybe they've been wounded, maybe there's been some spiritual abuse, maybe they've just deconstructed and they're just staying there and they haven't reconstructed into a more beautiful faith, send them the talk and just say, hey, these are things I've been thinking about. I'd like to know your opinion. And so these are, these are conversations where we want to open up more and more, not shut them down more and more. But the reality is is that in a lot of faith communities, these types of complicated conversations get shut down and you can go onto their website and you can see like their doctrinal statement and if you don't agree, Lock, lock Stock and barrel with every single little point, then you're not a part of the tribe, go find another tribe and that's not SFC, that's not our ethos, that's not how we began over 100 years ago. And so what we're trying to do is walk into these conversations and into the tension that they sometimes create and find depth and beauty and strong and new faith in these conversations. And for some of you, the Bible has been a big hurdle in your life for some of the people that aren't here, some of the people that you know, it's been a big hurdle in their life. And so what I want to do today is something really simple. I want to give you a very long definition of the Bible and I'm sorry, but not sorry. And I've given you pieces of this definition in the past and I've actually did a whole message a couple of years ago about the Bible using part of this definition. But what I want to say up front is that I believed down to my toes. What Paul said to Timothy, what he said was all scripture is God breathed. And it's useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, righteousness. We've talked about that a lot. It just means to be in a right relationship with one another so that the servant of God will be thoroughly equipped for every good deed so to live out the Christian life to be more like Jesus. For me, the scriptures are like a non negotiable thing where it gets challenging though is when we start digging into things like, well, what did Paul mean by all scripture? I mean, what scriptures did was he referring to? Was he referring to the Greeks of, did he, was he referring to the Hebrew scriptures? The manuscripts that came before that? Was he referring to his own letters? Did he think he was writing scripture? Some people think he did? Some people think he did it? I mean, so you can see how just the first word, all the first word is, you can start pulling this apart and there's differences in Christian brothers and sisters that love Jesus have differences about this into more of that or more of that verse God breathed that word is a very strange word. It's a unique word. It's a compound word and it literally means God spirited or some people will just translate it, inspired God inspired. But the word, this idea of God spiriting or God breathing his spirit, it really takes us all the way back to guess where, where do I always go back to the garden to the very beginning? Well, actually I'm not in Genesis one with this one. We're in Genesis two and God forms humanity out of the earth. And um but he, but he doesn't stop there forms humanity. There's humanity but he has to do something, he has to breathe his spirit into them. And then it says that they became living. And so maybe that's how inspiration works. You know, there's the scriptures that we have and as we engage them, God breathes, he breathed that into us. When the writers who were writing, a lot of people think that inspired means that, you know, it's just sort of dictated like the biblical authors are like robots and just sort of like writing the letters. And what I want to tell you today is that it's a whole messy and beautiful than that. So I want to give you this really long definition. Let's put it up on the, on the screen and we'll sort of work through it. Um You too. Well, I'll get to it, but I'm just going to mention really quick and other parts we will dive into. And so here's the definition the Bible is culturally, yeah, divine. This course its Jewish and Christian meditation literature that communicates a united story leading to Jesus. And what's the purpose? It's for the shaping of the Christian community, the church and the transformation of the world. So I know that that's a lot. So we're gonna start at the very beginning and work through some of this. So uh right off the top in the Bible, culturally located when we read the Bible, it's a little bit like getting on an airplane and flying to a distant country where the culture and the language and all the customs and the people and everything is just different, the smells are different, the food is different and you get off the plane and if you've ever had that experience, it's a bit disorienting. And what we need in those situations is we need wise guides that can help us through those things. When Sally and I went to Malawi, we had a very wise person guiding us through. When we went to Kurdistan, we had a very wise person guiding us through. And so that's really helpful and this is where the scholarship comes in. This is where we need those that have gone before us. And so the Bible is culturally located. The Bible is written over a long period of time. The Hebrew scriptures took more than about 1000 years to come into their final form. This is not controversial by the way in biblical studies between conservatives, traditionalists and progressives. It's not controversial only if you're on the very end of the spectrum. And I don't advise going there. This is not a controversial thing. It took a long time for the final shape of the Hebrew scriptures to come into being. Now, there were, there were the verbal telling of stories and then people were writing things down and then more people and really it came into its existence the way that we have it after the Babylonian captivity. Just a few 100 years before Jesus, these total Bible nerds, these rabbis and these scribes were putting all of the final touches and making sure this is here. This is here, this is here. And by the way, they included things that included it in a completely different order, which I think makes way more sense than how we order our Old Testament. That's a whole other class. I'm in first chronicles right now in the first nine chapters of chronicles. This is like my daily reading. It is just like genealogy, genealogy, genealogy, but it all has a purpose and chronicles is actually the last book in the Hebrew Scriptures. And it makes sense that it is anyway. Again, it's another class I digress. How would you like to live in the year 10, 23 instead of here? Would you, would you go back? Yeah. This is the drop anchor in the year 10, like 1000 years ago. I mean, it's before the great schism. So you can kind of see what was happening and everything was falling apart in Christianity, East versus West and all of that. We don't want to go back 1000 years and live there. I mean, maybe we want to visit. Let me ask you this. What do you think people 1000 years from now? What are you gonna say about us? Do you want to go back 1000 years and have their science, their medicine, their way of treating things. Their way of treating even like cognitive and like learning disabilities and social issues or anything like that. And I don't think we want that. I wonder what people 1000 years from now are going to be saying about. It's really interesting. So the Bible is written over a long period of time. And one of the things we have to realize about it is that it's ancient and one of the most helpful things that we can remember is that the Bible, while it was written for us, it was not written to us. The Bible was written in its own context. We have to do that context justice before we take it to our context. When we take it to our context, that's called re contextualizing the scripture so that it's helpful and understandable and it applies to our life. It was written for Christians of all ages like the ages, but it wasn't written to us. And so we have to pause and humble ourselves and respect that about the scriptures. John Walton is a biblical scholar out of Wheaton College. If you don't know anything about Wheaton College, it's a flagship university for evangelicalism and it has been for a long time and John Walton leans conservative on a lot of issues. He's a traditionalist on a lot of issues, but he's a brilliant biblical scholar and his views on Genesis one and two and three, as well as the whole Hebrew scriptures might blow your mind a little bit. I encourage you to get this book the last word of Genesis one, if you haven't read it already, and he's got a whole series of these. Here's what he says. The Bible's message must not be subjected to cultural imperialism. That's strong language. In other words, we don't superimpose our culture on top of the biblical culture. In fact, we have to be aware of our culture. One of the first things that I do when I teach biblical interpretation, it's either in the first or second lecture is I talk about the gaps. You made gaps, like there's a distance, there's a great deal of distance between the world of the text and our world. The world of when it took place in our world, the world of when it was written down in our world, the ancient world and our world, there's a huge gap, there's language gaps, custom gaps, there's, there's cultural gaps, there's world view gaps, there's all of these gaps that we have to somehow bridge and deal with. Another problem that we have when we come to the text. And one of the reasons why we kind of impose our thinking on top of it before we get the thinking of the scripture is we have presuppositions that we all walk with. I call it baggage, we all have baggage and sometimes we're blind to the baggage. So we come to the text already presupposing certain things about it because they've been handed down to us because we've been taught to read at a very surface, not a very deep level. And so we bring certain thoughts and opinions to the text instead, instead of letting the scriptures speak to us and allowing the spirit of God to use the scriptures to speak to us. And on top of that, we also have filters that we put on. This is not a presupposition, but it's a filter. And what I mean by that is oftentimes we will come to the scripture but there will be a filter that we're looking through. And sometimes that filter is a political filter. Sometimes it's a social filter and there's all sorts of different filters. And sometimes we say, well, the Bible has made my filter but we got to check that and that's why we need to read in community with one another and live in a place like Saratoga Federated Church. That isn't like way we're in the extreme extreme or way we're on that extreme. But we're willing to live in the tension of wrestling with these things together and I'll say more about. So let me go on with this quote by John Mo. He says, its message transcends the culture in which it originated. So it's for us, its message is for us. But the form in which the message was embedded was fully permeated by the ancient culture. If you read his books, it will blow your mind if you could, if you could read one old Testament scholar. Well, there's two. If you could read one, I would say read John Walton. If you could listen to one, I'd say listen to Tim Mackey, New Testament scholar. Who would I suggest? Right. All right, lucky. So, get into the early parts of Genesis one. What do we have going on in this chapter in this poem? And Genesis two? That's part of what you'll discover in this book. And one of the things that John Walton Caos and believes is that the authors of Genesis one and two weren't so concerned about material origins. They were very concerned about functional origins. What I mean is that they weren't so concerned about how the world was created, how the cosmos was created. They were very concerned with why it was created. Now, they thought about material origins, but guess what? They're ancient people. How do you think they thought about the cosmos in a very ancient way? They thought about the cosmos in the same way because it was just the water that they swam in as the other ancient, near eastern peoples around them. And you can read creation epics from the Egyptians, from the Babylonians, from the Samarian, from the Assyrians. They all have versions of their creation epics. You see these biblical writers, they just had an ancient cosmology and we have to accept that I want to put a picture up for you and go ahead and put that picture up of the four pillars. Yes. So this one, so this is, this is sort of an illustration of ancient, ancient cosmology that the biblical writers had in their minds when they're writing Genesis one and two. And so, and you can even find there's a whole bunch of verses in the Bible to support how they viewed about the world. But you see that the earth is flat, the sea is sort of next to it. And it's kind of kept in by these mountains on each side. There's waters below, there's waters above, there's a fin above and it's kind of like holding everything, eats everything in, there's the sun and the moon and that sort of thing. They have this little floodgate that's going to open up and that sort of thing. You have the grave, she means grave, that's what it was. All the dead people go there. And, and so this is their ancient cosmology. Let me ask you this. I was looking at Cory Davis in the first service and I didn't say this, but I should have said he's a science teacher by the way, right down the street. And I should have said, hey, Cory, if your students submitted this for a test, would it be wrong or right? Like is this, is this true cosmology from what we know today? Is this accurate or inaccurate? Do you want your teenagers or your grandkids or whatever to submit this to their teachers. No, not unless we're talking about ancient cosmology. So, what do we have? We have some tension here. The biblical writers are writing something is scripture that we believe is God breath that's inspired. But they're writing from their ancient location. The Bible is culturally located and it's ancient, it's not ours. And so they're writing something, the bits inaccurate that they're telling God's word, they're telling truth, they're telling something that I believe is infallible. It's a message that succeeds and lives on and goes. So I know that this is hard for us to wrestle with. And so, you know, when you think about the ancient world, they had a lot of viewpoints that were quite regressive and inaccurate for us as we look back, we're like, no, that was wrong, that was wrong, that was wrong, that was wrong. And somehow in God's wisdom, he allows his truth to be communicated through people that had these inaccurate views on things, whether it was science or, you know, taking marriage and roles in the world between the sexes and stuff like that and take slavery. That's a huge issue in the ancient world. A third of the ancient world are slaves. And some people say, oh, this is a different kind of slavery and they say yes and no, yes and no. There was the brutal ethnic slavery in the ancient world and there was also indentured servitude. So it's just more complicated than just reading across the top. And see, I think the Bible Wars of the last 150 years when it comes to like Genesis, one are misguided and actually they're harmful, they divide people and they're pointless. And so we have to be able to humble ourselves and pause and see through the lens of the ancient writers and then asked, what is the spirit of God trying to communicate here? Why is this written? What is the purpose of it? Now, John Walton, who again, I encourage you to read. One of the things he says is that the ancient writers were in conversation with the other people groups around them when we read Genesis, one and two especially and three but one and two especially, they're in conversation with them. And this is what he says, he says in the ancient near East, people were created as slaves to the gods. If you read any of these creation ethics, this is what you'll find. And a lot of other, here's some weird stuff too. The world was created by the gods for the gods and people met and people met the needs of the gods. Now compare that to Genesis, one where people are created in the very image of God and they're invited into a holy space to become kings and queens and partner with God to fill the world with good things. Do we feel a difference in that conversation? They had the same ancient cosmology as those other people groups. But the reason for writing was completely different, they're telling a different story is what it comes down to. And so I got to spend the most of the time 11 other thing about Genesis one and at some point I hope to do a series maybe eight weeks long just through Genesis one. It would be super fun. I've been doing some periodic deep dives on it and reacquainting myself with it. So we'll see, I don't know. But Genesis chapter one, John Walton says is about a temple inauguration. It's a text that talks about a temple being inaugurated. So the first six days of creation are talking about this cosmic temple. A temple was a space where God's space and human space overlapped so that there can be fellowship. When you worshiped, you would go into the temple. And after you constructed your temple, the very last thing that you would put into it is an image of the God that you worship. Now, by the way, side note image and idol in Hebrew is the same word. So God creates this cosmic temple, this overlap of heaven and earth. And what's the very last thing he puts into it? His image you make us. That's a whole different story. OK. That's the first one I'll spend less time on these as I go. But this next one is also critical. So it's culturally located. But it's also divine discourse. It's divine human discourse. When we read the Bible, we're reading somebody else's mail is what we're reading. But we're reading a conversation. Sometimes we only get one side of it, but we're reading this conversation between God and people, people and God and people in one another. And they're working out how this story that God has given them is supposed to play out in the world in their personal lives and their community lives. We're listening to a conversation. There's another biblical scholar that's really challenged me. His name is Peter ends and he likes to say that God lets his Children tell the story. Now, let me ask you if you're writing a family history, which of your kids are you gonna allow to write it? Do you want, do you want your kids to tell the family history when they're teenagers? How about when they're in middle school? Is that when they write the family history? How about like elementary school? You let them write the family history. It's messy. Yeah. God. God lets his Children tell the story and over the last 150 years, what we've tended to do with the Bible is we have tended to emphasize the divine nature of the Bible over and above and sometimes to the exclusion of the human nature of the Bible. It's both, it's human and divine. And what do you think you're going to get when God lets sinful broken, not knowing at all, inaccurate, people tell the story, you're going to get something pretty messy. I think what this means is that when we read any particular text, we are hearing a perspective that from our vantage point, me or me not actual, but it still communicates sole truth. Are you with me? The biblical authors lived again in that world that was flat and so can we receive God's word with these twists and turns? That don't really seem right to us. And quite frankly, in some cases, are just inaccurate and still receive it as God's word. I think you can, I think you can. So it's culturally located, it's divine discourse. There's a conversation going on and we have to accept humbly the human side of the Bible. I think you can fully trust it. But if you just read it on the surface and say, hey, what does that mean to you? Well, it means this to you and this to me, then you're probably not going to get down to the beauty of the scriptures. And you're going to have some pretty bad interpretations, maybe even some harmful interpretations. So culturally located divine discourse. Here's the next part and this is really critical. Uh The next part is of our definition is a mouthful. But, but I, I think it's, it's super important. The Bible is Jewish and Christian meditation literature and I don't have this part on there, but it was in the original definition that communicates a unified story leads to Jesus. Now I get this unashamedly. I just, I pull this right from Tim Mackey in the Bible project and I encourage you, there's so much there. You can take seminary level classes for free. And I've watched some of these and they blow my mind. They were better than some of my seminary classes that I paid for. They're amazing. And so they have what they call the seven pillars at the Bible project. I I kind of call them seven affirmations about the Bible. And here's what they say. Some of these we've gone over. So it's divine in human literature, it is literature. You know, that God chose for whatever reason to communicate through a literary device. It's cool, it's OK. That's what God decided to do. He speaks in a lot of other ways too, but he decided to use literature. It's united literature. In other words, the Bible is United, not necessarily in all of its details, but in the meta narrative, there's one overarching story, a meta narrative that continues to move forward. And there are no contradictions in that story. Get into some of the details like the ancient cosmology and different things like that. You're like, wait a minute. That doesn't make sense. That doesn't make sense. But the overarching story is united and the biblical authors were very careful in making sure that they were all telling the same story. And the spirit of God inspired them, I believe, to do that in such a remarkable and beautiful way. It's also Messianic literature. And so what do we mean by that? So it means that the literature is leaning towards some one, the star of the show, the anointed one, the Christ who is to come and change everything, not just change everything for ancient Israel, but for the whole world and really for the whole cosmos. Now, Christians believe that's Jesus. And so it all leads to Jesus and your best Hermana, your best biblical filter is Jesus. So go to Jesus and ask, does this make sense? Would Jesus say this when you're interpreting the scripture and if not need to wrestle with it, you need to wrestle with, well, where is this coming from? What is this supposed to mean with me or to me it's meditation literature. And so by that, I mean that the Bible isn't a book that you just sort of, it's not designed this way. You can just pick it up and read it. I read it every morning, sometimes I listen to it on the Bible app. Um And I do that, I try to read a lot of chapters at once so that I'm getting the whole story and I'm reminded of things, but the Bible isn't designed to just pick up and read a few verses and then that's it. Devotional reading is good. And I'm not saying that do your devotional reading do like our daily bread stuff and all of that. But the Bible is not designed primarily to be engaged in that way. It's not, it's designed to sit with for a long period of time, like years and years for a lifetime. It's designed to have you sink down into it to stay there. And that's when you start defying the beauty is when you sit for long periods of time and you dig down and you go back, even in your frustration, sometimes you go back and you keep digging, the biblical writers were brilliant and they were nerds. But the way that they designed it was not to give everything away. It's like, well, why didn't God just say it plain, like plain to us? You know, and that's also a cultural question, what playing to us might not be playing to another culture. But besides that point, he designed it so that as you see, you find and you seek more and you find. But if you don't seek, you have to find and only that, but you could have some really bad interpretations that you're walking with. And so because it's designed that way, we to slow ourselves down and sink down into the scriptures and we need a lot of help to do that. Sometimes we need great men and women of God that are scholars that love Jesus and want to help us. It's ancient, you've talked about that. It's also wisdom, literature. What do I mean by that? What do they mean by that? Well, here's what I mean by that wisdom in the scriptures means to live life skillfully. It means like when you read Proverbs and Ecclesiastes and different things like that or when you read any of the scripture, it's trying to give us wisdom and what it's trying to do is it's trying to help us live life in the way that it was meant to be lived. And sometimes I call it the Jesus humanity, the scriptures are helping you, they're helping us, they're leading us to a place where we can understand what humanity is supposed to be like. What are we supposed to be like with one another? And we find that ultimately again in Jesus who is the ultimate perfect human. And this last one, of course, I put it really big in yellow because it's special. It's communal literature. Now, it's not necessarily better than any of the others. But here's the deal. The Bible was designed to be in, in community. And so it's OK to go seek solitude. Like don't go into isolation because that's harmful, but go into solitude. Study, read, read widely as I always say, but then come back to your community and wrestle with these things because that's the way it was designed. And when we're used in it, the way that it was designed, we're going to find the beauty in the scriptures we're going to avoid some of the pitfalls of bad interpretations as well. Last part of the definition, the Bible is culturally located divine discourse, Jewish Christian meditation literature that's told in a unified story that leads to Jesus. But it's also for the shaping of the Christian community, the church and the transformation of the. So when we read the scriptures, we don't primarily read for information, we read for transformation. And so that's, that's what God wants for us. And this is where I think the spirit works his power and he meets us where we're at and he pushes us and he challenges us and he beckons us forward to be able to walk through even the challenging times that we have because he wants to shape our lives. He wants to shape this community because he wants us to be a light to the world. And ultimately, he wants us to live out the scriptures in the most beautiful way so that world as well can be transformed. This is not a secret, it's not just for us, right? It's so there can be transformation in, right? And so I have some questions here and if you have the Bible app, there's a bunch of other questions and we'll have some small group questions online that you can download for your small group. But here are some things that you might want to wrestle with later on today at lunch. Just some light conversation, you know, which part of the definition of the Bible interested you the most or resonated with you? What is the biggest difficulty you personally have with the Bible? Or if you could ask one question about the Bible, what would it be? You might want to write some of those down and put them in the basket? And on May 21st, we're going to be having sort of like a panel discussion where we're wrestling with the different questions that have come in throughout this series. So if you want to do that, that's great. Well, but I think the most effective place to work that out is with your friends and with your family and your community, your small groups. So do that. In John chapter five, Jesus had a healing encounter with a man sick for 38 years. Can you imagine 38 years and heal him? And then he tells them pick up your mat to go home? Ok. And if you were sick for 38 years and got ill, you would pick up your mat and go home as well. But he did it on the Sabbath day in the Pharisees who had a, a jaded interpretation of the Sabbath that's putting it lightly criticized them. If they wanted to kill them. If they were done with them, they didn't like Jesus. Jesus, you're breaking the rules, you're breaking God's word. And here's what Jesus said to him. And I think this speaks to one of the main problems that I've seen in the tribe of Christianity that I've come to faith in and have grown in. We won't admit, but I think it actually has become a major problem. Jesus says the Pharisees, hey, you study the scriptures diligently and some of you do that. We do that. I, I do that. I, I try to do that. Probably not as diligent as I should be. But I, I, I go for it. You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them, you have eternal life, the Pharisees had made an idol out of the Bible. They're putting the Bible above God can go to some churches and read their doctrinal statement. And the very first thing is the Bible that's problematic. It's like, doesn't the Trinity like go above the Bible, like isn't God bigger than the Bible? Uh Who are we worshiping here, Jesus or the Bible? So we can get things really out of whack and nobody would ever admit that and nobody wants that to be true. But I think we have gotten lulled into this. The Bible has become something that was never meant to be and that needs to be deconstructed so that we can engage with it in a more productive way and we can rebuild our faith in a stronger way. So here's what Jesus says. These are the very scriptures that testify about it all leads to Jesus. Yet he refused to come to me to have what to have life. He's the giver of life. You don't wanna be like that. You want to receive the gift of God's amazing communication. His word to us. And we want to handle it as accurately as we can so that we can be effective with it. And that takes a lifetime of work and it takes all of us working together. But at the end of the day lead to Jesus and that's where we wanna go. Amen. All right, let's pray together, father. Thank you for your amazing care. And God, I, I just feel so much dignity in what it means to be human in the very best way that you would allow your Children to tell the story that you would engage with people from their location and time and history and all of the Brokenness that they have and that you would use them in an amazing way to craft the scriptures. God that's so powerful and so beautiful to me. And so God, I pray that we would um be authentic with you that our hearts would be real with you. We have real struggles with the Bible from time to time. And it's really easy to just ignore those or take the pat answers or the surface, the answers. And God, we don't want to do that. We want to dive in and at the end of the day, we won't cross the finish line until we see you face to face. We've been saying in this series, Lord that now we see in a mirror dimly one day we will see you face to face with all clarity. And until that happens, I pray that we would roll up our sleeves and wrestle with these things. Um At the end of the day, I pray that we would love you and love one another as you have loved us. And so we give this, this church is yours. We give it to you. You are the Lord of all of it. And God, we praise you for that because we don't have to be the Lord. And that's really, really good. And so we thank you. We praise you this morning in your name. And then man, he stand and sing a closing song as you rise. Please feel free to join us as we sing. Hymn 5 26. The Solid Rock.