Inspiration

Well, good morning. My name is Paul. I'm one of your pastors here at Twin Lakes, and I get the privilege of sharing the word with you today. But before I do that, I just want to also thank those of you. There were dozens of you that went out and helped out at Project Homeless Connect in Watsonville, our first time out there. Here's some video of many of you out there serving. I mean, you gave haircuts, you fed people, you guided clients around.

And if you're not familiar with the program, the premise is to take all the resources that someone who's homeless could really benefit by and bring them into one central location, from ID cards to job referrals. You got to get a haircut, cleaned up, eye check, dental care, clothing, leads to shelter and housing that's affordable. That's the whole premise. And several of you helped out in that. So let's give them a hand. Great job.

If you're new to TLC, we are in the midst of what we call 40 days in the Word. That's the Bible. And we're trying to get it in us so that its author, Jesus, will more get in us. That's the whole idea. So in your bulletins, pull out those notes that say sermon notes. And while you're doing that, I have a question for you, kind of personal. I want you to think about your most embarrassing moment ever. We're gonna be watching those in heaven someday. They're all on video. I'm kidding. Thank goodness.

I'll tell you about mine. I was five years old, I think. Alright. And my mother had all of us kids in the car who were born at that point. It's some old Plymouth heading down to what is now Nob Hill. But if you're a long-term resident around here, you know it used to be called what? Disco. Remember disco? What kind of name is that? No dance floor to boogie out there, but all kinds of weird stores and things.

Well, I was on an aisle unchaperoned. Didn't see anybody either way. And there in front of me was the candy and gum rack. And I looked back and forth, and in a moment of poor judgment, I took the gum and slipped it in my pocket. Okay, so far so good. No one's grabbed me. Walking out the store. I remember feeling two emotions as I merged out of the exit with the family. One, no one's grabbed me yet. This might just work. And also the thrill of the successful heist at age five.

And then we get in the car. But being young, my levels of deferred gratification weren't that developed yet. So I took the gum out, slipped it under the passenger seat, waited about a minute, and then reached under a grout and said, "Hey everybody, look what I found!" To which my mother said, "You didn't find that. You stole it." Turns that car around, hauls us back to disco, does like all mothers did it that day, grabs you by the back of the hair, right? Hauls you in like a mama kitten with a little baby cat and says, "My son has something to tell you."

And without getting my Miranda rights or my attorney presence, they got a forced confession out of me with this big mean stern looking manager who, by the way, his son was here last hour and said, "That was my dad." So we had this connection. And he looked like him from my memory, really. And he was playing the part of trying to scare me straight and he said, "Young man, not only are we gonna make you pay for this," and it was seven cents, he said, "Your name is going to be placed permanently on a record." And I thought, in my five-year-old mind, a record? What does a five-year-old think of in that age back in the late 60s about a record? It's those big LPs that go around in the turntable, right?

I was totally confused at that point. I thought, why would they make a record that just goes around that says what? Paul Spurlock is a no-good scumbag thief. Paul Spurlock is a thief. Stay away. And who's gonna buy that record? I don't want it, although I wish I had it today. It'd be kind of funny, but... So I was totally confused, but the scared straight thing worked very embarrassed because you could tell the word was trickling out because as I left, every adult there was just kind of standing, you know, "Good for nothing, loser. You're gonna be in prison." I mean, they've given me that look like I'm gonna scare the devil out of this kid now. And they could do that back then.

And parents went along with it. "Yeah, scare him. Get him. Get him. Get him." Now days parents sue you, right? If you look across at their kids, then it was like, "Yeah, I just ripped him up." And so they did. I left. And the only thing I can say to my credit was, unlike when my brother Mark was caught shoplifting a few years later, I did not wet my pants. So ask Mark afterwards about his time at Value Giant in Watsonville.

So why do I bring this up? Get a shot at my poor brother. But also because there are things in our Bible, as we look in 40 days in the word, that if you have read cover to cover, you have read things that you say, "Whoa, what is that doing in here?" And you're hoping if you have a thoughtful relative or maybe skeptical friend, you're hoping, "I hope he or she doesn't read this story. It's kind of embarrassing." Makes God look angry or crazy or capricious or just really strange. Why is that in here?

Well, I want you to know today that you were in good company. Genuine Christians from the start of this whole thing have wondered about certain scriptures. They seem hard or harsh or you wish you could take them out if you were in charge of being the editor of the Bible. And it goes, like I said, all the way back to the beginning. Here's an incredible confession from the Apostle Peter. In 2 Peter 3:15, he says about Paul's writings, his scriptures. He writes, "Paul writes in the same way in all his letters, speaking in them of these matters. His letters contain some things that are," watch this, "hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort as they do other scriptures to their own destruction." But the key I want you to look at there is there's some scriptures even then that are hard to understand and I'm struck that this is an admission not from a new believer. This is Peter who's becoming an apostle at this point and he's saying some of this stuff is hard for me to get.

Well, that's what we want to look at today because you are either maybe at Thanksgiving time with that crazy uncle that kind of says, "Hey, I read your Bible the other day. Whoo! Let me tell you about this one. Crazy stuff and I want to talk to you about it." Or maybe you have a, you're a student, you're coming back from college and you've had professors shoot hard questions at you and you don't know what to say. It's in the book after all. What are you gonna do? Well today I want to be able to give you just some introductory level ways to respond in a winsome way, in an honest way, in a transparent way. We have nothing to hide here so that whether it's a crazy uncle, the co-worker, you're a student, you're gonna have something.

I mean raise your hand if you've ever had someone ask you an awkward question along these lines or you've had a question. Yeah, okay, a lot of us have, absolutely, and if you have it, you will. So let's tackle a few. I've chosen some of the hard ones that kind of get harder as we go along if you looked at your notes already and I've chosen ones that are commonplace. So let's look at that first one in your notes. It's question one. It says, "Is it the Bible full of contradictions or outright mistakes that undermine its own authority?" Isn't it? Let me just give you a classic one right here.

In Matthew 4 and in Luke 4 we have the famous story of Jesus being tested or tempted by Satan. This is preparatory before Jesus inaugurates his ministry and he's gonna be tested by the devil. And they all center around the devil trying to get Jesus to use his powers in a way that he shouldn't be at that time. Satan will say, "Okay, for example, in the first temptation, if you're really the Son of God, Mr. All-Powerful, turn those stones into bread." Jesus, of course, doesn't do that, doesn't fall for the trick. But now here's where the contradiction or alleged contradiction comes up.

Look at the screen. Matthew and Luke both talk about turning bread to stones first. But in Matthew, the next temptation is Jesus being tempted to throw himself off of the temple to jump off. Angels will catch him if he's really the Son of God, right? But Luke has that third. Matthew then has the temptation to worship Satan to be given all the kingdoms of the world. But Luke has that second. So question, who is right? Do we have a discrepancy here, an error? Is Matthew right? Is Luke right? Are they both wrong? What do we do? How do we answer this? And who is right?

Well, as far as who is right, we don't know. But this speaks to even a bigger issue about our Bible. It's robust with actual factual history. Even non-Christian scholars use especially Luke and Acts for history and they love the Old Testament for clues to archaeological digs. It has good history and accurate history. But this is an example of how sometimes the writers will depart from a chronological emphasis for a bigger purpose. And here it is, a climactic or theological emphasis. Both have different audiences here. Matthew wants to give the climactic temptation to his audience in a way that best meets their needs. So he focuses on Jesus being tempted to worship Satan. Why? Because Matthew wants his readers going away saying, "Wow, this Jesus as the ultimate high priest would never ever have us worship anybody but God." So he ends with the temptation to worship another God.

Okay? Luke's emphasis though is very geographical. Luke loves to talk about things around Jerusalem because he knows that's where all of the climactic endeavors of Jesus' life come to their head. And so Luke ends with Jesus on the temple which is in Jerusalem and all that geography right there because he wants his readers to know it's in Jerusalem where this thing is going to finally go down. So that's his emphasis. That is why they differ in chronology because it wasn't about strict history, it was about theology and climactic emphasis. You follow me on that? Okay, good.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is just one example of how we can use a little digging deeper to unearth what's going on here. I could do many more. There are many more, by the way, but there are good books and there are other studies we have that show maybe there's another angle to look at this that explains the alleged contradiction. And for this instance, that is the answer. Alright, so that's not so tough. Let's move on to even a tougher one, but before I do, this might even help clear this up. Think about if your kids come home from the boardwalk. You say, "How did it go?" And what do they say? "Oh man, the giant dipper was totally awesome and the log ride, oh, what was good, oh, what it was so cool. Then we went on that pirate thing and it swung us back, oh, we almost lost it, it was just so rad, right?"

They have given you an accurate history of their day, the rides they went on, but you know as well as I do, their emphasis wasn't strict chronology. It was climactic thrill emphasis, but it doesn't mean or follow that their history is erroneous or that what they tell you didn't happen. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John do the same thing. They alter the emphases for a purpose. So when you read, look for that, again it's not an error or bad history, it's an emphasis to make a better point.

Well, let's go to the second one now. Second question says, "How do you decide what part of the Bible is still valid for today?" Doesn't the Bible have all kinds of weird commands that no one obeys anymore? If you've read the Old Testament, you have surely stopped and gone, "Whoa, that's odd." I mean, just take circumcision for an example. Yeah, when all the guys are like, "Yeah." When this first was inaugurated, it didn't go, they started with the baby boys, but anybody that was a grown-up guy had to get on board too. That's right. Can you imagine that scene?

I mean, Abraham's, you know, revealing this to the other guys. By the way, God wants us to do this thing, it's part of his contract covenant with us in the middle, like, "Whoa, wait, wait, can we renegotiate here, Abraham?" Can you go back to God and say, "How about a different haircut?" Or maybe we'll wear our clothes differently, or a tattoo maybe, but circumcision, really? I could just see that. I mean, that would be an awkward scene. And it does sound weird. It does sound a little crazy.

Well, you have to understand that these things fall in what are called covenants. So here's your key question you want to ask. When you find a command or something that seems weird or bizarre, and you wonder, "Do we follow this today?" Ask this question. What covenant, that's a fancy Bible word for contract, does the teaching occur in? For example, if you're back in Old Testament Israel, after Moses comes down the mountain of the Ten Commandments and then all the other laws written out of that, if you're in the Jewish nation, you are obligated to follow that old covenant. But if you're not in the Jewish nation, you were not obligated to follow it.

Here's an example that might help clear this up for us. How many of you know about what the highest speed limit is in our country? Anybody know the highest you can, the fastest you can drive in the country? In the 90s, it used to be Montana. There were no speed limits in places. They changed that. The teenagers thought that was great and got carried away. Right now, presently, it's in Texas. And the fastest you can drive in certain rural areas of Texas is 85 miles an hour. Yeah. Now you're going, "Oh, like what?" Yeah, but come on, I've seen a lot of you driving down I-5 to Disneyland and you're doing 85. We all know this.

Well, now here's, here's what I'm getting at. If you live in Texas, you are in a particular contractual speed limit agreement area. That's your thing. You can go 85. Here in California, can't go 85. We're obliged to go by our limit. I think it's 70 on some of our roads. Okay, the old covenant is sort of like a state's only set of laws that if you're in that state, you got to live by them. But if you're out of that state, you don't. So that's the old covenant. We're in the new, which kind of did away with all the different state distinctions that now it's more of a federal thing.

So just like Texas can go 85 and we can't, Texans still can't disobey the bigger rules like don't kill, don't steal. That applies to all of us. So how do we decipher which ones were just particular to then and there and how much and what is for us today in the new covenant? And isn't there some overlap? Yes. Well, I have three C's that I hope will help show the way in figuring out what is now obsolete and what is still binding upon us.

The first C is ceremonial. You might want to write that in your notes. Just write in ceremonial. What is that all about? It has to do in the old covenant with rituals and regulations and different religious customs they did that were binding upon them but not binding on anybody else. If you didn't live in Israel then you didn't have to do it. But they did it because again God wanted to distinguish them. He wanted to make sure that they were particular and He safeguarded them. Even some of the hygiene things and dietary laws kept them alive literally.

But again there's some of the bizarre ones like I mentioned earlier. Circumcision. What's that all about? Well, it was again a demarker and it was profound because it was a way for God to say, "Look, you might think you're in control of your life and your progeny but let me just give you a harsh demarker if you will to remind you that I am in control of life. So remember to give me that honor in all of that which you do." So it had significant sin but it had a greater fulfillment. It was preparing them from circumcision physically to a much greater fulfillment in Christ and that was this. Circumcision of the heart.

As Colossians 2:17 shows us these former physical things just for Israel were a shadow compared to the full substance and fulfillment in Christ. So it's actually a bigger demand. It's not just a demarker physically. It's your whole heart circumcised for the sake of Christ. So it's a bigger deal and it set them up to recognize it when it came. So that's why they do that and that's why the Old Testament in some ways, in those covenantal ways, has some obsolescence built in. Look at Hebrews 8:13 on the screen which says when he said, "A new covenant." With that he has made the first obsolete. But whatever is becoming obsolete and is growing old is ready to disappear. So you see they did it. It was for them. It was particular. Not for us why. It's got obsolete.

So if something that you read in the Bible is ceremonial in nature, appreciate it for what it was, apply the deeper fulfillment today, but realize you're not obligated to follow an Old Testament law like that. Well let's look at the next see. The next see has to do with conduct laws. These are our morals. These are things based on God's unchanging character. His standards eternally are right and wrong, good and evil. These are unchanging because again they're based in his character. So they're relevant to today. They can be summed up in this, "Love your neighbor as yourself." But Paul with some of this particular ones, how do we know which one's still to follow?

If you see an Old Testament moral code of some kind or particular law reaffirmed in the new like don't steal, don't lie, don't take your neighbor's wife or husband, oh, keep following those. But they're always reaffirmed in the New Testament. That's how we know they're still for us today. So to summarize, ceremonial, obsolete, a shadow, a pointer, conduct, love your neighbor as yourself. And the final see is civic commands, also known as your judicial, not jiu-jitsu, judicial commands. This is where most of the confusion comes in because we say, "Well, they had this way of running their government in their cities. Are we supposed to do it like that?" No.

Again, that was just for them, like a state's law that's now obsolete. But what do we do with it then? We look at it and we say with the master ethic of love your neighbor as yourself, what did they do that helped community flourish? It'd be a good idea to keep doing that. So let's say you have a heart for politics. Great. Get into it, go as high as you can, and use your Christ formed conscience to give a conscience to the state. States need Jesus-like ethics to inform them or they go bad. Think about Stalin's Russia or Hitler's Germany. Without a Christian conscience informing them, they went horribly bad.

So that's a great thing to get into. On a lesser level, when you walk into that voting booth, don't think, "Ha ha, what am I gonna get for me? I'm gonna vote in ways to give me goodies." No. The Christian says, "Huh, let's see, my master ethic is love my neighbor as myself." So which candidates and which propositions or whatever initiatives will best help this community flourish and especially look out for the vulnerable? I would think that's how you'd want to do it. How would Jesus have you vote? So that's how I go about it when I go in and I think that's how we could apply the civic stuff that we don't have to follow literally, but it has some good ideas for us today.

So ceremonial to sum up. Obsolete. The conduct, if it's still in the New Testament, keep on doing it, and the civic look for good examples. So that leads us now to our third and most difficult question of all. Probably spend the most time here. Look in your notes. Here it is. It's a biggie. Doesn't the Bible support regressive practices like God or Dane's slaughter? And why is God so apparently full of wrath all the time in the Old Testament? It's like, come on, if you read the Old Testament, it's like God, sign up for anger management. It's just over the top sometimes you think as you read it. And I would agree on first reading.

This is why leading atheists, and here's probably the world's number one, he's read some of these Old Testament stories and this is what he said. This is Richard Dawkins saying, "The God of the Old Testament is vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser, a misogynist, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, phyllicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully." Wow, that's a mouthful. He says that because he's read some of the verses in our book and here's one that will probably make you uncomfortable. Joshua 11:14 says, this is a war context, "All the spoil of these cities and the cattle the sons of Israel took as their plunder, but they struck every man with the edge of the sword until they had destroyed them. They left not one who breathed." Whoa, how's that around the Thanksgiving table with Uncle if he gets a hold of that one, right? And you'll never see in the popular Precious Moma series somebody making up one of these, right? They don't do that for this. It's all the happy stuff, baby Jesus, etc., right? It's because this can be embarrassing for us.

So seriously though, what do we do with all of this? Well first, we got to jump into their historical situation and go, "Oh, this was descriptive for us. We're not to go do that." But it was prescriptive for them. They were to go out and fight at times. Why was this? Well, think about their situation. Children of Israel come out of Egypt. They don't have a country. They're nomadic. They're living in tents. They are highly vulnerable to any kind of raid or war. And if they go down, something bad is going to happen. You have to understand this is a time of, I would say, martial law where the people of God had to be protected. Why? Because the prophecies and God's plan had set it up so that the Savior of the world, the one to bless everybody, is coming out of this group. They have got to make it. Jesus is coming out of this group.

So yes, for a time, God set up sort of a martial law. And we would see this today. If we had a great earthquake here in the food shortages and you went out and tried to steal some of that food, you could get shot. You steal food today, you go to prison. You steal food during martial law, it's more like a capital crime, isn't it? This is the kind of situation we're dealing with. This people had to survive and they were going up against some pretty ugly situations. So remember, it is disturbing, but God is going to meet them where they're at. In almost a barbaric world, He's going to say, "I'm going to use pointers, ceremonial things, other conduct things to point you eventually to the master ethic in Jesus." That's where we're going. And one day, He's going to say, "Stop fighting your enemies. Love your enemies." That's where He's taking them.

But He's got to meet them where they're at. Secondly, this battle talk we read about, most of the time, I would think almost all, is hyperbolic. What do I mean by that? It's like today. Sometimes when you have a conflict or even sports, you break, "We're going to massacre you!" Right? We don't really mean that. We mean defeat soundly. Here's some examples of even other people's living at the same time who had this hyperbolic war talk. Here's Egypt's Tut III. He said, "The numerous army of Mitanni was overthrown within the hour. Annihilated totally like those no longer existent." In fact, though, we know Mitanni's forces lived on for several centuries after that.

Here's another example. Moab's King Misha said, "The northern kingdom of Israel has utterly perished. It will be gone always." Well, they didn't perish. They're still around. They went on. In fact, they were captured by the Assyrians and hauled off a century later. They were not utterly destroyed. What's going on here? It's hyperbolic war talk. And we see this in the Bible too. Look at Joshua 11:22, it says, "There were no Anakim left in the land of the sons of Israel." Alright, Anakim, gone. But then just three chapters later, watch this, "Now then, give me this hill country about which the Lord spoke on that day. For you heard that on that day, the Anakim were there, and not just there, with great fortified cities." Three chapters later, they're from nothing to great fortified cities. What is going on? This is classic hyperbolic war talk, and the Bible adopts that literary genre too. So it was understood by them.

We still do this today in some ways, in lesser ways. I found some incredible headlines that had incredible hyperbole just last week here's one it said, "David Letterman malls Jay Leno." Or how about this one? It's even more, "John Stewart disembowels Mike Huckabee." Disembowels? Wow. Or how about this, "McCain goes nuclear on Obama." Now we read that and we realize he's talking about an interview or something or one or a debate where one beat the other decisively apparently, but it's not literal. It's hyperbole. And I have a video to show you that even involves children using death talk. They think they're gonna die, and I leave it to you to decide literal or hyperbole.

Check out the screen. This is not to run into the trees. I'm gonna slide from over here. Mommy and dad, they're gonna kill me. I lost my cancer. It fell out on this lead, right? Mommy won't kill you. But it was so much money for Jay and she thought I could take care of it. Mommy won't kill you. Dad was gonna get another one. And now, do you know what I can do? It's right here, Miles. I found it. Mommy won't kill you. Sometimes kill means killing. Sometimes it means I hope Mommy don't really mess with us. We're losing the camera.

So we do the same thing today in lesser ways, and they did it back then. And by the way, archaeology even supports us. We don't find ruins of massive, fortified cities or civilian areas that were wiped out. What you find are references like this one scholar put it. He said, "And the evidence indicates that no civilian populations existed at Jericho, Ai, and other cities," mentioned to Joshua. In other words, what we do find is evidence that places like Jericho were more like armed encampments. The women and children, when the armies were coming, they were taken out. That was the general thing. So this is like men fighting men. This isn't a genocide or people wanting to attack every last person. It was men fighting.

So that's what the archaeology supports. And finally, third, you've got to realize these tribes that we were talking about in Canaan at the time, this is a bad people. From the day that the Jews left from the Exodus, a particular tribe, the Amalekites, followed them for hundreds of years, and they picked off the old or the weak or the child that might stray from the camp, and they were butchers. And they made up the other Amorites and all the Kite people with names that ended in Kite, and made up this Canaanite group of people that were in the land where Joshua was bringing the Israelites after Egypt. But still, they're in there. Why kick them out? Here's why. God says He owns the land.

The promised land is actually His. He gave the Jews the land for a certain purpose, bring Jesus into the world, be my people, and be a blessing to every ethnic group, by the way. But if you're in His land and you begin to pollute it, as the Bible says, He won't have patience forever. How long did He allow these people to do their thing? 400 years He allowed the Canaanites to be in the land. They were vicious, and they had horrible, horrible practices. Let me just share a few with you. Archaeologist William Albright has discovered some relief, some artwork, some descriptions of the god the Canaanites revered amongst their high pantheon. Her name was Annith, and she was known for this. She's depicted as waiting in the blood of humans up to her neck. She promoted child sacrifice, sexual violence. It was said that she had joy at the sight of the footury, and she washed her hands in human gore. This is the Canaanite deity, Annith. This is the one they worshiped, and it's the one that informed their behavior.

And yet God had 400 years of patience before driving them out of His land that they were polluting with these practices. That's longer than we have been a country. This is also one reason why the psalmist, often as you read them, are complaining against God. These people are among us. They have these horrible practices. They pick off our old and our children. Would you please give us some justice here? And yet most of the psalmist went to their grave, never seeing God bring about justice for people like this. 400 years of patience. He's not just snappy and quick in His judgments. He's far more long-suffering and kind and loving. But eventually His patience wears out, and justice comes in, and He did. He drove them out of the land. That was the point, by the way, not genocide. It was to get them out from the pollution they brought.

Okay, but Paul still, as you read the Old Testament, he seems to be angry an awful lot. Yes, he was. Always read the end of those texts, though, because he always says, "But my hope for you is to come back to loving kindness because I never give up." But before he can get to that, justice sometimes is called for. A skeptic and atheist, he was a Yale professor. His name is Miroslav Volf. He was born in Croatia back when it was Yugoslavia. He lived through the nightmare of their incredible wars not long ago, and this is what he wrote. He said, "I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? But my last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia." According to some estimates, 200,000 people, my people, were brutalized and killed beyond imagination.

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the last part of the past century, where 800,000 people were hacked to death in 100 days. How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandfatherly fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being love. God has wrath because God is love. Love to be full-orbed must have justice. We all know this.

I remember being with René just a few years ago in Nicaragua. This really came home for me. It was one of the most angry times in my life for a moment, or a few. We met a poor farmer in the flesh, told us his story. He was there among some of our mission contacts that provide farming initiatives, just so these people can feed themselves because many don't have enough. And he had done all his work and he'd raised 12 healthy chickens. He'd made contact with the city. He was going to sell them there so that he could have enough grain to feed his family for the next year. Now he's got to get them to the market first. So he has to travel and escape gangs and robbers and he's on a bicycle that was broken down. But thank God he makes it.

But once he gets to the city, a messenger for the buyer tells him, "Come back tomorrow." He's like, "What? This isn't a man that has the means to just go to a hotel like you or I could." He's got to find an alley in this town just to sort of hide out and try to sleep in the midst of watching the chickens so they don't get away or get stolen. This is his savings right here. So he goes back the next day, haggardly, tired. He says, "Okay, I'm here. Same message. Come back tomorrow." This goes on for another day. On day four, he finally gets to meet the buyer. But the buyer says, "I'm not going to give you what we agreed on." What? Well, look, your chickens, they don't weigh what you said they weighed. And they didn't because they'd gone four days without food and very little water. And so they'd all lost weight. They were worth less money now. And the buyer knew it. And this was his trick upon a poor man who had nothing else to do to feed his family with. And he just stole from this man.

And this men and women, this is what the Old Testament talks about with unjust scales and how God gets incensed at those, the wealthy, like this buyer, that prey on the poor and the widow and the orphan and just mess them over for their own good and fattening of themselves. And if that doesn't anger you, pray to God you'll have a heart of justice and love. René and I, I mean, I wanted to just curse and go to, I wanted to go to the town and we wanted to pummel that guy. We were so angry because we were looking at the man of whom this had affected. That's why God gets angry at times in the Old Testament. It's a tough time and people do this kind of stuff and they still do today.

But thank God when Jesus came, he said, "Yep, you're a bunch of barbarians. But I'm going to give you a model, a pointer, as much as you can take, like a parent that gives a kid as much as they can handle. I'm going to grow this people up, give them more, more of my revelation, more enlightenment, more and more and more. Jesus comes and then he's going to point even more through the age of the spirit and say, "Here's where I want you to go. Leave it behind. Let's get to a Jesus-like ethic where you don't mess people over like that." That is where God wants to take us.

So finally, we see our God is a God of love and justice. So I have a question for you. Number four, if I took the Bible seriously, wouldn't it interfere with my plans for my life? Oh yeah, it does. It's like a virus that gets in and starts to actually have the audacity to challenge your thinking, your feelings, your values, your interests. It begins to do this by the spirit. This is why even dictators today ban the Bible from their countries, why they know it's a subversive book. If people start getting this Bible and letting it get into them, its author, Jesus, starts to make them want to love their neighbors themselves. And that's not good for a communist regime. They need to have them in fear, not fearing God.

And so this book will radically change your life. I know it's ancient and some of the things sound weird, but fast forward 3,000 years. Just think if somebody came and looked at like a video of our age, you think they'd find us weird? I'm going to go, "What's with this Lady Gaga and Duck Dynasty? What's that all about?" They'd think that was weird. And we don't even have to go to the future. When I'm in Africa, I said, "Villagers say to me, 'I want to ask you a question. I've heard you have the bike that goes nowhere.'" I go, "What do you mean?" I go, "You have the bike in the gym. It goes nowhere. You have the plane. You can make a plane to come here across the ocean, but you cannot make a bike that goes anywhere." And I have to go, "Oh, so they think we're crazy, our customs." Well, the ancients had some strange things too that we may not fully understand.

And let me just be honest as a pastor, I have a lot of satisfaction in my studies of these things, but there are still some questions I go, "I don't know." But we have a faith and a Jesus that says, "Let's be transparent about this. Let's investigate this together because all truth is God's truth. Let's let it go where it leads. We're not ashamed of this. We're going to investigate it." That's the kind of Jesus and the kind of faith we have. If you dig into it, you're going to get some answers for uncle at Thanksgiving. And you're going to be able to have confidence to know you can even get more.

As Jesus takes us on a trajectory of our barbarism, even for us, to Jesus-like ethics that change people. It changes marriages. It heals relationships. It inspires us to greatness beyond ourselves. It exposes our selfishness and says, "Jesus can do better with that heart." That's why we get into the Word. It makes us more like the author of the Word. Let's pray and ask Him to do that today for us all.

Jesus, thank You so much for Your Word. We don't understand it all even today. Like Peter, it has hard things. But thank You that we can be honest about it. We can freely investigate it and talk about it and ask questions. So help each one here to be able to seek out their heart and mind questions and find answers in You. Help us all to be winsome and engaging and honest with what we know and what we don't know with those crazy uncles at Thanksgiving. And above all, Jesus, I pray that our own personal trajectories would be like the Jesus ethic we talked about earlier today. Let us never stop moving towards being more like Your Son. In Your incredible name we pray. Amen.