#279 Wes Huff - This Might Be the Most Important Biblical Discovery of the 20th Century

What's up? Welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Man,

breakfast this morning we realized it's been almost one year exactly since we've made contact

and we're trying to get you. So long time coming. Yeah. Yeah. I'm glad I came to fruition.

Me too. Me too. But so I want to give I want to start you off with an introduction here. Just

Wes Huff. Born in molten Pakistan you spent part of your childhood in the Middle East surrounded

by Islam and other world views and overcame a rare condition as a kid that left you temporarily

paralyzed without medical explanation. I call that a miracle. Now you're the vice president

of Apologetics Canada where you equip people with answers to tough questions about scripture,

history and faith. A Canadian Christian apologist reformed Baptist theologian in one of the

sharpest voices defending historical reliability of the Bible and our Christian faith.

You approach skeptics with clarity, grace and rock solid evidence making the case that the

Bible isn't just a book of faith. It's the most scrutinized and preserved text in human history.

A father to four husband to Melissa and most importantly your Christian. Thanks for being here.

So everybody that comes on the show gets a gift. Okay. So we got you a couple. Okay. First one

vigilance league gummy bears. Awesome. Made in the USA. It's just candy. They're legal in all

50 states and legal in Canada. I'm pretty sure. So it's just candy. Amazing. And then

I got some buddies over at SIG. One of them happens to be the VP of marketing.

He's named Jason. Okay. And I told him you were coming on. He got all excited. Oh man.

So with that, you might like this. We're not sure how you're going to get that back to Canada,

but we'll help you figure it out. Oh my goodness. Okay. Explain to me what I'm looking at.

All right. You're looking at a six hour P365 Legion. Okay. So that is a carry. That's an

every day carry gun. Okay. It takes 17 rounds in the magazine plus one in the pipe for 18. That's

their new optics line. They put those little slits in the in the front to help with recoil

management. I'm not sure what's legal and what's illegal in Canada. So we're going to figure that

out and we're going to get you. Yeah. We might need to get creative, but it's close to that as we

can. Man, that's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you so much. Hey, you're welcome. Hey, shooter.

I have shot. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. So that's amazing. I really appreciate that. My pleasure. Yeah.

I got a couple things for you. Oh, really? Yeah. So we're going to we're going to be trading. So

the first one I want to give you is so my friends over at Dawson Blades, which is a forge that I

hooked up with. Well, not that long ago. We collaborated on making a series of historically

accurate with a modern twist. Blades named after early Christians who were influential individuals

in the faith. So this is a recreation of a Roman Pugio dagger that we're calling the Irenais.

And so he was he was an early church father, a very prominent individual who wrote a series of

writings called against heresies, wrote against guys like the no sticks and why they they were off

base. And so this is the second in our series. We have one out called the Augustine. This just

launched this month. And that is a size accurate historical modern kind of twist on what a Roman

centurion would have carried in the first century. This is awesome. Wow. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah.

And I also have for you beautiful a page from a 1576 Geneva Bible. So that's what you're 1576.

So the the first Bible that was brought over to the United States by the pilgrim was the Geneva

Bible. Most people think it's the King James Bible. So King James Bibles were brought over. But

the Geneva Bible was actually the Bible of the Puritans. Because they considered the King James

a state developed Bible. Really? So when they came over, they brought Geneva Bibles. And so that

that's one of the the first they started printing. I believe in 1560. And then that's the 1576

one, which was their kind of second round. Man, this is thank you. Yeah. Of course.

getting framed and put in here. Put in the studio. Thank this is wow. This leaf is guaranteed

to be an original from from a 1576 Geneva Bible printed in London by Christopher Barker.

The first year Geneva Bibles were printed in England was 1576. That's amazing. There you

thank you. All right, Wes. So we're going to do a little bit of a life story talk a lot about

a lot of the research you've done. And but first I woke up in in a weird mood today and had a

had an interesting conversation with my wife this morning. And so

last last week was a rough week of interviews. We had an interview about all of the

Epstein stuff going on and you know politics right now. And that's always a dark

dark place to be. And then the another interview that we had last week was Elizabeth Phillips

whose brother was molested in a camp cannicook, one of the biggest Christian camps in the world.

And after she dug in, allegedly there's been thousands of kids abused. And I will go I just

whenever I do these uncover some this kind of stuff that's going on with kids Epstein

that camp. I mean, we've done a lot of them. It just it it it um it really throws me into a thing

you know that um why is this happening. And it just man it just it like reopens all the questions

that I used to have before I really came to Christ about three years ago. And you know and

I don't even know how to organize all my thoughts. I thought I had them all organized before we

started this. But I don't but it basically where the conversation ended is what what is what you know

if what is the point of living like a Christian. If you know the the common thing that I find in

Christian is really all you have to do is believe to go to heaven. And so you know

I grew up Catholic joined the civil teams pretty much lost my faith for about 14 and 50 maybe

20 years. And then came back about three years ago out of a very profound experience in Sedona.

But you know and so through my journey you know I've been talking to people like you and Lee

Strobel and John Burke and and and priests and um Father Rehill that lives down in clump just

just 45 minutes away. And and I'm I'm learning from all of you guys a tremendous amount. But

you know I'll bring up John Burke for example John is researched I think around 1500 near death

experiences all throughout the world different religions different countries different

ethnicities different everything and what he does is he finds all the commonalities of these

near death experiences and relates them all to Christ. Now in his studies sometimes he talks about

people go to hell and they'll have a hellish near death experience where they were they where

they die on the operating table or or wherever and then they wind up and hell and Jesus is there

basically saying you know do you accept me as Lord Saviour yes boom out of hell and to heaven you know

in in those a lot more upset this morning so it would float a lot better but kind of the point

being is it's it's hard to live as a Christian it's hard to do the right thing it's hard to admit

you're wrong it's hard to say I'm sorry it's hard to not lie cheat steal screw people over to

get what you want it would probably be a lot easier to get what you want get to your goals in

if you didn't live as a Christian and so you know kind of my point here is is if you can go

through life a shit bag not being a Christian lie cheat steal kill adultery wouldn't break every one

of the ten commandments all of the time and then you die and you are in hell but you still have

that one last chance it says hey do you accept me as Lord and Savior yes then what what is the point

of playing it out every day and is a Christian yeah I mean I think there's probably two

components to that question one is a very you know I think honest assessment of what's typically

called the problem of evil and I think that totally makes sense and I think if you don't feel

those things you're probably not living your life in the real world in that we see that this world

is beautiful yet it's profoundly broken and that's that that's the testimony of scripture

ultimately is that God created the world to be good but something took place we know deep down

that the world is not meant to be like this people aren't meant to die prematurely

be children aren't meant to be abused people aren't meant to get cancer and we know that there's

something wrong and there's there's this this you know got feeling that we get and ultimately I

think it's Jesus who puts that gut feeling there I think the fact that we understand that evil

is something speaks to the fact that there is an objective evil to be outbalanced by an objective

good because in one sense there's this understanding that if you subjectivise evil then we can say we

don't like those things that that they they really you know shouldn't happen but to say that that

we need to stop them that these are objectively evil is actually admitting that there's some sort

of moral law and a moral law needs a moral law giver and so ultimately I talked a lot of people

who almost assume that taking God out of the picture solves the problem I think it actually makes

it more complicated it makes it more complicated because now you're you've removed the objective

standard by which to actually say something is truly objectively evil and there's there's

something that's unique about the Christian worldview in the question of pain and suffering and

evil in that the God of the Bible describes himself there's this really great instance in Exodus

where Moses he's up on Mount Sinai and he says you know I I want to see you God but God says you

know I'm too great I'm going to put you in the cleft of a rock I'm going to pass by and you're

just going to kind of see a snippet of me by God describes himself as a God who is as this

Exodus 346 he's compassionate he's gracious he's merciful and he's over abouting instead fast

love and kindness and there are different iterations of that particular description of who God is

throughout the Bible throughout the Psalms or the prophets in fact if you read the book of Jonah

it's actually Jonah's beef with God he doesn't want to go to Nineveh and preach repentance and at the

very end he says I didn't want to come here because I hate them and invites and I knew that you

are a God who is compassionate that you're over abouting instead fast love and kindness and that

you're true to your word and if they repented you would forgive them I didn't want that to happen

right his beef is that actually God is too good but I think what's interesting about all of the

common denominators within that sort of description of who God is despite the differences

is that it all includes some version of what we would translate as the English word compassion

and compassion in English comes from two Latin words calm meaning with and passion meaning

suffering and I think one of the things that's unique about the Christian worldview is that the

God of the Bible actually steps off his throne in eternity and into humanity and experiences

brokenness he experiences abandonment he experiences pain and suffering ultimately he experiences

being murdered and in that way the God of the Bible is not distanced or aloof to the pain and

suffering that we actually experience because he can actually relate to it that as the second

person of the Trinity entering into humanity he understands what depravity actually is because

he can relate to the pain suffering abandonment hurt turmoil that we experience in this world I

think that actually changes the dynamic when we understand the different worldview perspectives

and how they describe God yes God is transcendent yes God is holy yes God is above anything we could

fully comprehend but God actually experienced what we experience in that brokenness in the world

and that he conquered that I think the second part of your question

what why do you say he conquered that because it's still here yeah it's a very good point so

it's it's what theologians sometimes refer to as a now but not yet reality in that

the when Jesus rose from the dead what he did ultimately is he said that death has no hold anymore

you know the wages of sin is death Paul says but the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus

and so the the punishment that was given to our first parents Adam and Eve when they ate of the

fruit of the the tree of knowledge of good to be evil good and evil and God said if you eat from

this you're going to die was that they did die they didn't die right then and there but there was

a spiritual brokenness let me put it this way so when you read Genesis chapter one you see all

these iterations you know God makes the sea and the fish and the land and and the animals and

and the trees and the plants and if you separate the fish from the water right it dies God

speaks to the water and it teams with life but if you separate the fish from the water it's going to

die God speaks to the land and it brings forth vegetation and greenery but if you remove the plant

from the soil it's going to die who does God speak to when he creates humans he speaks to himself

what happens when we remove ourselves from our creator we die there's a relational component to it

that I think is very profound no matter how you want to read the literalism or the figurative aspects

of Genesis chapter one and two I think the point there being is that we were created for

relationship with God and that's been affected that's been broken that's why we have

covenants that God makes with his people those are promises they're relational in their ultimate

articulation and their practicality and so when Jesus comes and he dies a death that we deserve

because of the cosmic rebellion the evil that we commit the sin then is in the grave but then

rises from the dead what that is symbolic of is that the grave death has no hold on those who are

found in Jesus Christ anymore so though we still live in this beautifully broken world all things

will be made new and that's the promise and that and this kind of leads into the other part of

your question you know why do we bother living our lives if it's just full of pain and suffering

I think when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray he says your kingdom come your will be done

on earth as it isn't heaven you know this this life matters and it can be profoundly beautiful

and just as you know we bring children into the world and there's a lot of potential for hurt

and pain and suffering but we still see that as a good thing we still see the beauty and the

amazingness of new life when I saw my children come into this world there's it was incredible

it's a miracle right how how did this come to be and yet we understand that there's there's so

much opportunity for hurt and pain and suffering and getting messed up there and yet

the potential for goodness and beauty and to be poured into in that little child to grow up

as a virtuous individual of characters a good citizen and a person who can understand

what is truly meaningful in this life that's worth doing absolutely and I think that's part of

you know the surrendering of making it's not just about dying and going going to heaven

if it was you know the gospel authors could have just solved the whole problem by just having

Jesus' passion narrative but a lot of the gospel is about his life it's about just the daily

struggle and the beauty and the amazingness of friends you know it's interesting in in scripture

and in John's gospel he records this event of Jesus' friend Lazarus dying and Lazarus goes to the tomb

and Lazarus' sister is Mary and Martha basically think that Jesus is procrastinated and he's got

there too late like if you were only here our brother would still be alive and it's interesting

because Jesus fully knows what he's going to do he's going to speak into that tomb and tell Lazarus to

get out and yet John records it and says that Jesus stood there and he wept he wept because his

friend had died and that feeling of that wrong motion that's not wrong Jesus knew he was going to

raise him from the dead but he's also weeping I think because Jesus understands more than anybody

else what the true significance of the brokenness of this world can be in the physical death

but that we look forward to something amazing in the resurrection of life eternal but that

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I mean I have another interesting conversation with why he met earlier and we were just chatting

upstairs right before I came down and talking about the same kind of thing and I can't remember

how he worded it but he'd he had asked I have a whole another life where I was

addicted to cocaine and party and and doing pretty much anything living the non-Christian life

right it was a lot of fun it was maybe the most fun I've ever had I'm just being honest I did I

wasn't I wasn't riddled with anxiety I didn't have to worry about shit because I had no

responsibilities I didn't have a son I didn't have a daughter I didn't have a wife but

so there were no worries there were no anxieties there was I don't know I have to get this stuff

done I mean yes I had a job but it was it was do you understand what I'm saying and so in the back

then I didn't I wouldn't say I was an atheist it's not that I didn't believe in God I just

didn't give a shit and I was a sideline person and with no fear of death it actually went

went a lived in Columbia I went down there with full intention of dying down there it's been

OD on drugs and when life gets boring I'm check it out right well that didn't happen right let's

fast forward you know and in in now I've I've come to Christ I believe in Christ I'm a Christian

I'm scared to death of death I'm scared to leave my kid behind my kids my wife because I know

how fucked up this world is I have more I have a team I'm responsible for a business I'm

responsible for I have anxieties I have worries I have it seems like you would be not worried

about death after you believe in Christ after you come to Christ yeah yeah well I think seems like

life would be I don't know of easier but less anxious less worries less I mean but it's actually

I'm just being honest it's not a sit for me yeah definitely I mean I think I think when we're young

we're we're kind of naive in thinking that the the indulgences are just what matters

and as we mature we realize that there's so much more than just pleasure and you know pouring

our lives into temporality and I totally get what you're saying in terms of there being no outward

effect on you don't have a family you don't have friends necessarily I bet though if you had

died it would have affected somebody and there's a ripple effect that we often don't realize to how

our lives actually impact others I mean this is a lie that a lot of people who commit suicide

often just assume they're better off gone right everyone's going to be better off without them

and the just the the ripple effect outwards of how much pain that causes I also think

you know see us Lewis the famous theologian writer he wrote a book called Surprise by Joy

in that when he writes he said you know if I was looking for happiness a good cigar and a

bottle of scotch could have suffice that that would have got me there and in his own autobiography

he talks about the fact that he was actually surprised at the fulfillment that was brought

and the realization and the maturity that came with it of how much his life affected the people

around him and how much more meaningful it could be realizing what his purpose and identity actually

was in Christ that he actually was surprised by joy and that he thought his life is basically

going to be over he couldn't do all the fun things he couldn't jump into those vices and indulgences

and but that he felt to realize that the temporal that ecstasees those were ultimately fleeting

that they wouldn't fulfill him in the way that he was actually looking for there what I was

referring to earlier when you know G.K. Chesterton says that the man is walking to the brothel

is searching for God he's looking to worship something and I think maybe the the anxiety and the stress

of what you're feeling because I feel that too in that one of my biggest fears is is dying and

leaving my family and not being able to see my children grow up and not being able and then

thinking you know I don't want my children to grow up without a father and and that that weighs on

me not because I'm necessarily afraid of death because I truly believe that I will be united with

my Lord and Savior but it's a grieving of the reality of what could be left behind but I think

that's a that's a realization of a maturity that as we grow older he relies the responsibilities

that come with the things that we do and the people that were connected to

and that though we might feel like the drugs and the sex and the the physical things and

that those are going to give us meaning and purpose when we're younger it's largely because

we we have a mentality that fails to realize our mortality more broadly that that this world has

a lot more to offer than fleeting pledders and that you know when you pour into your kids

when you're building the train sets with your son like the joy that that can bring

and just seeing a child light up and and seeing your child being born and the love that you

share with your wife that's that's something that I think goes beyond a high right which is a very

in one sense a very selfish thing right I'm experiencing this but

when we get to do something like raise children as virtuous citizens when we instill character in them

that that's a legacy that goes beyond the simple you know I'm feeling this right now and that

feels great but the thing that lasts are the things that are truly going to give meaning and

purpose in the world around us and is ultimately going to change the world we have that potential

so maybe we should be looking for fulfillment instead of happiness I think I think sometimes I

wonder you know we tease out the differences between joy and happiness and in some ways those

are synonymous I don't think that but yeah fulfillment fulfillment goes beyond simple happiness in

the same way that love is far more than an emotional feeling right there days that I wake up and I

don't necessarily feel like I'm loving my wife like I did on our wedding day or on our honeymoon or

whatever and that love transcends that because love is actually about sacrifice to a certain degree

and that's what we see I mean if God's character is love John the Apostle and his epistle says God

is love and love is the greatest ethic so if the greatest God is going to find going to

encompass himself his identity in the greatest ethic well the greatest example of that ethic is

actually self-sacrifice which is what we see in the person of Jesus Christ you know no greater

love has this than a man lays his life down for his friend it says in scripture and so whether

we're talking about happiness or whether we're talking about love or whether I think we need to

calibrate these within a framework that actually puts them into an understanding that goes beyond

a simple feeling because if love is a simple feeling if happiness is a simple feeling if meaning

and purpose and identity are simple feelings well then those are those are going to change with

my mood it's going to change with my diet right and so these concepts go beyond maybe the

simplicity that we often describe the mass because I love my wife even when I'm not necessarily

feeling as in love with her as I could possibly be and I can actually live that out in a self-sacrificial

way that will truly be loving to her even if I'm not feeling the warm fuzzies all the time

makes sense makes sense

I'm trying to think how to ask is it would what do you think happens when we die when when you

think of heaven what is your imagination what is your faith tell you where is it what do we see

what where are we going well Paul says it is appointed people wants to die and then the judgment

so I think you know what what's going to happen is we're we're going to be judged what we're

going to stand before our creator and there's going to be an instance of we are either the

ologians sometimes describe it as being found in the first Adam or the second Adam so Jesus is

described as the second Adam in scripture and the idea is you're they're going to be found in

your sin and you're going to take the brunt of that or you're going to be found in the covering of

Christ and he's taken the brunt of that so what we do in this life it's not that you know we just

we punch our ticket we say you know Jesus I believe in you and then whatever we do after that

doesn't matter you know what we do actually does matter we're not saved by our works but we're saved

for works and those works can actually be an example and an outworking what do you mean by that

we're not saved by our works we're saved for our works yeah so yeah so in in the book of Ephesians

Paul writes and he says that in chapter two he says and you were dead in your transgressions

and sins in which you formally walked according to the course of this world according to

the ruler and the power of the air and the spirit is now working in the sons of disobedience among

whom we all also formally conducted ourselves in the lust of our flesh doing the desires of our flesh

and the mind and we're by nature children of wrath even even as the rest but God being rich

in mercy because of his great love which has which he loves us even when we were dead in our transgressions

made us alive together with Christ by grace you have been saved and raised up with him and seated

he has seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ and he says that you are saved

so for by grace you have been saved through faith and this is not of yourselves it is not the gift

of God not of work so that no one may boast for we are his workmanship creating Christ Jesus for

good works which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them so in other words there's

nothing you can do or I can do that is going to placate God we're not going to be able to

earn our salvation because compared to the standard of the holiness of God it's always going to fall

short we're broken whether we realize it or not and we're often I sometimes say you know

worried about the evil out there when there's a lot of evil in here and so what God has done in our

behalf is through Christ Jesus he has saved us like Paul says that we are saved by faith in grace

and it's not works so in one sense you know the the law is like a mirror so when we see God's law

and his holiness displayed in his character that calls us to righteousness to call the stupid things

that's like a mirror showing us how dirty we are but we make a mistake when we think that we need

to grab the mirror and wash ourselves with it right that's not going to clean us we need something

external we need we need to jump in the shower that's what's truly going to clean us the law has a

purpose and a good purpose and that's to show us that we're dirty but it's through faith alone

in Christ alone to the glory of God alone that we're saved that that's something that he has done

we're saved by works just not ours Christ who has done them perfectly and the works that we do

when I say we're not saved by our works but we're saved for our works but I mean that by that is

that the works are actually the evidence to show that God has truly done something in our life

and now we see that movement in our heart so I talked to I was talking to someone recently who

was saying you know I have a friend who he claims to be a Christian and but he's he's really not

living a life that I would say is overly overly a good example of what a Christian should be living

he said like west do you think he's a do you think he's a believer do you think he has a genuine

faith in God and what I said to him was you know ultimately that's between him and God but I think

it's perfectly reasonable to look at that person and say listen your salvation is between you and God

but I have no reason to believe that I have no reason to believe that you're saved and I think

that should worry you I think you should worry you that when I look at the world and I look at you

I really don't see that much of a difference and that either means that you're you're not living

the life that God has called you to or you're in real danger that you don't actually understand

who Jesus is and what he's done for you on your behalf and so I think the mistake we can make

is thinking that God is like the gods of the Old Testament that the nation surrounding is real

we're trying to offer up sacrifices to the agricultural gods so that you know if I sacrifice my son

on the altar of of bail maybe he'll grow good crops for me and and God says I hate that I hate that

because that's and it's it's it's making the thing and it means to an ends I don't want you to

sacrifice to get I want you to love I want you to love me and I want this to be an act of devotion

which is why eventually God through the prophets starts to condemn the sacrifices which he commands

these relates to do not because the sacrifices are bad but because he says you know you've just made

this you've made it a meaningless act you've made it something that just becomes wrote it's it's

just a ritual God says I don't want ritual I'm not interested in that all those other gods they

can get the rituals right it's fake it's meaningless it's purposeless but I love you and I want you

to do this because I want you to understand the relationship that I've called you to be in

and so those works those works are an outpouring of the love right if I were to ask you Sean what's the

opposite of love what would you say hey hate that's a common answer and I think that's a good answer

but if you think about it to hate something is actually to to invest emotional energy in it

apathy apathy is actually the opposite of love because apathy just doesn't care when we see people

who abandon children who you know evil is being done around them and they're just indifferent

that that stirs us as it should and it's because apathy is the opposite of love

and what God is calling us to is you know the way that we live out that love is by

showing that that is actually not because it saves us because it can't there's nothing that we can

do that God you know God doesn't need us to love him in one sense God doesn't need us to do

anything but it's kind of amazing that he he wants us to God is no better off or worse off

if I don't love him if I don't worship him God exists perfectly in a set of living loving

relationships and did eternally and yes out of an outpouring of his love he decides to create

he doesn't need to do that he existed in a set of living and living relationships in the Father

the Son and the Holy Spirit and yet he creates and even he creates knowing that his creation is

going to rebel that's going to cause pain and that he himself and the second person as the

Son is going to enter into that pain and yet it's to his glory in the the book of Revelation

the last book of the Bible it says that before the foundations of the world were laying the lamb

was slain and so the cross wasn't a contingency plan it wasn't an oops I better fix things it was

all for the glory of God because he loves us and he wants right relationship with us so you're

saying it's not the works it's grace and faith so the way I understand what you're saying is

if you have faith then you wouldn't do the latter anyways you wouldn't act like that anyways

am I correct in the wrong things okay when we're talking about it's not for your deeds or your

works correct that's it's for your grace and faith yeah it gets you to have it is that's what

you said correct yep so if you had faith and grace then maybe you wouldn't have done the works

but you wouldn't have lied she'd steal murder done any of that shit does that make sense yeah

I mean I think so but by by having faith alone you would not partake and

breaking the 10 commandments or at least there's an understanding that this is not what I

should be doing right there's that there's a changing of of mind in in the mindset of

when I think of my life before really understanding what Jesus had done on my behalf

I could easily explain away bad things right because the significance of them

it was different Martin Luther the the German reformer he talks about the difference between

you know falling in a hole and making a bed in a hole or if you fall you're tripping the hole

and then you get out of the hole but that's a mistake and you understand that's a mistake you

don't then set up camp in the hole or a bird flying over your head and a bird making an est in your

hair like when we when we truly understand the significance of the weight of the wrong doing

that we participate in it it grieves us and we want to change and maturity is realizing that

we shouldn't be doing these things though we do them because we're still in on this side of

eternity we're still in a broken world but we have an understanding and we have that conviction

of the Holy Spirit that we shouldn't do them and we don't want to do them when I sin when I

when I sin against my wife when I sin against my family my friends anybody I I feel convicted of

that because I know I shouldn't be doing that but and that's not to say that um you know if you

aren't a Christian that you don't feel guilt or conviction or I think we all do by nature of the

fact that we're created in God's image there's an aspect of that that's still it's crying out to

us in our identity we know we're not meant to be doing these things but in the book of James

there's this this really great passage where James um he talks about the fact that if you break

one commandment of the law uh you've you've broken all the law um

um and what he says there uh is he says what use is it my brothers if someone says he has faith

but he has no works can that faith save him if a brother or sister is without clothing in the

need of daily food and one of you says to him go in peace be warmed and be filled and yet you

do not give him what is necessary for their body what is the use even so faith if it has no

works is dead by itself now you could read that and think we're saying it's its faith and works

right because he says you know show me your your faith and I'll show you my works but what he's

getting there is not that it's both faith and works it's that the works are going to be an outpouring

of the faith that you have he says um now uh let me see if I can find it um that if you

if you now if you commit if you break one aspect of the law you are held accountable for all of it

and it's kind of like this Sean if you're hanging off this edge of a cliff and you're hanging on to

uh like a chain if one of those links in the chain is cut you're going to fall as if none of those

links are holding you up right and it that's kind of what James is getting out there if you if

you break one of the commandments you break broken all of them it's not that if you lie you're

now held accountable for murder but it's that I'm hanging on to that chain and if one of those links

is severed I'm going to plummet to my death because there's no small sin because there's no small

God that doesn't mean all sin is created equal we know that murder is worse than sin and we even see

when Jesus is handed over to Pilate just before his crucifixion he says the one who's given

given me over to you has committed the greater sin the law has more severe penalties for

some sins and less of your penalties for others and the Old Testament it's not that this is all

you know flattened out there are gradations of sin and we even understand that in our own civil

law but it's it's cosmic treason against a holy God and so in that sense it's always going to be

significant because of who it's against you know I read this if you heard of the Jesus calling

I read this every morning I read it more than my Bible because I actually understand that

and I know it's funny but it's true but you know this morning I was reading it you know

it's a couple days behind so I've caught up but you know we're talking about a common thing in

there is it's so it's always talking about hand over your problems to me hand them over to me

hold the shit you're worried about hand it over to me I'll take care of it and I was I just I don't

understand what that means and I mean I've got all kinds of fucking problems I pray for them all

the time years some of these problems and I'm not saying I have more problems or less problems than

anybody else they're just problems you know and I pray about them a lot of them don't get answered

and then I think about it I'm like what is that mean like it's Monday morning I'm anxious I'm

a business owner I got I'm a family guy I got I got all kinds of problems in anxieties and good

and so what is it when it says don't worry about your problems hand them over to me I'll take

care of them like I've been praying for years for you to take care of some of these problems and

they're all not all of them but a lot of them are still here so what does that mean like I can't

just go hey I got all this shit coming up and there are problems and things that I'm stressed about

but I'm just not gonna fucking do any of it because you said you're gonna handle it right that's

not gonna work out well for me right now and and so I don't even know what that means just hand

over your problems here you go I think they are yeah exactly I think one way that that it could

be looked at and maybe this is a different like a unique way of framing it but I think part of that

calling that God says you know come to me because my yoke is easy and my burden is light is an

invitation to be transparent with God in those things a song 23 pretty famous song the Lord

is my shepherd Yahweh is my shepherd I shall not want he makes me lie down in green pastors he

leaves me beside quiet waters he restores my soul he guides me in the paths of righteousness for

his name's sake one chapter over song 22 starts very different my God my God why have you forsaken

why are you so far from me from this my salvation and the words of my groaning oh my God I call

by day but you do not answer and by night and I have no rest you know what I find really interesting

about the God of the Bible is the God of the Bible who calls us to come to him sees both the person

who says Yahweh is my shepherd I shall not want and the person who says my God my God why

you forsaken me as equally valid forms of worship in that one third of the book of Psalms is what

is sometimes referred to as the lament or the complaint Psalms and that God wants us to come to him

he wants us to be transparent with him he wants us to be like David who says I don't get it

I'm struggling I'm lost I don't feel you I feel like you're far away I feel like I'm forsaken

and that aspect I think of God calling us to cast our burdens on him part of that is

an acknowledgement of God realizing that this world is hard that that that our burdens aren't

meaningless you know as a meastron philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism and Chintuism

you read some of these writings and the the way that they talk about struggle and pain and suffering

is sometimes very dismissive and that it's like well just stop desiring things just stop you know

that you're two you're you're attached to this world because you have this desire so cast off

all desires you know easier said than done right you know ironically they desire to do that

to cast off all the desires but the I think what we see within the just honesty of the text of the

Bible is that you see that God that God who's compassionate that God who understands that God who

says you know you can come to me and you can be honest with me about what's going on you don't

have to sugarcoat your problems you don't have to pretend that you're holier than you really are

you don't have to pretend that things are going well or that things are easy or because listen

I I get it you know I walked the dusty streets of 1st century Galilee and my my my my feet ached

and I my friends abandoned me my family members died and I was betrayed and I was murdered

and I think part of God calling us to come to him is less of a cure all you know all of a sudden

all your problems are going to be fixed that's not realistic we know we know that's not going to happen

there's a future tense of the fact that God says you know

well I'm going to make all things new but he also says this world is going to be hard and this

world is going to be full of pain and struggle but I've overcome the world and so all authority

and heaven on earth has been given to me Jesus says and as part of that I think the calling

is less of Jesus is just a fixer who's going to solve all our problems Jesus isn't a genie

but the relational component is that God wants us to come to him he wants us to be honest he wants us

to be transparent because he can understand those things and the reassurance in that is that

it's not a God that just creates and sets the dials in motion and then steps back and says well

I hope everything works out you know let's see how all these little people can figure themselves out

and I hope it I hope it works out no God desires are good but that good doesn't necessarily mean

that everything is going to work perfectly in this world look at the apostles look at Jesus

himself you know all of the apostles after coming to the realization that their their Rabbi rose

from the dead and that the claims that he made about himself were true saw that proclamation and

the new life that was a possibility for others as something worth suffering and dying for and although

we can't be sure of all the martyrdom stories that they're rock solid about all the apostles we

know that they had minimum suffered pain and persecution for that and they desired that not

that they were going out to get hurt but they understood that you know the the God who loves us

is worth knowing personally because the God who loves us cares about us when we are in those

seasons of my God my God why have you forsaken me and in the seasons of the Lord is my shepherd I

shall not want all right all right where do you think we were before we were born I I don't think we

existed before we were born do you think that it's just you don't think I mean when you hear the

term old soul does that mean anything to you no I think it's a turn of phrase you know it is

interesting the I thought about this with every kid that's been born of of mine you know it's so

crazy that a new life just pops into existence and that that is something like the I can see the

personality of the baby and I can see how my wife's personality and my personality are articulated

in my sons and my daughters and how amazing that is and that that fact is a little bit

incomprehensible but I don't believe in the pre existence of souls I don't think that that's

something that that scripture articulates in in a way this concrete but I think there's a divine

mystery to the act of life how does non-life produce life I we don't we don't really have an

answer to that question in terms of a scientific pursuit and even the fact that you know this how

many pounds of gray matter in my brain is able to ponder those questions is pretty crazy in and

of itself yeah if we really think about it why why can I trust this if this is a product of time

plus matter plus chance what what is really grounding my ability to trust my reasoning faculties

well I think it's because I am endowed with the image of my creator which

gives meaning and purpose to that but man there's something crazy about you know seeing

a new life coming to existence and watching that person grow up and oh yeah

man it truly is miraculous yeah but there's no doubt

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all right west we're back from the break so all that wasn't on the outline before this but

so now I want to get into your story born in Pakistan hmm what were you doing over there

well what were your parents doing yeah that's right usually when I cross the border and people look

at my passport they ask military or missionary because why why else would a guy that looks like me

be born in Pakistan yeah and it is it's missionary so my parents were missionaries in the

early 90s in in Pakistan so I was born there but we weren't there for very long because the

Gulf War broke out and Pakistan sided with Saddam Hussein so it wasn't safe to be in in Pakistan

anymore and so we eventually came back to Canada and then we my parents went back to the missions

field where my my dad worked in Amon Jordan where for a short time he was the chaplain at the

British Embassy so very short-standing to my child so I actually went back after I graduated high

school I went back to Jordan but it was it was very different because when I was there as a child

we were in Amon and we it was very rural and urban and then when I went back it was very rural we

were I was working with Bedouin with a tuberculosis clinic oh wow and so it's a very different

experience even the language the Arabic that the the Bedouin spoke the locals said like don't worry

we can't understand them either so it was uh but it was it was it was it was great and I think

I think formed a lot of my desires and interests in even something like inquiry into Islam

having understood what a majority Muslim perspective was and some of the things that might

like not totally compute if you were just learning about something like a worldly like Islam from

a book did you how far into Islam did you get um why research it pretty heavily like I read I read

the Quran covered a cover a few times and um connected with some people who were doing academic

work on the Quran there was a period when I was in university where there were other Muslim

students who during Ramadan they would read the Quran for beginning to end and I would do it

with them almost as a way to establish relationships but also to talk through some of these things

and then I would also share some of what I was reading in the Bible as well but uh in my

four-year undergraduate degree I probably read the Quran five or six times well and in English

mind you never in Arabic which my Muslim friends would say you haven't read the Quran because it

only exists in Arabic right and English translation they wouldn't consider properly being a Quran

but um I read I read quite a bit of the adjacent stuff the Hadith and the Sunnah and then the

Sarat Rasulullah the biography of the prophet Muhammad um it been a shock so I was I was genuinely

interested in it because of the interplay historically with Christianity in Islam and also just

trying to figure out you know okay well well what are the claims of this worldview could they

actually be legitimate compared to something that I was raised to believe and ultimately I found

them very wanting really what what what I mean what would you say what are some of the main

teachings in the Quran well I think Islam has an issue in that there are historical articulations of

what's going on in the biblical stories that are just false so the main one would be in

uh uh in the Quran uh surah 147 um it denies the crucifixion uh so it it says that uh it has the

Jews speaking and say we crucified Jesus the son of Mary which is kind of an odd thing if the Jews

believed he was the Messiah that they were crucifying him and then it says that uh that he he was not

crucified nor was he killed but it was made to appear to them and so there's a face value denial

of the crucifixion now they say that he was real yes so Muslims believe in Jesus in fact Jesus

had mentioned 25 times in the Quran uh far more than even Muhammad is mentioned in the Quran

and the the if you think of the traditional Islamic narrative of

Muhammad being a seven century caravanar I think it makes sense for some of the stories that you

find of whether that's Abraham or Noah or Jesus John the Baptist Mary who were in the Quran

because I think what's probably going on is that you have an individual if we're accepting the

traditional narrative that there was a historical Muhammad that he's a caravanar that he's

he's traveling in and around the Arabian peninsula up into areas like Syria and Jordan he's being

exposed to Christians and Jews and I mean the traditional narrative is that he was a literate

so he's not reading these stories he's hearing them orally but because there's really no exposure to

what we call the old and the new testaments and even then it's it's up for debate whether they

existed in Arabic as Arabic existed in like seven century hegeese script at that point in time

anyways but he would have been hearing these stories with no kind of discerning ability to

differentiate between fables and campfire stories about these characters and what were the actual

historically reliable non apocryphal documents so the earliest source material for Jesus are

the 27 books that we call the New Testament primarily the biographies of Matthew, Mark,

and John but there are other stories that are apocryphal in nature that talk about say Jesus what

Jesus was like as a child so there's one called the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas and the Arab

Infancy Gospel of Thomas has a story about child Jesus now this is coming a long time after Jesus

everyone in New Jesus was dead by the time these stories were developing but the biblical

gospels are very sparse on what Jesus was like as a child the gospel of Luke has a very brief story

of Jesus when he's 12 going to the temple with his family and then teaching in the temple and

Mary and Joseph forget him in Jerusalem and then have to go back but so there's a body of literature

that pops up that's basically talking about well what was Jesus like as a child and so

infancy narratives become kind of this very popular if we want to call them fanfiction it's not

really like a proper historical designation but kind of like that and one of these is the Arab

Infancy Gospel of Thomas which has a story about Jesus making clay birds by a riverbank and then

some of the Jews get mad at him because it happens to be the Sabbath and he's working on the

Sabbath and so the story goes that he breathes on the birds they turn into real birds and the evidence

flies away this story ends up in the Quran and we know that this is an apocryphal story we know

that it has no historical designation of actually being tied to the first century

itinerant Jewish Rabbi Jesus Nazareth but it is something that would have been available potentially

in oral form in the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century and so you have these things

that get smuggled into the text of the Quran but they're jumbled and they have so there's

their characters that are in some places that shouldn't be in others Hayman who is from the book of

Esther ends up in the Exodus story is the right-hand man to Pharaoh well there are hundreds of

years between the Persian story of Esther and the Egyptian story of Moses and Pharaoh

so there's confusion and conflation that's going on and I was at least when I was reading

the Quran early on aware of the biblical narratives and so when I'm reading the Quran and I'm reading

some of the Quran's versions of these stories it's not hard to pick up on where they're just not

right and ultimately surfer verse 157 that denies the crucifixion that's a pretty serious one what

I mean what does it say what does it say I mean it denies the crucifixion yeah it says that he

was neither killed nor was he crucified but it was made to appear to them and it says that even

those who proclaim it are in doubt about it so part of the problem is that there's a little bit of

ambiguity in the wording of the Arabic so some Islamic exegetes and interpreters have

interpreted this as he wasn't he wasn't killed but he was put on the cross and crucified others

take that but it was made to appear to them and take that as what's sometimes called the

substitution theory where someone else was made to look like Jesus and put in his place

and that's a minority view but it is a view that some scholars like Shabir Ali has articulated in

the past the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam that this is the perspective they hold and they actually

believe that well they believe actually so so our backup that was a mistake they don't believe

that they believe that Jesus was on the cross but he survived which is called the Sunn theory that in

in the crucifixion when it says that he he did not die nor was he crucified it's that he wasn't

crucified all the way because he didn't die but that actually he recovered afterwards and they have

a story about him going to India and living to over a hundred years and having a family and that

kind of thing but there is some ambiguity in the historical commentaries the tough seer on this

particular passage to where there's debate even amongst Muslims as is this a full outright denial

of the crucifixion that's what the kind of mainstream zuni orthodox perspective would be

but some believe that maybe Judas was dressed up like Jesus and he was put on the cross and Jesus

is placed or that Jesus recovered or that it never happened it was all an illusion to begin with

but no matter which way you swing it it's still a denial of one of the most established facts

of all of history yeah even like the most skeptical of biblical scholars if they can say we can

basically know nothing about the details of Jesus's life we can say that he was crucified under

Pontius Pilate because we have so many intersecting sources Christian and non-Christian like

wow that's I mean so are they bringing up is the only point of bringing up Christianity the

crucifixion Jesus Moses everybody you know the the plays role in the book is it to discredit Christianity

in the Quran I mean I think the answer to that would be yes and no there's a clear line of

succession within the Quran and I think part of this is the confusion on the author of the

Quran's part that they thought they knew what the Torah and the gospel were so the Torah

and the angel the Torah and the gospel are referred to multiple times within the Quran itself and

you have a kind of a you have succession language that the Torah was given to Moses and it was

full of guidance and light and the gospel was given to Jesus and it was full of guidance and light

and then the final revelation is the Quran but there's almost a tacit implication that they're

all saying basically the same thing and that God's message is unified across all of them the problem

with that is that we know what the Torah and the gospel looked like in the 7th century in Muhammad's

day and doesn't look any different than what we have now but I don't think that the I don't see any

evidence that the author of the Quran knew what the Torah of the gospel Torah or the gospel were

so you have 900 approximately either direct quotations or illusions of the Old Testament in the New

Testament. In the Quran you only have one in quotation of either the Old or the New Testament,

the lexatallionus, an I for an I and a tooth for a tooth. So in terms of the synchronicity of the

Quran to these previous books it's lacking to say the least. It's not an organic cultural document

like the New Testament is. The New Testament was predominantly written by Jews for Jews

and is saturated in hebraic and Jewish and Old Testament understandings. If you don't understand

something about what's going on in the New Testament going back and reading the Old Testament

might actually help you because there's just so much symbolism and calling back to and the gospel

authors, Jesus' parallel with Moses and David and you know they're all these things but the author

of the Quran I think is aware of some of these Jewish Christian and Zorastrian fables is assuming

that those are what's going on and so he's baking those into the text maybe with the implication to

kind of woo the Christians and the Jews to come over to a side but you see so I think there's one

passage in the Quran that says it has this kind of succession narrative right it talks about

the gospel or the Torah being full of guidance and light and being given to Moses and then the

gospel being full of guidance and light giving to Jesus and then it says that the people of the gospel

judge by what they have therein. It's talking to Christians right those are the people of the gospel

they al-Alangil but if they do not judge by what they have therein they are the defiantly disobedient.

Now in the grammatical context what they have therein for the people of the gospel is the gospel

so when I'm talking to my Muslim friends sometimes I open to this passage and I say like

hey I don't want to be one of the defiantly disobedient I want to stand before God and not

have that on my shoulders however in order to be obedient to this passage and I judge

using the gospel which it's telling me to do and I judge the Quran by the gospel I find the Quran

doesn't understand the gospel has no earthly understanding of what I believe and actually

denies central points of it the divinity of Christ the crucifixion and so if the Quran is true

and it's telling me to do this then I have to conclude that the Quran is false because it

tells me to do something that's an impossibility I cannot judge the Quran by the gospel and find

that the Quran actually understands what the gospel is saying and so this kind of my Muslim

friends often have large articulations but you have in the gospel isn't what they had in the gospel

I think that's highly problematic I don't see any reason why in the seventh century a gospel

would be any different than it is to what it is now especially when I mean in my own study

in manuscript studies I can find copies of the gospel in Syriac from Syria in the six and seven

centuries it reads exactly like what my gospel reads today so it's not that there's no evidence

for that or if that is the case and the Quran says that nobody can change God's words and the

gospel is God's word who changed it who was able to kind of thwart the God of Islam's ability to

preserve his word in that endeavor he's either he was either unable to do it or he didn't

do that and when he says no one can change my words in the Quran it's not true

and so ultimately I think Muslims have a problem they're painted into these corners

they have these passages about the Torah and the gospel and yet the Quran doesn't seem to understand

what those are or just flat out contradicted the Quran denies the crucifixion when we know

that the crucifixion happened and so they're kind of painted themselves into these corners

corners in defending these particular positions and I just I don't I don't think that they can

stand up to scrutiny that is I mean I'm now I've never studied I don't remember read it I thought

I find it very interesting how much of the Bible is in there that's

yeah I mean Jesus is a central figure he's even referred to as the Messiah although it's ambiguous

and Islamic like understanding what that means um he's he's said to be sinless he's said to be

virgin born he's said to be the one who's going to come back at the end of time so there are all

of these things like Jesus is a prominent character like I said before I mentioned 25 times far

more than Muhammad has mentioned in fact the only woman named in the entire Quran is Mary the mother

of Jesus and so these figures have prominence within the Islamic holy book but ultimately they have

no full historical understanding of who they are wow very interesting well I want to talk about

this miracle about you walking mm-hmm I didn't you we kind of talked about a little bit of the

hawk question could we go under that a little bit sure yeah let's do it yeah so I was just before

my 12th birthday I was diagnosed with a condition called acute transverse myelitis and so I had the

flu and my body's immune system in sort of a freak accident response attack the nerve endings

that the base my spinal cord the myelons sheath instead of attacking the flu and so what that

causes inflammation on the base of my spinal cord which severed the communication between my legs

and my brain and so the diagnosis um I literally woke up from a nap and couldn't feel my legs

and so oh you remember this oh yeah very vividly yeah yeah um the diagnosis was that I would most

likely be a paraplegic for the rest of my life so recovery wasn't impossible but it was you know

you're going to dig in for the long haul kind of deal um especially because transverse myelitis

as a condition how it's been described to me by medical professionals is that the recovery rate

has a correlation to the quickness of the actual paralysis so because mine was instant the conclusion was

that the recovery was going to be long and it was going to be hard and um the short story is that

one month from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs on February 8th I woke up

got out of my bed and walked over to my wheelchair

how did you know to get up so it was kind of instinctual um it's a yeah how did I know to get up

I mean so for one month you were paralyzed for one month I was completely paralyzed no feeling

from the waist down yeah and um I don't know how long it was that I sat in my wheelchair

until I realized that I I'd what I'd done but I knew something was different

and I could have been five minutes could have been 45 minutes and I couldn't actually tell you how

long it was but eventually I looked down and I wiggled my toe and that kind of broke me out of

the spell and I ran upstairs and got my parents you ran upstairs yeah holy which was

proceeded by my mom telling me to run up and down the stairs and weeping yeah

now you were in bed and you're just like I'm gonna get up and walk over to my wheelchair

do I mean did you I mean did you prepare yourself was there any or you just did it

that he did realizing yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah what I typically do is I would like kind of fall

out of bed and crawl over um so wheelchair wasn't far from my bed obviously it needed to be in

close proximity but uh at that at that point that's basically what I had done I pulled myself up

to my wheelchair but um and it was the doctors that first used the word miracle I think my parents

are very hesitant to use that word but the medical professionals when they were the ones who said

we really don't have an explanation because the the inflammation was gone there's no evidence of it

what happened when you sat in the wheelchair well I just kind of was try to figure out what happened

like because you know something is different but you don't know what it is it's kind of like what do

you mean you don't know what it is you've just got out of bed and walked to the wheelchair because

it's so passive that you don't it it's like the the reality of the situation it it it precedes

like the what is actually taking place so so I couldn't figure out exactly what had happened

but I knew something different had happened and then it was the process of looking down and

wiggling my toe that made me realize like I can move

and you you then run upstairs mm-hmm yeah I got my parents

what did your dad say you know what I can't remember what my dad that's probably a good question

ask him I remember my mom because she's very emotional but I mean it was pretty surreal I think a

lot of us were in shock I was I think after the whole paralysis incident I was in shock for a long

time because I remember feeling oddly normal I mean there are obvious times there were there were

definitely times during that 30 days where I cried myself to sleep but it also was just kind of

strangely you're kind of strangely numb because it's such a drastic change to be told you know

you're a healthy child you're 11 year old playing sports going to school hanging out with your

friends okay now you're you're disabled you're you're not gonna things are gonna look very different

you got to put a ramp on your house you know you can't get up and down the stairs with like

regularity kind of thing so it was a big change and um and I think my parents and my family

general they were largely they were they were kind of you know accepted of the fact okay this is

our reality now we're gonna do everything we can for this to go well we're gonna we're gonna do

we're gonna put the ramp on the house we're gone we moved my bedroom to the living room

um because I was upstairs I couldn't get down up and down the stairs very easily and so we were

kind of at this temporary room downstairs and uh but there was an acceptance that this was

probably my reality and I was doing uh physiotherapy but it was kind of joke um you know what do you

do for a paraplegic you know yeah so so we uh and me I was ready to be a paraplegic for the rest

my life and I think my my parents prayer at the time was always that God would be glorified in the

situation not necessarily that I would be healed not that they were against something miraculous

happening but I think they their perspective was you know we we God is in control and we could

trust him even when things aren't going the way we planned or even the way we understand

gee man wow it nothing I mean nothing nothing morack nothing crazy before you want to bed the

night before no wow wow yeah and I think that did mark a very powerful what I would describe

as a supernatural experience in my life when the medical professionals said and this is your

lot you're gonna be a paraplegic too now I guess you're walking again so that that's it's in some

ways it's disorienting in other ways I did have a framework for the transcendent for things that

are out of the ordinary happening but it was it was actually connecting those those the dots

between my heart and my head later on that really made that more tangible in the intellectual

questions that I was wrestling with later in my teens to going back and thinking you know I

I can't describe this kind of crazy thing that happened to me as a child to something tangible

it's not just a random fluke it's not just you know strange things happen no explanation

I I I can assign it to an actual individual in this case right God who operates in time and space

in history and does things out of the ordinary man that is amazing wow would I mean do you remember

meeting the doctor yeah what I mean you did you walk into his office yeah we did a schedule

deployment I believe it was scheduled like like regular schedule deployment shortly after I could walk

and I yeah I walked in I was wearing these really big rain boots I don't know why I was wearing them

I don't think it was raining and they got me to run up and down the hall and I remember because

the rain boots were like a little bit too big and they were like not just awkward but running

up and down the hallway for the doctor that's amazing what did I mean what did he what did he say

this is a miracle we have no medical explanation I believe I'd have to double check I have my mom's

journal entries from that time she photocopy them all for me but they definitely the doctor was

the first one to drop the word miracle and I could I could I think I'm remembering this correctly

the dog one of the doctors because there were number of specialists that were signed in my

particular case said what did you do and my mom said we prayed and I can't remember if the story

is that they went off and printed a list of the other kids in the intensive care unit said can you

pray for these or just said like you should pray for the other kids in here say it was something like

that in her journal entry because they were like something happened that is wild that just I mean

did you were you at full faith back then at 11 as much as an 11 year old can be it's kind of

what I'm getting at yeah I mean I think I made like I made a conscious decision that I believe

was genuine when I was six as much as a six year old can like in my limited understanding of

reality and the world and I think I did I remember sitting on my bedroom floor and feeling like

I need God I need God to to rescue me to to lead me in this life and age six age six yeah yeah

and and that being real and I mean that doesn't mean that I wasn't like when I was a teenager I

did go through a period of if you want to call it deconstruction or whatever I wasn't an abandonment

into my faith it wasn't a crisis of faith I think those are too strong for what was actually I was

experiencing but I was I was investigating I figured you know okay my parents raised me to believe

something do I believe it based on the fact that they told me to now I don't think that's a bad

reason I want my kids to believe what I tell them right but I think everybody at some point goes

through a period of time where they kind of have to figure out where the dividing lines are

between the parents and them and part of that for me was an investigation of okay what does the

Quran say what does the Bhagavad Gita say what does the Book of Mormon say what does what are

what are atheists writing about that maybe has some credibility and I did you know dig into those

because I wanted to be honest with the fact that believing alive even if it's a convenient lie

still not worth believing and I wanted to follow what was true and so if I was living a delusion

to some degree I didn't think I was but if I was I wanted to at least be aware of what that delusion

was and what maybe was a better explanation for the world around me right so you'd think that

that powerful supernatural experiences a child would have solidified something and it definitely

was a piece of the puzzle but I think I still needed to remedy the intellectual questions that I

had there were different than the ones I was asking as an 11 year old when I was 11 I was

up at night with the whiny questions you know I'm a good kid my parents are good people why is

this happening to me well when I was a teenager it was more did Jesus actually exist like what's

what's this thing can I believe this like 2000 years old and I'm trying to live my life by it

what what what are the what are the evidences what are the reasons what are what are the data points

the point that to me because ultimately I think the world view and the Christian worldview

it's essentially satisfying but it's also intellectually robust and that there's a cumulative

case of all sorts of things whether that's historical or philosophical or sociological

that contribute to the truth claims that it's ultimately making about who we are why we're here

where are we going questions that all humanity has always asked themselves but it's because I think

those are imprinted on our are being on our soul as image bears of God but it was exploring those

in the capacity that I I as a teenager could explore in the same way that you know the commitment

that I made at six years old I believe was genuine and the investigation that I did when I was

17 or 18 years old was genuine and that that's just grown right as I've been exposed to more

been given the opportunity to research to investigate to learn to grow I think that's only

operated to bolster my belief doesn't mean that there haven't been times where I've questioned

things or thought you know is this is this really all true but what are some of the things

and though that you thought were hard to find true hard to find true you struggled with personal yeah

I mean I think what we were talking about before the the the problem in pain and suffering I think

is a genuinely good objection to Christianity because it's far it's it's goes beyond an intellectual

question it's a it's a personal question it it it it it speaks to us in a way that

a very tidy theological or philosophical answer might not actually suffice you know if I'm

hurting if I have a child or a family member or someone who's close to me if they're sick if they're

dying if something is a tragic accident happens it's hard to to to really wrestle with that and

that's why I think you know what we're talking about before the Psalm 22 my god my god why have

you forsaken me in one way I think the transparency and the honesty of scripture is something that I

want to line myself with because it speaks to the reality of when I hurt there's something there

that I can that I can reach out to God is not afraid of our objections of our doubts of our

insecurities and that's been very comforting to me especially this previous year my my my

my two-year-old daughter was having seizures we almost lost her at one point this last fall she

was hit by a distracted driver while we were crossing the road and nightmare situations for me

as a father like to sit in a hospital room with my wife thinking we're going to lose our daughter

and yet to still believe that God is in control that God is good that you know we're going to get

through this because God is with us in the midst of that I think that goes beyond any

like the the the personal existential struggle is hard but the personal existential comfort is also

very very comforting in in a lot of those moments you know to to give up my desire for control and say

listen there's nothing I could do the doctors are running around they're intubating her they're

you know she's a you can see her heartbeat being a regular and and saying like God I don't know

I don't know what's going to happen here and yet there can still be peace in that despite that

and if that had gone south I could rest in that God is good and that he has a perfect plan even

if I don't understand it but it's those questions that sometimes genuinely make me feel like

man I wish I understood what's going on here I wish I wish I could figure out why God allows

these things to happen because I don't know I give you another example after I experienced my my

healing I encountered people who were sick and who were say themselves like quadriplegic and to

wrestle with okay I believe you healed me but what about that guy like why why did you choose it's

almost like a survivor's guilt what about them well why are they still in in their particular

predicament I don't I don't have an answer to that and and that's that's a hard one to reconcile

but I have enough to rest on that I know that God is good I know that the Christian world view is true

and I know that despite what my maybe fleeting or subjective insecurities are about those things

and there's a comfort in that as well

did you struggle a lot when you were dealing with your daughter with your faith or always rock solid

by then I mean I think I think we all struggle in different capacities right like

you still struggle with all the research you've done that sees squirrels everything you still

struggle well I think you know the the human condition is that we're fickle and nobody is

bulletproof and the like I said before like this world is beautiful but it's also profoundly broken

and I think we're supposed to feel that broken like that lump that's in my throat I believe

God put that there because I think a God who is himself worried about things like hope and justice

he's instilled us with a desire to also be concerned with justice be concerned with injustice be

concerned with hurt and the brokenness and like we can say all day long God why don't you do

something but I think God could equally say you can do something too you know I've given you

faculties and abilities and this this world is not moving without your contribution to it

and that's why we're we're called to go out into the world to make disciples of all nations

because our actions mean something and does that mean that you know I don't wake up in the morning

and really struggle with this thing or that thing no I they're there periods of my life periods of

time where I just sit down and think like man I don't know I don't know what's going on here

but when I have those moments I think falling back onto the foundation of the investigation

that I have done you know I think that the publicly available evidence points to the truthfulness

of the Christian worldview to the degree that you would have to move so much evidence out of the

way to make me not believe it at this point that even when I don't understand something I can trust

that maybe God knows something I don't and there's there's a level of giving up control in those

moments that I think is appropriate not giving up control in that you know I'm just turning my brain off

and I'm you know I'm gonna I'm just a robot at that point but that God calls me personally

and understands me personally because he knit me together and my mother's a womb and

there's there's a an intimacy there that exists the God of the Bible is you know sometimes say you

know when God revealed himself to the patriarchs the Abraham Isaac and Jacob to Moses he didn't say

you know I'm the all-knowing all-powerful all-everywhere God he said I'm the God of Abraham Isaac and Jacob

I'm the God relationally I'm making a covenant I'm making an agreement I'm making a promise with my

people and then that all ultimately culminates in him stepping into time and reality in Jesus and

having friends having colleagues and laughing and traveling and crying and experiencing all of those

things I think that there's there's there's something that sets apart the Christian worldview with

Jesus that he's a real person that really lived that we can point to you know in one sense if the

Buddha didn't exist you could still technically have Buddhism you could have the philosophies you

could have the noble truths and you know the path and all of those things it didn't have to be

Guitama Sardartha who who came up with those things could have been anybody and likewise in

Islam it could have been anybody it didn't have to be Muhammad the God of Islam could have chosen

any person to be the prophet that he revealed his truth to but it does have to be Jesus

it cannot be anybody else and there is a historical grounding of the Christian faith that the

tomb is either empty or it's not and with empty now see us Lewis who I referenced before he said

Christianity of true is of infinitely importance if it's not true is of no importance the only thing

it cannot be is moderately important and he's famous for the whole liar lunatic or Lord

kind of Trilama if you look at what Jesus did and what he said about himself he's either a liar

in a con man he's either a lunatic and he's crazy or he's the creator of the universe and he's Lord

now we could also add one more legend we could say well he's just you know he's just a good figure

he's just a good person to pattern our lives after I don't actually think Jesus gives you the room

to to to look at him like that because Jesus didn't just say here's a philosophy to live by

he said I'm the way the truth in the life no one comes the father but through me and if you don't

believe that I am invoking the divine name from the Old Testament then he will die in your sins

you know he doesn't give us the room to just say you're a good example you know I said this

on Rogan where I said you know if Jesus is just a pattern then you don't need a savior

because you can do it yourself you just need an example if it's if Jesus is only an example to

live by then all you need to do is you know type your boots a little tighter and do better but

but the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross wasn't because Jesus came to show us how to live it was to

live the life we couldn't live and on that basis like I said before you're saved by works but it's

Jesus's work it's not yours I want to talk about I don't know what you call it but you know I wanted

to bring this up earlier when we were talking about all the other stuff from all the reform reform

is it Christian Christian Jeremy told me about this there are formerers the reformation

you you have some kind of reform am I wrong yeah so I'm I'm part of kind of a tradition of

Protestant Christianity that would typically be referred to as reformed their capital are reformed

and so what that is is it's going back to the Protestant Reformation so individuals like

Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Malanthan who were there were there were proto reformers there

were individuals prior to that a John Huss and John Wycliffe and what that period of time is in

the Protestant Reformation was it was a number of individuals who were looking at the church around

them and they were saying you know there have been these traditions that have developed these

accretions over time and we need to get back to the gospel we need to get back to primitive Christianity

there was a lot of things that were had taken place in the middle ages a lot of corruption within

the church hierarchy there were a number of popes who basically bought themselves into the position

of the papacy and it had children out of wet log and all these sorts of things it was a little bit

of a of a crazy time and there was what kind of spawned that with the the in in the what we typically

mark as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation is 1517 when Martin Luther nails his 95

these these to the door the chapel door of the castle church in Vittenburg Germany so that's kind

of this placeholder marker as the beginning of the Reformation in in in a historical sense what

Luther did wasn't actually all that odd you know now it is the equivalent of going to a football

game now in Vittenburg Germany in the 16th century was that one theologian would put up their debate

challenge on the door and another theologian would take it up and they'd go to the pub and they

would debate they'd go back and forth and so in a very practical sense Luther wasn't doing like

this wasn't an act of vandalism by nailing something to do a door and he actually could have very

well pasted it but the nailing in the hammer makes a good image but what he was doing was he was

challenging the church and particularly the Pope's authority to forgive sins in what are

referred to as indulgences so there's this idea now I'll try not to go into too much detail

about like the treasury of merit but the idea is that you can by giving money to the church

by forgiveness of sins to get yourself so many years off of purgatory so in this particular time

there was a lot of corruption in that they were trying to rebuild St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome

and one of the ways they did this was that they sent these individuals out who were basically

salesmen and there was a saying when a when a coin in the coffer rings a soul from purgatory springs

and the idea was that you know you give your money and you can get either your family members

who have passed away or maybe you in the future time off of purgatory and so Luther is looking at

this and he's seeing people being taken advantage of at this point he is he's a professor he's

teaching of the seminary but he's also a minister he's a priest in the church in infantburg

and he sees this and he's seeing this as people who don't really have the means to give

being taken advantage of for the purpose of rebuilding the St. Peter's in Rome and so he writes up

these these and part and parcel to it is that he's saying if the Pope has the authority to forgive

sins why doesn't he just do it if he can pull people out of purgatory by the grace and loving

kindness that he possesses why doesn't he just do it why do you have to pay him now that's a

kind of an oversimplification of the 95 articulations of what he puts but that's a big part of it

and this gets him in trouble it gets him in trouble because he's really pushing against

making sense I think that's part of it and also he was at a very advantageous time the printing

press had just taken on so it's not that there were other there weren't other people who were

challenging the Pope's authority or the Magisterium's ability but because people then take his writings

and they print them and through technology are able to get this out and it's just you know it

catches wildfire now all of a sudden Luther's teachings are all over Europe and so the availability

of the technological advancement aids the the change and the questioning and all of these things

while so Luther is kind of championed with starting some of this and then that that proceeds into

more and more and even the questioning of okay at the time the Bible is primarily read in Latin

it's not widely available in their vernacular of the people and so Luther endeavors to translate

the Bible into German into the language that people can read and this is also seen as controversial

because the lady are not seen as being able to properly interpret the word of God you need kind

of the intermediaries of the priests and and that the powers that be to tell you exactly what's going

on and so these individuals are called the reformers they're reforming the church to go back

so there are these things it's like a tree and moss has grown all over it and Luther is looking

at this and he's saying there's a tree in there and it's a good tree and it's a healthy tree

and it's a beautiful tree let's just shave all that moss off all of these traditions that we've

developed and so the kind of cries of the reformation are scripture alone faith alone by grace

alone to the glory of God alone I actually had it inscribed on the side of my Bible right here

solar scripture a solar gracia solar feed a solar christus solar day of glory right scripture alone

grace alone faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone wow and that that was the cry of

the reformation is that they were saying I mean those ideas kind of got articulated in those Latin

phrases a little bit later on but the idea is that scripture is unique in that it is the voice of

God it's unique in what it is and what it does and that that doesn't mean the tradition is not

important that doesn't mean that the church is not important but it means that scripture is

our only soul and fallible rule of faith and practice for the church that if you have a tradition

but the tradition contradicts or contravene scripture then you go to scripture you don't the

tradition is not on the same par whereas in the Catholic church then and now you do have the

understanding of an infallible church an infallible magisterium and an infallible scripture but

they're on more of an even playing field and so the the Protestant reformation said no no no

counsels air popes air people air God doesn't air and so let's go to scripture let's go to that

which is infallible let's make sure we're doing our due diligence you know this didn't make

everyone a pope to themselves we we still you have to read it within a proper understanding

of the context and the history there's a meaning to the text and you have to do your due diligence

to get to that meaning but ultimately in what this is and what it does it's unique it has

an ontological status of of of what it is in its being that is as as Peter says this all scripture

is this there's this Greek word that uses the upnostas god breathed and so that's that's different

and I had a systematic theology professor when I was in grad school who I always said a tradition has

a voice an emotion has a voice they have a voice and they have a vote but scripture has the

veto because scripture is the one that comes its origination is god alone and so in that sense

the reformed tradition following guys like Luther and Calvin and others

is the tradition within historical Protestantism that tries to focus on that those are the ideals

of you know this is this is our plumbline everything else is measured against this

and people can get it wrong church leaders can get it wrong popes can get it wrong and they do

they will but if this properly understood within its historical context within digging into

what it's actually intending to say the author had an intention there are many applications

but there's only one intention of the text in so far as it is communicated by the author the

human author inspired by god but that's kind of a brief overview maybe insufficient

of kind of the tradition that I I find myself in I am a Baptist and I'm reformed

you try to go all the way back to what I was written yeah I mean ultimately the thing that's

different about say the Protestant tradition that's different from maybe the Greek Orthodox

tradition of the Roman Catholic tradition is that Protestants aren't attempting to look at the

church within say the first hundred years and say they need to look exactly like me right like

my church needs to look like a first century Galilean church I don't that's not the claim and

it is in one sense the claim of Roman Catholicism in Eastern Orthodoxy and often kind of the

accusation is you're not going to find any one who looks like a Protestant within the early church

I know I think that's an over generalization but the claim is not do the traditions that the

Protestants adhere to within their church practice mere exactly what the like a church in the first

second third century look like as much as it is our beliefs at their central points of

understanding and articulation that which the early church articulated primarily from here right

because even you know even Paul writes to the churches in they're included in scripture he

writes the church in Corinth and says listen you're getting stuff wrong stop it right so it's not

if it's earlier it's better necessarily okay we're still going to get wrong things wrong right Paul

writes and he says the guy in your congregation he's sleeping with his he's sleeping with his

you know mother-in-law stop it that's that's gross it's evil and so it's it's that there's a constant

needing to be shaped by the word of God and let the central teachings of what God has inspired

be that thing which which draws us together okay wow

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all right west we're back from the break getting ready to dive into the dead sea scrolls but we

had we had a another offline conversation I love these turns into rabbit holes but we had

an offline conversation about in vitro and that kind of got mind mind triggered into you

know there's a lot of new things that are happening nowadays that with with advances in technology

that just weren't even a possibility or even a in anybody's mind that I would imagine

in vitro being one of them um sex changes AI like there's a whole slew of possibilities

in present day that we're not there back then and so I'm just I'm just curious I mean

within vitro thing you know we just had that discussion we don't have to get into it if you don't

want to or we can but but point being with all these new advances in technology and it's it's

it is I mean shit I don't know what you would call it other than creation but

it where do you send people to for guidance for moral guidance on on any one of these subjects

yeah and there's a lot more that I that I didn't mention that of course I mean AI alone right when

we're talking about there all sorts of questions about consciousness in regards to what we're

looking at with AI like is AI is it solving the churring test can it it recognize its own

existence and reality and it's there have been examples I think all throughout history of things

that are spoken to directly within scripture and so it's easy when we we're talking about moral

prescriptions to just go to the place where the moral prescriptions apply and do this don't do

that kind of thing but there are so many things that are in these weird gray areas that like

whether you're talking about pastors or counselors or theologians or whoever it's it's it's really

hard to try to pin down there isn't just an easy do this don't do this here's what the outline

says you know off off air I was saying you don't you don't open to second opinions chapter three

and you have that section on the exact thing you're looking for but I think what's interesting

about the Bible is that despite it being you know it's most recent book being 2000 years old

it's still informing our moral basis for so many things we're still using it in some ways as the

guiding principles because it provides an objective framework to understand you know whether that's

when life begins or things like consciousness or purpose or meaning or identity and how we

understand things so I think that though there are issues that aren't spoken to directly we can

look at examples that relate to some of the very different very not even within the consciousness

of a first century offer but and yet morality hasn't changed good is good and bad is bad

and there's still things that we need to parse through and figure out how do we figure out the

intricacies of that and I think that's where something like scripture can give us guiding

principles to the best of our ability try to speak into those situations not always straightforward

yeah I mean I don't think any of the thing I think one of them is pretty straightforward I don't

think the other ones are very straightforward I think I mean I don't think in vitro is I don't know

you know I don't know what I honestly didn't know what I thought about it until about 20 minutes

ago right you know and then I thought I was like huh that's an interesting question you know and

I mean there's actually something has come up in my own life I mean I've I've I talk a lot about

defense tech here and I've got the opportunities to invest in some major defense tech firms

and I thought or companies and I thought after the after I made the investments I was actually

there was one pending but I had already invested in in another one in an events tech in just

in company but then I then the question after I did it popped up into my head shit

should I have invested in this hmm this is I mean what do we use these things for yeah yeah

and then in the same on the other hand it's like well yeah I should have invested in this because

this might be the very same damn thing that saves my kids way of life right you know in the future

and so it's but it's a question that I don't know if I could find the answer to in there because

they didn't have defense tech firms back then and I don't know if you could even invest in I don't

know a spear maker yeah yeah well you know what it's interesting you do have similar conversations

within the early church period because you have say Roman soldiers who come to faith and you do

have in instances where say especially in the time of Augustin St. Augustin where you have the

conversations if you are a Roman soldier and you've now come to faith can you really be integrated

into the Christian community and that's where the whole concept of just war theory

particularly fleshed out by say in Augustin comes into purview where you know when is it right

to fight what what do we what do we truly understand contextually about a passage like

turn the other cheek what does that mean is it you know always be passive is is

you know complete a cessation of any type of self-defense what scripture is teaching I don't

think so I think I think I think Augustin got it right and he outlines that so there are instances

of that what did he outline well he outlined basically that you know he has these precepts and he

says it it it is right to defend the weak it is right to make sure that you know injustice is

not being done Paul says that the the government has the authority to wield the sword and so

there is there's a right that's actually given to the powers that be in order to enact justice

now we especially Christians it is likewise our duty to speak into that and make sure that

the magistrates the officials are not doing that unjustly so there's an accountability of

speaking into the laws that are are being enacted in order that God gives the authority to whether it's

the the the Pharaoh or the Caesar the emperor or the king or the governor the president of the

prime minister but that doesn't mean that everything they do is right just because God gives them that

power so we need to hold them accountable when they are not doing that justly right when the laws

because what what is a law a law is prescribed a morality when people say you can't force people

to be moral like you can't prescribe your morality what it's do not murder is the prescribed

morality so there's always going to be a level of that where as a Christian I want our society to

live by the laws that scripture actually dictates I think that's going to be better for it now a good

society is one where people's hearts are changed not just their actions and so it goes beyond simply

making people do things because if there's one thing we find out time and time again is that

you can make a law but we're really good at trying to find the loopholes we're really good at maybe

we'll obey it to not get in trouble but the good society the just society is one where you want

people to actually their hearts are changed in order that they actually want to obey because they

understand why it is good for them for society for the world to do those things but Augustan

looks at these things and he says the war is okay as long as it is done for the right reasons like

I think we would look at something like World War II and we would look at the tyranny and the

injustice of the Holocaust and we would say it was right for nations to get involved and not to

stop that from happening that doesn't mean that you know it's perfect that everything works out

in this nice tied up with the bow way but we

those kind of understandings of the the world around us and

and safeguarding the weak and looking after those who are marginalized and taking care of people

who are being abused I think that there's a place for that and we see that within the enacting

of Israel in the ancient world being under theocracy God is their leader and God is actually enacting

his justice when he tells them to go and wipe out certain nations because as the people of God being

his hand of justice in the world of that point now I do this is descriptive right is telling us

what happened it's not prescriptive it's not saying okay Sean and Wes you go and do likewise now

this is a different situation is telling us what happened but at the exact same time we do have

an example of God is judging groups of people because they are evil is using Israel to do that he's

using people to do that and a lot of the time I will have you know skeptics atheists agnostics

talk about you know if God is so good why doesn't he do anything in the world you know why

isn't he stopping evil well I think we actually have some instances of God stopping evil

and ironically those are oftentimes when people say oh look a bad goddess he's wiping out

these people in the grand scheme of things there's a context to that he was he's told Abraham I'm

going to give you I'm going to give you a lad I'm going to give you a nation but the sins of the

Amorites has not come to its full fruition so you're going to wait 400 years and anyway they wait

for 100 years for those people to repent God is being gracious as slow to his judgment there

and they don't they don't repent they get worse and so when that time comes after the exodus they're

going to the land the people are bad they're bad they're evil and so God judges them so I think

pacifism is not necessarily what my I believe got a scripture teaches but you look at what a

gustan articulates in saying you know there needs to be an even handedness in this there needs to be

carefulness to this you know even says that the defeated peoples shouldn't feel disgruntled at the

end of the battle that's really hard to do maybe that's a two ideal of a situation but unfortunately

going forward from that especially into the middle ages everybody who pointed to a gustan as

a justification for war kind of ignored all of the things that he laid out and only saw

fighting you're allowed to fight so it didn't always go the way it should have gone but

you know it's a it's a good example in in terms of you saying you know I

having reservations about contributing financially and what's what's the you know downstream

effect of something like arms you know or or anything else these aren't these aren't easy

black and white topics but I think I trust I hope that what I see in scripture is that God is not

going to judge us based on what we don't know okay I'm gonna judge us on what we do know and I think

God is going to be gracious with us in that if we are there's caveats to this obviously

but God judges those who know better worse we have a story of this I was reading this recently

um so there's uh first and second Samuel our two books which are really kind of one book

in the Old Testament and you have now closer to the beginning of first Samuel I have this story where

the Israelites are uh they're defeated in a battle and the the enemies the Philistines they take

the arc of the covenant which the Israelites have kind of prematurely brought into battle with them

because they think it's going to be some sort of magic fix all it's it's captured and the Philistines

just pick it up and they take it away and uh they put it in the temple of Deagon it causes all

sorts of problems because the island Deagon falls over in breaks and they're like we need to get

this thing out of here right the god of the Israelites is causing us to much trouble but they've

just picked it up and they leave whereas if you go to second Samuel uh there's a guy named

and the Israelites once again they're kind of playing fast and loose with God's laws they go into a

battle um and they're moving the arc of the covenant but they're not moving it how God actually

told them to move it they're they put it on a carton it's being carried with oxen whereas they're

supposed to have four priests carrying it on either side and march with it well they're they're

improperly and inappropriately carrying the arc of the covenant and the the wheel of the

the wheel of the the the wagon hits a pothole or whatever and the arc becomes unsteady

and uza who's right there puts his hand out to study the arc he touches the arc and he immediately

dies and you read that I remember reading that as a teenager and thinking we hold on

the Philistines in first Samuel they just pick the thing up they just take it and they leave

what's going on here mm-hmm I think this is a good example of you know uza was part of a nation

that said I'm gonna obey laws I'm gonna obey the good laws that God has given us as a chosen people

as an example to the surrounding nations and there's a responsibility there of what I'm supposed

to do and how I'm supposed to the standard that I'm supposed to be held by and so uza knew better

the group that he was with knew better then to move the arc in the way that they were doing

that was inappropriate of them to do that so because they knew better God judged them based on that

accountability accountability was higher and so when he touches the arc he dies because the

arc is a dangerous thing but he knows it's a dangerous thing and he should know better than to

just kind of very glibly retreating the presence of God on the mercy see like he is whereas the

Philistines don't know any better now it still causes them lots of trouble they need to get it out

of their camp eventually mm-hmm but I think in like telling that story what I'm communicating there

is that there's a level of accountability not that God is is arbitrary and subjective in the way

that he treats us but I think that we are going to be judged on the basis of what we do know not on

what we don't know and that doesn't mean that our sin is insufficient that doesn't mean that our

sin is winked at but these at the same time I think there are certain things that we we need to

weigh based on our conscience and on the level of accountability and understanding that we are given

and do our best to operate on that knowledge and sometimes that's not easy sometimes it is

I think this is why we should seek the wisdom and the understanding of people who know a lot

more than we do who are wise who have walked through these things who are you know elders in our

you know whether that's why I'm here I'm going to learn from you but so I think we should continually

be trying to mature and trying to learn but at the exact same time you know there's going to be

things that I do that I'm going to realize in retrospect maybe oh I should have done that very

differently and that's okay but we we should be trying to do our due diligence to try to the best

of our ability to conform that to scripture and the right teaching that God reveals to us

makes sense a little bit ago when I when I had mentioned when I called called a creation I thought

I noticed your face kind of changed there all of a sudden I did what would you what is your

definition of creation did I strike a chord there accidentally uh not that I am aware of maybe

that's an involuntary face twitch okay but uh maybe I need to see my doctor get that looked after

there's um yeah I mean I think it's really interesting the topic of creation I mean when I

when I brought it up we were talking about in vitro mm-hmm but then I think about what else are we

doing we can we now have the ability to clone mm-hmm clone in their animals we can clone humans

we have organs yeah we're growing organs you can grow organs in a basically a plastic bag now

or if you're trying to or yeah a bad guy you can just harvest them but you know what I mean so all

these things in I I get I don't know what else to call it other than creation but um

but you know like what I'm just what are your thoughts on all of that I think because it's not

it's different yeah I you know I've heard some people you're a link yeah putting a chip in your head

exactly I I've heard some people argue that this is evidence that we don't need God right like we

can create we can make a life what I always think is interesting about that's interesting is

that what this is all about is this I mean in the grand scheme of things and the battle of good

and evil is this is that all of that going to create a godless society well I think if anything

what it points to is that all of these things need an originator they need a creator right like

and we are created in the image of God who is himself the author of creation and so I think it's

just part and parcel it makes sense that we would then try to create something in our image right

whether you're talking about AI or whether you're talking about like computer models or whatever

all of that just in my mind points to the fact that we're we're just patterning ourselves

after our own creator and all of these things whether it's a beautiful painting or like a work of art

or um you know how an artist puts together visually or you know they're all different ways

that that can manifest these are testimonies to our ability to exemplify what God has instilled

in us as humanity there's something unique about humanity that other living things on this planet

just does it we they don't do it in the same way you can get an elephant to paint a picture with

trunk but is it really meditating on the beauty and the aspects and the angles and the if if if a

monkey painted the Mona Lisa would it be really thinking about you know the expression on the

individual's face and how that might be understood by the view all of these things I think are unique

to humanity there's something about us something about this species on this planet

that is just completely different than every other species and I think as technology

advanced and you get to something like AI or neural link or in my mind these are just testimonies to

we are in doubt with an ability to create I mean that's the whole the concept of the Sabbath

um within the old covenant system you work six days uh but the seventh day you rest

and it's not resting you know God doesn't rest on the seventh day because God is tired God

rests because he is viewing his creation and he's he's just looking over it and so there's an

understanding within I think you see how ancient Jewish writings talk about okay why do we rest on

the Sabbath what is the purpose of this there's all sorts of reasons why one of them is that there's a

there's an understanding that the only being in this universe that has the authority to create

is God and we create six days a week and we stop to acknowledge that God is the author of creation

not us so all of our creative acts are going to be an expression of that not everything from

nothing act of God right Xni hello but we pause to reflect on the fact that that doesn't come from

me that comes from the image that I bear and this is why it's so significant when Jesus calls

himself the Lord of the Sabbath when he's accused of working on the Sabbath it's in all four

gospels and in John is a little bit different he says my father is working until now and I'm also

working but if you kind of put that in the framework of Jesus's historical context and you look at

some of the articulations of ancient Jewish understanding of what the Sabbath is when Jesus says

I'm the Lord of the Sabbath there's an aspect of what he's saying that is I'm the only one who's

allowed to work on this day and and he's what he's really claiming even the Jews get very mad at him

for it is you saw that sunrise in the morning that was me I did that I'm the Lord of the Sabbath

so you know being accused of picking some heads of grain uh with his disciples and eating on

on on Saturday you know he's like listen I'm in control of all of this because that goes over

ahead because we don't have a framework for it Jesus claims to be God or not him saying I am

God worship me it's said in a much more Jewish accent than that but they are no no less a claim

of divinity and so that's when you when you look at these understandings of what the Sabbath is

of who God is and how he's the one who is the author of creation which by the way is the title is

given to Jesus he's also said to be the author of creation the alpha and the omega the beginning

in the end that in John chapter one in Colossians chapter one in Hebrews chapter one all three of those

authors give this exhaustive list that nothing was made without Jesus that everything was made for him

and by him Paul exhaust the prepositions you know that the author of Hebrews you know calls him the

progenitor of all things the in the exact image and likeness of God and it's a reflection of our

character that we also then create because we're made in the image of a God who is an artist who

who paints a picture of the universe with his words wow you brought up the ark of the covenant

mm-hmm who's that the ark of the covenant was the presence of God on earth in the Old Testament so

you have eventually the temple being made or prior to that is the tabernacle and then you have

this really interesting box that God tells the Israelites to make and he says I'm going to dwell

with you with the presence like the presence in the garden so you go all the way back to Genesis

chapter one and Adam and Eve are have this community communicative relationship with God in a very

unique way in fact when they eat of the fruit and they realize they're shaming their nakedness and

they hide it says that they heard the Lord God walking in the cool of the day and so there's a

presence there that's tangible and real but that like I was talking about before that separation from

God it's created a rift in that relationship and so there's there's the the rift has made the

proximity to God dangerous and eventually what you get in God's chosen people the Israelites

having that the presence in God in the tabernacle and then the temple God says I'm going to do

all with you but you need to be careful we need to be careful with this so there's a particular

way that you're going to build this and I'm going to my presence my glory is going to exist on

the top of this box and that's the arc of the covenant now interestingly enough when Jesus

comes around John's gospel starts out right in the beginning was the word in the word is with God

and the word was God but then in John 114 it says and the word became flesh and made his dwelling

among us and that word that we translate as made his dwelling is actually the same word that is

used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament translated prior to Jesus for tabernacled so

referring to the tent that the arc of the covenant which held the presence of God had so I think

it's very overt it would have been far more overt to the Jewish reader so some translations just

say made his presence made his dwelling there are some translations that say tabernacled among us

but I think the Jewish reader who's reading the Greek there if they were aware of the Greek

translation of the Old Testament would have immediately thought he's talking about God's presence

he's talking about what was dwelling over the arc of the covenant and guess what God is with us

again but it's in Jesus Jesus is that presence he's dwelling with us he's walking with us he's

in the midst of his people and that's what ultimately you know in Revelation in the last book of the

Bible it says that that's going to be there that presence is going to be there in the new heavens

in the new earth and so the arc of the covenant was part of this old covenantal system which is always

meant to point to something and this is if people are interested in this reading the book of Hebrews

in the New Testament the whole theme is how all of these things in the old covenant were shadows cast

by Jesus all of these things are fulfilled you like Moses Jesus the new Moses you like the

priest system Jesus is the priest who's never going to die he's always going to intercede on your

behalf you like the angels Jesus is greater than the angels you like the temple Jesus has

fulfilled the temple you are now the presence of the Holy Spirit you are now the temple so it's all

of these things it's an amazing book in that way and that it's talking to Jews who are tempted to go

back to go by they've been ostracized from the pagan recommend culture their day and now they're

proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah and they're being ostracized by their Jewish communities as well

the author of Hebrews says there's nothing to go back to don't be tempted Jesus is the fulfillment

of all these things don't go back to the shadows when you know what cast said it's this foolish

and ultimately part of that is that you know that presence of God in the tabernacle that

so there was a there was a curtain in front of the holy of holies where the arc of the covenant was

in the temple and in the gospels it says that when Jesus died the the the the curtain was actually

ripped into and there's a symbolic meaning in there in that the divide between the priests who get

to go into the holy of holies once a year on yomka pour on the day of atonement well now

you that that that's been that divide that's been eradicated because the author of Hebrews says

you have a priest who now intercedes on your behalf where you can go into the holy of holies

into the presence of God you can talk to God directly so that was a long-winded answer wow

what the arc of the covenant is that all right the dead squeeze the Dead Sea Scrolls yeah what are

the so the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish writings they were discovered

between 1947 and 1956 we have discovered some since then just fragments but the story is that

there were some Bedouin on the northwest side of the Dead Sea between the border of Israel and

Jordan and they were hurting some sheep and they discovered these jars full of documents so in

the Roman Jewish wars which happened kind of into the mid late first century but after Jesus

which ultimately culminated in 70 AD when Rome they marched into Jerusalem and they

sacked Jerusalem and they destroyed the temple um these Jews went and they hid kind of maybe

knowing that danger was coming they hid these documents in these caves in the the hills along the

coast of the northwest side of the Dead Sea that's why they call the Dead Sea Scrolls because that's

the location 11 caves altogether that that they were discovered in uh probably with the intention

to come back and get them when things were a little bit like had simmered down but they got wiped

out and so they never had the chance to go back and get them so ironically the arid environment

of the the region there preserved these things for close to 2000 years and we discovered them in

like I said the late 1940s I mean to the 1950s and they revealed a ton of uh

around 970 documents in um between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments so some of them are you know

entire books uh others of them are very very fragmentary they need to be pieced together

now interestingly enough the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibition at the Museum of the Bible in

Washington DC oh right now wow and I will actually be given be giving a tour on March 28th

of the Dead Sea Scrolls so if people are listening and this goes out in time um you can actually have

a tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls with me and my partnership with the Museum of the Bible but otherwise

I think it's worth seeing I think these are probably the most important archaeological discovery

of the 20th century wow and they shed so much light on ancient Judaism leading up to the time

of Jesus in understandings of different Jewish thought and practice but also every book of the

Bible apart from two of the Old Testament was discovered in in these and some of them were so

well preserved that what they did is they pushed back our understanding of the text of the Bible

close to a thousand years sometimes even further than that because for a long time our

copies of particularly the Hebrew Old Testament so we had translations like I've

referred to the Greek translation of the Old Testament those those have existed for a long time

um it's called the Septuagint is one of the main streams of the Greek translation of the Old

Testament most people in the time of Jesus were speaking and reading Greek if they were able to

read because that was the lingua franca the language of the day and so about 200 years prior to

Jesus a bunch of the books particularly the Torah the first five books the Bible were translated

from the Hebrew into the Greek and then as time went on more and more books were translated

of the Old Testament into Greek um so that started about the third century BC it didn't really

finish until the first century AD but our Hebrew copies of most of the Old Testament were from

the middle ages for a long long time wow and what the Dead Sea Scrolls did is all of a sudden we have

pre-first century copies of some of these books and we're able to compare them to compare something

like the great great song scroll or the great Isaiah scroll with copies of what's called the

masoretic text which is the text of the Hebrew Bible from the middle ages copied by the scroll

of these scribes the maserites and they're surprisingly similar shockingly similar some of them are

exact not all of them are but it the testimony of the fidelity between the time when we get something

like the Lenin Greg codex in the middle ages to something like the Dead Sea Scrolls

isn't huge gap and yet you you have now evidence of this faithful copying process over the centuries

of scribes to the point where you can follow them you know to the letter and see the fidelity

of of these texts is there any new testament in there no so it's all Old Testament so the thing

with the Dead Sea Scrolls is that most of them predate Jesus some of them are written in around

the time when Jesus was was living but they're mostly the writings we think of a group called the

Essenes who were a sectarian group of Jews who had removed themselves from the Jerusalem community

and gone out into the desert in this area called Kumron so they were a if you read the New Testament

you're going to hear about groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees the Essenes were a group

aside from that and they had gone out of the desert and they had kind of their own rules and regulations

but they also copied a lot of these books and so along with a lot of other books they had

uh like rules and and wrote about what their their religious practices were and then had some other

theological writings that they deemed valuable but they clearly viewed what we call the Old

Testament the Hebrew Bible of scriptures is is incredibly important as scriptural as their guiding

principles but they often viewed the propheticness of those as applying to their day right then

and there like they thought kind of apocalypticly that they were going to be the reason why you know

everything was solved because of their they're very faithful practice okay and Jerusalem they'd

capitulated they were you know in in bed with Rome and they'd removed themselves they were pure

they were holy and they had some other you know practices that were a little bit more sectarian

and agmatic there so not all of the documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls are part of the Kumron community

a lot of them are but then there are other writings from groups that were hidden in the caves

that kind of and then some of them are just like very unusual there there's a treasure map

um this is a treasure map too so it's it's known as the copper scroll uh so it's the only one that's

not on either um parchment or on papyrus but it's on very thin sheeps of copper and it's rolled up

and it's a treasure map with all of these locations uh uh of of a lot of gold and silver

so some people have tried to kind of decode it and figure out where you know is this some of the

stuff uh that's the treasure from the temple is this you know some of the treasure of Solomon

from the Old Testament it's not entirely clear um but it does appear to be like the person who wrote it

does seem to think that this is where treasure is but that's kind of an outlier a lot of the

others have to do with religious practice or kind of historical scriptural things

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what percentage of this is in the bible or is a book in the bible so about uh

uh um so all of the books of the bible apart from uh one prophetic book and uh

ester were were found within in amongst the dicey scrolls um it's it's also in a number of

different languages so about 75 percent of it is written in Hebrew but some of it is written in

Greek and some in aramaic and uh a minority very small minority in nabatian so um that's where

it's like it's kind of a grouping the dead sea scrolls is an umbrella term for all of these

writings they just happen to be discovered in these 11 caves on the northwest side of the

dead sea but they're incredibly important and shed light on even things like uh there's one

particular manuscript which talks about the messiah and talks about the messiah in divine terms

and so this kind of shed light on our understanding of accusations that early christians are

imposing a foreign idea on to jesus you know that the messiah was going to be a divine figure

well we have actually some texts in the dead sea scrolls which actually do kind of indicate

that the messiah who is about to come the this anointed one he's actually going to have

a divine quality to him that exceeds just a mere man they're they're writing about this before he

came yeah yeah well that that was the expectation that the messiah was going to come so that that's

going on all throughout you know the Old Testament period but the the Essenes uh they they they

have an understanding that there's there's going to be two messiahs one from the line of

Aaron who's going to be a priestly messiah and one from the line of david who's going to be a king

messiah and that these people are going to fulfill the expectation of making all things right with

the nation of Israel particularly they're kind of sect of Israel that they see as the the pure one

and part of that was going to be they were going to drive out the Romans and make all things right

and they have a lot of um writings about them being the children of light and it's going to they're

going to defeat the children of darkness which could be assumed as you know the Greeks the Romans

or whoever but either way they're very apocalyptic in their understanding of these things

what else have we learned from them i mean they're they're very uh i mean the dead sea scrolls

are so fascinating because they shed so much understanding on like how Jews were say parsing out

some of the things within the Old Testament that maybe um we'd like to know more about so something

like the inocaine literature so there's a book of inoc so there's there's there's actually three

books of inoc for a second and thirty inoc the one that civically referred to as the book of inoc

is first inoc and some it's it's it's it's an amalgamated group of different literature

the book of the watchers the book of the giants uh the book of parables these kinds of things

that we all put into one book that we call first inoc some of it's really old uh and actually

right now on display at the Museum of the Bible you can see a fragment of astronomical inoc which

is on display i think for the first time ever i don't think it's ever been displayed this fragment

of astronomical inoc but what the documents that make up what we call first inoc are trying

to extrapolate on is what's going on before the flood so you have in Genesis chapter six there's

very you know cryptic passage of the sons of god saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and

they came and they slept with them and these women gave birth to these children that were the

Nephilim that were the heroes of old men of renown and so there's a bunch of different interpretations

in the ancient world as to what this means the um the Greek translation of the Old Testament

translates Nephilim as uh gigas which is giants and so there's a there's one particular

understanding of that uh and there's both a kind of naturalistic explanation that the sons of god

weren't necessarily angels but then there's another stream of interpretation that's fleshed out in

something like the book of inoc where it talks about okay well who are these sons of god and so

why were they um why why what were there their progeny what were the Nephilim and how did this come

into being and so uh it kind of does this through a narrative about the great grandfather of Noah

Inoc and flashes some of these things out and this goes into like a long history of leading up to

the New Testament where there's uh you know the demons kind of show up in the New Testament there

really isn't all that much said in the Old Testament about demons but in some of this

ancient Jewish literature that's incorporated and found in the Dead Sea Scrolls we have some of

these discussions of things like what are the demons well there was a pretty strong

thread of thinking within ancient Judaism that demons were disembodied spirits of the Nephilim

so the Nephilim if you're taking a supernatural understanding of who they are their fathers are

angels and their mothers are humans so they're kind of these half supernatural half carnal

things so when they die their spirits don't have anywhere to go so now they're trapped in their

wandering the earth they're aimless and they're constantly trying to get back into a physical form

and so they possess people and because they're not really meant to do that because they're

these wayward supernatural beings it never really works out and they end up making people do all

sorts of crazy things and they're they're cursed because they're unholy they're the the progeny

of fallen angels and so there's all this stuff so some of this literature is flushing that out now

is that really what's going on I don't know what do you think about that I think it's very very

interesting I think some of it makes sense I think on things that scripture whispers about I

don't want to yell too loudly I'm very conscious I'm I think it's entirely plausible given what the

what we see within scripture and the fact that it's not 100% clear exactly what demons or even

angels are but that's what something like the book of Enoch is trying to flesh out and so some

of this literature what kind of falls into the category of what's called pseudo-pographical writing

so pseudo means false right in Greek and graphene means writing so it's a false writing so it's

attributed to an author who's not really the author or about an author that's not necessarily

meant to be thought of realistically as that author so Enoch the book of Enoch almost certainly

wasn't written pre-flood in the time of Enoch and there's all sorts of ways that we can tease that

out with even the time-keeping that it it includes is very influenced by the Hellenistic time-keeping

the Greek time-keeping in the day there are illusions to the book of Daniel to the book of

Deuronomy and the book of Numbers which are in the Enochian literature which means that they're

probably being written after those and especially with the book of Daniel which is in the Persian

period that's quite late so and even some ancient Jewish writers like Josephus who comes around

at the end of the first century very beginning of the second century when he has his conversation

in in a writing of his where he's talking about scripture he specifically says that nothing

was written before Moses so he kind of disqualifies Enoch as being you know this is claiming to be

written prior to there's no scripture that's written prior to that so that's kind of his category

of articulating that but I mean these things are you look at the ancient world and how they're

trying to flesh things out and though they're some in some ways very ambiguous like scripture

tells us what we need to know not always what we want to know but I don't think that that means

that we cancel out any idea of a theory or a probability or a possibility of say you know what is a

demon I don't claim to totally know but I think it's very interesting that the Jews themselves in

the ancient world prior to leading up to and during the time of Jesus they're also discussing these

things wrestling with them and coming up with these ideas that we can read to interesting kind of

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why did why did um well how many Dead Sea Scrolls didn't make it how many of the Scrolls did not

make it into the Bible so uh yeah so i mean part of the trickiness like i said before is

that the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind of an umbrella category it's like saying library right like uh

there's a whole bunch there's a range of literature so by the time in and around Jesus

the Protestant what we have in the Protestant Old Testament was I would argue established

as the Hebrew scriptures so modern orthodox Jews today their Bible is the Tanakh the Torah

the Naviim and the Ketsavim the law of the prophets and the writings that's the same number of

books that are in a Protestant Old Testament so there are other books that are also

included in the Dead Sea Scrolls like i said some of them are apocalyptic the war scroll

is a really interesting one which is you know another apocalypse so we have an apocalyptic

book in our Bible revelation right but apocalypse is weren't that uncommon in ancient Jewish

writings in fact enoc is in many ways an apocalyptic book but the war scroll is an apocalyptic book

and uh so there's different categories that are um included within the Dead Sea Scrolls

but what do you mean different i mean it sounds like way i'm hearing that is there's different

apocalypse is is that what you're saying so apocalypse is just a category of literature it's

like saying biography or letter or so the one that ends up in the Bible is the book of revelation

and that's tied to specifically the john who's you know a traditionally associated with john

the apostle of Jesus and so when we're talking about the canon of scripture what books

are aren't included in our Bible what the early church is doing first of all they have a direct

connection in association with the early Jesus community so there's a chain of custody in that

there are individuals who are disciples of the disciples of Jesus so you have guys like

so the dagger i gave you is named after urnaus urnaus is part of a community where they're called

the apostolic fathers where their own teachers are the apostles so in one sense the earliest

Jesus community has a direct line of communication with people who knew Jesus

okay and so when they're talking about okay you were the old covenant and there were books

that were associated with the old covenant right god makes a covenant with Moses you have the

Torah you have the law god makes covenant with Israel you have prophetic writings and there is

an understanding in ancient Judaism that covenant and writings were intricately connected so Jesus

comes along he establishes the new covenant he establishes even like the signs of that in the

last supper in the the Eucharist the Lord's table and the apostles see themselves as kind of the

arbiters of the new covenant so the natural question for the earliest Christians who were Jews

who believe in Jesus as the Messiah is okay new covenant where are the books

because that understanding is carried over it's an ancient Jewish understanding god makes a promise it

makes a covenant with the people and it's followed up by books that we have the new covenant

where are the books kind of the natural organic question the follow that and so very very early on

the four biographies of Jesus Matthew Mark look and John they are being read as scripture

Justin martyr this early Christian writer refers to them as the memoirs of the apostles he says

when Christians gather together early in the morning they read the memoirs of the apostles

and and the letters of Paul are very early collected together and even in one single document so we

in the late second early third century we have two collections of manuscripts one they're

referred to as p 46 and p 45 and those are a grouping of the fourfold gospel canon and acts

and pause letters so like I said before most of these are circulating independently

okay as like you have a copy of pause letters for Romans because once again it's super expensive

right I mentioned codex about a canis earlier there's another one codex synaticus which comes from

the fourth century it would have taken 360 sheep to make so like no small commitment and effort

and financial you know contribution so you would usually just have them in single books but the

four gospels we do find collections of them all together and whenever we have conversations of

what is scripture there's very little debate about the gospels and there's knowledge of other

gospels a gospel Thomas gospel of Peter gospel of Philip but they're always mentioned in connection

of saying they have no connection to the actual apostles we know what are the documents that

have connection to the apostles Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John the gospel of Thomas doesn't it's

it's a it's a forgery it's false Thomas was dead by the time it was written so we have really

Christians talking about this stuff and in going back to your original question like when we have

these conversations on canon the Christians are wrestling some books are a shoe in the gospels we

can tie directly to Matthew he was a disciple of Jesus John he was a disciple of Jesus Luke is a

traveling companion to Paul and Mark is intricately and closely tied to Peter so those are kind of a

shoe in right and then you have the letters of Paul those are kind of a shoe in but then you have

questions about some of the others and some of those questions have to do with the fact that you

have other letters floating around with apostles names so in our new testaments we have for

second and third John at the letters of John and first and second Peter those took a little bit

longer for the dust to settle on to get into what we would consider as like a closed canon

and it it was partly because the early Christians were looking and they were looking around and

they were saying okay there are other groups writing documents and they're co-opting

popular figures names like Peter and like John because those are very you know key individuals

in the early Jesus community so we need to do our due diligence because we have

we have first and second Peter we have this other writing called the gospel of Peter we have an

apocalypse of Peter we have an acts of Peter let's let's make sure we know let's make sure we're

actually reading the book that is tied to the actual Peter and so some of these books take a

little bit longer to get full wide acceptance and I think that's a good thing and in terms of like

books that are maybe found in the Dead Sea Scrolls that are like other Jewish writings the Jews

had already fleshed a lot of that out in that they saw some of these books is very valuable

very like key into the historical understandings of the Jewish nation especially during the time

of the Greek occupation and the Hasmanine revolt and like these are important writings

but the Jews didn't consider them scripture and we can look at individuals like I mentioned before

Josephus who talk about this and kind of lay out guidelines and say like here is we don't have

an innumerable books of holy scripture like the Greeks do we have a set number and here's how we

understand that set number and Paul says in the book of Romans that the Jews were entrusted with the

oracles of God and so part of the conversation of the Old Testament scripture is okay some people

like Jerome in the 4th century was responsible for putting together the Latin Vulgate which was the

Latin copy of the Bible that was the Bible of the church for a thousand years okay he goes back

and he's a he's a very competent linguist so he knows Greek and Hebrew and he's going back and

he's talking with rabbis and he's saying okay well what do you consider scripture what are these

conversations and there's kind of a disagreement between him and Augustin about some Old Testament

books but and so there are all these conversations happening but ultimately the Doss does settle

and there is an established core of books and that's the 66 the 66 that's in this Bible are the

established core and there's debate about some others even leading up to the reformation which is

why Luther says you know let's not worry about some of these other books that there's continual

debate for that you know even some popes are not are saying that's not scripture um let's let's

stick to the ones that we know the Jews themselves considered scripture and that's the central core

and that's what we will hold to as the word of God but all that to say it's the Dead Sea Scrolls that

kind of elucidate some of our understandings of that in looking at okay what were some of these

groups reading and maybe how were they treating these books in the way that they were copying them

that Shed's light on some of these conversations are they are the other books that aren't in the

Bible are they published somewhere can you get them oh yeah I mean a Roman Catholic Bible will have

what's called the Deutero canonical books so Deutero canon means second canon um so to give the

you know the Roman Catholic Church there do they would say second in reception not second in authority

so they were officially pronounced as part of the official canon at the council of Trent

in the after the reformation there's a counter reformation after the Protestant reformation

and that's when those books were officially designated as these are included in scripture so you

can get um Protestants typically typically refer to it as the apocrypha uh which is just a designation

that goes back to the ancient church for books that are not canonical or canonical or you're

apocryphal doesn't mean all apocryphal books are heretical there's not part of scripture um but you

can read them yeah first and first second and third macabees um Tobit Judith you know the bell

in the dragon there's an extra chapter of the Psalms these are I think good useful books to read

would encourage everybody to read them because I do think that they they shed light on our understanding

of ancient Jewish culture and something like the macabees tell us about the story of Hanukkah

where uh you had the Greeks they go in and they take over Jerusalem and uh the the Greek emperor

goes in and he he desecrates the temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar of God to Zeus so like

bad news bears all over the place right and uh then um Judas macabees uh Judas the hammer

he goes in and he he defeats them and he rededicates the temple to God and that's Hanukkah

this is this story that happens prior to the time of Jesus and then you get to Jesus and in the

gospel of John it talks about Jesus going to Jerusalem to the temple for the feast of dedication

that's Hanukkah so something like the macabees can they can actually shed a lot of light on

what's going on even in how we understand what Jesus is doing in his own day like why do Jews

today celebrate Hanukkah what's about this historical event that took place prior to Jesus

and we read about that in these very valuable books these these historical books but the

the differentiation is are these considered scripture and as a Protestant I would say no

and I would say that they're good historical reasons to believe that going through all of the

conversations of the the last 2000 years um but I think people should read them whether they

think that their scripture or not what's in the what you call the war scroll yeah the war scroll

what's that about so that's uh that's the battle so it's either called the war scroll or the

battle of the sons of light versus the sons of darkness and it's this big cosmic battle of

uh kind of the the the Essenes the Kumaran community seeing themselves as the ones that are holding

down the fort for the people of God um so the the high priest under David in the Old Testament was

a guy named Zorak so uh there's uh uh they see themselves as kind of successors of the high priest

under David and they see themselves as the ones who are undefiled from all of the corruption that

they see going on in Jerusalem so they there's this they write this document that is this cosmic

battle between angels and demons and all these things and really it's a it's a representation

of what they see as you know the marching orders of how they need to be as holy as possible

and that there's a cosmic battle that's raging in in the background in the supernatural realm uh

that is going to influence how one day all things going to be made right God's going to win

and there are going to be the ones that are going to be kind of the the way that this comes into

fruition wow wow you know this morning uh at breakfast we we were talking about um a lot of the

people who have studied this have never been to the location where they were found um what do you

think that's important i think it should be there yeah i think it connects us to the times and

places where these things happened and so so one of the the things that we with the organization

that i have the the pleasure and opportunity to be the vice president of the paulgetics

canada we have this video series can i trust the bible and what we want to do is we want to tell

some of those stories in the places where they happen to try to make that kind of connection

so we go to naqamadi where the naqamadi library was discovered in the desert in egypt

where the gospel of thomas and the gospel of philipp were included and i we went to the naqamadi desert

i stand in an approximate location of where it could have been potentially found and i tell the story

of this bedouin shepherd who is wandering through the desert he's digging for what's arguably

fertilizer and he finds this jar and in it are these books and i think you know for me personally

there's something really amazing about kind of just standing and visualizing where this happened

and then being able to tell that story in the location so the one we recently did we were just in

turkey my colleague gandy and i and we are filming in isnec which is the modern side of the ancient

city of nicaea because the council of nicaea often becomes this uh kind of uh uh catch all for

conspiracy theories about whether that's the books the bible or the divinity of christ that's kind

of the divinci code-esque argument is that all of these things get pinned on constantine in the

council of nicaea so we went to nicaea and the the basilica the church where they think it happened

was discovered recently it's in a lake so the there's been a drought the lake's been receding

over time and when the lake receded it actually revealed the footprint of this ancient church

no way yeah it's really cool where is this this is an isnec turkey is this where you you were just

there yeah so we my colleague gandy and i we weighed out into the lake in front of the ruins

you can see them we fly a drone over top and you can see the ruins is like this this footprint of a

church um really amazing stuff and we talk about did you dive it no so at this point when it was

discovered you actually had to dive it and we planned when we like map this out we were going to

dive it um my my colleague gandy is actually a pretty experienced uh uh scuba diver and so that

was our intention but the lake has receded so much that it's basically on dry land at this point

okay so we we we were like not that far off the shore and uh uh like the waves are laughing

up on the top of of the ruins wow but um we went there to tell the story because in 2025 it was

1700 years because it was 325 is when the council of nicia happened and so we went and we're like we

don't we don't just want to clear up the details of what didn't and did happen to the council nicia

we want to do it in nicia we want to do it in front of the the ruins of the the sunken basilica

and i think that just that i hope what that does for the viewer is it connects them in a more

tangible way that these aren't just facts and these aren't just kind of data points this is real

history and when we can connect with the real history and talk about what actually happened

that that connects us to something bigger than just me as a talking head um and i think it just like

those opportunities are man that is amazing all right west we're winding down the interview

i want to ask

what is the most compelling piece of evidence for you

that proves jive that proves jesus's existence i'm always curious everybody you know

yeah you know i think i don't think it's necessarily one thing what i'm always blown away with

for the multi-valent case of the christian worldview is that when you look at the claims

of christianity and ultimately like them centering on who jesus is there are so many

cross over interlocking areas of inquiry and evidence you know now i i went to university

because i had full intention of going into the police force what yeah i wanted to be i wanted to be

serious yeah yeah i wanted to be police detective got out other plans and i kind of went off now

unbeknownst to me historiography and detective work are not all that i was just gonna say that

but in police work especially with something like uh like an investigation on a murder say

you want a number of lines of evidence that vary on how good or not good they are right because it

makes a cumulative case some evidence is a lot better than other evidence but when you put it

all together it makes that cumulative case to point to the evidence of a specific thing happening

and this is where i think people people often miss the boat in that we don't just believe the god

of the bible arbitrarily it's not like i picked Yahweh but i could have picked Zeus you know i

believe that there's evidence that ultimately points to the truthfulness of the christian worldview

so when you have someone like rickard jervais who says you there are 30,000 religions out there

you really think yours is true in my mind sometimes i think that's like standing in front of a judge

and saying there are 30,000 people in this town you really think this guy's the guy you did it

well it depends what the evidence is right it depends whether the evidence is pointing in the direction

of that person being the culprit and so it's not just arbitrary we didn't just pick a random

person and put him on trial there's evidence that actually points to whether that person is guilty

or not and actually there could be good evidence and bad evidence and the judge could throw at some

evidence as being inconsequential or weak but it's all of that evidence together and so when i'm

looking at the historical evidence and i'm looking at something like whether that's the transmission

history of the manuscripts that i see you know we can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we can see

their fidelity to a thousand years later and that being so close that it's staggering sometimes

or just you know a copy i have some like high grade photocopies facsimiles and manuscripts

that i do my academic work on and i have a couple of like late second early third century copies

of the gospels and i'm looking at it and i'm looking at it i'm reading the Greek and when i'm

sight translating it and i look at my english bible i'm like guess what i'm translating

like i could i might as well just open this up because the connectivity is just there now that's

not to say there aren't like differences in spelling word order or variances those do exist

but it's just like the fidelity is just so mind blowing to me personally and then you look at the

internal evidence and you look at the fact that the names the places the facts the information

all tie it to the first century in Galilee of people who either they were there themselves

and they're communicating this or like the gospel author Luke says that he's interviewing

eyewitnesses he says that at the beginning of his gospel he's very purposeful you know i'm not

i wasn't there but i'm writing these things down and making an orderly account i'm interviewing

eyewitnesses so that you may know the things you are taught and so you look at these levels of

the things that we're trying to highlight with the can I trust the bible series the internal

evidence and with the names the places the people and you see that and you go wow this this is

testifying to it being written in the place it's claiming to be written in the time frame it's

claiming to be written and when we use that exact same methodology and criteria for something like

the gospel of Judas guess what it reveals that the names the places the details outed as being

written in third century Egypt and so you're like so when you ask well what is the piece of evidence

i think i think it's a multi-valent web that all conjoins at the truthful claim of all of these

things are pointing to this guy Jesus they're all pointing all there's prophecies in the old

testament there is an expectation this guy Jesus he comes on the scene he fulfills in some instances

very specific prophecies he predicts his own death and resurrection and then he does it

and as a friend of mine likes to say people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority

those who don't rise from the dead right and so i so i find it so fascinating that i'm i'm a

transistor and so i look at the historical data but when i talk to my my colleagues and friends

who are scientists who are philosophers who are sociologists and they also have all of these

different kind of lines of argumentation some of which you know i don't like this one i don't like

that one but it's the cumulative case the points to the truthfulness so you could eliminate one

and i don't think it would it wouldn't collapse my worldview because i genuinely believe that at

this point with my inquiry and investigation like i said before i think it's intellectually robust

but it's also exicentially satisfying it's changed my life it's changed the way that i think

you know i see it's Lewis record before he said you know i believe in Jesus like i believe in

the sun not that i see it but that by it i see everything else and so it's that's why we call it

a world of you right it's how we view the world around us and when we were talking before about

you know those those times where we struggle the those seasons of the dark nights of the soul

it's not that those aren't tangible but it's when i'm really struggling i go back to

listen i have something that points to truthfulness and despite my very subjective

feelings despite what i might be struggling with right now i i genuinely believe this is true

and the truthfulness of that changes the way that i live for the better that as echoes into

not just this life which should be lived well which should be lived with integrity but

after my mortal coil is given up and i go into eternity uh that i

more questions will be answered in a way that i never could have understood before

i'm actually i'm curious about those two what what his strength in your faith more is it through

your researchers through your personal experiences when i say personal experiences i mean

the miracle that you're not a pair of paralyzed from the waist down now

yeah i stuff like that i'm not church in either or i think it's a both and um i don't think you know

faith isn't an intellectual endeavor i don't think we're gonna stand before god and he's

gonna give us a theological test because if he did i'd fail right i think we'd all fail um

it's it's it goes beyond that you know paul i read his is in effusion chapter two earlier he says

you know faith is a gift it's a gift or saved by faith through grace and there's something about

that which has always been very tangible for me especially in my field where there are plenty of

non-believing atheist agnostic biblical scholars who know all sorts of things that um are

even like like go beyond even my level of understanding and that's been a testimony to me

that you can't you can't intellectualize yourself into the kingdom of god it's not about that

it's not about knowing the most there is something that is genuinely goes beyond the transcendent

beyond just the simple understanding right james even says you believe that god is one

says great even the demons believe that and they shudder at that fact it's not about you know who

knows god the best let's probably satan but what what is different about the understanding that

goes beyond i think the factual knowledge sits as kind of the confidence building of i i can have

hope because i truly believe that this is something that is true with the capital T

but beyond that i've actually seen Jesus change my life i've seen Jesus take my heart of stone

and give me a heart of flesh and remove desires that i had before to do things that were wrong you

had a heart of stone yeah we all have hearts of stone that's it we all have hearts of stone and

apart from the saving work of the spirit speaking to our life you know we are going to choose death a

hundred percent of the time me i west you know without god working in me i am going to fight him

with everything i have because i don't know what's good for me and so i mean that's why it's such

the invitation that christ extends is so amazing because he doesn't need to do that he doesn't need

to save us like i said before he's never he's not better or worse off if i choose to follow choose

to worship he's still god he's still ruling and raining he's still the author of creation and the

creator of the universe and yet not only does he invite me into that but he himself steps into the

conversation and he becomes a human being he comes a baby vulnerable and and and you know crying

in a manger a feeding trough in israel and in Bethlehem and how does god show he he can't he

can't become any greater right so he steps down from the highest highs into the lowest lows

to show how great he truly can be and that like i said before if god is love and love is the

greatest ethic and the greatest example of that greatest ethic is self sacrifice then the god

of the bible has truly in himself exemplified what love embodies and it's in jesus christ

wow do you think god speaks to you i think god speaks to me in so far as

he moves me i don't think i've never heard an audible you know thus say it the lord statement

but i think the ways that god communicates with us in in leading us um i think through our

conscience in in how he directs us in the ways that certain things come together i think are

tangible that are not necessarily uh like a a prophetic of us say at the lord statement the author

of hebrus who i mentioned before opens his book by saying god having spoken long ago to the

fathers and the prophets in many portions and in many ways in these last days spoke to us in his son

whom he appointed air of all things through whom he also made the worlds who is the radiance of his

glory in the exact representation of his nature and upholds all things by the word of his power who

having accomplished cleansing of sins sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high and i think

you know there's something beautiful about god presenting us with his word that's tangible

that we can look at and can influence us and i think in the moments where i've heard god's voice

speak to me most is in the quiet moments of reflection of reading scripture and seeing

just the profound truths through all 66 books woven together that speak to things that i didn't even

know i needed to know about who i am about the people around me about who god is and how that

just so drastically and and impactfully changes the way that i understand the world

man i love that would you uh would you mind leading us in prayer yeah i'd love to and thus

thank you i thank you for this time lord i thank you for shan and i thank you for just the

giftings and opportunities that you have given him that you have blessed him with

a lord i pray that you would continue to lead him in your understanding for your glory

lord would you shape us into the image of your son jesus christ each and every day

by the power of your word and your spirit who leads or that your word would be our rule

and your spirit our teacher and your greater glory our supreme concern for the growth of your kingdom

and the name of the one who has saved us jesus christ amen amen

bless woke up very restless this morning and um you put me at ease oh i appreciate that thank you

yeah it's been an absolute pleasure it has been i i'm so glad we met yeah very thankful god bless

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