Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello. Hello. What's up? Did we answer all your questions yesterday? Because nobody wrote anymore in so we must have answered all of your questions. They would've had to really know what we were talking about yesterday. You, the person that wrote the question yesterday, I'm really proud of him for writing that question in. I thought it was, and we could be proud too of you if you wrote a question in too. We could. We could. You could write it into podcasts@tx.org. He's probably proud of himself that he wrote it too. I'm proud that I remembered. Also whatever you listen on, we haven't talked about this in a while, but if you wouldn't mind leaving a review and rating us, that would be awesome. It, it's at the end of every podcast still. I believe Unless, okay, unless you changed it. I did not change it. I haven't, I mean that, yes. If you listen all the way to the end, I know some people do that is always there. So if you ever get the inkling we will raffle off things to anyone who gives us a perfect. Five stars or above review, right. And raves about the podcast up for grabs. Pastor PJ's car. You get to choose what wrap we put on the car. that's not, that's not true. A free ride in Pastor Mark's car., anywhere you want. Wherever the battery will take you. Yes. And also you can come into the office and help Kelly file. So those are three options. You should see the options on the, somebody updated the serve at Compass. Did they form? Did they form? Somebody did form. And I can't figure out who it is, but the options that they added were awesome. You should go take a look at the serve at Compass sheet. Well sign up. One person did submit a volunteering to serve signup form, and they may share a last name with you. Yeah. Well that's because I live with the most humble and godly and servings woman in the world. Well, she, sorry. Well, did great job volunteering one of your sons. Oh, well, yeah. For this service, of course. Yes. He doesn't have a job, so he gets to get volunteered for lots of things. Volunteer. It's part of being in a family. Yeah. You just gotta do those things. Yeah. Hey, pastor Mark's here, by the way. Yeah, I am. I am. And my car was voluntold. Yeah. Yeah. I talked, he was here. I said, how do y'all brief? I said, A little interjection, and I said it was proud of them. Okay. There you did. So that's true. You did. You did. And I was proud of myself. Well, we, yeah, please pray for our student ministry. Yes. They're coming back today. They went on not RWE yesterday, and they're learning about some pretty heavy topics, and this is the one that was rescheduled after God's notice us all in and canceled our plans. And so this is not what we wanted, but this is what we now have. If you would think about them today and pray for them. They should be on their way back some point this afternoon, but we'd love for you to pray for them, think about them, and then. Lewis on Sunday is gonna give us an update about how it went. So we'd love to see you on Sunday so you can hear all about that. Yes. Yeah, good call. We should have probably brought that up yesterday, but you can pray. Here's a question I've got. Do prayers work retroactively? Yes. Wow. Without hesitation. Yes. Okay, so in other words, prove it buddy writing by that. If we're asking you to pray for their return, can you pray today for the teaching that's already happened and already taken place? Pastor Mark says, yes. Yes. Without hesitation. Do you want to expound on that? I have thought about this here. Here's my contention. On why such prayers would be appropriate, should you regularly pray in such a way? No, I don't think it's a helpful way to regularly pray. However, I'm praying that JFK survives Sorry. So, okay. God is outside of time. Yes. God has created time. Oh, he agree. He is not restricted by the bounds of time, and there's gonna be points in your life where there's uncertainty about things that may have already been set in stone, right. that you can pray for, and I think is appropriate to pray for is praying that JFK come back to life or wasn't shot or whatever, that wouldn't be. A helpful application of what I'm suggesting. I think rather what I'm suggesting is there are times when you can pray for things that are uncertain in your perspective, that are certain in God's perspective, and perhaps even certain in reality, you just may not be aware of it. So does my praying for example, the teaching from this past two days at Revival. Does my praying or not praying change the outcome? It would change the outcome. Because otherwise you think about David when the baby dies, right? He actually stops praying. Why is that? He says it's because the baby is dead. So I do think that there is, well that's contradict. I'm contradicting myself, aren't I? Yes. But I think the point you're making is still helpful in that the prayers have been cast. You don't know what the outcome is, but the Lord does and he could. That's my point. That's retroactively. Credit your prayer account, so to speak, and say, I'm gonna apply Pastor Mark's prayers in the future to now. Yeah. I lost my train of thought in the middle of what I was saying, but yes, thank you for saving me. I got you. I was tracking and I think I agree with the idea. And, but the only difference in my mind then is that, well, if we know the outcome, could I still pray? And you're saying probably not in my mind then, well, then why pray? I would pray maybe for my sake. Because I wanna feel better about whatever's happened or is happening. Yeah. I don't know that it necessarily changes anything that God would do if in fact it's already taken place. I wouldn't discourage praying. I would just pray regardless. I'd rather you pray to the Lord than not. But theologically, I'm having a hard time putting the pieces together. Although I fully understand your point. God's outside of time. I could pray outside. I could pray in time, and he can retroactively apply it. I just don't see any examples of that to give me great confidence that that's the way that God intends it to work. Yeah. I think also the reason why that we pray, even if we know the outcome, is I think God sovereignly uses our prayers to bring about the outcomes that he has ordained. And I think that's one of the answers to why pray of God is sovereign, because God has ordained that we would pray for this and we would pray a certain way for that and ordained the outcome of that event to be an answer to the prayer that we pray. So I think he uses our prayers in the accomplishing of his sovereign plan. So even though he's sovereign. I don't think anything really changes from what he's ordained from eternity past, and yet I think part of what he's ordained is the fact that we would pray for those things and he would answer those prayers in accordance with what he's doing. Amen. I agree with you theologically. The problem I have is the uhoh and this is a conflict that I have in my own thought on these things, is then doesn't that strip it of all? The passion, right? If everything is set in stone and you're just commanded to pray and I'm being a little simplistic here intentionally, but if everything's set in stone and you're commanded to pray, then why not just say some words to be done and move on? Because you still have a relationship with the guy that you're pranked. They're in the pot, right? And so I think the fact that you still do have that relationship with him helps to inform the passion in our prayers. And I think even greater so, gives us that reason to pray. If he is fully sovereign, knowing that, okay, Lord, you could use this prayer as part of the accomplishing of your plan in that person's life. So I'm gonna pray passionately for the salvation of my lost neighbor, because he may use that as part of what he's going to do to bring about that salvation. So I don't think it occurs in the vacuum of, Calvin's study of going, well, God is stopping, so build your bridge and get over it. I think it frees us up with the passion to pray all the more. So knowing that he does use our prayers in the accomplishing of his plan. But I get what you're saying. Yeah. Again, I don't have a conflict theologically with that. It's more when it comes to my day-to-day like life and the way I feel about things, where that becomes a bigger issue. Fair. Hey, let's get into our daily Bible reading for today. Deuteronomy 33 through 34, 33. Moses's. Goodbye continues. So Moses gives this blessing. Speaking of things that change. Does a blessing like this change anything about any of the futures of these tribes? Kinda like our prayer conversation doesn't, it sounds a lot like that. Feels like it. What are your thoughts, pastor Mark, do you have any thoughts on that? Well, and it even goes to what we're just talking about now, right? Yeah. Just a second ago. Right. Does the blessing as opposed to the prayer, does it matter? Does it matter? Right. If everything is locked in, is every, if God is sovereign over everything, then, why do we go through this? I do think that these blessings do matter. If they did not matter, then they would not be part of Deuteronomy. Right? If God was putting these things in here just for show or just for some sort of demonstration of Moses's ability to speak well that wouldn't serve us, right? So this has to serve us somehow. And I do think one of the ways it does that is by showing us that these, it does have importance, working out how it works is a little bit more difficult. Yeah, I agree with you. And I think that these are meaningful and they're meant to be understood as God's word on the matter, which is why we start talking about what are we reading? This is Moses speaking. Mm-hmm. Yes. But it is also the spirit of God speaking through Moses, and so it carries a different weight than if it were just Pastor Mark. Speaking of a blessing over Pastor PJ and Kelly and Ali and Lewis. There's more here than what meets the eye. And because this is God's word through Moses, we can see these words as particularly binding, even if interesting because one of the guys is missing, and I'm sure he was probably scratching his head saying, but what about me, Lisa? I want some more Simeon's not there, by the way. Well, and Joseph gets, e freeman manas get combined. Yeah, I'm okay with that. Yeah they're both from his line, which I understand that, but poor Simeon, like, where's he. Why is he neglected? And there's que there's questions about that. We don't know why he was, why is Simeon not there? But he isn't. I looked. Twice. Dan gets such a short blessing that maybe his is just so short it didn't even get a word. Maybe that's what it was. What about Asher? Asher's blessing is interesting. He says, most blessed of sons be Asher. Let him be the favorite of his brothers and let him dip his foot in oil. You think Asher's the tribe of Judah with the language that he's getting here as far as being the tribe to bring about the Messiah. Asher's kind of a small player. This just strong language for Asher here. That's something that jumped out this time around. And I've read different things while his name means happy and he had a fruitful and fertile area of the promised land associated to him. I don't know, it's just an interesting one from, from the blessing of Asher here. Yeah. And part of this is that we don't know all the particulars of how God works this out. That's what's so interesting about the biblical narrative. We read it be, and we rightly ascribe to it a comprehensiveness. We say that there's the word is plenary inspired. The whole thing is inspired of God now. But just because as true doesn't mean it's comprehensive. It doesn't tell us everything that happened or all the ways that it played out. In fact, there's a ton of questions that we come up against in the text that we don't get. Amazing answers to, well, we think, well, we're just gonna have to trust that the Lord, Deuteronomy 29 29, the secret things belong to the Lord. We don't have all of our answers, all of our questions answered. But what we do have is sufficient to make a really strong case for one thing or another, and everything we need for life and godliness. Second Peter one is there. We have all that we need. It is sufficient, but it is not comprehensive in the way that we often want. Yeah. One of the other things that's interesting about this is, this is coming on the heels of Deuteronomy 31, where the Lord said to Moses, none of these people are gonna do anything that is worthy or honorable or righteous. But yet there's some hints here for sure, that there is, there's problems in these blessings, but there're also being blessed nonetheless. Yeah, it's an amazing, it's an amazing thing. That's great. This blessing is coming to these people despite the fact that they were. Just told that they would not be able to do any of the things they have to. You're gonna fail miserably, but here's a blessing for you regardless. That's a great point. Chapter 34 contains the death of Moses, which I found myself a little bit sad about to leave Moses behind us. We're gonna continue reading. I know, Moses died a long time ago, but I was reading, I was like, oh man, Moses is gone now. Just feeling it today. Huh? Enjoying feeling, Moses and his leadership as we were reading through, but 120 years old, he's taken up on this mountain. He's allowed to see the promised land and then the Lord takes him and it says there. That his eye was not dimmed and is vigor unabated. The people of Israel wet for Moses in the plains of mo 30 days. That's how I wanna go out my eye, not dimmed in my vigor unabated. Th this, he's fully healthy, which goes to show again, this is not Moses dying accidentally of natural causes. This is Moses dying because God was bringing the discipline into his life that he said he was going to when Moses disobeyed and struck the rock. It's interesting here that we don't read and it was your fault again that this happened to me. This is why. Right. What is super cool though, is that God himself buried Moses. You see that in verse six. Well, you have to back up to verse five to get the context, but it says here Moses, a servant, the Lord died there in the land of Moab, according to the word of the Lord, and he buried him in the valley of the land of Moab opposite Beth Peor. Nobody knows where Moses is buried, and God kept that secret for. Some good purpose. I assume, in fact, there's this interesting account in the Book of Enoch that talks about Moses' body being argued over between the angel, Gabriel or Michael, I can't remember which angel do either. You guys recall and the devil, there's a dispute over his body. Do you guys have any insight or input on that? Clearly no one knows who his body was because God, I think didn't want them to venerate him or make his bone some kind of shrin or altar. And so God took care of business here. But anything about, it's Jude nine where we read that. Maybe the dispute wasn't, and I think what you just said, they didn't want him venerated. Maybe the dispute was the devil wanted to reveal where he was and yet God was saying, oh, interesting. No, that's not gonna happen. And so I want to keep it concealed because I don't want venerated, I don't want him to turn be turned into an idol as that people were prone to, to be quite idolatrous. I would've to agree with that. I think there's many things that God does to prevent his people, including us today in the New Covenant from becoming idolaters. Yeah. Well, let me just read to you Jude nine, just so you guys have a reference for that. It says, but when the Archangel Michael, it was Michael, not Gabriel, contending with the devil, was disputing about the body of Moses. He did not presume to pronounce a blasphemous judgment, but said the Lord rebuke you. That's in the book of Jude, the one little one chapter book and by the way, Jude is quoting from, if I'm not mistaken the book of Enoch. Yes. Yeah. Which is apocryphal. Which is apocryphal. Yeah. And not in our Bibles. Correct. Which is why it's called apocryphal. Yes. Yep. Well, you don't get to miss out on Moses too long, so don't be too sad. Okay, because in just a couple days we're gonna be reading from Luke nine and guess who shows up there? Oh yes, that's true. So you won't have to miss him too long. So don't be too sad. One of the things, so Moses does make it to the promise. Well, that's what I wanted to point out, which is that it is true that. The death of Moses is judgment. But here's another example of God being gracious, and Moses actually does make it to the promised land, despite God's judgment here in Deuteronomy, the better promised land, the true promised land. Well, that one and the proverbial promised land, I guess. Yes, both. Both. And very generous of God to do that. Yeah. All right. Let's flip over to Luke chapter 1, 24 through 56, and we have another announcement of an impending birth. This time, it is the announcement of Jesus' impending birth to Mary. And so Mary is greeted by the angel. She's terrified. The angel says Greetings will favored one, and then proceeds to tell her that she's gonna have a baby. Mary's pretty sharp. She says, I've never known a man, and so how is this gonna be possible? Now again, there's a difference here between Mary's questioning. Ann Zacharia is questioning. And the reason we know this is because Mary's not disciplined for this. In fact the Angel Condescends to Mary to continue to explain things to her to say, this is what this is gonna be like. This is what's gonna happen to you. And it prompts in response, a humility and a, an act of worship from Mary as she proceeds with the, what we call the Magnifico there in verses 47 through 56. But Mary is Mary's commendable for the way that she receives this announcement from this angel in this text. Yeah, super cool here. John the Baptist is six months older than Jesus. We assume a family relationship here that would make John the Baptist and Jesus probably cousins. That's a really safe bet. Maybe they had a slightly different familial relationship, but at least we would say they're related. And what's happening here is fun because you see in verse 26 that John is six months older. There's a six month. You also see that in verse 36. This is the sixth month with her, who is called Barren. And then you'll also see one super cool thing, verse 41, when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary John got hyped, he's excited. He jumps up and I don't know what else he's doing in the womb. I know some moms, when we had our kids, when the kids would move in the belly, especially for the first time, really exciting. Super creepy at the same time, but also really exciting. This has gotta be. For, Elizabeth clearly understood this more than just, oh he's alert. He saw, she saw this as him being excited that she was in the presence, or he was in the presence of the soon coming Messiah. How does John know this? How does John the Baptist know this in the mom's womb? She interprets it that way, and we assume that's what's happening, but he's okay. I don't know. I'm stoked, I'm excited. I'm perplexed all at the same time. It's a wonder of wonders. He's filled with the spirit. It's the spirit is controlling the baby, right? Sure, yeah. Outside of John's control. I'm just saying as one who came outta the charismatic movement, you could seize this to be like, look, this is evidence we should be leaping and jumping and dancing in the aisles during worship if we're truly spirit controlled. Well, yeah I won't push back to you on you too hard, but I just think this is phenomenally cool and we read it quickly because we're used to it, but it's one of those things where if you just stopped and thought about what this, what's happening and what it means, I am, I'm just flabbergasted. Yes. Super cool. It is really cool. I think that's the response you're supposed to have though. I agree. I think that's the response you're supposed to have when you read this passage. I think you're not supposed to necessarily be able to figure out all the components or how the nuts and bolts go together. I want to though. Well, that's not a bad thing. Okay. But I do think that you're, I think the reason it is the way it is to draw you to that sort of praise. If you were able to figure out all of those different components and you were able to put the puzzle together. I'm not, it might not have the majesty and the incredible nature that this passage has. I thought you were gonna say magic, which I did not say magic. I thought you were gonna say that though. Might not have all the magic that it has. Yeah, I agree. This is a great text and this is why reading it and rereading it is so important because you just tend to skip things. Yeah. Your mind fills in the blanks and you forget, oh, this is actually very unique. Yeah. Well, and I think it's probably worth pointing out too. I mentioned Mary's commendable. I preached a sermon on Mary's response, and at the same time, we can't commit the era that the Catholic Church commits with Mary. This is not something where Mary needs to be worshiped or venerated. Mary is a servant of the Lord. She's the one that's chosen. This does not put Mary in a class that she is above other people or worthy to be elevated or prayed to or anything else like. That. And we see that even in her response, she acknowledges her own humble estate and she doesn't say, I'm gonna reign and I'm gonna be the coem tricks and everything else like that. And so I think we have to guard against that and be able to say, yeah, Mary's commendable without saying, Hey, we're saying we should worship Mary and want to be like Mary. Yeah. Because we should be people who see ourselves. Able to say the same thing that Mary said. Yeah, right. We should be able to say to God, behold, I'm a servant of the Lord. Let it be to me, according to your word. If we make Mary something that she's not and we say she's sinless, she's perfect. We should worship her, pray to her, et cetera, et cetera. I think it removes that impetus for our own lives. Right. We are like Mary in many ways, and what an amazing thing it is that she says that and we ought to say the same thing. Well, and then she also pens this chart topper too. Mary's also contributing to Israel's top 10 list, and she says in verse 47, my soul magnifies the Lord in my spirit rejoices in God my savior. So clearly she recognized that she needed a savior just as much as the next John Doe. And this was, this song is evidence of her theological prowess for being a young lady. And we think that Mary could have been as young as early teens, super uncomfortable for us in modern America, but the timing of a family and beginning a family was way earlier for them. They didn't have as long a life predicted as we do. And so their start to life as they understood it was far earlier and that was appropriate and fitting for their season. But you'll read as you look at these verses that she penned she's got a great theological head on her shoulders. Yeah, she does. For a young lady, any young lady. Yeah. But especially for the mother of God, this makes perfect sense. Yeah. How much do you think she understood about. The child she was carrying did, do you think she connected the dots at this being the Messiah? Are you asking Mary, did you know? Did you know? And I bring that up because 54 and 55, he has helped his servant Israel in remembrance of his mercy as he spoke to our fathers to Abraham into his offspring forever. I think she's even alluding to the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant, at least part of it there, which I think going back to verses 32 and 33, the announcement, he will be great and will be called Son of the most high. The Lord God will give to him the throne of his father, David. So I think she is making some pretty robust theological connections. To your point, pastor Rod, she knew her stuff. And so she didn't know about the cross. She didn't know about the death of him and everything else, but I think she knew quite a bit at this point. Yeah, I agree. She's clearly she's got some stuff figured out how much she knows. You'll have to ask her according to the song lyrics when you see her in heaven and then see if she gets annoyed with you. I don't think she can get annoyed in heaven. I'll take that back. But verse 56 tells us that she stayed with Elizabeth for three months, and if she's around the six month timeframe when she shows up, that means she's pretty near term when she either, and maybe she was there for the birth of John the Baptist. That would be really cool. Yeah, we don't know, but there you go. All right, let's pray and they'll be done with this episode. Lord, we are grateful that you showed up to Mary and you showed up with this announcement, with this news of the birth of the Savior and that you saw fit to come to earth to come after us in the form of Christ, in the form of the second member of the Trinity. And so we pray, God, that we would never lose the a, the wonder the on the wonder that even Mary had here as she reflected and pray that we would have the same heart posture before you to say whatever you see fit, do as you see fit to us. We want to be your servants. As we seek to avail ourselves to you, and so we're grateful for this. We're thankful for your word, and thankful for the day that you've given us. We pray all this in Jesus name. Amen. We'll keep reading your Bibles and come back tomorrow where I think, Lord willing, all three of us will be back for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See you. Bye bye.

Thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. We’re grateful you chose to spend time with us today. This podcast is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in North Texas. You can learn more about our church at compassntx.org. If this podcast has been helpful, we’d appreciate it if you’d consider leaving a review, rating the show, or sharing it with someone else. We hope you’ll join us again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast.