Hey everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. We are your hosts, pastor PJ and Pastor Rod Gomez up. And, uh, we're here to read the Bible together and talk to everything going on in the world. Everything going on in the world. Exhaustively. Exhaustively. Yes. Hey, we're talking about politics this weekend and Oh, that'll be fun. That non-controversial, that is fun and non-controversial, but, actually, it's fun. Not non-controversial. Right. But it will be fun. It will be. Yeah. Yeah. And we listen, at the end of the day, we've got one sermon to preach on a topic that is massive. So, come hungry, but become understanding that you're gonna still have some hunger pains probably after you leave on Sunday. It's gonna be a very long sermon. It's gonna be a three hour sermon. Yeah. It's so fascinating though, with an intermission, I think and we just talked about this, but. We're gonna have, we have a different perspective on this than we did six years ago at this point. Because we've seen a lot of things happen, especially in 2020, that were eye-opening for a lot of us. Cause us to raise an eyebrow at least. Exactly. So, we'll have to walk through what this looks like as Peter's calling us to sub submit ourselves to governing authorities. Oh. And if you're looking for, Hey, my pastor told me I didn't have to pay my taxes, so you don't, if you wanna throw me in jail, go after him. Instead, you're not gonna hear me say, uh that you don't have to pay your taxes. But that said. We have to understand, okay, how do we live as Christians under an ungodly, form of government, which is every form of government, no matter where you're at. Should be an interesting, interesting time on Sunday to say the least. Don't miss it. Don't miss it. Yeah. As it is, it's Thursday and so our week is winding down. Your week is winding down. Ours is just getting started. That's true. Actually, your week is winding down. Ours, it's just getting started. We're not winding down at all. Ours ramps up all the way through Sunday. In fact, especially on Sunday because we've got a longer day on Sunday. 'cause it is fall fest. Yeah. So it's hopefully you're planning on being there with your family. Four to seven. Can we dress up? You can dress up. Is there any guidelines for what you should or shouldn't wear? Yes. We don't want it to celebrate evil or be overly gory or anything like that. We're trying not to have like the screen masks and things like that. That would be So no chainsaws, right? Yeah. Okay. Leave those at home. But yeah, costumes are fine. If you want your kids to wear their Halloween costumes, that's fine. When you say scary, how scary? Like, if I'd come dressed up as. As heresy. Is that scary? Yes. Or COVID? 19. If I come dressed up as COVID-19. After this morning or after that morning sermon. Oh man. Yeah, that'd be funny. Are you dressing up? I'm not. People wanna know what you're wearing. I'm dressing as a pastor, so that's kind of expected. You know, I'm not a big costume guy. No, never. Well, even for the church though, what about the, what about the kids? Think about the kids. I am thinking about the kids. I'm actually, they would love to, I'm thinking about visitors that I. Hopefully gonna have come back to church the next Sunday. And I don't want them to have me pictured as a giant banana or something like that, lying around. This guy's such a banana. He's so humble and he's lowly, he's just one of the people. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. Maybe you should dress as a shepherd. I like a first century shepherd. Do that too. Yeah. Get the shepherd staff. Yeah. And the long robes. And then you could show us what it looks like to git up your loins when we do the race. I don't, I don't think anybody that you and Pastor Mark can race girding up your loins. Anyways. Fault. Best, the church would be honored to see you gird up like your loins brail. Come on. I don't, this is, you've said the word loins far too many times. We're getting an E on this podcast up. Gird up your loins is what I said. I it is not without context here. Well, yeah, that's probably not gonna happen. But yeah, we want you to join us. It should be a great time on Sunday. See you there. Let's talk about the Bible, John seven and eight. John seven is interesting because this is really, the tip of the spear, at least in John's gospel for Jesus really starting to go head to head with the religious leaders. We're gonna get in John eight, by the way, a section of the Bible that probably. Wasn't there in the original manuscripts, which I preached on when we preached through the Gospel of John. So if you're looking for that more in depth, you can go back to that message. But as John seven opens, we got a problem because there's a feast and the Feast of Booze and the Feast of Booze was one of three of the major feasts that required the presence of all Jewish males in Jerusalem. So Jesus' brother say, Hey let's go up to Jerusalem. And Jesus says. I'm not going up to this feast. But then shortly after that says in verse 10, after his brothers had gone up to the feast, then he also went up. We've got a problem. Did Jesus lie? Have we finally caught Jesus in a sin? He said, I'm not going. But then he went. Answer, no. Jesus is not lying. Right. How do we know that? Because of what is added by John. Whew. You're relieved, pastor. I'm relieved. He was about to, I was afraid I was about to quit my job and move to Kentucky. Says. Then he also went up and here's the modifier. Not publicly, but in private and that's what helps us understand what's going on. When Jesus brothers were saying, let's go to the feast Jesus brothers were inviting him to step into the public spotlight and to declare his identity and to make himself known as the Messiah they're wanting to follow and ride on his coattails and gain the glory that they would be able to get from this brother of theirs that was attracting so many people up in the region of Galilee. They're saying, let's take this to the place that it really needs to be taken to, which is Jerusalem. That's why Jesus said to them, I'm not going up. I'm not going up. In other words, in the way that you want me to go up to this feast. And that's why John says in verse 10, after they left, he went up and then he as the qualifier, not publicly, but in private. And why? Because John's theme of the hour, his hour was not yet at hand. And Jesus knew for him to go up the way they wanted him to, which is Allah, the triumphal entry, which John will show us Jesus is going to do eventually. This wasn't the time for that. And so Jesus tells his brothers, now is not the time. But he goes up privately because he was keeping the law. The law required his presence there. He wasn't gonna disobey the law. He just wasn't gonna go up the way they wanted him to. Can we just acknowledge one of the elephants in the room here? Verse eight says, you go up to the feast. I am not going up to the feast. If you just take it for what it says, face value. Jesus says, you go up. I'm not going up. And I think for some critics of the Bible, they're gonna look at that and say, see, you're just talking around it here. You're just saying things. You're asserting things that aren't there. He clearly says something that's not true. He intended to go up the whole time. Alright here's the deal. When you're reading a text, you can say black and white, hear what the letter. But you have to read the Bible, what they tend or touch. You have to read it with a skillful hand. And that means doing more than just looking at what the words say on the page. You have to say, what do they mean? What's being communicated here? And all you have to do is read the few verses after what he says to get a sense of what he's after. We're not. Apologizing for Jesus and making something up that wasn't there. All we're doing is looking at it at face value and saying, what's happening in the text and what is Jesus trying to communicate? If John knew that Jesus was contradicting himself or that he was lying, do you think John would've put it in there? Would John be like, you know what, this is the son of God. This is the Lamb of God, but he's a liar in this funny. Let's keep it in there. See what happens. Right? He's not an idiot, right? Like he's not a dummy. He knows what he's doing. So as you encounter critics of the Bible who say, well, well the says are in the black and white. He said that you know what I. On the one hand I wanna show some empathy and some care say, okay I get why you see that, but let's just look at the whole thing. Let's look at what the text says and try to get a sense of what's happening here. Do we really think Jesus in one moment is lying? And then the next moment saying, well, I'm gonna do this other thing over here. It just doesn't make sense given what we know about Jesus and even how John has written about him to this point. Yeah. Yeah, that's helpful. From here, when he goes up to the feast, he goes to the temple mountain. He begins to teach there. And you might again think to yourself, well, that seems like a pretty public move for him to make. It seems like he's. Creating a stir by doing that. And yet it's important to remember for us that this was not an uncommon thing for a rabbi to do. A rabbi would go to the Temple Mount and take his followers and he would teach them there on the temple mount in the precincts of the temple courts there. And so Jesus is simply doing what a rabbi would do. This would've not been. Him grabbing the microphone center stage and standing up and saying, and now our keynote speaker for the day is Jesus. And so the people though as would happen, were aware. It didn't take long for them to figure out that Jesus is there. And so he draws the ire of the leaders and they begin to oppose his authority. So Jesus is going to reestablish his authority and they're still coming after him. It appears, according to verse 21, for healing the man by the pool of Bethesda. Back in John chapter five, he said, I did one work and you marvel at it. That is, you're still coming after me for healing the man on the Sabbath there, and yet he's going to come at them and tell them. Look, Moses was dealing with a part of a man's body. We'll leave that vague there, and you're mad at me because I made a whole man's body well on the Sabbath and then he calls them to a right assessment of who he is. And so Jesus is going to, in John chapter seven, really take on the religious leaders. He's not gonna. To pass through their MITs. He's not going to fade into the background. He's going to answer them and he's going to go toe to toe with them, and he's going to deal with what's going on and also what's coming. If you jump down to verse 37, though, he says, on the last day of the feast, the great day, Jesus stood up and cried out if anyone. Thirst, let him come to me and drink. During this last day, there would've been these water offerings that were being poured out. And so Jesus is using things going on nearby. Again, another object lesson from Jesus here to make a statement here, and he says, out of his heart will flow rivers of living water. This is a callback to language of the new covenant. Ezekiel 47. This is also a callback to some of what he said to the woman at the well in John chapter four. So Jesus is there, he's in the public, he's going head to head, which is going to cause people to choose sides, and that's what happens in the rest of chapter seven. Is people begin to say, okay, we have to decide what to do with Jesus. Do we wanna follow him? Do we not wanna follow him? And he's gonna be divisive. And that's the thing. Jesus is polarizing. He was then, he is still today. And people have to choose what side of things they're going to fall on there. John Chapter eight opens with the portion that I referenced earlier that probably wasn't there in the original manuscripts. The best manuscripts that we have, the earliest manuscripts don't include this. Interaction between Jesus and the woman, cotton, adultery. And that creates some questions that creates the questions of, okay, so why is it there? And it's there most likely because it was added at some point by a scribe. And then out of. Just general uncertainty scribes from that time forward, nobody wanted to be described to take it out after that. So you think about, for example, social security today as broken as that system is. No president, no matter Republican or Democrat, wants to be the one that's gonna be tagged with, well, you're the one that killed Social Security. And so here, nobody's gonna take this out because they don't wanna make that judgment call. But they will usually bracket it like it is in the ESV. There'll be notes there. We can't say with certainty this never happened. It's possible this did happen and that this is tradition that then was passed down and passed down and that's how it wound his way into here. It's possible that it happened around this same time. We just can't say with certainty thus says the Lord. So when I preached through John chapter eight, I didn't preach this as I preached the other passages because I couldn't stand up and say with absolute certainty, thus says the Lord on this passage. If you're looking to learn more about how stuff like this works, you're gonna wanna look for books about textual criticism. This is the study of how the manuscripts were compiled and whether and how to tell the manuscripts are forgeries of the originals rather not forgeries, that's not the right word, whether they're. Significantly different from the originals and how you can discern that and actually this, the art and science of textual criticism is really good. It's not just a manmade science that is speculating as to which is best and which isn't. But there's a lot that goes into thinking about that. So textual criticism is what that's called. You can look that up. You can type in textual criticism in your Amazon searcher and find a couple good books. That's a really helpful study to understand how the text that we have reflect the originals as closely as they do. And actually speaking of that we referenced, we talked about the King James Bible a few days ago, and we will link in the show notes here. A thread, which is something that you find on Twitter, where there's one post after one post after one post, and it was put together by, again, guy named Wes Huff. And it's all about the. Manuscript traditions for the King James Bible. So, we'll throw that in the show notes on here. Be sure to click on that. You can follow that over and read it. Super helpful. He's also got some great graphics that he throws in there too. It's really readable and is just a good treatment of the question of the King James Bible, which we answered a few days ago on the podcast. After we get through this, then if we look at verse 12, another reason why we think that this was at least put in here maybe out of place, is because verse 12 does seem to really flow well from where Jesus has just been still continuing during this feast of booze. And it says, again, Jesus spoke to them saying, and so who are we speaking to here? I think it's the same audience as we had back in chapter seven. And so he gives. Another I am statement. We haven't really talked about that, but John has multiple I am statements that he records of Jesus. This is another one. He says, I am the light of the world feast of the booze. That final day they would've had lights that would've been lit up to illuminate the whole temple mount there. And so again, in the context of the feast of the booze that last day there it seems natural for Jesus to make this statement to say, I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness, but will have the light of life. He's challenged from here on his testimony and he says, I'm the one who bears witness about myself. And the father who sent me also bears a witness about me. So there was Jewish law that said the testimony of one person should not be accepted, but there needs to be the testimony of multiple witnesses. And Jesus says, well, you have my testimony, but you also have. The testimony of the father. Now, that's going to cause the Jews to be pretty upset because again, he's claiming that authority of the father, and so they want to arrest him. He's able to evade that because why? Because verse 20, it's still not his hour. He then talks about his future, impending departure, the ascension. The Jews are confused by this. Where are you going? Where is he going to go? How come we can't follow him? And Jesus is gonna say, look, you need to believe. This is the key. If you want to be with me, you need to believe. And so he was. Calling for this. He's going to say that they're going to eventually understand as he continues in this diatribe this conversation, this monologue here. He's gonna say, you'll eventually understand this. When you lift up the son of man, you'll understand what I meant by all these things. And it says in verse 30, as he was saying these things, many of them believed in him. And then Jesus says to those that believed, if your faith is real, you're gonna abide in my word. In other words, you're gonna obey me, you're gonna follow after me, and there will be signs of obedience therein. After this, we get into some more conflict between Jesus and the enemies, Jesus and the religious leaders. Because he says anyone who practices sin is a slave to sin. And the Jews are gonna say, we've never been slaves of anyone. Now. That's not true. They had been slaves of plenty of people, but they're referring to their standing with God and they're saying we've never been slaves to anyone but God. And Jesus said, no, rather, God is not your father. You have another father and your father is the devil. And they say, Abraham's our father and Jesus is going to go after them. And so really, I know there's a lot of stuff going on here and it's easy to get lost in the weeds, but this is Jesus. Taking the religious leader's head on. And as he's doing this, there are people overhearing Eve's dropping on his conversation with the Jews, hearing him say things. And verse 47, whoever is of God hears the words of God. And so there are people listening to Jesus and this is some of the teaching that's drawing people to himself. And yet at the same time, he's defending himself and he's defending himself perfectly with the Jews. And the Jews are gonna accuse him of having a demon. And then the Jews are gonna accuse him of not knowing Abraham. And he's gonna say, look, before Abraham was, I am. And again, they're gonna get angry because this is a claim to deity. They're gonna pick up stones, they're gonna wanna stone him to death. They're gonna end his life here. And so John, chapter seven, John chapter eight, all of this I think, has taken place in the feast of the booth, on the temple mount, on that final day where Jesus, in the Jews the tension is rising so that we understand why eventually they want to take him, arrest him, and put him to death. Let me just underline what you said. PPJ, this is another time where Jesus is making a claim to deity, and this happens seven times in the gospel of John. You can count one of them more than once, but Jesus uses an I am to signify something significant about who he is here in John 8 58. This is probably the most clear expression of him saying, I am God. He doesn't say that. He doesn't say, I am God with a capital G. And then od. What he does say though is as significant as if he were saying that he's appealing again to Exodus chapter three. He's saying before Abraham was, I am, this is the divine name. This is how God revealed himself to Moses. And this is what Moses then utilized to communicate to the people of Israel about Yahweh's covenant love for them. So this is it. These are the things that we look at when we compile the picture and say, Jesus is more than a man. He's actually the son of God and he's. God in the flesh, he's more than a man. He's God in the flesh. That's why these passages are so significant. Look for the ims. The ims in John in particular, again, there's seven major ims and this is one of them. They're really important. They tell us about who Jesus is as more than a man. Yeah. That's a lot. And I, I apologize sometimes I feel like I'm just droning through these podcast episodes. We accept your apology. Thank you. Thanks, man. You forgave. That's great. That's putting practice, yesterday's message in practice right now on yesterday's podcast. But hey, let's pray and then we'll be done with this this episode. God, there's a lot here. And yet we are so grateful for having John's record of it and the record of the son of God, the record of your son of Jesus here on earth. Undefeated, not backing down, not bowing out, not shying away from conflict, but really stepping into it as it was fitting to defend who he truly is. And we see here in John eight, in John seven that he truly is God in the flesh and he. Has come to do the work that you father had sent him to do. So we pray that we would appreciate that as we read these things, that we'd even see the rumblings that began here that were going to ultimately lead Jesus to the cross, not under compulsion, not unwillingly, not as a, an act of cosmic childhood abuse but willingly, and this is even part of his submission to you throughout this whole thing, his willing obedience to continue in your will. And so we're thankful for these chapters that show us so much of what ultimately led to. The cross and his death in our place, his resurrection for our life. And we thank you so much for that. In Jesus name, amen. Amen. Keep reading new Bibles. Tune again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See you folks. Bye.

​Well, thank you for listening to another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast, folks! We're honored to have you join us. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about our Church at compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review, to rate, or to share this podcast on whatever platform you're listening on, and we hope to see you again tomorrow for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Ya'll come back now, ya hear?

Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said