Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible podcast. Happy Wednesday and happy October. Wow. It is now the fourth quarter. It is. We are in the final stretch of the year. Does it feel like that to you? It does not. It does not, no. Not here either. No. The the weather's getting a little bit cooler, but not enough yet. The leaves are still on the trees. We don't really le lose leaves here all that much in, Texas until it gets really cold. Then everything just goes barren. Yes. And brown and everything goes to sleep or whatever. I'm not sure how that works, but it's not very attractive at this point in the year right now. It's great. Yeah. Later, less so, but I'm so surprised. It's 2025. It's the end of 2025. It is. We're more than halfway through. Yep. We're on the final decline. Yep. Yep. It's terrifying. Finished strong. Finish strong. And in fact if you know you haven't been hitting your Bible reading very much recently then there's still time to finish strong. I know a lot of times with Bible reading plans, we can think, ah, well the, year's wrapped winding down. I'll jump back in next year and I'll do better next year. Don't wait. In fact, right now is a great time to jump back in because we're just now starting the new t. And so you can jump in with us afresh and finish strong throughout the last section of the year with the New Testament and read with us. Hey, this week I got motivated on Monday. So I went into my front yard with some clippers and I just started going out my trees out there. Oh, right. The branches were hanging down, they were getting in the way. And I took 'em all off and then I realized I had to do something with the branches after I took 'em all off. So you put them in the garage? No, we managed to parcel 'em out into trash cans and Wow. May have borrowed my in-laws, trash cans for without their notice without their notice or. They're not here. So we're like, well, they're paying for trash. We might as well use their trash cans. That's a good point. But my neighbor came out and he's a former police officer, and so he saw me doing that. He was like, wow, you guys are making quite a difference there. I was like, Hey, thanks for the backend to compliment on. It looks much better than it used to. But he told me this. He said, A good rule of thumb for your front. Yard is tree branches. You want 'em at least six, six feet off the ground from a security standpoint, he said six feet off the ground and bushes no higher than four feet. And the reason being is it gives a line of sight that nefarious types don't want to be seen. So if you've got branches that are hanging down lower than six feet and that are creating ground cover and bushes that are higher than four feet, it becomes much easier for people of nefarious intent to hide and to conceal themselves. Yeah, that makes sense. But what if you want privacy? You gotta sacrifice privacy if you want. Safety. Yeah. I felt like those two usually go together though. Although most people have blinds and things like that. Yeah, I guess, yeah. Alright. Yeah. Hey, I wanna be clear if there's ever an e next to this podcast title, is it true that we're cussing it is not true that we're cussing, we're not cussing on this podcast even a little bit. We are not. Not even a little bit, even if we get heated, is there any chance that we're cussing? No chance. There's a couple platforms that seem to think that we are. Yes. And we are certainly not using potty language on occasion. Maybe the transcript is mist transcribing our words, in which case you should know we are not using any kind of potty language. Thanks for pointing it out to us. Those of us or those of you rather who let us know, we appreciate that we're unsure of how to fix it. 'cause some of this is just not our fault. Yeah. Some of the providers. Auto transcribe what we're saying or what they think we're saying, and it's just not accurate all the time. Let that be the, let that be a caution to you to trust ai. It's not always good. Yeah. It's not always accurate. Yeah. I looked up where somebody was that I used to fall on YouTube the other day and they. Told me the guy died and it was not him, it was somebody else, but they were like, no, it was that guy. He died. Yikes. I don't think so. So yeah, trust, but verify and definitely try to verify. Speaking of death, and this one we do have verified voting, man. Yeah. What gifts? Yeah. Did you know about this? I did. But not, I knew it happened. Yeah. Same here. Incredible. Yeah. Do we know anything about why? I think it's traceable back to, I think he had heart surgery not long ago, and so he had heart complications and it seems like, dude, it didn't work. He, oh man. I guess there's other people that you expect. Yeah, because. There's ages and there's limits that God has put on mankind that are natural. His is one that hit kind of outta left field. Yeah. It did not expect it. And according to them, to at least what founders put out, it was pretty sudden. Yeah. Which is a good warning to us. All our lives are not guaranteed. For sure. Life is a missed in a vapor. It's only here for a little time. For sure. Take advantage of it, man. Read your Bible. Get into it. Yeah. Good job. If you're here with us, you've been with us all year. Well done. Stay at it. You're not gonna regret time in the Bible. No. Ever. Nope. It's eternal investment, for sure. That's right. Yeah. Let's get into the Bible. Speaking of that, we're in Luke chapter one and John chapter one. We're in the New Testament. Wow. You made it. You made it through the Old Testament. Now we're in the New Testament. Man, I hope you're having some cake steak today to honor that cake steak. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of man, where's my cake steak? I know. I didn't get choose cakes, steak. I was promised a cake steak today. Now that, think about it. I forgot. You owe me a cake, steak. Raw meat. I don with frosting is coming at you. I don't know what it is, man. I'll take the raw meat. I'll find a way to use it. Yeah, I'll take off the frosting. Hey, we were listening to a podcast that I think was helpful for all of us just in how to think about the framework of the Bible and. This guy, his name is Herschel York, he put out there and I think it's apropos we turn the page to the New Testament that we not forget about where the Old Testament has been and where it's taken us, but a way to think of what's called redemptive historical activity by God, which is all of creation from creation all the way through consummation. And so the way you can break it down is you can think about it this way. You can think about creation. So we've got back in Genesis and then the fall, so that's part two. So creation part one. Then the fall, part two, that's obviously Genesis three, the fall of mankind, and then. After the fall, you have this period of what's known as anticipation or longing, and so this is the time period from the fall all the way through the rest of the Old Testament. That was the majority of the Old Testament that we read. This is the time of the judges, the time of the kings, the time of the prophets, the time of exile, the time of post exile, everything that we've been going through. This is anticipation and longing for what? For the results of the fall to be undone. There's things that are developed through that time but this is that third part. So part one is creation, part two, fall, part three, longing or anticipation. Part four then is what we're getting into right now, and that is the gospel. That is the redemption part. That's the story of Jesus. That's the death on the cross. That's the resurrection. This is gospel. After this comes part five, which is the church, and that's what the epistles in the New Testament are all about. So beginning in Acts you're gonna read all about the church and then the epistles are the letters written to these churches. And then the final part, which is part six, is consummation, and that is the, and that's when the eternal state comes in and when we will be with God forever. So you can slot the various things that we've been reading into one of those different buckets. And it will help you remember that there's one theme throughout all of scripture and it's all moving in the same direction. Yeah. I read this or heard about this in seminary, sometimes it's referred to as the grand meta-narrative of scripture. Sure. Or sometimes just meta-narrative. But yeah, that's a really helpful framework because we're in a story, and I think that's important for us to recall. As humans, we are part of a story that God himself is writing. In fact, I'm not sure if this is on purpose or not, but some people have noted that the word history is. His story. It's God's story on human creation, how our lives are going. And interestingly, the Bible tells us how it's all gonna end. So it's future history, as you sometimes will say. And that's what we see in scripture. It's all one meta-narrative, a grand overarching story that tells us how it's started, how it's going, and how it's going to finish. You're in a story. Don't forget that as you read your Bible. Yeah. So as we get into Luke one, we pick up from the, if you remember in Malachi, there was a reference, hey, that the day Elijah is gonna come before the coming day of the Lord, and we're gonna meet Elijah right off the bat in Luke chapter one. After Luke's introduction, Luke is writing to say, Hey I'm doing this. I'm writing these things so that you may be certain about the things that you believe in. And so Luke is gonna take painstakingly careful a painstakingly careful approach to. His biography of Jesus. He's going to record details that we don't find in some of the other gospels because Luke was a physician, a scientist. He paid attention to these things and he wanted to make sure that Theophilus, now we're not sure whether Theophilus was a historical person or just a stand in for his general audience. Those that are lovers of God, which is what Theophilus means. I lean towards person. Do you have a take on that? Yeah I went to person as well. Yeah. It just seems like Luke is too scrupulous to invent somebody. Yeah. He's trying to be thoroughly historical, so I lean on a person. Yeah, I would agree. I would agree. And so Luke introduces himself and then he gets into the birth of John the Baptist. Now the birth of John the Baptist happens with his, this situation where his mom, Elizabeth, had been barren and his father Zechariah was on duty in the temple when. The angel shows up to him, Gabriel, and tells him that his wife is going to have a baby. And it just so happens that zacharia much like we've seen in other instances in the past where a woman was beyond childbearing age and he was getting old himself, Zachariah has trouble believing this and questions the angel and says, how is this gonna be? And the angel says, well, you're gonna be mute. And so this is how you're gonna know this. You're gonna be mute until this baby is born. And that's exactly what takes place. He ends up not able to speak and he is not gonna have his tongue loosened until we'll pick up later on when John the Baptist is going to be born. But in the interim, here in Luke chapter one, you have Elizabeth after she is conceived and has John the Baptist within her, by the way, the Holy Spirit in dwelt John from the womb. That's something massively significant there about this child and about God's electing purposes too, that we see there. And. Elizabeth has a cousin and her cousin's name or is Mary and Mary is the Mary of Mary and Joseph. And so Jesus is, his birth is gonna be predicted to Mary. And Mary's gonna question just like Zacharia did, and I think last year I asked the question, what's the difference and why is Mary given a pass on her question where Zacharia is punished seemingly for his question. And I think the difference is this, I think Zacharia was unbelief. I think Mary is awe. And that's what came through as I was reading it this time. It's a good distinction. Yeah. That Mary is saying how is this even possible considering that I'm a virgin, not, this is impossible. Whereas Zaria was more along the lines of this is physically impossible. What are you even talking about? Mary's is more of on, I think that's why she's shown a different response from the, an angel there. Amen of that. Yeah, and I think that'll help us work through some of the things that we're working on in terms of scripture. There is such a thing as faithful questioning, faithful doubt, if you wanna call it that. Yeah. And I think Mary's a really good example of what that looks like. Her awe is in combination with her genuine question, it's just gonna work. How are you gonna do this versus. Exactly the skeptical and maybe even cynical approach of, come on. Yeah. Tell me, how's this really gonna work out? So Amen to that. Yeah. As part of the prophecy to Mary, as you know, Mary is a virgin, and it says very clearly in verse 35, the Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the most high will overshadow you. Therefore, the child will be born, will be called holy. This is why the virgin birth is so. Necessary for us because this is what allowed Christ to be born without the sin nature. This is what allowed him to be born without the same corruptive, inherited sin, nature that we all have from birth, that we inherit from our F Father Adam. And it says very plainly here, the Holy Spirit's role in this is gonna allow him to be born holy, the Son of God. And so that's why we can't compromise on something like the virgin birth, as some want us to do and instead to understand that this is. A key part of our understanding of the birth of Christ. Mary's character is seen in her response to this as she worships the Lord. She's a well-versed young woman. She knows the scripture, she knows God's promises, she knows theology, and she knows doctrine, and that comes out in her magnifica. There in in chapter one, starting in verse 47. After this, the scene shifts back to Elizabeth, her cousin, who is giving birth to John the Baptist. John is born, and at the time, the people looked to Zechariah and they know he can't talk. And so they think let's just honor his father, as was the custom of the time and name him Zechariah. Zechariah says, no, we're not gonna do this. He gets his whiteboard and he writes on it with his expo marker. His name is supposed to be John Na Zacharia. And at that moment, his mouth is opened and he launches into a prophetic app. Praise of John. Of God and in prophesying about what John would do in relation to the coming Messiah Question. How did Zacharia get a whiteboard and an expo marker? That's a good question. Target probably. Yeah. Yeah, you're right. Yeah. I just wanna point out here, verse 47. Mary says that she rejoices in God, her savior, which is important because that suggests to me that Mary recognized she needed a savior and that she herself was not sinless. Mm. Hashtag Catholic theology. Yep. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. So Luke chapter one records this in great detail for us. John chapter one, which is our second part of our reading today also records the birth of Jesus, but from a much different point of view, a much different perspective. And so when we go to John chapter one, if you were with us from the word go with our church, we preached through John ch John as our first book together. Felt so long ago. I know it's. Two, two plus years ago now when we started. Yeah. But John opens with what's called the prologue in verses one, one through five. And this is all about the deity of Christ. The word was in the beginning with God. The Word was God. These are the key things for us to appeal back to to impart, to help prove that the deity of Christ, the word laga, he's the self-disclosure, the self revelation of God, and he's the that in that the greatest degree he's. Mission is laid out for us in verses nine through 13, that he would come to bring life to the world and to make a way for those who would believe in him to become children of God. And so these spiritual offspring, these children of God would come to Jesus in faith because of God's activity there. They're born of God. They're not born of the will of the flesh, nor of the blood, nor of the will of men, but of God. And then we come to John's birth story, and that's John one 14. And this is why it's from such a different perspective. Everything we just read in Luke chapter one, summarized in John one 14 in one. One verse. It says, the word became flesh and we have seen his glory, glories of the only begotten from the father. And so there it is. John says, here's the birth story right here. Jesus is born. The word became flesh. Alright, so some people came to my door and they're wearing suits and tis look very attractive. And they said that John chapter one is mistranslated in our Bibles, and here's what it should say. And I'd love for you to comment on it. John chapter one, verse one in the New World Translation, which is a translation of the Bible, actually, I'm gonna use air quotes here. Yeah. Translation of the Bible from the Jehovah's Witness perspective. And here's what it says. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God. So far so good. And the word was a God. Emergency break. Yep. Tell us about that. Yeah the, their argument is there's no article, there's no definite article before the Greek word theos there. Yeah. And there's not, they're right on that. If you go to the most reliable Greek manuscripts, you're not gonna find a definite article. But that's actually on purpose from John, because if John had put a definite article in there, what that would've done according to Greek grammar, is equate the word exactly to the father. So in other words, it would've been, the word was the God. There's no distinction whatsoever. And there is a distinction because the Son, the word the son is not the same as the word the Father. They're both God or the word. Sorry, back that up. The word the son is not the same as the father. They're both. God, but they're distinct in their personhood. And so to put a definite article in there would remove the distinction between the personhood of the Father and the son, which is what we know as Modalism, which would, in other words, argue that God is sometimes the Father. Other times he's the son, and other times he's the spirit. So John intentionally left out the definite article, but beyond that, this is common. There's plenty of other instances in the Gospel of John that we could point to and say, look, the definite article is not present here. Right. Yet you still don't translate it as a kingdom. You translate it as the kingdom. Because we know contextually the clues would argue this is what's meant to be there and intended to be there. So the argument that is mistranslated, that you should have a God in there is only evidence of the Mormons bringing a perverted theology into the mix by trying to apply that, is there a simple way that we could communicate this to Jehovah's Witness who comes to our door, because this is. Obviously one of our go-to texts. Yeah. We're trying to say, look, Jesus is God. That's the biggest difference between what you believe and what we believe. We believe that he is a son of God incarnate. You believe he's the Archangel Michael, I believe is what they teach. How would you communicate this without some of the theological. Seminary training that you have. I think there's other passages for us to turn to where Jesus does claim, in fact to be God. Even later on in John, in John chapter five where we'll get there, he says, the father's been working until now, and I myself have been working, and it says there, the Jews picked up stones to stone him because he making himself equal with God. There's other instances when he says, for example, in John eight, before Abraham was, I am. This is not the only instance that we have in the Bible where Jesus is put on the. Level playing field with the father. When Jesus says later on in John, you need to honor me as you honor the Father. If you don't honor me, you don't honor the father. These are claims of equality between the son and the Father. So I think there's a good grounds for us to, to appeal to other passages beyond just this one. To point to the fact that, hey, there are other instances where we see that Jesus is God, but I think here. Yeah, go ahead. Would you suggest then that our listeners maybe not go to John one when they're trying to make a defense for Jesus being God in the flesh? 'cause it's because I agree. There's other passages. I think this is probably one of the few passages that comes up first in someone's mind when they're thinking, how do I defend Christ deity? Would you suggest they go to John 8 28 instead or something like that? Or 8 58 rather not 28. That's Romans. I think here's the thing at the end of the day too to understand when you're engaging back and forth with Mormons and I'm not saying you shouldn't, you should, but you all should know that they've been trained to respond to a lot of what you're gonna, what you're gonna bring up. Yeah. And that's why a book like Reasoning from the Scriptures with Mormons by Ron Rhodes is super helpful. R-H-O-D-E-S, he's gonna give you a lot of really good health Helpful information there. That's why going to a website like Carm, CAR m.org and reading some of their articles on Mormonism, super helpful information contained therein as well. I think you can go to John one and just say, you know what, grammatically Yeah. The definite article is not required in the Greek, and if you look up Greek grammars, you're gonna find out that that's true. The definite article is not required there. And in fact, there's other instances where it's not. Present. And we don't translate it as a, we translate it as the, yeah. And literally here, Kai and God was the word, is what it says. Yeah. So we're translating it differently in English just for the sake of smoothing it out. But it's quite literal. Yeah. That says God was the word. Yeah. There's no escaping that. Anyway. One, one additional recommendation on top of what you said. All those are so good. I love watching people like. Jeff Durbin interact with Jehovah's Witnesses or Mormons. He's a really fun study just to watch him do that. He'll record it in a way where they don't know that he's recording and take your ethics aside on that. But it's helpful for the average watcher to say, oh, how does he do this? And I think he does a really good job using his Bible and also. Some plain theological reasoning. Yeah. So if you're interested at all, look up apology pastor and Jehovah's Witnesses or pastor and Mormons, you'll find lots of options there. Yeah. In the rest of John chapter one, you've got John the Baptist testimony. He is bursting on the scene. He's meant to point people to Jesus, and that's what he says of his own ministry. And even when the Jewish leaders come to him and ask him, are you the Christ? He defers, he says, I'm not the Christ. And he says I'm here to bear witness about him and bear witness about Christ. And then we see him actually do that with. Two of his own disciples, he points to Jesus and says, behold the lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. And he says this twice and encourages these two disciples to go and follow Jesus. One of them we find out, ends up being Andrew Simon Peter's brother, and he ends up following Jesus, understanding who Jesus is, and he goes and gets Peter, and then you've got the calling of Philip who goes and gets Nathaniel. You've got the scene there when Nathaniel says, can anything good come out of Nazareth? And Philip says, come and see. And so he's beckoned to come with him to come and meet Jesus. Now we have to understand what's happening in John chapter one as the informal call of these disciples, and that's gonna help us understand what's gonna come in the coming days, readings. 'cause you're gonna see where Jesus calls them away from their boats and says, follow me and I'll make you fishers. And men, there's a progressive. Commitment to Jesus that we see in the lives of these men. There's a formal call, there's an informal call. This is their informal introduction to Jesus, and this happens before the boats. This happens before them mending their nets and leaving their father to go and follow Jesus. This is them getting to know who Jesus is before Jesus formally calls them into discipleship. And that's the rest of John chapter one. Man. Stay tuned. Lots of fun stuff ahead. Yeah, let's pray. God, we are thankful for the framework that we talked about of your word, that we can understand it from beginning to end and we pray that we would apply our minds to do just that. And we thank you that your word is reliable and trustworthy. That even when those that wish to promote a false gospel would come and say, we've got the Bible wrong. We can have a confidence based on manuscript evidence and tradition and looking into the word and studying these things. We, our translations are reliable. We can bank on them and we can not just bank on them for debates against Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, but we can bank on them for debates against for eternity to, to put our full confidence and trust in what your word says. And so give us such confidence. We pray as we continue to read through the New Testament between now and the end of the year. We pray that we glean much from it. In Jesus name, amen. Keep in your Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See y'all. 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