Hey folks. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. What, ah, that, those commercials, man, those ones in the Bud Wise or commercials, man, those are classic commercials that will never die in my head. Yes, they live rent free and I really would like to evict them and put some scripture in there. Probably, yeah. Much like songs from our childhood that we, yeah, we just listened to one before we started to, we did hype ourselves up. We did Did, if you can guess which song we listened to to get hyped up before this podcast you, we will send you. Oh, you know we just got a shipment of our new sweaters. We did. And they're black. Are they? I think they got, I think we got black. Did we? Well, I'll just find out right now. You, Stacey. Why here? Why? Okay. This is riveting. I think we just reordered the green ones again. I thought. Okay, well we're gonna, we're gonna let you know right now, pastor Rod thinks that they're black. These are green. We're talking about the to live as Christ to dies, gain sweaters that some of you didn't get. And so we, we had a, another order go through. This is, you probably are so violent right now, if you're hearing this in the background. Oh, they're. Oh, after all that. Oh, they're green. They're still green. Okay. Well, all right, well, we'll get a black run at some point. That was riveting. That was, people were on the edge of their seats wanted, could you hear me pulling off the tape a little bit? I was trying to be loud so that you would be able to hear. Yeah, well, you could have been louder, yeah. Now if you guess a song, we'll give you an extra sweater at some point. Yeah. Maybe a black one when we do the black one. But you'd have to, you have to guess the song specifically. You can't just be like, oh, generically 'cause blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's gotta be a specific one. Yep. Gotta be specific. And I'm not gonna tell you that Pastor PJ loves Britney Spears. And that's his favorite artist. But it's not true. Yeah. I'm not saying it either. It's also not Taylor Swift. I mean you could go through a bunch of other people. Its not you're, you seem to me like more like a Backstreet Boys guy. No, like secretly though. 'cause you don't want people to know, you don't want to have that ruin your street cred. So secretly you would listen to back, well dad was listening to Rush Limbaugh. You had your CD player on. He was listening to Rushing by and you were listening to Back Streets Back. Alright. Now John Michael Montgomery. I did listen to a lot of John Michael Montgomery growing up. What is that country? That's country. Yeah. Okay. See that? Yeah. John Michael Reet Boys. Yeah. Disc men. Do you remember those things? The CD players? Yeah. I, well, I'll do you one better. I had an Iowa cassette player. Yeah. That was just the bomb. Yeah, it was so good. It was one of my favorite devices and I had a few cassettes and I took it to middle school. And I got busted, of course. And so the teacher took it and sent it up to the office and I went up to get it at the end of the school day, like I was told I should, and it was stolen. And the thing is, I am like 98% sure I know who did it. Was it a teacher? And I still hate him to this day. No, it was a student. It was a student who would sometimes work up in the office. Yeah. And he had access to things like that. So I'm like, I know it's you bud. Yeah. And he never showed up with it, obviously. 'cause that would've been a fight. I was a scrapper back in those days. I'm not surprised. I, yeah, we had several fights. One guy I had a fight with, I felt so bad. We fought, we and I got a good shot. It's not like I was an amazing fighter, but I got a good shot. Yeah. So much so that when I saw him on that following Monday, it was, I was, I felt really bad. Wow. So I went up to him and said, man I'm sorry. And that was one of the few times that I'd ever did that with someone I fought. Wow. I fought one of my best friends. I punched him several times and nothing happened. He was like that blow up doll. Yeah. You hit it and it comes back up again. Yeah. He was that dude. And so after that we were best friends again. We fought, we took it out, and then we hugged and we went home. Dude, we were talking about Disman and now all of a sudden you're like, I've gotten all these fights. Well, 'cause I was, and I came back to middle school and then I thought about that. I did have a disman. I had one even as early as like college age. I had one that didn't skip. Yeah, it was great. Yeah. Do you remember those earphones are horrible too. I'm just thinking about how far the, your phones come. They were like, they come so far. And they were, yeah, it was, I had the kind that would go around your ears. Okay. They were the workout kind. Yeah. So they were a little better. Yeah. They're like 50 bucks. But I I am so thankful for the audio technology we have today. It's so much better. It is. You kids don't even know. No. You have no clue what you missed. Yeah. Yeah. And sometimes you had to adjust the connector of the headphone cable to the discman to get it to start playing. And it had to be in just the right location. Oh, yeah. Or bend the cable to get the, they were enormously heavy. They required like 16 double As, and so it would last like eight hours. Yeah. And you had to replace 'em. And you remember replacing the batteries. That alone was. We just recharge it now. Yeah. Plug it into your USBC and you recharge the thing. Now it doesn't require that. So many things I don't miss, although I do miss this. Tell me if you thought about this recently, being able to flip through your whole CD catalog. I had this massive Oh, yeah. For CD case for sure. I think that was fun. And then you listen to the whole album today, you never do that. Unless you deliberately say, I wanna listen to the whole album. If you're a Taylor Swifty fan, that's the person who will do that. I miss that. 'cause then you just pop it in and you listen to the whole album and then you get a sense of the artist. Or back in the day when people had the like 10 disc changers in the car. Dude, those were the rich kids. Like in the trunk that the rich kids did that. Yeah. My, my people, we didn't do that. Yeah. No, I didn't either. I didn't either. Yeah. Yeah. People talk about how distracted we were in driving. Today with our iPhones, but back then it was, yeah, it was flipping the CD thing and trying to keep your eye on the road. Try with your knee searching for, yeah. Yeah. And then you, if you have a map, you had a Thomas guide. Yeah. If you were trying to get somewhere or you printed out the map. MapQuest. MapQuest. So now, yeah, we have distractions, but we also had them back then. And we did okay. We made, we survived. We made it barely. Yeah. Well, hey, let's jump into our daily Bible reading numbers 30 through 31. They didn't have a Discman, they didn't have an iPhone. They didn't have MapQuest at all. It's bummer during this time. So bummer. Yeah, they're just wandering through that one guy singing the song in the back of the camp. They're like, will you stop already? What do you mean you're not surprised that I was a scrapper? What's that supposed to mean? Hold on a second. We've moved on. What do you mean by that? We've moved on from that. I, oh, okay. We're gonna have a conversation after this thing. Are we gonna scrap? We're gonna scrap. I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell, I'm over for one in fights. I announced that publicly. Yeah, that's true. I'm not looking for two. Yeah. Right. I'll let you off of it. Alright. Number chapter 30, we get into a situation that, again, involves a little bit of clarification for us because we might read this, and you might read this as, okay, here comes more patriarchal, things that the men could undo, the vows the women made and so forth and so on. Instead, I think the way that we have to read this is that God was providing a covering for these and remember, these are the daughters, these are the younger women, and God is providing male headship and. Covering to these daughters and he is providing the husband to be able to provide even, I would argue wisdom that they're not gonna have in their youthfulness to be able to say, you know what? It sounds like that was pretty impetuous, the vow that you just made. I don't think that you should honor that. And God was providing an out where as otherwise they would've had to fulfill their vow. The law said you have to fulfill your vow. God's saying, I'm gonna give you protection here. Whether it be the husband who marries a young girl or. The father who says, you know what, this is not okay. We're gonna, we're gonna undo this. God is merciful here to allow them to do that. Yeah. And remember, we think about this so differently. We live in 2026 and so we see this and we're like, oh, I don't like that. She should have freedom to do all these things. And she's her own woman. And I'm woman, I'm invincible. Hear me roar. All those things. God is doing this as a protective measure. It's a different society, different expectations. This is a good thing. Don't read this with your 2026 eyes. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of which, you've referenced that book a couple times. You, you just finished the book, the Western Eyes. I did, yes. Misreading scripture through Western Eyes. E Randolph something and another guy. I forget the names of these guys, but I, overall I appreciated it 'cause it did challenge me and to gimme opportunity to argue with it a little bit and to sharpen my own theological sort as I consider how we read scripture. So I recommend it. I enjoyed it. If you want to understand some of the. Things that we bring to scripture that we're not often aware of. It's a great read for that. Not everything in it do I love. And in fact, one of the things I think is that the Western culture in a lot of ways, not every way, but in a lot of ways gets scripture right in saying even though it was written from an Eastern mindset, the way that the Western has the west has interpreted a lot of these things has been largely beneficial. And that's why you see so many common grace effects all around us. The fact that we drive on the right side of the road. Just think about that. You go, I mean there's the western nations developed nations will do the same thing, but that's a law abiding prospect that's people saying this makes sense. We like, we don't like chaos. We like organization. We like when people of color inside the lines. We like when people go the right speed. We like when people stop at red lights. When people don't do that, you undermine how things are supposed to work. But just go to an eastern country where they don't have western values of organized meaning what you say, staying in the line, but not meaning what you say. That's unfair. Staying in the lines. I, as you think about the traffic in India. In India, yeah. Well, how they drive. I went down to Costa Rica. They're driving terrified me. Granted, they're, I guess they're no western country, so it's not a, it's not a firm fix in the heavens kind of thing. But overall. I love the book. It's helpful, helps you look at things from the perspective of both your eyes as a westerner, but also from the eyes of an easterner. Also in England, western country, they drive on the other side of the road, but they drive in an organized way. That's my point. You're welcome. Fair. Fair. Alright. Chapter 31. We have been talking and alluding to the fact that the baam was going to be judged for his role in leading Israel stray. And this is what we're gonna find here vengeance on Midian. The Midianites were particularly gonna be targeted for the way that they had all lured the Israelites into sin with them. This is not, let's be clear, this is not God saying, Israel, you're not guilty because it's Midian made you do it. But rather this has gotta executing justice on midn because the Midianites were doing wrong. They were sinning by his people. And Baam is going to be held accountable here. It is gonna say in verse eight. And they also killed Baam, the son of bor with the sword. And you jump down and you say, well, how do we know why? If you can come down to verse 15, have you let all the women live? Behold these. On Blum's advice caused the people of Israel to act treacherous against the Lord in the incident of Peor. So the plague came among the congregation. So there we see that the balam had a role in this, that balam was inciting these women to go and intervene with the Israelite men and lure them away. Maybe this was Blum's concession to bail. Okay. I can't curse the people for you, but here's what I can do. And so perhaps this is why Bayam is still involved at this point with in introducing this idle worship and this adultery to the Israelite people. But God is executing justice on the Midianites for what they did towards that end. And that's really where Bayam is an issue because he's a prophet for hire. He's really not doing it from this principled position of saying, my conviction is that the Lord is good and he's going to do this, and that He loved gain. That's what Peter's commentary is about him. And consequently, I think he's doing this as a way to say, I may not get them this way, but I can tell you how I can do it. Let's exchange some dollars here and then I'll help you out. And so I think he does that. I have every sense every sense enemy says, that's a really helpful explanation that fits his character and his motive. So that's gonna be my suggestion. And that's why even though they're not the ones who are the direct. They're not the ones who are directly assaulting Israel, they're still the willing participants. And so they're guilty, they're held accountable, just in the same way that bail's held accountable. Well, the Midi Knights are gonna be defeated, and we're gonna see some of the spoil divided here. And again, this is preparing, I think these, this generation for when they entered into the Promised land and go after the nations there on how they should operate, what they should do. And so the spoils gonna be divided. The Levites are gonna get some of this as well. So God is preparing them on this side of the Jordan for what's gonna happen on the other side of the Jordan. Let's jump over to our New Testament reading then in Mark chapter nine we're gonna be in verses 30 through 50, mark, chapter nine, verses 30 through 50. We start out again with another prediction that Jesus gives of his crucifixion. And we, again, look at this, these things and we might be tempted to say, why? Why didn't they understand? Why didn't they get it? Because they had no frame of reference for this. This is why Peter stopped Jesus the last time I said, Jesus, what are you talking about? You are the Christ. You're the Messiah. The Messiah doesn't die. Remember when Paul says, we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to the Jews at this point in time, to the disciples, Christ crucified would've been a stumbling block to them. They would not have had any way to understand this. And so, Jesus is saying these things and he's saying these things for the future benefit, not for the present benefit. What I mean by that is. When Jesus rises from the dead, that's when it says in the text that the disciples remembered that he had said this. He had remembered that he had spoken about these things even on the road to Emmaus. The two disciples there will get there in Luke 24. They said you know, he said he would rise again three days later, but it's now the third day and he's not. Risen yet. And so this is going to take root. They're going to remember these words, but they're not gonna really come to fruition in their lives until the backside of the cross until after the resurrection. Yeah. So we're now reading the second time that Jesus foretells his death and resurrection. We're gonna get one more in chapter 10. Yeah. Chapter 10. We'll see the third time that he says it. But here, that reminder's important for them. They needed to hear it multiple times. Just as you're saying here, they didn't get it the first time. Maybe not the second time, maybe not even the third. Because they were still a bit confused afterward, but they need to be reminded. I just can't help but understand. I need to be reminded too, we all need this. And sometimes what we think we understand, we actually really don't, which is why we see things like who's the greatest. Jesus continues to point to himself as being the servant of all saying, basically, because I'm the greatest servant, I'm also gonna be the greatest in the kingdom, which makes perfect sense. Jesus is that but for you and I. We have to see it from the same vantage point of saying, service is how you achieve greatness. You're not to achieve greatness, you're not to not pursue it, but you're to pursue it the right way by seeking to be a servant. And he brings out kids to make the point. I love the fact that Jesus is so approachable by kids. I think it says something about Jesus as a man. Mm-hmm. Who was both tough and he was able to stand toe to toe with the Pharisees and the scribes, but yet still approachable enough with the child. I think that speaks volumes about the kind of person he was. Because you don't have that. You often, you have one or the other. You have a really a genteel kind of guy that just welcomes kids. They love to hang on him and do all sorts of things, but tends not to be an alpha of sorts. And yet Jesus is strong, mighty, and yet incredibly approachable. And he brings a kid and says, look, you wanna be great, be like this one. Yeah. Yeah. Well, after this the disciples are still competitive because they're pointing out these other people that are casting out demons and saying, Hey, Lord, do you want us to tell 'em to stop? Yeah, this is our gig, but they're going to call down fire at this point. So they're making progress, right? Yeah. It's a little bit better, do you want us to call down fire on them? And Jesus says, no, don't stop 'em from doing this. For whoever's not against us is for us, which is just introduces a wrinkle. Into this whole idea of like, are these other disciples that were on the periphery that, how is this happening? Who are these people that are doing this? And Jesus doesn't identify them as enemies. Perhaps this is, I don't know, perhaps this is like Paul, when Paul says whether in pretense or truth, Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice and maybe there's some similarities here. Jesus is saying, Hey, he's not. Working against us. He's working for the things of God. And so let him go, let him be. But this is one of those mysterious things in the New Testament. We don't really know who these people are that he's talking about here. Amen. That's weird. Yeah. The rest of chapter nine, we get a similar account to what we read about in the Sermon of the Mountain, Matthew, where Jesus is gonna tell the disciples of the seriousness of sin, and he's gonna tell them to treat sin radically and not to give it any quarter in their life. If their hand causes them to sin, cut it off, throw it away. If your eye causes you sin, gouge it out and throw it out. Now again, we've talked about this. This was not to be taken literally. Because you'd be, have churches full of maimed and blind people. But rather this is about, we need to deal with sin as a threat and not give it any quarter. It's not a pet to have to say, it's okay that I have this little pet in my life that is fine. And it's not doing anybody harm. No, it is doing people harm and it's doing you harm in your relationship with the Lord and Jesus wants you to deal with it radically. Whatever the cost is, sacrifice for your godliness, your holiness. Get rid of it, get it out of your life. So Mark does his thing, literary, a literary device where he likes to sandwich things and I think the part of the reason is that he's trying to say these things are related. So let me throw it at you and you tell me if you see what I see. Yes. Under the, who is the greatest heading? He has little ones. A child puts him in the midst. So you wanna be great, be like this kid. And then you have this intervening episode where this guy's casting out demons. He's like, Hey, let's get rid of that guy. Let's call him out. Yeah. And she's like, Hey, don't do that. And then in the next section where it says, temptations to sin, if you're following along in your ESV, says, whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin. So the question then is who's the little one that he's referring to? The most recent time where he refers to a little one is in the previous perpe. Not the most recent one, but the one before that the who is the greatest? So I wonder then if what. Mark is trying to help us see, and maybe what Jesus was getting at here is that the people that are not part of our tribe are still little ones, and we ought to not cause him a sin. So maybe it was a sin in Jesus' mind for him to say, Hey, hey, stop casting out demons because you're not part of our tribe. You're not part of our band. And he's saying here, whoever causes one of these little ones, both that person that he's talking about, the one who is casting out demons, and the little ones who are childlike. You're saying don't cause him to sin because it the stakes are incredibly high and the stakes are eternal. Would you track with that? I think so. Yeah. Yeah. It's a mark, it's a marking thing, right. Mark does a lot of this and I, I was trying to say, okay, how does this fit, right? 'cause there's I see the two breads. Yeah. Pieces of bread. Yeah. Okay. So another thing I wanna point out, I really wanna ask you a question about this because I'm sure people are gonna see, what does that mean? The worm does not die. Is more obscure, the fire not being quenched. I think we all get that idea. What does it mean that the worm does not die? How does a worm play into eternal? Torment. My thought on that is, is worms are part of the natural decaying process of our physical bodies. And nobody would look at a worm eating our physical bodies as something that is desirable. Nobody would say, yeah I want that, that's something that I would really like to have in my life. And yet it. It seems spiritually that the comparison is there, the degradation that the body is always being destroyed without ever fully being destroyed. The death is always taking place without ever fully being done. If you go to a, this is morbid, but if you were to go to an ancient a Mummy or a Pharaoh you open up King Tuts tomb. There's not active worms in there because there's nothing left. Yeah, right. For those worms, but. That's not what happens in, in the natural decaying process with other bodies that are buried and exposed to the elements. So, yeah, that, that would be my take on that. Yeah, I would agree with that. In fact, let's just be clear here. If you're reading along with this Jesus is quoting, you'll notice there's little quotation marks, single quotation marks there in verse 48. He's citing Isaiah 66 24. It's the last verse of, in the last chapter of Isaiah where he says, and they shall go out and look on the dead bodies of the men who have rebelled against me for their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched, and they shall be an abhorrence to all flesh. So as dishonor, the shame and the perpetual. The perpetual nature of their death. I think you're right about that. Salt is good, but for everyone who will be salted with fire, salt is good. But if the salt is lost at saltiness, how will you then make it salty again? This is weird. What would you say about this? This is a strange phrase that this is the very end of Mark nine. Perhaps just the compromise the impact that. That sin can have in the believer's life. If we go back to the Sermon on the Mount, if there's parallel themes here, the salt is supposed to be something that's good. It's supposed to enhance flavor of something, it's supposed to make something more attractive. So in that sense, we are doing that with the gospel to the world around us and sin can compromise that sin. That is not dealt with the way it should be can lead us to lose our impact. And once we've lost our impact, it's hard to regain that. Yeah, that makes sense to me. Specifically for verse 50 what do you make of this? Everyone is salted with fire. Do you have any idea about that? Not enough specificity to speak to it, I don't think. Yeah I, yeah. That one is, alluded me a bit. Okay. Those are good questions that you've answered. Thank you. Alright. Yeah. Now you've got me noodling on that one. Maybe we'll answer that in our next episode. Okay. I'll send, it'll send the question to the podcast if that's okay. I'll do that. Alright, let's pray for the rest of our day. God, thanks for your word and for this time in it, we are grateful for our ability to understand it and learn it and give our thoughts to it and ask. Good questions of it. Pray that we continue to be good students of your word. Good. Bereans as well. Pray for this all to be true of us as a church and true of us, obviously as individuals. We pray this all in Jesus' name, amen. Keep reading your Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See that. Bye. See.

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