Hey, welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Hello. We have a pope having this. We do Pappa. That's what they say. Do we have a pope? We don't have a pope. I gonna say we have Jesus. I feel like I'm in the wrong who's branch of Christianity for that to be true for of me. Yeah. Somebody actually tweeted that out. Earlier today. They said to all my Protestant fans out there, or friends out there who is the the head of the Protestant church and say, Jesus is the head of the Protestant church. He just got duked. Yeah. Yeah. But the, all the pomp circumstance of this, it's fascinating. I was doing a little bit of reading into it as we were getting ready to record the day they, yeah the senior cardinal comes out and says, Haus Pappa, which says, we have a Pope in Latin. And they do the whole introduction of the Pope there, and he's apparently gonna be Leo the 14th. That's the name that he chose for himself. And it's a, an interesting ordeal that they go through. Ritual that, so the Cardinals. All the electors, and that's not all the cardinals, but a certain group of electors, they go in and they meet together in this conclave, which is the Sistine Chapel, and they stay there until they have determined who the next Pope is gonna be. And then they elect him and he has to accept the position. And he is there's rights and sacraments they go through with him. In there. And then he's introduced to the public. But one of the things they do to let the public know that there's a pope is they have white smoke that goes up through this chimney. And I always thought there must be a certain type of wood that they throw in there. It's not that their ballots, it's all of their ballots. Yeah. Yeah. And the other documents that go into selecting the pope, they burn all of those things. And that's what signifies that a new pope has been chosen. We don't know a whole lot about this guy at this point other than he's the first American pope ever in the history of the papacy. Crazy. He go America. Yeah. USAU. Yeah. Charlie Kirk of all people jumped on and had his voting records. So Turning Point, some people at Turning Point immediately went on and he's a registered Republican. He has supported pro-life movements pretty heavily in the past. He has some questionable things when it comes to open borders and some other things like that. But yeah, it's, and you may be. Thinking why do we care? He's not our pope. He, Jesus Christ is the head of the church. Yes, that's true. But the Pope is significant and plays a significant role, not only on the world scene, but in how the world views Christianity because so much of that is conflated by people that don't know any better to think the Catholics are Christians, and that the Pope is connected with Christianity. So what the Pope says must be what Christians believe. And so we should care. We should pay somewhat. Close attention to what's going on here. So we'll see more will come out in the coming days, but we the Catholics have a pope and his name is going to be Leo the 14th. Pray that one way or the other, that this will result in more people coming to know Christ as their savior. It would be great if we got a pope in place that said, you know what? We're not doing things biblically, and I'm gonna take off my frock and garb and destroy this office permanently. And we're gonna call each other back to the true gospel. That would be phenomenal. And we scoff at that. But in Christ, all things are possible. Or just pray that more and more people will come to see the drift and come to faith in Christ as a result of that too. That would be equally as good. Let's talk about maybe not equally as good. The other one would be better. We got a question that was written in so Pastor Rod, we got a lot of snow this past wintertime here in Texas. We had a couple of days. You remember that? That it just dumped. Oh yeah. It was great. It was awesome. It was awesome. But we don't often think about snow in in the Middle East, in Israel. And so the Kim family was paying attention and they noticed that in their Bible reading, there was a reference to a snowy day. It said Bonia two Samuel 23 Bonia, the son of Jahoda, the son of Valiant men of Ki. Cab zeal mighty indeed, so forth and so on. It struck down a lion in a pit on a snowy day. So they said, does it snow in Israel? And the answer to that question is, yes, it does. Not as much, not as evenly, not as predictably as it does in parts of our country, but it's in, in that sense, it's like Texas. You can't bank on it snowing in Texas all the time here either. But it does snow in Israel. In fact, when Amanda and I were there back in 2019. There was snow on Mount Lebanon when we were there and when we were on the Temple Mount, it was in the thirties on the Temple Mount. Wow. It was freezing, almost freezing. Not quite literally freezing, but it was really cold up there. And it does snow in Israel. And so this happened to be a day where this took place, where there was snow on the ground. And that's certainly possible though, not something that we often think about. Yeah, Jerusalem is elevated, right? Jerusalem is is higher than the region beside it, which is why the songs of as Sense are called that they're songs of as sense because you're always going up in altitude, right? And the Temple Mount itself is lifted high. So I think you have to take in a couple factors to make sense of it. But even, we talk about that, the lions. When's the last time you saw a lion in Israel? Sure. I don't think you see a lot of those people or bearers perhaps. But the idea is that scripture is conveying something that is true. It happens and it's historically relevant. It's historically accurate. You just don't see it all the time, which is one of those interesting. Tidbits about how scripture works. It records historical events that we just don't always see. And that's true in a lot of ways too, because scripture records revelation that you don't always see, but we take it at its word and scripture is always proven to be reliable in this regard. Yeah. Let's jump into two Samuel eight and nine. Two Samuel eight. This chapter contains a rundown of some of David's more noteworthy battles, which he fought and won. And it's important that we note because the text tells us twice in verse six and verse 14, that he won these battles because the Lord was with him. And so this isn't a chapter praising David. It's praising God and saying God was using David and David's facility of being used and winning these battles came from his faithfulness. To the Lord at this point in time in his life. Th this is still pre his downfall. We're gonna see his downfall in the not too distant future, unfortunately, but at this point still we find good things happening here. This is this is something that, that is noteworthy for David as he's going out and winning these battles as he expands the reach and drives more people away. One thing that's interesting though is the Moabites. He goes off to the Moabites who were part of his family. These are kin. For him because you remember Ruth was a motus and Ruth was David's, I think great grandmother, if I'm not mistaken, if I've got that right. I think that's right. Yeah. Great-grandmother. So not long ago. In the past, some of those of us listening I got to meet one of my great-grandmothers. She was a moist, she was not a moist, but all that to say, we're not talking a ton of generations. There's probably some that were like, wait a minute, your Ruth's great grandson. What are you coming after us for? And yet they were God's enemies. And so I think David was justified in what he was doing here, which is why it's so important that Ruth was included because she was a convert. She did it in, she just. Didn't change religions. She gave up her people. Yeah, your people are my people. Your God is my God. Ruth made a complete break with her people, and that's not too different from how Jesus calls us to live for him even today. He says, you have to take up your cross and follow me. You can't say this is my allegiance over here. No, Jesus must come first. And here you have an example of the fact that even though the Moabites were related to David through their distant with his distant grandmother, they were still God's enemies and therefore they were David's enemies. Yeah. Yeah. Let's deal with a word here that shows up in verse 18 in connection with David's sons. It says in second Samuel eight 18, David's sons were priests priest. Yeah. Which the priest, co cocaine priestly line is the Levitical line. That's right. Pastor, help us unpack this a little bit because this seems like this is not not biblical, not right. That, that David's sons would be called priests. Yeah. I think we covered this last time we came to it as well. Let's remind you guys that we take scripture and we interpret scripture with scripture. So the first thing that we wanna do is, okay, what's the word here? Is it possible that we're, that the word that we're looking at maybe isn't the word that we think? Maybe there's another word that kind of conveys a different sense. And here that doesn't help us. The word that we, that the word that is priest in the Hebrew is kohe. And that's what we have here. So the word is translated in a way that's consistent. So that's not helping us at all. What do we have? Do we have anything else that can help us understand what this is? And of course we do. In fact, we're gonna get to it in just a few moments here in First Chronicles 18, which tells us that David's sons were not. Priests, but it says that they were chief officials, which tells us then that their function and their role was something akin to what we might call a minister today. He was a minister of defense, or he was a minister of this or that. So his sons were servants. And I'm unclear, I'm unsure of why they chose the term priests here, except to say that there's a sense in which they're serving the administration of the temple in some way, shape, or form. But they're chief officials, they're high ranking officials within his governmental. Situation. And that's my best take at that. Although, again, I still I'm a bit confused as to why they chose priest. Why, maybe it was Samuel or one of his editors that did this in Second Samuel, who chose that word, but first Chronicles 18 says light. Yeah. And look at verse 17. You see a distinction here in Second Samuel eight. You've got oc, the son of acu, YouTube, and a Alek. The son of Abiathar were priests now. They were. The actual priest, the real priest here. And so even that lends support to what we're saying here. David's already identified, or the one writing this portion of second Samuel has already identified that the priests in the fullest sense of the term that we normally think of zadak and a alek fulfilled those roles, not. The Sons of David. So yeah, this is an interesting interesting connection there. One author pointed out, the roles were still being defined here under the monarchy now versus what I don't know. I, yeah it's curious that he describes them this way here when we get to have, and if he's there, we'll have to say, Hey, you know what? This was not really helpful. Could you have done it better? If we could make an adjustment? Yeah, if we could change things. Alright chapter nine chapter nine's an interesting situation here because this goes back to Jonathan and David and their relationship, their love for each other because you'll remember there perhaps that David had sworn to Jonathan, Hey I love you. I care about you. I'm gonna care about not only you, but also your family. And Jonathan had asked him to do that. He said, Hey, take care of my family for me. And David is so overwhelmed by the memory of his love for his friend Jonathan. He could have. Just continued on with his reign at this point, but he actually seeks out. It's not like he happened upon this guy that was like, by the way, I'm the son of Jonathan. He, David seeks out, he says, I want to honor my friend Jonathan. And he asks about someone who might still be of his line that's alive and finds out that this guy Mephibosheth fits the bill there. And so David calls for Mephibosheth and basically honors him, blesses him, brings him into the royal household, gives him land. And in the, at the same time, there's this guy Zeba that is going to become the one that, that is the the overseer of the property that David Entrusts here to Mephibosheth. This is gonna come back into play later on with David and Absalom. And there's gonna be some question as to how loyal Mephibosheth is to David, because Zeba is going to say that he's not very loyal at all. So it's, it is an interesting situation, but Mephibosheth is basically embraced by David brought into David's household and given a seat at the king's table almost as though he's one of the sons of the royal family at the same time there. Yeah, I remember that. Pastor Matt Chandler saying You are not David, but I think he could say, you are Mephibosheth. We are Mephibosheth. I think this is a really cool scene because it reminds us of how Jesus takes us under his wing and he. For his own sake. He takes us and he makes us clean. He brings us to the king's table and we are now reconciled to God through, through David our truer and better David. And so we are Mephibosheth. We have nothing to offer. We're lame. We're from nowhere. Low to bar. That's where he's from. He's from nowhere. That's what the word means. No, no place, nowhere. We are of no accounts, we're of no status, and yet we are accepted for the sake of Jesus God. The father, our true king accepts us because of who Jesus is. And second Samuel, chapter nine is really a story about you and I. Yeah. First Chronicles 18. Then the parallel accounts are given here for what takes place, especially in Second Samuel chapter eight. This is where in, in chapter 18, verse 17, we do get the the recording that David Sons were chief officials and not priests. And yeah, there's not a lot of difference here. I was reading this saying, okay where's the difference? Is there something different from what we had previously? And I really couldn't find anything of note here. I don't know if PR anything jumped out to you in this parallel account. That was different from what we've read in the second Samuel eight? No. I think I guess it's worth us reminding you what role the Chronicles play when it comes to retelling the story. That's helpful. Yeah. Yeah. So Chronicles is for the post exilic people. They're coming back to the land, they're reestablishing their community. We're going to soon see that the chronicler selectively adds information that. He thinks is necessary for them to have the kind of mentality and attitude that they need to rebuild their community. So he's not adding everything he could add, but he is adding things that are helpful to his cause. So you're gonna see that David's, some of David's major blemishes are not. They're not smoothed over, they're just really not talked about. They're e omitted because the recognition of first and second Samuel, which would've been one scroll at that time. So there would've been no first or second Samuel, it just would've been the scroll of Samuel. They're expecting that you had that available. First Chronicles 18 just highlights the fact that God is with David. God is blessing David, God is using David. And the point then for the audience at that time would've been, he could still use you guys. He can still take us and make us something if we do the right thing, if we surrender ourselves to him, God can give David the victory. He can give us the victory. Yeah. That is interesting, isn't it? That there is no David than Bathsheba in First Chronicles. And yeah, I, I. And I, I get it. I get it. There is post exilic. You're wanting things to be positive. You're wanting to encourage the people and remind them of the high points. And yet there's so much to be learned from the low points. In fact, the writer of Hebrews even says that these things were written for our instruction. Yeah. So I want, yeah. I wonder why that the chronicler didn't. Allude to the fact that, Hey, David, we need to be careful not to do these things that David did because David wasn't all great. And we need to be careful not to drift this way. Especially considering the exile. David's heart was lured away by, by a woman, and so much of the idolatry of the Israelites began the same way. And that, that led them into exile in the divided kingdom. So it's interesting that the chronicler doesn't record that for us, anyways. Yeah. But read it anyways and read it carefully because it's always good to have that repetition and if you can read it the second time, even though it's gonna seem man, this is what I just read. It's gonna help you know it better. It's gonna help you understand it better, and you'll appreciate it even more as you come back to it the next time and say, okay, I know this passage, I'm familiar with this passage, but let me come back to it again and read it and ask even as I'm reading it. Gotta help me to recognize something different. Help me to learn something new, to pay attention to something about you that I didn't even five minutes ago when I was reading Second Signal chapter eight. Help me see something fresh in one Chronicles chapter 18. And trust that's the spirit's delight. The spirit delights to take the word of God and cause it to to be illuminated so that we would better understand it and be able to apply it to our lives. So do you have any insight or input on the difference between the numbers in Second Samuel eight and one Chronicles 18 Specifically? I am looking at verse four and one Chronicles 18. Verse four in two Samuel eight. So just to quickly recap here, two Samuel chapter eight says, David took from him 1700 horsemen, 20,000 foot soldiers. Those are the two numbers in question. And in chapter 18 says, David took from him 1000 chariots. 7,000 horsemen and 20,000 foot soldiers. There they seem to be irreconcilable but I'm guessing that there's something that we're missing or some elements that we're just not seeing on the surface of it. Do you have anything that you could add to help us understand those differences? No. These are areas where you could allow for. Textual variance or the corruption of the text over time, that, that change numbers like this as scribes are copying and writing things down it's possible that a number was written as something that it wasn't or understood one way and conveyed a different way, especially with so much time between. First Chronicles and second Samuel in the events taking place there. But I don't know that there's anything significant there. Certainly nothing faith shaking for us as far as the veracity and reliability of scripture. So talk to the Christian then, who would read that and say how does this not impact or understanding of the reliability of scripture? We say that it's without error. Yeah. We call it, in Aaron Authoritarian in errands. Infallible, yeah. All the things that we talk about. And yet many times we've said this seems like this is a variant. This seems like this might be something that was omitted. Yeah. Edited out. We talked about the tribe of Dan not even being in the list in the Chronicles. What gives, how could scripture possess the qualities that we say and yet possess some fairly glaring issues? Yeah. When we say inanity and infallibility. Infallibility especially we're referring to the autographs, and what we mean by autographs are the original documents written by the original authors. Those are the only documents that we can point to and say these are the inspired word of God, the God-breathed word. When we're talking New Testament. This is the parchment that Paul. Was dictating to his enu. And as that man wrote Ephesians on the document for the first time, that is the only copy of scripture that we can say is fully iner and infallible, meaning without error and without fallibility perfect in its content. Everything after that, that, that becomes a copy of the original. We can have great confidence in, but we're not gonna be able to point to it and say it's. It's infallible and it's inert because of things like this. There are minor vari variants. There are minor situations where we might look at something and say, okay, the text seems to have been corrupted over time here. And that word corrupted can seem like a big, bad, scary word. But we're dealing with things like. Like the number of horsemen and chariots in one chronicles in two Samuel eight there, as I've said a number of times before, there are no variants that say, and Jesus stood up and said, I'm not God, or, and Jesus was actually dead and this was just an imposter. Or even, that Moses wasn't a real person or that David wasn't a real person. The variants are small things here, and when we look at and study textual criticism, which is what. This is all talking about here. What we find is the Bible is the most, bar none, the most reliable and verifiable ancient document that we have in our possession. When you compare it to the works of Homer, when you compare it to the works of Plato and Socrates the Caesar's, Gaelic Wars and others it's not even close. The amount of manuscripts that we have for the Bible. Blow those others out of the water. And what we can do with that is we can compare these manuscripts. So you can look at 10 copies of the Gospel of John chapter 21 verse one. So you're looking at 10 copies that may span, 700, 800 years in those copies. And you're gonna be able to look at those 10 copies. And if nine outta 10 of those copies read one way and then all of a sudden one copy has a little bit of a change there, then you can conclude. Okay, the nine outta those 10 are probably the accurate readings here. This seems to be a corruption, and so we're gonna footnote that. And then we're gonna move on with our translation. That's part of the way that all of these translations work. They study the originals, they look at all these variants, they compare everything, they make decisions, and then they move on. That's not always, that's oversimplifying it a little bit but you can have immense amount of confidence in the Bible that you have. It has been studied and vetted and researched to to no end. And it is a reliable document. So one thing to note here, and maybe this is a good endorsement for you from us to, to pick up a copy of this one. One resource that I tend to use is the net Bible will often address some of these things that we talk about. In fact, I think you use it as well, pastor pj, when we're making conversation or we're talking about some elements of scripture that says, oh what's the textual authority behind this translation or this word? That kind of thing. And that Bible will tell you. What we have, and it'll give you really helpful resources. For instance, on this particular passage, the net Bible says that the Sept has 1000 chariots and 7,000 charioteers in this passage in Second Samuel eight, verse four. Which tells us then that there's historical precedent to say that, okay, it sounds like Second Samuel eight then might have some. Copyist errors, which is why the numbers are different from First Chronicles and Second Samuel eight. This would be a really helpful resource and sometimes it's gonna talk about manuscripts that you may not know about that's okay. The point is that Christian scholars, brothers and sisters who do the work of textural criticism. Are looking at actual copies of the text that Pastor Pia was just talking about to help us come to conclusions about what the most accurate reading of the text is. It's an art and a science, but it's nothing to shake your faith about. In fact the very fact that Christians, I. Put this out there, tells you that we're committed to truth we're not com committed just to saying it's a myth and a legend, and you ought to just believe it because we say, we're trying to say, what does scripture say? What did it say? And by the way, 98% of what we have in our text is undisputed, right? We're talking about single digit percentages here of texts that are, there's a question mark behind it saying, oh, what's the right reading here? We even talked about the one where Solomon or King saw reigned for two years and then for 40 how does that work? Or, he was born and he was two years and then rained for 40, something like that. The text is hard to understand and it's probably because of some kind of error in transmission. But all that said, we like the NAT Bible that's worth you having in your library, especially if you have logs, because it'll help you and point you to. Sources that are used to help make decisions about texts like this. Yeah. And in the NAT, in their footnotes, you'll see two letters before their footnotes. Either you'll see TN or sn. SN is study note. So that's gonna be similar to the ESV Bible or something like that. A study bible note, TN is gonna be translators note and that's gonna contain a lot of the information, like what you were just talking about there. That's gonna get into okay, how do we understand this and what's the variant? Here and what's going on there, by the way, in case you're wondering, okay, but you guys are pastors. Your job is to uphold the Bible. Okay. There's a Bart Airman who is no friend of Christianity. He's not a believer. He has done a lot of work to try to undermine what Christ has said. He himself of the Bible has said that there are of all the variants that exist out there, there is not one. Key Christian doctrine that's called into question by a singular variant that's out there. So he would love nothing more than to undermine some of our core beliefs, and yet even he is out there on record saying, of all the variants that are out there, nothing is out there that would call into question any of the core Christian doctrines and beliefs. So I would echo what Pastor Rod said. Yeah, we can fully trust the Bibles that we have. Yeah, pick up an NET Bible. I'm trying to look at how much it costs. I can't tell 'cause I own it, but I'm sure it's, oh, here we go. If you want the full notes edition which I would suggest that you get from Logos Bible. Software. It's 1899. That's a good deal. That's a great deal. That's a great deal. Hey, lemme pray and then we'll be done with this episode. God gives us a great confidence in your word and even an expectation as we come to it, that as we read your word, your spirit will take your word and help us to understand it. That's what we know as the doctrine of illumination, and that we would understand you better as a result of it, not just your word, but understand you better, and that it would work to transform our lives and cause us to be more like Jesus as a result. So we love you. We thank you so much for your word, that we have it, that we can understand more of you through it, and we pray that we would do more of that as we progress throughout this year. Reading Your Word together. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Keep reading your Bibles. Tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. We'll see you. Bye.

Thanks for listening to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. This is a ministry of Compass Bible Church in north Texas. You can find out more information about ourChurch@compassntx.org. We would love for you to leave a review to rate to share this podcast on whatever platform you happen to be listening on, and we will catch you against tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Yeah. I would agree with everything that you said