Hey folks. Welcome to day two, back with another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Happy New Year, man. This music is bumping. It is the best music we've had so far. So far. It's so upbeat. I feel like I'm in the club. Undo reading the Bible. Undo, undoubtedly. Excellent. Hey, if you read yesterday, that was one day I did. If you read today, that's day two. That means you're on a streak. You have a chain. Don't break the chain. Don't break the chain. Keep it going. Hey, you know I, I did have a question actually. People are wondering. Everybody's asking, why are you here? Because you told us on Sunday that I told you were leaving and then you're, and you said that on your leader video, and yet here you are in the flesh. I'm here hologram in your office. Yep. What's going on. Yeah. We're actually recording these ahead of time so that we can have some of the can because this is, we want you to get a flavor of what this is gonna be like moving forward. That's right. And that, you know what we're about. So yeah. So what are you doing for your vacation? We wanna know, we are gonna be in San Diego, so we're there now. You're there now. We drove out on Sunday after church and made it safely. We're assuming a lot. I guess you would not, you would not make it out on Sunday. Yeah. Okay. We, we, we will pray for that. Yeah. In San Diego, you're gonna go to SeaWorld. You're gonna go on the USS midway. No we're not, we're gonna just hang out with Amanda's family. They're out there, so we're just gonna spend some time there and Cool. See some of her extended family. My sister-in-law's coming down with my niece and we're, yeah, just celebrate Christmas out there with my in-laws. Do you know, you probably know this. That one of the world's most highly rated zoos is in that area. San Diego Zoo. Do you know? Yes, I've been You've heard of that place? Yes. What do you think about that place? It's big. It's huge. It's enormous. Yeah. And very hilly. Yeah. Hard to walk around. You know what? I'm not handicapped, thankfully. At least for right now as we record this and to my knowledge, I'm not. Just to say that too, to my knowledge, I'm not handicapped, and one of the things that I've always been tempted by at the San Diego Zoo is those carts. The wheelchairs. Yeah, the wheelchairs. You know, the electric. Yeah. It's like, dude, those things are so steep. Yeah. Man, I was flirting with it one year. I'm thinking if they're available and no one else is using it, why can't I jump in and go? I think you carry the kids, you're carrying people and your wife and you carrying everybody in your shoulders, and it just gets hard after a few hours. Yes. Yes it does. You should go visit the San Diego Zoo on my behalf. Well, I miss it. Are you paying our family's way into the San Diego Zoo? I am praying your family's way. I will pray the whole way. I will pray your family's way in. Just walk in, walk past the security people. Yeah. Don't even look at them. Yeah. And the Lord will get you in buddy. Yeah. Yeah. So we're gonna be out there doing that and then Lord willing, we will, we'll drive back where I'll spend a little bit more time just here at home and then I'll be back in the office. That's great. For our biblical counseling intensive coming up on January 9th. That is coming up so soon. You're gonna be back on the ninth? I will be back on the ninth and then that's when we start our biblical counseling intensive. Yes. We have so many people signed up for that. Yeah, it's great. There's still room. There is still room. And it's still the same price. It is still the same price of $0. What a deal. Zero US dollars. How can f. Canadians, we don't know what the conversion rate. Yeah. $30 for Canadians. Okay. So what can we expect with that? Yeah, it's gonna be a great time. Pastor Dr. Lucas Pace is gonna be here to Mr. Pastor, doctor to you, and he is gonna be teaching us on the basics, intro level, what biblical counseling is all about, why it's important what does it look like, what are some of the basic principles and tenets of biblical counseling? Why is it different from maybe what you've known as Christian counseling or Christian psychology? And why do we. Prescribed to this over some of those other models. These are gonna be a lot of the things that you'll hear from him as he lays the groundwork for what really we are planning to be a full year's worth of material. Wow. So this is in person for Friday night, Saturday and Sunday, man. And then you're gonna have two more video lecture series that are gonna be provided for you during the year, and then we'll bring him back out again at the end of the year to do one more in person to finish everything up. And it's our understanding that if you do all of those things, that you will have at least a classroom portion of the A CBC, that is the Association of Certified Biblical Counselors. The classroom portion of that work done towards your certification. There's more that you need to do. No, there is. So this doesn't guarantee that you're gonna be certified at the end of this classroom stuff. There's quite a bit more that you need to do, but this is. Big step in that right, right. Direction. It sure is. And don't let that dissuade you. We would be happy for you just to take the classroom hours. Yeah, that's totally fine. Totally. And it's beneficial and valuable. In fact, when you listen to what the teaching is and you get a sense of how this works, I think you're gonna love it. Yeah. We've talked about this before about how exciting it is to do it and how your understanding of scripture broadens and changes when you realize, oh, there's a lot more here than I realized. That would be helpful to people. So it's gonna bless you, it's gonna benefit you. There's no loss. It's literally free. You can't go wrong with this thing if you don't like it. We'll give your money back for sure. For sure. Can't give you your time back though. That's God's department, but you'll be around other people from the church, so Yeah. Even if nothing else, you'll, you'll have good brothers and sisters in Christ. Good friends are gonna be there. Yeah. Hey, let's jump into our next portion of reading for the day. We have Genesis chapter three, four, and five, I believe. And then we have Matthew chapter two. So again, old Testament and then New Testament. So we're back in the Old Testament. We've looked at the creation from a high level chapter one, creation of mankind, chapter two. Now we're getting into what happened to cause everything to go haywire. And this is where I think the Bible is. Self attesting, one of the most reasonable interpretations of the current world that we find. Because no matter who you are, you have to look at the current world and say things are not right. No matter what your background is, your worldview is, your system is. Everybody's gonna look at things in this world and be able to say something's wrong. And the Bible right off the bat provides an explanation for why that is, and it's what takes place in chapter three, which is the fall of man. It's a familiar story. If you've been in the church from the time that you were little. You've seen this on the felt boards or on the TV screens or with whoever is telling you about this. But this is Adam and Eve, and this is the temptation, the serpent, the enemy, Satan, the adversary. He embodies a serpent, which, there's a lot there. Eve is not shocked when the serpent starts talking to her. So it causes us to wonder, maybe animals were able to talk at this time during the early stages of creation. But eve listens to the serpent as the serpent causes her to question God's word she takes from the tree that was forbidden, the tree, the knowledge of good and evil, which God had forbidden them. Back in chapter two, verse 17, he had specifically said, don't eat from this tree. She takes from it. She gives it to, to Adam, who was with her. Who had abdicated his role or failed in his role as a leader there. And they both eat together, and this is the fall. Their eyes are open. They're embarrassed that they're unclothed. They hide from God. God calls them out to give an account of what they had done. He then issues a judgment and says that there are consequences and punishment that will come, and also at the same time. Introduces us to our first hope at redemption in verse 15, where he promises that the offspring of the woman would ultimately crush the head of the serpent crush, the head of Satan. Things go pretty bad to, to really awful in a short matter of time. Yeah, they do. How long was it between chapter two and chapter three? Man, I wish we knew. That's a fascinating question. We don't know. The text doesn't tell us. We're not sure. We're not sure. Probably not long. We leave them naked and unashamed. And then chapter three, they're very naked and they're very ashamed. Yeah. Things go bad really quickly here. Okay. So notice a couple things and one thing I wanna point out, the serpent goes to Eve. Not to Adam. Right. Violation of the order of things right away. Right. So sins already in the world, although not through Adam and Eve because a serpent's already sitting against God. Is that true? Yes. And who's a serpent? Serpent is we know this to be Satan. The adversary. And that's a great point. 'cause at some point. Between the end of chapter one where God created everything. It was very good. And what we find here, there was the fall of Satan in Heaven, which we find described, we think in some other passages of scripture. Yeah. Though there's debate about whether those are, and we'll get there in our daily Bible reading, but the sin of Satan seems to be pride that he wanted to be God. God cast him down from heaven along with a lot of angels who would choose to follow him rather than God. So that's taking place in the white space between the chapters here. And so Satan is here and he's made him himself an a vowed and sworn enemy of God, and he's gonna go after God's creation. Because God's creation is that which was created in his image and Satan hates God. And so he's gonna go after the creation of God and he goes after Eve, to your point, usurping the authoritarian structure that gotta created, which is that Adam should be the leader here, and Satan knows that, and he's undermining what God has done. This is fascinating because it gives us at least a glimpse into how God designed creation, because it wasn't when Satan fell that everything went haywire. Yeah. It's when Adam and E fell, who God gave a vice regency, co regency, they were meant to reign with him and he was gonna use them to rule over a creation. Yeah. That was the culture mandate, the creation mandate that we saw previously. God says to them something interesting. He says where are you? So, yeah, verse nine of chapter three. How does God not know this? Yeah, no, he does for sure. This is a grace of God and a mercy of God because what God is doing here is he's drawing them into confession. Mm. And by extension, drawing them into repentance. He's causing them to come out of hiding and bring their sin to the light. And God still does this today for us as the church, through the indwelling of the Spirit within us as believers, when you feel the weight of sin, right? Or like David prayed in Psalm 55 or Psalm 51 when he said, your hand was heavy upon me. So God is drawing them into confession of their sin so that that sin can be dealt with like it should be dealt with. Even though the consequences are hard, it's better for them to confess than to continue to hide what incredible grace, so early in the pages of scripture. And right on the heels of their sin. Yeah. Okay. What does it mean then? So this is actually before what I just asked you. He says, the eye, it says here in verse seven, the eyes of both were opened and they knew that they were naked and they sowed fig leaves. What does it mean that their eyes were opened? How is it that it seems like. Their commitment to evil produced some new visibility, some new knowledge that they previously did not have. Yeah. Yeah. I think this is connected to the result, and that is they felt shame for the first time. And so they were able to understand the realm of darkness, the realm of evil, the realm of humiliation, the realm of shame. Things that they had never. Yeah. Humiliation. No. Okay, so this is about feeling a sense of insecurity, right. Inadequacy, for the first time, humanity felt broken. Incomplete because they were right. They were broken. They were in fact broken. Okay. Interesting point here. Eve sins first, and yet Adam gets the blame. Mm-hmm. What's going on with that? Yeah, that's again, the headship, the responsibility feature here. God is going to call Adam to account because Adam really failed as well by failing to. Lead his wife. It says that she took some of the fruit and gave it to her husband who was with her. And so Adam is not off, tending the garden in some of their area. This cat. Yeah. He's with her. Yeah. He should have. Unbelievable woman. We're not gonna do that. Yeah. Slap her hand, her hand guys her hand. And not in a violent way, just like, Hey, we're not the fruit out of the hand smack the fruit. Out of her hand. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. Okay. So God talks to the serpent in verse 14. Yeah. And issues this curse to the serpent. Can you explain what this means? Yeah. There's grounds to think that perhaps the serpent walked upright. I know the creation museum down in Dallas has a depiction of a very creepy looking that mission accomplished, I guess, walked upright, didn't make it look. And so the animal is punished for its complicity in here. And it's interesting because in chapter three verse one, it says the serpent was more crafty than any other beast. So there was something about, created even animals at this time that I think are different than the animals that we experience and see today. Mm. And God is gonna punish the serpent, the serpent's gonna crawl in his belly. And this is why we have rattlesnakes in Copperheads and everything else. Wow. Okay, so she says to the woman that she's gonna now have childbearing pain. So I guess to this point they didn't we don't know about her kids if she had any before this, right? But we do know that now part of the curse is childbearing pain. And then he says something to her That's really interesting. We'd love for you to talk about this part. Your desire shall be for or contrary to your husband, depending on what. Yeah. The year of your ESV, you're reading Yeah. Contrary to your husband, but he shall rule over you. So some people point to this as saying, look, see, headship is actually a result of sin and not a result of the new creation in Christ. No. I think what this is saying is the struggle against headship is the result of sin, not headship itself. Here, goddess saying to eve, this is gonna be a chore for you now to submit to your husband's leadership. Mm. This is gonna be something that you're not gonna want to do now. And that's what this is a result of. Not so much that the authorities is not been changed at all. Rather, the response to the authority is what's changing. Fascinating. Okay, one more thing here. He says to Adam, all the things that he says, work's gonna be hard. It's gonna stink. You're gonna have to sweat to make it happen. And then he says, you're gonna die. You came from dust, and you're gonna return to dust. And this is, as we see it today. Your body eventually decomposes and goes into the ground and that's kind of it. So much things here in chapter three. This is one of the most important chapters in the Bible. It is so critical. So if you didn't read it slowly, maybe go back and read it one more time and make sure you're just kind of getting a feel for this. Because this is the rest of why scripture exists. Jesus has to come because of chapter three. Yep. Everything in, in. Chapter four, de Revelation 22 is because of chapter three. So just halfway, I, in chapter four, we see that God's plan is gonna continue. And that is because right away, Adam and Eve, they have children after this. And so that, that seed of the woman that was promised in Genesis three 15, we see that it's gonna move towards that. And this is the very beginning of this. And there's two men that are born, one being Cain, the other being able, you probably again, are familiar with this story. Abel brings an offering that is pleasing to the Lord, not just because it's the animals. It's not that Kane's offering was not acceptable because it lacked protein, but rather it was the best of the flock. It was the choice. And it seems that Kain brought the second, so he didn't bring the cream of the crop. He didn't bring the first fruits to the Lord, the best of what he had to offer. And so, abel is gonna be commended and Cain is going to be challenged on this. And God even is gonna tell him, look you need to do well because if you don't sin his crouching at the doors, desire is contrary to you, but you must overcome it. You must rule over it. Cain chooses the wrong path and he goes after his brother and ends up committing the first murder, and God comes after Cain at that point and tells him what his punishment is gonna be, which causes Cain to say, I can't do this. This is too much for me. God tells Cain I'm gonna protect you. No one is going to harm you. You mentioned how much time is between Genesis chapter two and Genesis chapter three. Perhaps this gives us an indication that Cain and Abel were not ab Eve's first children because later on Cain is here afraid that other people living on the Earth at this time are going to do him harm. And it's possible that they had many other children and many other generations to this point because the, we're gonna see in a little bit here, they're living a long, long, long time. This is not a 70 year life. This is hundreds upon hundreds of years. So there's plenty of time for the earth who had been populated. I know that creates a lot of questions about relationships between family members. It seems during this time period that was something that God was. Was using and allowing. And you also have to remember that humanity was so nascent in its form that there weren't a lot of degradations of genetics at this point that could have led to problems that exist today when two people of the same family members get together in ways that they shouldn't. I don't think we need to throw a flag on that and say, oh, this is a different time. And I think the earth is being populated and that's really what Genesis four is there to show us, number one, God's value for life is still there. And number two, the earth is being populated in chapter four. Such helpful points to be aware of because all of this is baked in. You read and you don't really. Think at least in the moment, oh, there's different implications about this. Who's gonna kill Kane? Who's gonna give him issue? And of course you have to say, okay, well I guess this is this is not all the time that they spend on earth, and there's lots of kids that could be involved here. One thing I wanna point out here, Hebrews chapter 11. Verse four talks about the offering that Abel made, and it says that he offered those things by faith. And so even though it's true, he did offer the best clearly I think in part what caused God not to receive Kane's offering is because it wasn't by faith. That's good. God, from, good point, from the very earliest point was. Honoring our faith over and above the actual sacrifice itself. So jot that down in your Bible. Hebrews 11, four. That's a big part. And also notice that where his parents confessed Cain deflects, they honor the, honor it in the sense that they acknowledged their sin. They agreed with God that they were in sin. And yet Cain is like, well, are you talking about who's, who's? My? Yeah, my brother, my brother, the keeper, my guy. I don't know. So notice these things. However long this is, things are not going well. Sin infects and affects. And one other thing about sin, by the way you'll notice that when the Lord says to ca. He says if you do well, will you not be accepted? Suggesting to me that there is a relationship between your feelings and what your behavior is. When you do good, good things tend to happen, including good feelings. And when you do wrong, bad things tend to happen, including bad feelings. So this is maybe two elementary for some of you, you. Thinking like, well, duh, but I just wanna show you, God makes this a connection for us. He shows us when we do good, good things happen, including having happy feelings. Right feelings. Is this undeniable truth that always happens? No. Obviously there's always gonna be complications, but generally speaking, this is how God designed us to work. Yep. Chapter five is a pivot chapter for us. It sets up where we're going from here and it's a genealogy, and so you're gonna read a lot of names here and a lot of long years, like I said, all the days after Father to Seth were 800 years. Adam lived notice in verse 5, 930 years, and then he died. So you think of. About that. There's plenty of time for the Earth to be populated through the offspring of Adam and Eve here. But one thing that is repeated here, is not just the fathering component, but the death component. And I think that's setting up the reminder to us of the fact that creation is broken. And so he died. He died. He died. He died. He died. You're gonna notice that over and over and over again in chapter five. As well as some names here that are important to pay attention to. Seth is gonna be the son of the promise. So that promise that God gave to Eve, that one of your offspring is gonna crush the head of the serpent. That's gonna come through Seth. And the rest of this is gonna take us all the way up to Noah, which is where we get in tomorrow's reading in chapter six and following. Okay? Yes. But talk about Enoch. Enoch. What gives, I also hear he wrote a book in the Bible. Nope. Okay. Talk about Enoch. Yeah. So Enoch here is a Committable figure and we read about him in Hebrews as well, Hebrew chapter 11. But it says he, he walked with God and then he says he walked with God and he was not for God. It took him mysterious. It seems that the curse of. Sin, which is death, that Enoch was such a righteous man that God graciously took Enoch and prevented him from having to go through physical death. That's nice. Even though for those that are in Christ, physical death is a transition to eternal life. It's still not anything that we love. We don't welcome it. It sometimes our sending pastor would say at a funeral, people will say all the time, death is a part of life. And he would say, no, it's not. It's the enemy of life. Yeah. It's the end of it. And so he antithesis of life. Yeah. So Enoch, graciously by God takes him is taken so that he doesn't have to go through that period. There's a book, intertestamental book apocryphal book that's named after Enoch, but it was not written by Enoch. Okay. What kind of body does Enoch presently have? He was taken to heaven, I'm guessing with his body 'cause they didn't find his body right. Is does he have a glorified body is what I'm asking? I don't know. I don't know because yeah, I don't know. 'cause he did, yeah. He wasn't separated from his body, so that's a good He wasn't, he asked, I he would have to be right. Maybe every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. Maybe Enoch got his wings. I love that movie by the way. Yes. It's great. It's a great movie. That's not true, by the way. Angels. Angels do not become. This. Yeah. People don't become angels. That's what I was trying to get into. Thank you very much for saying that. 'cause that a lot of people have that misconception. In fact, I encountered that not too long ago. Yeah. And I thought, wow, that's a persistent myth. Yes. That's not what happens. No they do not become angels. That's okay. So we don't know what happened to Enoch but we do know what happens in Noah. And we will cover that tomorrow. But until then, let's jump over to Matthew. Matthew New Testament. Alright, so you've got the birth of Jesus. We're getting into Matthew chapter two. We're gonna jump forward now. And you've got the visit of the wise men. And so the wise men are showing up. We talked about this in one of our Christmas series messages here. They're possibly from the area of Babylon. All we know is that they're from the east and we don't know how many, there were, there's three gifts. And so tradition is landed on that. There were three of them, but. We don't know. We know that there was more than one. They show up in search of baby Jesus. They go to the king to Herod at the time. Now King being a loosely applied term here, he was a vice regent ruling on behalf of the Roman Empire here. And so he was in charge of the area. They go to him, he's troubled, but so is all Jerusalem with him, which always puzzles me. 'cause I'm wondering to myself if the wise men are here in search of the promised Messiah. I would think they would be excited, but there's confusion, there's puzzling there's troubling here. They even tell the Wiseman where to find him. He's gonna be born in Bethlehem, and that's where the Wiseman go. And they do indeed find him there. And so they go, they find the baby. Or, well, at this point in time, he's probably a young child and they come in and they fall down on their face and they worship him. And I'm just always in awe of the insight that these wise men had over who this one was. The fact that they came, it says to worship him. The word worship there in the Greek is. Pros, which means to prostrate to fall down in front of. And that's what they're there to do and that's what they end up doing. And they present 'em with these gifts which are gonna be important because at least church history teaches that that's what Joseph and Mary, these poor Jewish. This poor Jewish couple used to be able to afford their flight to Egypt to protect the baby or to protect Jesus. That is after Herod said, all right, I'm gonna take out all of the children in this region. You mentioned that he is likely a young child at this point. How do you know that? Where does it tell us that in the text? How would we do. Come to that same conclusion. Part of it is the amount of time it would've taken for them to journey from the East to get to Jerusalem at this point, because they're not taking a plane, they're not taking the Super highways, so it would've taken quite a while for them to get there. There was in a Dallas North Tollway, right. Okay. Right. And. And then the word that's used there when it says that they saw the star come to rest over the place where the child was in verse nine. So it's a word that implies not necessarily an infant any longer, but a child, it could be a toddler or older. And also Herod's response is that he, after ascertaining what time the star arose. Order that all children two years and younger should be executed. So from things like that, we can glean the fact that Jesus is no longer baby Jesus at this point. That's very helpful. Okay. Verse 23. Of chapter two, when he went and lived in a city called Nazareth, so that what was spoken by the prophets might be fulfilled. What prophet are we talking about? That he would be called a Nazarene? Nothing. I could find in my Bible that he would be called a Nazarene. Do you have any insight about that particular verse and what Matthew might be referring to? Yeah, that's unique because there isn't a verse that we can point back to you. Now, the word nazer in Hebrew means branch. And so it's possible that there's an illusion back to the passages that he would be the root of Jesse, a branch from the House of Jesse, and that this is. The branch town. So you've got the branch man from the branch town and that this is a loose illusion back to that connection. Very helpful. Oh, I did have I, okay. I remember part of the question. Okay. The star. Yes. What's going on with that star, star of wonder? Is this a natural, huh? Star of wonder? Star of wonder. Star of knight. Star of royal beauty. Bright. Yeah. That one. What is the nature of the star? Is this a miraculous event or are these astronomers slash astrologers? Are they looking at the sky and seeing some something new that's actually physically guiding them? It says that the star came to rest over the place where the child was. So is this something in the sky or is this something unique that God is sending to these guys to get them there? Mean, there's been a lot of study of this. A lot of people have done a lot of work to say, look, there was this coalescence of this planet with this star. I've heard. And it's here. These three three planets have aligned and it so it's especially bright, but it seems like it's resting over the child. It really does. And so I think there's a supernatural. Interference here with the cosmology, with the order of the Stars coupled with the likelihood that these wise men from the east would've been astrologers. They would've been those that study the sky. And if Daniel is behind. Some of their knowledge and understanding here, they would've had verses that talk about the dawning of the morning star. And so looking for something like that, a star that wasn't there, A star that stood out, A star that was unique, this is something that would've flagged them to say, wait a minute, this must be the fulfillment of that prophecy. Let's go check out what this is about. Okay. That explains everything. Good. I'm glad. Alright, well, hey, let's wrap this one up with prayer again, and then we will be back again tomorrow. God, we thank you for the promised. Messiah even as we just read about the fall earlier in our reading today, and now we get to see the birth of the one that is gonna be the seed that's gonna crush the serpent's head. What a great thing that is even in our Bible reading, the way this plan works out to be able to see the curse and also see that the answer to the curse in Jesus. And so we are so grateful for Christ. We pray that we would live faithful to him in the rest of our days in front of us today. We thank you so much for this in Jesus name. Amen. You guys keep reading those Bibles. Stay with us. You're on day two. Day three tomorrow, and we will catch you again for another episode of the Daily Bible Podcast. Bye y'all. Bye.

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