Hey everybody, welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. Well, hello, welcome back and let's jump in with a question. Let's jump in with a question. Happy Monday. Yeah, Tuesday, whatever day it is. It is Monday. Alright, so, let me just fill some of you guys in. We have listeners from different places and some places are California, where we have some friends who still like to listen to what we're talking about and track with our Bible reading program. And one of those listeners sent in a question. She's been interacting with a friend of hers from work and that friend is a Muslim. And she's been having gospel level conversations. She's been trying to share her faith with him. And so I've commended her for such things. And he has questions because she'll send him our podcast and say, here's what I, here's what these pastors said about this. And that guy will say, well, hold on a second here. Let me throw a flag on the play. Here's 15 things wrong with what they're saying. And while we can't dedicate the podcast to that on any regular basis, you understand, we know that you guys are not Muslims. This isn't helpful for most of you because you're not Muslims and you're not thinking about it these ways. But we thought this was helpful because there's things here that we think well, these are the kinds of challenges Christians get, and we wanna show you what it would look like to deal with some of them. Now, we're not gonna deal with them comprehensively. We can't spend the whole podcast on this, but we can give it a few minutes. So here's what he said. Okay. You ready for this? I think so. All right. So here's what he said. He says. This is him. I'm quoting him now. I'm getting this from the text. He says in the middle of the podcast that he's importing New Testament theology onto the Old Testament, which is very odd to me. But more importantly, he talks about the, he talks about understanding people's cultures and colloquial language and the use the colloquial language of the time, rather when referencing Jesus. Saying, you have said so, but does he forget to apply those same values to quote Son of God, which was also a metaphor and a term of respect to use at the time. Well, why so picky choosy about what fits their narrative. If he's gonna be honest about understanding of past people and how they presented and understood things, why is it so hard for him to be consistent? Okay. That's the whole of the text and. We want to, obviously I just read it as it was put there. Yes. I stumbled a few times and I read it with a similar spirit. So I think this is gonna be pretty close to what you might get if you're sharing the gospel with people that work. Especially in our neighborhood. We have lots of Southeast Asians. We have a decent sized population of Muslims and increasingly so. Yep. This sounds like it could track, this could be your neighbor. So I thought this would be helpful and let's talk first of all about the tone. You caught that initially and immediately Yeah. Gimme some feedback about that. Before we jump into the question, the tone of the challenge, the question, right? Yes. Yeah, that's right. It doesn't seem to be a tone of sincerity as far as asking a question saying, Hey, I really wanna know the answer to this. It seems more of an antagonistic tone picky, choosy, you know, does he forget there? It's condescending in its tone, at least. Yeah. And that's difficult. Granted, I, I don't know him. I haven't talked to him. We're reading something, which is always hard. In fact, I talked about that recently in a sermon. Yeah. It's better to have the voice to voice conversation. It seems antagonistic. So if this were your neighbor and he texted you this thing Yeah. And he says, look man, this is the issues I have. How would you be inclined to respond to this? Or would you be like, you know what? You're not even sincere about this. Forget it. I do think, and Jesus does talk about it at some point, casting pearls before the swine. I don't think that's where we're at right now. Sure. But I do think you can have an, a relationship with an unbeliever who gets to the level of being so consistently antagonistic that your evangelistic efforts become better spent somewhere else. Hmm. Because you're continually met with. The opposition from the person. In fact, a lot of times people will say a good evangelistic assessment question. If you find somebody asking you all kinds of like rabbit trail questions, a good question sometimes is, Hey if I can give you a satisfying answer to all of these objections that you have, would you be ready to repent and believe in Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior? And if they say no, yeah, well then you're, you really are casting your pearls before the swine. At that point you're arguing for argument's sake. And you're probably not going to get very far in that. It's not to say the spirit couldn't still soften that person's heart, but it might be a time to, to reconsider. But if I had a good relationship with the person, I might go back and say, Hey, hey let's be fair. Let's be charitable with each other. You know? Let's ask the question and not ask the antagonistic question. Not carry the tone there. Yeah. We wanna love each other. We wanna respect each other. Hey, here's what I think you're asking me. Lemme give you the best answer that I can. Right? And I guess I, I'm thinking love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. That kind of thing here that Jesus says it's a wisdom issue, I think in a lot of ways. Sometimes it's hard to know, okay, at what point have they crossed a line where I'm just, it's just not helpful anymore. In this case, this is a coworker, so you're not gonna get away from this conversation, at least with, you could say we're not talking anymore because of that. But I think it's important for people to see that this is the kind of question that some people level our way. And I think our ability to respond charitably and graciously can often disarm and dismantle that kind of attitude in that spirit. So I'm grateful that, that there's still a relationship there between this gal and her coworker. So let's get into some of the meat then, and we're already a few minutes into this, so we're gonna be brief. Maybe we can te turn this into two parts so that it's, we're not going for 20 minutes. We could, yeah. Let's deal with the first thing here. Yeah. In the first paragraph, he says in the middle of the podcast that he's importing New Testament theology onto the Old Testament, which is very odd to me. Do you wanna deal with that one first? What's the relation between Old and New Testament? Yeah. And how are we being Yeah. We talk a lot about the meta-narrative of scripture. That is, that there's one storyline that goes from the beginning of the Bible to the end, from Genesis all the way through. When we classify Old Testament, new Testament, we do so to understand the pivot point, which is the life of Jesus Christ, which marks the beginning of the New Testament. But really the Bible is one thread. It's one storyline going all the way through. So when we read the New Testament we are going to understand it in a way that is gonna help us understand things in the Old Testament. In a different way. This is known as progressive revelation When we read the New Testament and for example, he mentions Son of God, so that's a title that we could pull there. Son of God is a title that in pre, pre-Christian Judaism was associated with the Messiah. And this goes back to the Davidic Covenant. This goes back to Second Samuel, chapter seven, where one of your sons will be a son to me. He will I will make him the firstborn, the highest of the kings of the earth. That Psalm 89, I will be his father. He shall be my son. That's second Samuel seven 14. Then in Psalm two, you get God saying, today I've installed my son in on Mount Zion there. And so you have Messianic expectations surrounding the title Son of God. So when it's attributed to Jesus in the New Testament or when Jesus even takes it to himself in the New Testament there is a very real sense in which when we consider the context of the whole Bible, this is something that was relevant because it was a mess and a claim. Then you broaden that context to begin to. Consider the other claims that Jesus made. For example, when he says before Abraham was, I am when he says, I and the Father are one he's making claims, direct claims to being God. And that's something that is going to be a massive disagreement, for example, for this woman in her coworker, because the Jews the Muslims would deny that has ever taken place that Jesus ever claimed to be God. They believe in Jesus. He shows up in the Quran. In fact, they even believe that Jesus is gonna come back next to the their prophet. Muhammad, they have a tomb that's ready for Jesus when Jesus comes back and then dies again. And so there are so many inherent differences. The, for as many similarities as there are between the monotheistic religions, there are so many inherent differences. They're gonna argue against what the Bible says because they don't believe it. And we're gonna argue against what the Quran says because we don't believe it. And so this is a spiritual battle that's at work here, but when we're dealing with the scriptures, what we're doing by interpreting things this way in the Bible is totally within the realm of appropriate hermeneutics. Yeah, that's a helpful point. And I, I. Guess one of the challenges with trying to talk to somebody who is just coming from a very different perspective is I think we both bring stuff to the table that we're assuming the other knows right now when we're talking about how we look at the Old Testament in light of the new and even vice versa, we use both of the testaments, not interchangeably, but we use them. To help complete and compliment one another. I guess that's a better word to compliment one another. Jesus fulfills the laws and the prophets in the Old Testament, so it's right and natural that you take the old and you say, okay, how does this fit in the new and vice versa. We look at the Old Testament and say, okay, how does a New Testament present Jesus as the completion or the fulfillment? That's the word that we're more familiar with of the old that we bring that to the table. We're not thinking about that. We know that. And for someone who's not as familiar with the scriptures or they have a familiarity. And maybe it's not as deep or as long. And that makes perfect sense because if you've been in the church for a long time, you've heard these things we assume a lot. And my point in all of that is simply to say. With conversations like this, it may be more helpful to start from a more basic place than trying to say, Hey, let's jump into how the old and New Testament interrelate. For sure. Those are intermural intramural conversations that we have in-house. That's the word intramural. We talk about these things. We debate about them. How does it work? What emphasis do we place on the other? Those are intramural conversations. After faith in Christ has been established, it's harder to talk about that. Not impossible, but harder for someone who doesn't. Pay any lip service whatsoever or any sense of can I take this with a. In a good faith effort. And that's what we would ask for if we're gonna try to interact with this. Is this a good faith question or is this a gotcha. To your point earlier, this may not be as productive or fruitful. But if I could give you a sufficient answer, and by the way, he's gonna say sufficient by who standards. Right. This is the constant refrain that we get from people that are critical of our faith. So, well, it's sufficient. Is it? Is it. Does it pass muster? Mm-hmm. Is it basically understandable and basically believable? And for a lot of people, that's gonna be No. And we understand the reasons why. As you said, it's spiritual. But that's a good first place to start. We'll get to that. We'll get to more tomorrow and see how that goes. Sounds good. Well, let's get into our DBR for today. We're in Leviticus 22 through 23, and Mark chapter one starting the gospel. Mark probably, I mean, John's so good, but I think Mark might be my favorite Gospel. Is that okay? Can I have a favorite gospel? I don't know. Leviticus 22 through 23, we get into more of these rules and regulations. What should they do? What defiles the offerings? What doesn't defile the offerings? He says in verse three to say to them, if any one of all of your offspring throughout your generation's approaches the holy things that the people of Israel dedicated the Lord while he has uncles, that person should be cut off from my presence. I am the Lord. And again, he's still dealing with, in the context of the priesthood here, he's gonna go on and talk about who. Can and can't eat of the sacrificial meals and the sacrificial food. A layperson verse 10 cannot eat of a holy thing. No foreigner or guest of the priest or hired worker can eat of the holy thing the family can though he's gonna go on and talk about that. He's going to then in verses 17 and following, talk about. The types of animals that should be accepted, the types of animals that were allowable within the context and the framework of the sacrificial system. And those were to be animals that weren't blemished. They had to be animals that were according to what God had prescribed. And so these were all important things that they were to do because, and this is a common reframe in Leviticus. I don't know that we've hit it too much, but he constantly appeals back to this statement. I am the Lord, and I think there He's establishing his authority. He is God. He is the one that is called them out. They are to be his people. And so it's his right to prescribe and describe the way that they were to go about their practices of worship. And so God has given these commands. He's the Lord. That's even how he ends in chapter 22, reminding them even of the fact that he's the one that brought them out of Egypt. Chapter 23. Then we get into some instructions initially here of the different feasts of the Lord as well as the Sabbath. Then the Passover. These are our constant refrains that God is going back over. This is gonna be repetitious because God wanted it to be repetitious. These were things that God wanted repeated, and so he wanted them to understand and know why they were doing the things that they were doing, why they were observing these things. The feast of the. First fruits is gonna be referenced there. The burnt offering, the grain offering, the drink offering that was associated with that. And then you have the Feast of Weeks, and these time markers, 99 days after the feast of the first fruits. Here comes the Feast of Weeks, and he's gonna give them the instructions on the Feast of Weeks. By the way, there we see another reference to not. Reaping all the way up to the edges of the field. Verse 22 should call back to Ruth There. Feast of the Trumpets, the Day of Atonement There, these are all the meals that were to be celebrated in memory of what God has done or what he would do, the promises in the future. And so, God has a God of celebration and we see that with these feast. He wanted them to gather together, to celebrate, to hold these feasts, and they were holy and they were to be revered, but at the same time, they were to be observed as fellowship times and meal times together as a community. Now we've made mention before that we don't see things like this on the Christian calendar, at least not the kind that we celebrate anyway. There's not as times where we have to take time off except when we start getting into Easter. Now that brings up a different question for me. As New Testament Christians, we don't have the feast, we don't have the, this, the pausing like these guys do. But there is a liturgical Christian calendar that does have a lot of these things, not these same exact, holidays, but there's other times where there's pausing and reflection. I think of Lent lent is that 40 days before Easter that we typically celebrate 40 days before Passover. There's other days throughout the Christian calendar that we as western Christians who are not tied into a liturgical camp, don't celebrate. Do you think there's anything wrong with that? And maybe is there anything wrong with saying, oh, we're gonna do a. Like, a stater. Yeah. Some people do things like, I remember you took part in one not too long ago, this last week, if I'm not mistaken. Not so recent, but no I have participated in Passover, Seders, a couple of them before, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. There are Christians out there that will shy away from some of the things that we do and would look at what we do and go, I won't even do that. For example, the celebration of Christmas and things like, like they won't make as big of a deal out of that because they don't see it prescribed in the Bible that this is something that we should do. I think we have to look at why are we doing what we're doing when we celebrate these things, when we remember them, when we observe them. We need to do it with intentionality and not just do it because we feel like this is a requirement, or this is adding something that is, is making me more holy somehow or better than someone else. But if we want to do the pass Seder because we wanna see the symbolism that was representative in the Passover and how Christ is the fulfillment of those things. And that's a really cool thing to sit through and observe and watch that unfold. So I don't think there's anything wrong with those that do it. I don't think that there's anything wrong with abstaining in some most circumstances. As, as long as our reasons and our motives behind it are right, and we're not doing it with a judgemental, judgmental attitude one way or the other, I'm judging you because I don't do that or I'm judging you because you don't do that. And so I think it's, if we can do it to have it increase our faith or just strengthen our faith or help us appreciate something more. I think there's room for it. What about days? They're on the calendar. And I guess this is interesting 'cause we just recently talked about Eastern Orthodoxy. They have calendars and days where they celebrate and memorialize saints. Even saints. Yeah. There's saints that are memorialized. October. October, we think of All Saints Day. Yeah. The next day over. Yeah. There's days that we don't. In the Western Church. And I guess when I say that, I don't mean Western as an American West, I'm thinking east, Eastern Church, Western Church in terms of the split between the church and one 1054, if I'm not mistaken. Right. The great schism. The great schism. So do your church history. If you know what I'm talking about. There's a good book, in fact. Yeah. It's right over there. It's 2000 years of church history. Of Christ Power of Christ. Power of Christ Power. Thank you. My Nick Needham. I love that book. I've been, I'm just about finished with it. I'm gonna make my way through all five volumes this year. Yes. So help me God. I recommend that to you. Highly recommend it because it's so readable, so good. All that to say, Western churches in our tradition stems from the west. Let's just keep it at that. The Eastern Church has saints Yeah. And things. It's like, Hey, we're gonna think about Saint John of the cross today. Spend some time with that. Yeah. What do you think about those things? Yeah. That's where I get uncomfortable and when we begin to elevate a human being, that's where I think we, we run a risk of crossing a line and the Eastern Orthodox Church believes in icons, and the Catholic church is going to promote their saints. In some instances, even to the degree of saying you pray in such a way that you're. Asking the saints to carry your prayers to God as though you needed your prayers, needed an extra boost to get there. They will. Mary is considered a coem in the Catholic church. I don't know what that is other than worshipful language saying that she's a participant in the redemption of our souls by being the one that bore Jesus, we're crossing lines there, so I would shy away from celebrating the. Person, a human being in observing a day that would give honor to the human being, especially because most likely, most of those human beings were saying, my life is about honoring Jesus. Yeah. And so, St. Patrick's Day, other things like that, if you wear green, okay, fine, whatever, orange, I don't think that you're in sin or orange. But. At the same time I don't think that there's a spiritual significance that we should participate in. Yeah. And I would say you're free and you're free in these things. 'cause there's no command that says don't, there's no command that says do. This is one of those things that early church did these things because they saw, man, that guy was exemplary. He set a good example for us. Let's honor him. Let's think about him today and let's remember what he did. But often we're so far removed from these people that some of the fervor, and there's also some question about, okay, how much of this is hagiography? Like, are we talking about the real life of this person? Or is this kind of mythical? Have they grown in their. Their reputation since these things, again, there's lots of complex complexities here. We don't think there's inherent spiritual value in doing it, and we would say there's no inherent spiritual value in not doing this kind of a Romans 14 situation. Let one who esteems one day over the other be fully convinced in his own mind. And I would say if that's gonna be the case with your desire to honor the saints, then okay. No, no, no benefit in doing. No benefit in not doing. I think it really is a matter of your heart and how you're posturing. By the way, St. John, the cross day is Catholic. It's not Eastern Orthodoxy. So just to clarify and not throw those guys under the bus. Yeah. If you're gonna observe the day, observe the day because that person makes you love Jesus More. Don't observe the day because you want to revere the individual. Yeah. We would say that's a something to be avoided for sure. Yeah. Alright. New Testament reading for today. Mark chapter one, one through 22. Mark is, he's the rapid fire recorder. He is most likely Peter's biographer. And we find that out from some of the early. Apostolic fathers that talked to us about the fact that that's what happened. That Mark and Peter sat down together and Mark records what Peter remembered from the gospel. No birth account. Here. We're gonna start right away. The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Remember, gospel is a word that means good news. He identifies Jesus as the son of God. So there's Mark applying that Messianic title that we just talked about earlier in our podcast to Jesus here. And then he goes on and he introduces us to John the Baptist. He then goes from John the Baptist, straight into the baptism of Jesus. The temptation of Jesus gets. Two verses in Mark's gospel here versus a longer treatment in Matthew's gospel. And then you get Jesus right away into his earthly ministry, he's gonna begin calling his disciples. Now, it's important here for us to read the gospels together because when you read the calling of the disciples in Mark, it seems that Jesus is just happening upon these guys going, Hey, come follow me. And they're deciding to go, oh, that guy looks friendly. Let's go follow him. We don't know anything about him, but when we read John's gospel, we find out that these disciples had actually been exposed to Jesus before this. And this was the formal call into official discipleship. They had been casually following Jesus. They had been wanting to spend more time with him and get to know him. And yet this is that moment where Jesus says, come and I will make you fishers of men. I'm calling you into formal discipleship with me. And so that's what we see here taking place as Jesus begins his ministry and calls these disciples. And that's how it worked. You could not elect a teacher and say, Hey, I want you to be my teacher. The teacher had to select you. You were not. Free, especially with what they were doing. These guys are fishermen. These guys are not the upper crust of Israel who had the ability to send their kids to private colleges as it were, and say, we want Gamal. He's the rabbi of our day. Let's get our kids with that guy. There had to be a selection process, and of course, I'm sure there's relational bonds that made a difference, but. Traditionally it was the rabbi who chose his students. He would call them and they would respond affirmatively, and you have a relationship suddenly. So to that point they were they could not select Jesus and say, we're gonna be your closest disciples. He had to select them, and that's why he says later on is it not I who chose you and yet one of you is a devil? Jesus chose them. That was the norm. Yep. From here, Jesus goes into Capernaum. Capernaum is significant. This is gonna be his home base there in the region of Galilee. And he is going to enter the synagogue and begin teaching. And we're gonna see here that his teaching is unique and is gonna be unique, not just because of what he does, but the way that he goes about teaching. And this is what that people walk away saying he teaches unlike anything else we've ever heard. So we'll get into more of that tomorrow in our reading as we continue in Mark chapter one. Let's pray. One quick note before you do that. Yep. Verse four and verse 15, you'll see a common word there and the word is repent. So we see from the very earliest parts of scripture and the gospel that repentant is a con significant contributor to how our, how we were to relate to God. Lots of churches will sometimes leave that word out in their presentation of the gospel, and yet early in Mark, you see it twice. I think that's of noteworthy. Yep. In fact, I'm pretty sure Mark one 14 and 15 was the Adventure Club verse for this past Wednesday. So our little ones were learning about repentance as they should. Yep. Let's pray. God, thanks for the example that we see in scripture that message repent and believe for the kingdoms at hand. It's our message that we go out with as well as we call people to repent and believe in Jesus today. So we wanna be faithful as that pertains to, to us as the church, as we read about yesterday in the Great Commission. And now we see this, that Jesus was after preaching the gospel, we're even gonna see tomorrow that he's gonna say, this is why I came. I came to preach the good news. And so we want to follow in his footsteps towards that end. So make us a fruitful church as we go out and work. Proclaim the good news of repentance and faith in Jesus. We pray this in Jesus' name, amen. Keep reading the Bible and tune in again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. See ya. Bye.

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