Hey folks. Welcome back to another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. What's up? It is Thursday and we've got brand new books in front. Well, one brand new book. We're still in Mark, but we're in numbers right now. So that's speaking of Mark. Happy belated birthday, mark. Hey, happy belated birthday. We are thankful for you. He, he wants text messages. He does, and in fact, recently we put his face into different image gen generators. We did, and we made him a Mexican. He looked really good, by the way, as a Mexican, we made him an astronaut on Mars planting the first Compass Bible Church on Mars, which by the way, is not gonna happen anymore because the Moon SpaceX is no longer going to Mars. They're going to the moon. Yeah. So Pastor Mark will go to the moon. Representing Compass Bible Church, but it is his birthday this week, so please be sure to wish him a happy birthday. We love him. And in fact, I think he just left as I saw him out the window here. But Pastor Mark's awesome. He is awesome. Yeah, we're thankful for him and I'm so, so he doesn't know that we're gonna do this, pastor pge, but the song that you wrote for him that you're gonna sing for us right now, happy Birthday. No, no, no. The one that you wrote. Oh, the other one. The one about loving his hair and really appreciating his care. The hair's really cool. I like it a lot. That one. Yeah. Keep going. Yeah. Yeah. We're, we're here. Captive audience. Yeah. I'm grateful for all the stuff that you bought. Yeah. That's all, that's all I've written so far. It's not yet ready for public, so it's, it's, it's almost ready. Yeah. You know, we're gonna drop that on Spotify, guys, so it's gonna be a bang. Pres, save it. Yeah. We're gonna put it out there for you to, it slaps it's, it does lap. Yeah. Really good. If you have another verse though, I feel free to write it in here to us and we'll add it. No, you asked me to do the rap portion. Yeah, I did. And I'm still composing the, I'm still composing the lyrics. Okay. Well maybe somebody can lay down the beat for us on it. You know, I heard Kelly's really good at that. I heard something similar. Kelly's really often dropping beats in the, lobby just beatboxing while I'm in here studying. So, yeah. And if you catch her at the right time, she puts down a big cardboard box that she flattens. Yep. Dude, she's, she's pretty good at the, at the break dancing. Break dancing. Yeah. If you watch her. Okay. She's got the maddest headin that you've ever seen. Anyways, most of that was just all not true except for Pastor Mark's birthday. We're we're That is true. Yeah, that is, that is true. And he would love text messages from me. That is also true. So, and he loves Terry Black's barbecue. He does. He loves his Tesla and Kaz. I think he loves his family and Kaz, I'm not sure which order he put that in, so just kind of eyeball it, figure that. And tax returns. He loves tax returns. Yeah, I know that's one of his favorite things to do on his free time. He also loves books, so if there's a good book that you've been reading and you think he should have it, maybe you should get that for him. Maybe. Maybe you should. Alright, well hey, let's jump into our daily Bible reading. We are in numbers one and two in Mark chapter three, one through 21. So numbers, brand new book, still Moses writing. We are still in the Pentateuch, which again is Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, numbers, and Deuteronomy. So we're still in the Pentateuch. And Pentateuch comes from Five Five Scrolls. Five scrolls. Yep. So five books, first five books. Those are all we believe written by Moses. Now, we were just chatting a little bit offline. Is it fair for us to allow for there to be some editing within the context of the Pentateuch? There's textual criticism out there, that will allow for way more editing than we're comfortable with. And maybe some people have heard about the JEDP, hypothesis, which is put out there that there's all these JEDP being four different editors that compose the Pentateuch. We would reject that and say, no, that's. That's not actually what we believe happened, but there are statements that are made within the Pentateuch that we would allow for some editorial input, correct? Yes, absolutely. I think Paul used editors, I think Peter, did we call them Amanuensis? Mannu, yep. Eis. I, yep. Emanu I, yep. Anyway, I, I don't see anything wrong with that necessarily, and our doctrine of inspiration does not prohibit the use of someone who can say, wouldn't this be a better word? In fact, as I learned. When people compose, and I guess Moses is different. I think he's writing, he's writing things down, he's doing things, and I'm sure people come in after him, like Joshua perhaps, to come up and help edit and finish off the, the Pentitude because Moses eventually dies. He can't write after you're dead. Last time I checked. Correct. Joshua also dies and he can't write after he's dead. So there's gotta be somebody who's helping him fill the gaps. So we're okay with that. Where we get into trouble and where we would push back is when it's like, well, who knows what happened there? We, it could be everybody and anybody and anybody had access to these things. Mm-hmm. And everyone can make their edits as they saw fit. And it was the power dynamics and those who had the power made the changes. I don't think that's the way that it works. And that's not the impression that we get in scripture about how they treated God's word. They revered it, they esteemed it. It was not nearly Willie. Anybody could come and contribute their offerings. They didn't have Grammarly to go and say, oh, would this word be better for you? Right. You know, you're, you're a long sentence. Maybe break it up. So I'm okay with it. I think we're okay with it. Doctrine of inspiration does not negate the use of an editor. in so far as we qualify what we mean by that, would you add anything to that? No, I would agree with you on that. In fact, we were joking around about the verse that we're gonna read in numbers where it says that Moses was the most meek man in all of the Earth. Like Right. People are like you, you can't write that. I think you can, you would say, you can write that. I, I would say you can write that. Yeah. There's nothing, humble doesn't mean you can't say what's true about yourself. Right. humble just means that you're not, you're not a braggart about it. you can say, man, what I am, I am by God's grace. This is what Paul said. Paul said, I worked harder than any of them. Yeah. That's a pretty bold thing to say. Yeah. He said, he says, yeah, not I, but the grace of God that is in me. Yeah. So Paul is humble. He's saying what's true. I worked harder than he could say, objective. I worked harder than any of those guys. Yep. Which is amazing and kind of like I love that. But he can also say, but God's grace was at work in me. So I don't think there's anything wrong with saying this is what's true and, and I can honestly say it's because of what God is doing. Yeah. I would agree with that. Yeah. By the way, quick book recommendation, this is kind of adjacent to this whole subject you mentioned when, when there's a power struggle to say who gets the last word and editing this, there's a book that's more about the development of the early church and early church doctrine and Christianity that I would recommend to you towards, this. Angle, and that is the book is called The Heresy of Orthodoxy. How Contemporary Culture's Fascination with Diversity has reshaped our understanding of Early Christianity. Andreas Steinberger is the author of this and he does a great job as well as Michael Krueger, both of them great authors. I like so much of what both of those guys, right? But this book does a great job of showing why. The version of of Christianity that we have today is not just a result of the strongest people with the loudest voice in the room. Why we can trust this? Because that's an accusation from some, especially on the left. Well, the only reason why we hold to these things, doctrine of inspiration, authorities, things like that, is because the church held the power at the time and just silenced everybody who objected. Yeah. This B book by Koten Berger and Krueger called the Heresy of Orthodoxy, does a great job at diving into why that's not exactly true and why we can trust what we have to be truly, the written word of God as it was intended. Let's get into numbers one and two. numbers one and two is really about the organization of things. And so if you think about it, we have moved on from Sinai now and we're. Together. We've got all of these people, we've got a million people or so, give or take, and they need to be grouped. They need to be organized. And so in numbers chapter one, there's gonna be a census taken. Now a census, just like it is today, is accounting of those that are of a certain demographic. And so there's gonna be stipulations given here and the. Troops, so to speak. Those of fighting age and up are gonna be counted. And this is God preparing the nation for the journey, preparing the nation for what's in front of them. And they're going to be grouped by people and by tribes. And then after this, they are going to be arranged in, this is when you camp, this is how I want you to camp. I want the tabernacle in the middle, and then to the north, to the west, to the east, to the south. This is where you buy tribes are gonna camp. So it wasn't just willy nilly, it wasn't just, Hey. First tribe showing up gets to the best spot when they go to camp. It was, this is where I want you to be. And then even as they left camp, we're gonna find out that as they tore the tabernacle down and everything else, the tabernacle was to go out in, in a certain order that the tribes were to go out in front of it, tribes behind it. this is how God wanted his people to conduct themselves. And this is evidence of the fact that God is the God of. Order and not a God of chaos. And so God has given them specific instructions. This is how to organize yourselves so that things can be done in an orderly fashion. The one tribe that's not gonna be numbered here with the others is the tribe of Levi. They are exempt. They're gonna be exempt from military duty. They're gonna be exempt from a lot of the other things. 'cause they have different jobs. Their job is to care for the tabernacle and the things of the tabernacle. So we learned some things about God in the Book of Numbers that. Are gonna be both awesome and encouraging and some that are quite terrifying. Book of numbers the Jewish or Hebrew title rather, is in the wilderness. We get numbers because we're looking at the census data and we love, I guess, highlighting the boring stuff. Nevertheless, what we do learn about God is, as you said, he's organized and I think that it implies certain things about the way that we. Should be, even if we're not naturally geared that direction, we see that God is a God of order. In fact, later in the New Testament, Paul's gonna say, God's not the author of confusion. He's a God of order. And so we ought to mimic that in our lives. Now granted, there's different ways to approach this and different people are on different parts of the spectrum. in terms of their organizational skills, but I think it's still worth emulating. Second thing I would say here is that God is also specific in the way that he prescribes them to live. And I think this is important because we don't always see it this way. When we look at the New Testament reading, we might see that God has a lot of guidance and perhaps advice, but we see that God actually is pretty serious about the way he wants us to live. Even in the small things, it doesn't seem significant to me who's on the north side. Versus who's on the south side versus the Easter though. And yet God is like, you know, actually it does matter to me. it does matter to me. I want you to be, I want the middle to be the tabernacle. And that makes perfect sense. The whole community is organized around the Lord. Mm-hmm. That makes so much sense. If you just think about it for half a second, the other parts of it, I wonder if there's a organizational schema that I'm just not privy to, that God is using to put the people where they belong. Mm-hmm. They're kind of in a cross shape of sorts or maybe a donut, if you wanna look at it that way. and also he exempts the Levites because of their role. we saw this earlier, they're exempted from the Sabbath regulations because of their role, and now they're also exempted from the military draft because of their role. That tells me that God cares more about, he cares about their military. He obviously, that's a big part, but he also cares about their worship. Their worship is so central to their identity that they're accepted from the, the nation's draft, which by the way, there was no draft. It's if you were 20 years and older. Right. If you're a male 20 years and older, you're in. Congratulations fella. uh, so everyone's a soldier. The Levites are not part of this. So many things that you can learn about God just by observing what you see on the page. Yeah. And even the tribe of Judah oversaw it seems to be like two or three other tribes. And then there were tribes that were the head tribe in each of these general regions that they would camp, that the other tribes were kind of thrown in with them. Right. But that was the main tribe in it. Which is interesting too. It is. And you can endlessly speculate. Again, we've talked about this before, some things in scripture, it seems like, oh, there's something there. Yeah. hard to know exactly and to pound your fist on the table and say, this is what it means. But it is interesting and I do think it's their own purpose. Yep. Well, let's jump over to our New Testament reading Mark chapter three, one through 21. And so right on the heels, the Pharisees trying to get Jesus in trouble for his disciples breaking the Sabbath law about harvesting by plucking the heads of grain. We're gonna get to a scene in the synagogue here. And a man, it says, with a withered hand comes forward and the religious leaders are there to watch what Jesus is going to do. And so Jesus, is aware of this, calls the man there, and then turns on them and says, is it lawful on the Sabbath to do good or do harm or to save a life or to kill? But they were silent. And then it says he looked around at them with anger grieved at the hardness of heart. So. This is sobering, Jesus, we don't often think of Jesus as angry, and yet he's, he's angry with the opponents here and he's grieved over the hardness of heart. So there's both the fury and the sorrow here and it's, I mean, we see other instances of Jesus' anger. We do seem turning over the tables and driving people out with a whip from the temple who are trying to turn his father's house into a house of robbers. But this is an interesting scene because Jesus is looking at him. He's angry, and you can almost hear the silence just setting up the tension there as everybody's there. And you could hear a pin drop. And here's the man who needs to be healed. And Jesus' heart goes out to this man and his, at the same time, his anger goes out against his opponents here. And that's another feature of our Imago day. when we talk about the Imago Day, we're saying that mankind is made in the image of God, and because Jesus, the perfect man, showcases anger as a feature of his humanity, well, we can be confident then that anger has a redeeming place in the life of a Christian. In fact, most of our books are about how to deal with sinful anger and rightly so. We often struggle with those things. However, it might be that for some of us, certainly not all, but for some of us, maybe you need some righteous anger. Maybe you are not moved by the things that you should be moved by. Maybe there's a part of you that doesn't feel when you know in your head, I should feel something about this. Yeah, I should be bothered. And for some of us, we're on one end of the spectrum where we get angry about someone driving the wrong way on Preston Road, others of us. Or on the other side of anger where we're just not being moved by things that should move us. Sometimes, in fact, we look at those people as models of patience. It's like, oh, he's not. He's just not ruffled at all. You know, he's immune to things like that, but there are some things that should bother us. There are injustices that are committed. There's hard heartedness that should move us. Jesus shows us that anger is a part of our Imago day. And it can be and it must be redeemed. So you're saying we shouldn't be mad if somebody's driving the wrong way on Preston Road? Well, I mean, what I meant the wrong way, not like the wrong direction. I mean, like they, they're not driving the way that I think they should drive. Fair. Like if you're in the fast lane and you're going 10 under, that's the wrong way to drive. Yes. Sure. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna drive around you and I'm gonna do everything in me to not look at you right. Or to cut over too fast in front of you, right? Yeah. From here, we get another scene. Mark just fascinates me because he, he observes things that some of the other writers don't observe, like the great crowds and how many people are following Jesus. Mark wants us to know Jesus is famous and he. Continues to point out the crowds as well as the fact that the demons know who Jesus is. This is the third time that a demon is gonna be found in the gospel of Mark calling out to Jesus, acknowledging who Jesus' true identity is, and Jesus for the third time is gonna rebuke the demon and say, you are not to make me known. Which is fascinating because there's a whole spiritual. Realm that the Messiah's interacting with here. And for the, I think the same reasons why we talked about earlier. He doesn't just step into the limelight and say, here I am, I'm the son of God. I am God. He's doing this with the, the demons is also with those that he's healing, saying you are not to tell people who I am, because he still had work to do and he knew that if news got out, that work would be ended before it could get started. Yeah, sometimes people call this the Messianic Secret in Mark, and it's this sense that Jesus is constantly trying to qualm the crowds from saying or knowing too much about him. And I think that the way that we resolve this, because the other gospel writers don't write it the same way. That doesn't seem to be the same kind of gravity that Jesus is showing in Mark and the others. And so everyone questions, well, how is it like this in Mark, but not the others? And we would say, because Jesus is being highlighted here as having an agenda. That includes not being revealed by these sources. Jesus is okay with people knowing who he is. He's slowly revealing to them and showing them by his works and by His word, who he is. But what matters to Jesus is also the source by which his revelation is made known you. We don't want, certain, you don't want the bad guy telling people who you. They control the narrative. Jesus wants to be able to say it. It's on my terms. I will tell you who I am and I'll let people know when I'm ready to do that. Although it's interesting that the bad guys have such good theology so often. Right. Which leads to James saying even the demons believe in shudder. Right. That's they have great theology. Yeah. And they don't have any salvation. Right. Oof. Yeah. On the last part of our reading here, we get the appointing of the 12 apostles, and this is just a reminder that Jesus had many more followers than just these 12. But these 12 were gonna be the ones that he was gonna call and task with being his main guys. He was going to invest the most amount of time with them. He was going to empower them to do unique things, to be able to preach, but also to cast out demons. And he's going to take these 12 to say, you are the ones that I'm gonna invest the most. Of my time and efforts and teaching in, because you are the ones that I'm gonna send out. These are, except for Judas gonna become the apostles plus I think the Apostle Paul, that are gonna go and do so much work for the spread of the church after his resurrection and ascension. So, we get them all. They're listed here, they're, they're appointed here, and this is the beginning of his time spent with them in a formal sense. And I think we end verses 2021, right? Yes. Just a quick note on that. You'll notice here that even Jesus was not immune from being mischaracterized because of his love and zeal for his father. His own family thought that he was bonkers. And I wonder if maybe your family has at any point thought you were bonkers for good reasons. and, and if so, you're in good company. Yeah. In fact, we just mentioned James. James was probably one of those that was like, Hey, this guy's crazy. Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah. If James is the brother of Jesus in the flesh. No doubt. Yeah. Yeah. Well, let's pray and then we'll be done with this episode. Well, thanks for us, just venturing into this new book with numbers. I pray that we would learn from it what you would have us to learn from it. I thank you that we can see that you are indeed a God of order and not a God of chaos. And we can even reflect. That in our own lives. And I pray that we would do that as it's appropriate. certainly we can idolize those things, but it's also a risk that we run to neglect, being disciplined and having a purpose in setting goals for ourselves. And these are things that are good because you do care about order and you don't want us to just try to feel our way through life. And so help us to learn those things and certainly chief among those things, it should be our time in the word each and every day. So I pray that you keep us in your word, keep us learning great things as we study, we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Keep your new Bibles tuned again tomorrow for another edition of the Daily Bible Podcast. We'll see you. Bye.

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