This is the Bainwell Podcast with Marty Solman. I'm his co-host Brent Billings. Today we're setting up the narrative of God's story as a contrast between Empire and Shalom.

And we do have a special guest today. Tell me Chris Marshall. Welcome Chris.

Hey! Thanks for joining us. Always good to have the Talmadim join us when they can.

We talked about Talmadim yet in this podcast. I mean we've referenced we've had a couple other Talmadim on the show before but I don't think we've really covered it in depth yet.

Talmadim means disciple plural. Talmead singular. So Chris is Talmead. Talmead Chris. Welcome Talmead Chris. Thanks. It's good to be on.

All right so we've chatted about let's see here. We've chat about Genesis. We've wrapped up the Genesis material. We've talked about Genesis 1 through 11 as preface. And we've spoken about how God said that creation was good and that he loves it. He values it. He accepts it and he pleads with his creation particularly mankind to trust in his love and his value and his acceptance of this creation.

And if they will, we'll set them free and we'll set them free to do what they're created to do. And the preface is full of different pieces of humanity. Whether it's family lines, lineages, whole civilizations that just don't.

And that let us into the introduction. Right about the time we got hopeless. We got introduced to the family of God. These are people that knew how to trust the story. They knew how to be hospitable.

They knew how to live lives of self sacrifice rather than lies of fear and insecurity.

Didn't mean that it didn't struggle with fear and insecurity. It didn't mean they didn't make a bunch of mistakes.

But they're full of Hutzpah. They're full of determination. They're full of commitment. They're a stiff-necked people. And they kept insisting in the truth of God's narrative, the truth of a good story. And they trusted it ultimately. And so we saw that all throughout Avram, Yitzak,

Zhakova, and then in the story of Yosef, we watched this incredibly dysfunctional family get brought back together through the heroism of not just Yosef, but also of Yuta.

And a Judah who's willing to admit that he's made a horrible mistake. And his willingness to stop the cycle of deception is actually what enables his family to find its redemption.

These are people that know how to trust the story. And then we could have kind of flowed right into Exodus, but what we said last week was we wanted to kind of take a break and just briefly and pause and take a look before we go from the preface and the introduction into the narrative.

We wanted to step back and we wanted to ask some questions about who we were. And that's what we did last week. We kind of talked about what do we do with this God of wrath and what do we do with these feelings of insecurity.

And just kind of pause to deal with that before we jump into the Exodus story and deal with the slaughter of the firstborn. Like let's make sure we have that in its appropriate place.

And then today we want to back up and we want to take a macro look at the story like this narrative. And we want to understand Egypt not just in its academic history, not just in its physicality, but we want to understand Egypt as a metaphor.

And Brent said it in the intro to this podcast to understand the narrative as as this contrast between empire and Shalom. And Egypt will kind of become our first metaphor. It will not be our only metaphor. It won't be the only way we see this, but Egypt will become our first metaphor for this idea of empire and what that looks like.

And so today is going to try to help us to figure that out. And so what we did is in our discussion groups, we talked, we looked at three different DVD lessons. And we because a copyright, we want to honor that.

And we're not going to be able to play those in our podcast or anything like that. But I wanted to let you know about it. My teacher, one of my teachers, but I call him my teacher, Ray Vanderlund did a series. Some people have seen it.

Let's put out by focus on the family. And the series itself is called that the world may know there are about 12 DVDs in this series. And the one that we're working off for this discussion today is volume eight, it's volume eight of 12.

It's a volume called God heard their cry. And we will going to offer some links in the show notes so you can buy that DVD for yourself.

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