If you've been around the Bible for a while, you've been around people talking about the Bible for a while. You've been around people talking about the Bible for a while, you've seen this phenomenon where sometimes people, maybe with the best of intentions, I don't know, but sometimes it seems like people will pit one part of the Bible, one part of the New Testament, against another part of the New Testament. I've heard a lot of people

over the course of my life pit Paul against Jesus and make an argument that goes something

like this. Well, there's a thing in culture that you don't like and you're citing verses that

Paul wrote, but I don't see Jesus talking about this thing. And if I don't hear from

Jesus, then I'm not sure I'm going to go with you on that because maybe Paul, you know,

implicitly what they're saying is, maybe Paul was getting this wrong and maybe Paul isn't on

the same side as Jesus here. Okay, I get the argument.

And the Bible really gets into our business. Everybody's grappling with it. To me, the problem

with this, and maybe I've done this at some point, I hope not. I'm not trying to do this.

But the problem with this is that it assumes that the Bible isn't a unified document. It assumes that parts are not

from God and other parts are from God. Or some parts are more from God and other parts are less from God.

Historically, the church Christians have said, it's all from God. Scripture affirms each other.

So, you know, it's, yeah, it's a little problematic. It's, you're kind of cutting off the branch on which you sit, I think, a little bit. If as a Christian, you make such arguments. Well, there's always been debates about what is loving to your neighbor and what is not.

What is loving to another person and what is not?

What is a proper expression of love and what is not?

Here's one that always makes everybody mad when I talk about it on the podcast.

And I'm going to shoot this right down the middle so you can't even tell what my opinion might have been on this.

But there are some people who said that it is fundamentally unloving not to follow the instructions that were handed down

for how to mitigate the spread of COVID when we were early on in that. There were other people who said,

no, those strategies are wrong. Therefore, it would be fundamentally unloving to do those

mitigation approaches. Well, that's a pretty big disagreement about what actually is and is not

loving. And of course, that was a pretty tough one to sort through with just Bible verses alone,

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