And here's the point I want to make.

Sometimes members respond to some of this stuff by shunting it off as, that's academic, that's scholarly, we don't need it, it doesn't do anything.

And this story demonstrates that, the better we understand, the better we can explain, the more powerful our witness can be, and we can reach people who otherwise might have walled themselves off completely from anything about it.

Yeah, it's true in Scripture. It's true in church history. It's just true.

It's true. It's cool. That's right.

This kind of stuff makes Scripture be less than ink on a page and more about real people in real situations

that we can relate to. That's right. And that give us deeper understanding and better discipleship.

That's right. Something that really throws a lot of people off with the Old and New Testaments. And that's this idea that the God of the Old Testament

is an ugly, harsh, cruel, intolerant God, just ready to kill people for any small offense.

But then we have Jesus whose message is as a fifth beetle and comes in and shows all you need

is love. He's all about loving

people, showing kindness and mercy to them and helping them. And this kind of dichotomy trips

up a lot of people because they go into scriptures with these assumptions and it throws them

off. There's sort of almost this harmonmeneutic that says, the closer it involves Jesus,

the more true it is.

And if it doesn't involve Jesus at all, it can't possibly be true.

But in order to make that work, you have to exclude a lot of the things that Jesus said.

Jesus says, cut off your hand to keep your body from going to hell, right?

Like, you know, leave your family and follow me.

Yes.

And you're going to fight with your family.

Yeah.

...