So, Okay, look they say that one of the keys to great podcasting for the long haul is you got to make it evergreen. You don't want to be

saying a bunch of stuff that's about what's happening right now because then people listen to it later and they

feel alienated. Also, hi, person who's listening later, it can be right now for us. It doesn't have to feel weird.

But I do want to talk about something that happened this week. The Super Bowl got played. Between two teams, I won't say who they are that way it feels a little more evergreen

right? This could be any time. The game went to overtime and the one team won the coin toss and thus they get to pick whether they kick off the ball or receive the ball in overtime.

Now the rules of overtime in professional football in my country have changed in the playoffs so that it is now by far the better

strategic choice to kick the ball than to receive the ball in overtime. And the one team won the toss, I thought, oh I mean they're

lucky, I know what they're going to do, and they opted to receive the ball. Well that's the

exact wrong thing. It's like choosing to be the away team in a baseball game. You want to bat last.

You want to be the home team. What are you doing? And after the team that won the toss and

incorrectly elected to receive the kick after they lost the game.

The players on the team admitted in the locker room, we did not even know the rules of overtime and if we had strategically it would have

been wiser to do the other thing. Likewise I think there are people we're

running into here in the Old Testament who just have no idea what the ground rules are.

They don't understand the covenants, the deals that God made with his chosen people.

They're outsiders to it. They're inattentive to it, I mean maybe ethnically they're not even a part of this deal, and they operate in kind of a different way than the people who do know the ground rules and understand exactly how everything works and if this happens

then this happens and if that happens and this happens and this happens and let me tell you my friends

Ezra and Nehemiah they're two guys who know the rules.

They know exactly how everything works and what God has laid out.

They are students of history.

They know that God means it and that he'll do exactly what he said. That is that if his

chosen people, the Jews, the Hebrew people, the Israelites, if they honor and obey

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