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What are the different views of Genesis? 10 Qs with Mike Winger (Ep 39)
01:13:15
Question Time Stamps for Quick Reference:1. 0:07 {Genesis: Different Views} What are the different interpretations that different Christians have about the book of Genesis and the creation accounts?2. 26:27 {Israel – God’s People or Moses’ People?} What’s the significance of God calling the Israelites Moses’ people in the golden calf story, and then Moses calling them God’s people? I can’t help but think it sounds like two parents of the same child saying “That’s your kid” as the child misbehaves (Exodus 32:1-14, specifically verses 7 and 11). 3. 30:25 {Are our Souls Immortal?} Seventh-day Adventism claims that belief in an immortal soul comes from Paganism and leads to occult spiritualism (like necromancy and belief in ghosts). Is this biblical?4. 35:00 {Christians and Yoga} A family member does yoga for stretching, but in that quiet time they meditate, pray, and worship God. I know yoga for stretching is fine, but is worshiping while doing yoga an issue because of Deuteronomy 12:...
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The Bible says that in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. But the debate is, what does that mean? The first question for today, which I'll get the counter up in a minute, Sarah, don't worry. But not yet. The first question for today is about what are the different interpretations that Christians, Christians have for the book of Genesis? And I'm going to give you like 10 different ones. And that's not even all of them. It's impossible to summarize this perfectly. So. So I'm going to run through a bunch of different things. The goal right now isn't for me to so much advocate for one of these interpretations as just make you aware of them. I think it's healthy to be aware. Understand that there are different views about Genesis and the creation accounts from people who do believe the Bible. Now there are views from people who don't believe the Bible. But I am a Christian. I do believe the Bible is God's word. It's infallible, it's authoritative, it's all those things. So the question, when we ask how do we interpret Genesis? We're not asking what, whether it's true, we're asking what does it mean? These are different questions that we need to consider. And yeah, there's a lot more heat than light on this type of issue. So hopefully I can bring some light and lessen the heat a little bit. All right. The first view we'll look at is the young earth creationist view. This is the view that the earth was made in seven literal days, 24 hour periods. You're probably familiar with this view. It seems fairly straightforward. You know, when you actually just read the text, you go, yeah, it looks like it's understandably, especially being someone in modern times, you read it and you think, yeah, it looks like normal creation days. Now, usually a young earth creationist, they're going to take the seven literal 24 hour day and they're young earth because they're going to combine this with the genealogies of Genesis and see them as sort of an unbroken chain that these ages are literal ages. And all this stuff is quite straightforward and literal. And so they'll say, six to 10,000 years ago, that was the creation of the world. So those seven days of creation plus the genealogies, then that'll be combined with flood geology usually. So when it comes to the scientific side of things, they'll say, yeah, well, there was a universal flood and there's a catastrophism of view of geology and tectonic plate movement and the formation of the Grand Canyon is ascribed to the Flood, largely, that sort of thing. And then this gets heavy. You move off of scripture into all kinds of debates about, you know, how old, how old is human civilization, you know, things like that. Answers in Genesis promotes this view. That's Ken ham and then creation.com, that's another website, Creation Ministries International, that promotes this young Earth view and tries to defend it both with biblical exegesis and scientific research or theories. That's one view. Now, that might be the only view you're aware of. There's other views. There's a lot of other views. There's another 724 hour day view, as in Genesis has 724 hour days. But this view says that the reason why the universe looks old, the reason why all this stuff looks old, is because God gave it the appearance of age. He put the appearance of age into all of his creation. And a way to argue for this, or at least explain it, even if it's not an argument for it, is to say that when God made Adam and Eve, how old were Adam and Eve? And you'd have to say, well, if it's literal, then they were one day old the day they were made. They were just made that day, or one day old, you know, you know, Adam's slightly older than Eve by a small amount. But how old did they look? Did they look like they were one day old? Well, I mean, they couldn't possibly have looked like they were a day old either day after birth or day after fertilization. They couldn't have looked like they were one day old. They had to have had the appearance of age. Their argument against this, of course, is that the appearance of age can be challenged by the idea that we have not only the universe or the Earth looking old, but actually showing signs of historical events in the past. There's a difference between those two things. Adam may have looked, say, 30, 25, 30 years old, but if he had scars and wounds, that would imply that it's not just an appearance of age. Like he had experiences that brought him to that age. Do you get the difference? So evidence in distant starlight can be an argument against this? Can be. And starlight stuff gets complicated. But it can be because what you can see is a supernova that appeared, at least based on normal scientific research, that a supernova, that it would have appeared long before any of the appearance of age or real age of humanity existed. So if you have a supernova that went supernova apparently 10 million years ago, and we're Seeing it now, I don't know if those timelines work for some astronomer can tell me then what you have is like, hey, that's not just the appearance of age. That's an event in the past. Did God bake the deceptive events into the history of the universe beyond just making it look older than it actually is? My cat has joined us. Anyway, that's the 24 hour day with the appearance of age view. Then there's the day age view. The day age view. Are you coming for some pets? Oh gosh, this is her new thing. She likes to sit right here and not move. Don't be rude. You're being rude. Okay, the day age view is that in Genesis it's still recounting like this is actual creation. This is historically giving us what happened. But each of these days they're not morning and evening a 24 hour period. But the word yom can mean a period of time. It's a metaphorical day. It's some period of time. So it's in order. God created these same things, but over an indetermined period of time. And these days could be different. One day could have happened in 10 minutes or one day could have happened in 50 million years. It's indeterminate. For this they'll often quote scripture that says that to the Lord, a day is a thousand years and a thousand years is a day. Some even say, well we can do math on this. When God says in three days he's going to do something, it'll be 3,000 years, that sort of thing. That's a different class of people. I'm just, I'm just, I'm going off on a rabbit trail in my head. Forgive me. This is typically though an old earth creationist perspective, not necessarily evolution. Hugh Ross and reasons to believe a well known organization, they promote or have historically they've promoted this view of like day age type theory that there's this sort of progressive creation throughout time. Like I say it does it can, you can try to put this with evolution. You're going to have some challenges there, but you can. But they're not necessarily doing that. They will see special, often will see special acts of creation during the history of the universe. Now you've got to ask questions about what about the order of the events that are happening there and how clear is it. But they'll for instance say like the Cambrian explosion, that would have been like a special act of creation of God. So that's the day age theory. I'm not 100% sure how much reasons to believe. But banks themselves on the idea that yom is an age. But they do that is a necessary, I think part of their view. They have a lot of other stuff they say as well, it's super complicated. There's an intermittent day view. Okay? They're going to handle the days of Genesis differently. The intermittent view says that each day was 24 hours, but there could have been spaces between the days. So day one, God does this and some amount of time goes by and then day two he does this. So when he creates, you know, the animals is different than when he separates the waters. And those differences could be a year, could be a day, could be millions of years. There's an indeterminate space of time between the events. That's the intermittent day view. Then there's something called the gap theory. Have you heard of the gap theory? Some of you have heard of this one. As you're hearing me slurp my coffee. Sorry, that's probably unpleasant places. Anyways, the gap theory is the idea that Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 have this gap of time between them. I'll just put it on your screen so you can see it. Genesis 1 In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And then right here in this space between verse one and two, there's this potentially massive period of time. Because here where it says the earth was without form and void, they're going to suggest the earth became without form and void. So first God creates everything. Some event happens. The earth becomes without form and void. Perhaps it's the fall of Satan. People are often going, when exactly did this happen? What were the effects of it? And they say boom, it decimated the earth. So Genesis 1 is not the creation account beyond verse 1 anyways. It's the reforming account. That's the gap theory. I don't think the gap theory has much even chances of being true, but it is one of the views that people do hold to. Then there is. We're moving into what are called non concordist interpretations of Genesis where they don't try to find parallels in history with the events of Genesis. They're not looking for true scientific recounting of events. They're not saying the Bible's wrong here. The non concordist is going to say, you're misunderstanding, that's not the point of Genesis. So here's something that starts to become more on the non concordist view. It's the idea that God in the beginning, not that he created in the beginning, but that he when the beginning of the activity In Genesis happened, there is a event taking place where God is creating like theologically a temple out of creation where he can dwell and he can dwell with man. And the garden has seen like a temple. And Adam and Eve are like priest, priestess type roles that we've got here. Theological meaning, but not so much historical record. John Walton promotes this view that. The assigning function view. We'll call this the next view in the list here, that God, when it says he creates the sun or he makes this, he made the stars, he made these things. He. He's not actually creating them as in material creation, making them out of nothing. And now they exist and before they didn't. Rather he's assigning them function and giving them a name. He calls them by a name. He gives them a reason to be, gives them a function. Now they exist, though physically they would have existed before. And as he does this, he's creating temple space and sacred space. And you get all these terminologies. If you ever hear someone talk about Genesis or even the temple area and they start calling it sacred space, that means they're probably thinking something along these lines, or at least they're influenced by that same sort of school of thought. So, yeah, that's the sacred space view or the temple view. John Walton promotes that view. It's not one that I think is very viable, to be honest, but plenty of other people do and promote it. And they're believers and they genuinely trust that God's word is scripture. They believe in Jesus, they are saved, their salvation is not in question as far as I'm concerned. And so there's a different view there. Adam and Eve as not. This is, I guess, still somewhat of a concordance type reading, but Adam and Eve are seen here in the next view as a special creation, not the only creation. Let me explain it. Instead of viewing them as the only humans, you could have a view that perhaps even evolutionarily human humankind exists, hominids exist, they evolve, all that stuff happens. And then when you get to the creation account in Genesis, it's just talking about events around the Garden of Eden. And so maybe as the sun is being made, it's really just being revealed. That's a feature in numerous different views. People who interpret Genesis, the sun's being revealed, you're able to see it now from the location of the garden, not that it is being created as in not existing before. And when you get to Adam and Eve, you could actually follow the genealogies and there's all varieties, there's people who hold this view, who will argue against some of the things I've just said. It's so complicated. So forgive me for not unpacking all the complexity, but the heart of it is this idea of a genealogical Adam. So Adam and Eve are genetically connected to every human that exists in the time of Jesus, but they're not necessarily genetically connected to every hominid or humanoid who's ever existed. So you could have a bunch of a big population of evolved humanoids. That's a possibility. You can add that to this theory and it will work. So it fits with evolution, all this stuff of evolution, not just parts of it. Then you have a special garden, a special creation, perhaps of Adam and Eve, or a claiming of two hominids who've evolved and then God gives them his image and he does something special to them. So either they're created out of nothing, de novo creation, or they're selected from a population and they're made to be the figureheads for humanity in the future. Then this is where Cain gets his wife, right? They go out of the garden, they populate with these inner bree, with these other creatures, humans. Do you call them humans or not? It's up to you. And then you get to the time of Jesus and by then genealogically, everybody is descendant from Adam and Eve. It doesn't mean they're all from Adam and Eve directly, but they have an Adam and Eve ancestral trail. And that some of their ancestors would have been these hominids or these other humans, depending on whether you consider them humans or not. That's a debate. But in their blood there's some connection to Adam. I'm not saying this is my theory, as you know, but it's a theory. You could look at Joshua Swamidass. Swamidass stuff. He talks about the genealogical Adam and get a more accurate understanding of that view, if you're interested. Then there's like the analogical day view. And this is the idea that when the book of Genesis talks about morning and evening, how it says God created morning and evening, first day, morning and evening, the second day. These are not actual 24 hour days. It's an analogy for work and rest. Morning and evening is seen as work and then rest. So Genesis 1 doesn't record days, but work sessions for God. Those work sessions could last any length of time. A moment, a minute, 100 million years. It's a work season where God's I'm working on this part of creation now. And then that's morning, evening, okay, Then the next day. Now he's going to shift and work on a different part. So this is seeing it as analogies. Then there's another view, the framework hypothesis, and this is another, like non concordance type reading. Framework hypothesis says that only theology is intended. It's not meant to be a historical account. Now, that might sound confusing at first, but as I explain it, you'll understand. Michael Heiser would promote this kind of thing, at least from the stuff I'd heard from him. I haven't gone into all this stuff on this, but he would promote this type of thing and he would talk about how the Bible's into theological messaging and that's what we should be focusing on. Now, there's an element that all of us should agree with on this. Genesis is primarily about the theological meanings, but primarily doesn't mean. So, yeah, there's still questions to ask about what's it teaching us about the history of Adam and Eve, history of the universe. These are important questions. But our concern, we open Genesis and we think, how long ago did this happen according to this text? And yet every one of the original readers would have opened this and thought, wow, they're really taking a potshot against every other God. And this is teaching monotheism. This is something they would have gotten from it. This is teaching monotheism. There's only one God who created all this stuff. This is teaching a separation between the material of the universe and deity, so that we don't look at the sun and think there's a God there. We see something God made. This is huge to them. This is a big deal. This is the theological messaging they're getting, among other things, all of humankind coming from one source, and therefore we are what we are all equal. This is like a human equality thing. This is against different kinds of racism as well. That's an aspect of it. There's a lot more stuff about Jesus, stuff about the serpent crushing the head, stuff about Adam and Eve and their creation, how that pictures Christ in the church. Theological messaging is a big deal here. So proponents of this kind of view, the framework hypothesis, or those who just go for the theological messaging view, is they don't really need to settle on the history of what Genesis is talking about. They can use another term, accommodation, and they'll say, well, Genesis is using accommodation. Some of them will actually interpret Genesis as teaching a flat earth and a solid dome over the earth, the firmament. That's what they'll interpret. And they'll say, but that's just accommodation. Genesis doesn't care about Fixing the wrong cosmological views of people in the ancient Near East. It cares about teaching them theology. So it's not going to go through all these pains of God teaching Moses property cosmology and then having him teach it to the Israelites So that then 21st century Christians could open Genesis and go, wow, Genesis got this cosmology right? Instead they go, it's just accommodation. God's using where they're at. He's just trying to teach them the theology that I'm the one that made this the one God, the one true God and created Adam and Eve and all this other stuff, showing us humans and God in our place, setting up the idea of the Fall and ultimately leading us to Jesus Christ. So that is the term accommodation is what you got to be aware of there. And there is some degree of accommodation in scripture where some degree, but you have to go to some other steps. I actually have a video on why I think Genesis or the Bible as a whole does not teach a flat earth cosmology. It just doesn't teach it. This is something that some ancient Near Eastern groups believed, but the Bible itself is not teaching that in my opinion. And I have a video on that. I'll link it below after the stream so you guys can check it out. The next one I'll give is the mytho history view. This is the last one I'll give William Lane Craig, which doesn't mean that I think it's the right one, by the way, I'm not doing the college professor thing, I don't know. But William Lane Craig has been promoting this view most recently and he wrote a book In Search of the Historical Atom, I think it is. In his book he talks about the mythohistory view. Now I think this is a very unfortunate name for this view. I'm not telling you this view is accurate, but the name itself in my opinion is unfortunate. When normal people hear the word myth, they think, oh, you mean it didn't happen? It's not true. That's not what they mean by the word. Like this is a definitional problem they've got. They say myth and they don't mean myth, at least not what you and I mean with myth. They mean, according to Craig, what folklorists, that is scholars who focus on researching folklore. What they mean when they say myth, which of course is irrelevant to most humans around the world. So when they say myth, what they mean is an ancient story that's meant to do, you might say theological messaging, but it is true. It's Just in a genre called myth, as in the way that we communicate these truths is with things like archetypes that communicate truths about humans, using Adam as an archetype, Eve as an archetype, that sort of thing. But this is not the myth theory of Genesis. I could have listed that as a theory. This is the mytho history theory. Why is the word history combined with the word myth here? In this view, because Adam and Eve are seen as real people and it is seen as God really did create the heavens and the earth and he really did make it there out of nothing. I think even the ex nihilo, the out of nothing part is part of Craig's view. I think it is. But Genesis 1 is a true account of, of God really creating the world, but uses, and I'll give you my terminology here, uses archetypes to represent larger truths so that you don't have to find perfect correspondence in say, the 24 hour days, don't have to have literally been 24 hour days. They're archetypes that are meant to teach God created and he's the one who made the sun, he's the one who made the moon, and he did so through his own power and through the command of his own authority. He gets credit for it. That's the mytho history view. I may not have explained it perfectly well. I apologize if I haven't. I encourage you guys to check it out. William Lake, Craig's got a bunch of videos you can see on this kind of thing. He does see Adam and Eve as real. They are the progenitors of all humans. They're historically true. They are real. But then the big debate where the big question marks arise with, say, Craig's view, the mythohistory view is which pieces of Genesis are literally true and which are more just archetypes and true in the archetype sense. And that's like a big question that I don't think has clear answers on this view and that that is a shortcoming of the view. It fits with old Earth creation, it could fit with evolution, but it doesn't rely on evolution. You're not saying evolution has to be true for this and you can reject evolution and embrace this view. It rather fits with a number of different views. To understand the mythohistory view, though, you have to understand the role of genre in interpreting scripture. When I read Mark and it says John the Baptist came baptizing, I know what that means. It means that there was a real literal historical guy named John and he came to the public. He went public as someone who is baptizing Jews. That's what he was doing. So this is very literal and straightforward. When I read psalms, where there's somebody. And I know psalms are a different genre, right? When I read psalms and it says, I make my bed swim with tears, I don't actually picture the psalmist crying so much that the bedroom floods and the bed becomes animated and starts swimming around the bedroom. Nobody thinks this because that would be an overly literal interpretation, because I didn't do a genre analysis of what I was reading. When I read Jesus saying, better to cut off your eye or cut off your hand, I know that this is in his teaching. He uses hyperbole, and he uses this type of thing in his teaching. And it's meant to communicate in certain ways. So that's the genre. That's understanding how he's speaking, ways of speech and stuff like that. So when you go to Genesis 1 and Genesis 1 through 11, ultimately, what genre is it? Now? William Lynn Craig tries to build a case that the genre is mytho history, that this is like the myth genre and the historical elements seen within Genesis 1, they're both present in such a way that you can actually assign it a class, a category, where you look at other ancient Near Eastern works and you go see, this is a real genre. There really are people who write this way, and that's the kind of work that we have in Genesis. It was always meant to be interpreted this way. This is different than saying it's not true. So whether you agree with them or not, you should at least understand the angle, the direction he's coming from. I think real Christians can be in every one of these categories. Real believers can fit in every single one of these categories. Genuine Christians. I don't know how much louder I should say this, because it should be said pretty loudly. One of my regrets as a youth pastor for many years is that I didn't teach it like this. I didn't explain to students that there are a variety of views within genuine Christian faith. It wasn't until, like, you years down, years later, right? I'd been a youth pastor for like 10 years or something, maybe less, maybe seven or eight years before I started saying, like, hey, guys, there's other genuine believers who believe evolution, who believe old Earth creation, who believe different views of Genesis, and we can talk about that. You can be a real Christian and think it was a local flood instead of global. Now, let me say this. That doesn't mean you're right. Like, they're not all equally right. They're not equally good views. One of them is right or none of them are right in some alternate views. Right, but they don't mean you're not a Christian. That's what I'm suggesting here. These views aren't right. And now somebody could respond and say, but Mike, there's consequences. And this is what you often hear, and usually from young earth creationists you often hear, but there's consequences if you get this view wrong. Because logically if you say X about this thing I don't like and I think is untrue about Adam, then that relates to something about sin and something about Jesus. And so you've undermined the gospel. And so then they start to think that denying something that may be true about Genesis is in fact not just a problem, an error, and even an error that's worth talking about, but is actually a rejection of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Here we have to be very, very careful. It's one thing to say to somebody you reject. Let's say you meet someone and they go, I don't think Exodus should be in the Bible. And you go, well that's a major problem, you know, and if you reject Exodus, then you're, you're rejecting the foundation for a lot of what we see Jesus doing. And so that's, that's a big problem. What I'm doing though is I'm, I'm, I'm getting upset at what would happen if they were consistent rather than what they're actually doing. So you might think if someone holds this view of Genesis, then if they're consistent, they're also in my opinion at least undermining the gospel of Christ. That may be your view, but that's only if they're consistent. You have to at least let people be inconsistent because guess what? They are. So even if you are staunch, like young earth creationist, very strong on that view, very much convinced this is absolutely right, you may be right. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you can at least look at other views and you can say this. Maybe if you're consistent, it will lead to really scary things about the gospel, I think. Right, but you're not consistent, are you? So let me let you be at least what I think as I see as non consistent and say, I think you're wrong about this, but you're still a believer. Let's not turn everything into a gospel issue. It's just not. That'd be my encouragement. I'm gonna like lose subscribers and stuff for saying that. I think that's what's healthy for the body of Christ. And that's something that I've came to after many years of being pretty staunch on this stuff and now being, like, open to different views and not actually sure what my own view is. All right, guys, I'm going to do something here. You're not going to see my screen for just a second, but I'm here. I'm still with you. I'm just going to fix my. My counter. All right, let's do this. Okay. Oh, go the other way. All right, so I'm just. I'm just getting my counter going because I forgot to do it earlier. So let's go to question number two. This is the last Q and A of the year 2024. You'll watch this. Somebody watch this in the future and be like, oh, look how young Mike is. His beard wasn't all gray yet, because in six months, I'm pretty sure it's going to be all gray. So Isaac from Australia says, what's the significance of calling God the Israelites of God Calling the Israelites Moses people in the golden calf story? And then Moses calling them God's people? I can't help but think. Think it sounds like two parents of the same child saying, that's your kid, as the child misbehaves. I think you're right on that observation. It really does. It does have that vibe. Let's look at the verses for Everybody here. Exodus 32. You guys know the story in general, right? Moses is up talking with God. They make a golden calf and they start worshiping it. And he comes down with the ten Commandments, and it's like, you know, disaster, disaster. So let's look at the verses you specifically mentioned, which is verse seven. And the Lord said to Moses, go down for your people whom you brought up out of Egypt, out of the land of Egypt, have corrupted themselves. This is normally when God talks about the people and bringing them up. He's the one who talks about doing it, right? They're my people. I brought them up out of the land of Egypt. The Lord brought you up from Egypt. This is a common refrain in the Old Testament. They're God's people, and God brought them out. But here, God does distance himself. And he says, look, Moses, it's your people. You brought them up. I think there's theological significance here I'll talk about in a second. But there is this sense of, like. It feels like a parent's discussion, Right? Moses, then is going to go on, let's see, verse 11. And actually I'll back up to verse. I'll just read through starting verse eight. They have turned aside quickly out of the way that I commanded them. They've made for themselves a golden calf and have worshiped it and said, sacrificed to it and said, these are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. And the Lord said to Moses, I have seen this people and behold, it is a stiff necked people. Now therefore let me alone that my wrath may burn hot against them and I may consume them in order that I may make a great nation out of you. So God's going to make a nation out of Moses. The idea here is that of all Israel, there's only one acceptable guy right now. Moses. And God calls them Moses people. And who Moses brought up. But Moses implored the Lord his God and said, O Lord, why does your wrath burn hot against your people whom you have brought out of the land of Egypt with great power and with a mighty hand? And then this is one of the multiple times Moses will stand as intercessor. His role here is like intercessor. He goes between the people and God. This is something he does frequently. It's a really strong emphasis. In the Old Testament, Moses goes to God to get the commandments back to the people to deliver them. He goes into the tabernacle to meet and talk with God and then he comes back out to tell the people what God says. He's the go between. Moses is the mediator between God and man. And so when God says to Moses, yeah, there's this whole idea of a parent your kids, your kids. But there's more. He says to Moses, think about it as the Christology of it, how Moses represents Jesus. Moses, you're the representative of these people who you brought out of Egypt. And look what they've done. I'm just going to kill them all and I'll start over with you. And Moses is the one who intercedes as the representative of those people and as the one among them who hasn't done this, who is being faithful. And he's like, I plead with him. I plead with them, don't do this, don't do this. Look for your namesake and all this stuff. Later on, he even says to God, I'd rather you just eat. Wipe my name out too. And God's like, I'm going to start over with just you, Moses. And he goes, no, if you're going to destroy them, destroy me too. Destroy me too. This is A picture of Christ. This is Jesus who goes to the cross for us and says, wipe my name out. You will have to God saying, putting his own name down on the line, wipe my own name out before I wipe you guys out. So that Jesus earns the restoration that we get with God. It's a beautiful thing. It's a beautiful thing. I think there's a Christology that's going on there. All right, let's go to question number three. Hot wax 93 says Seventh Day Adventist claims that belief in an immortal soul comes from paganism and leads to occult spiritism, like necromancy and belief in ghosts. Is this biblical? Okay, so the Seventh Day Adventists, they are rejecting the idea of an immortal soul. So they're what I think would be called conditionalists. A conditionalist is thinking that when Adam and Eve were made, their soul doesn't naturally live forever. If the body dies, the soul can also die. It's not eternal. It doesn't have eternal existence or what they probably call eternal life. Then you can translate this to the idea of hell being a final punishment that destroys the soul of the person, their body, soul, everything destroyed in hell. And they might quote Jesus saying, fear him who can, after your body's been destroyed, can destroy both body and soul in hell. And that this is the idea of the soul actually being ceasing, no longer exists. You simply don't exist. Now, one of the arguments for this is that it comes for this view of conditionalism is that the idea of an immortal soul of. Of humans naturally having immortal souls, not just bodies that can die and souls that can die, but bodies that die, but souls that live on. That this comes from Greek paganism and Greek philosophy and it's not actually a Christian or. And it wasn't a Jewish view. I don't personally believe that that's true. There's elements of that that are true. There's some elements that are true, but I don't think it's in and of itself is true. So that's where your question comes in. Okay. Seventh Day Adventism claims that belief in an immortal soul comes from paganism and leads to occult spiritism, like necromancy, belief in ghosts, etc. That is one does not necessarily lead to the other. I believe in an immortal soul. It has not in any way led me towards paganism or led to occult spiritism in any way. Now even the Seventh Day Adventist thinks that there is a resurrection and that there is immortality eventually and certain. I don't know anybody who thinks that my Christian views lead me to necromancy and belief in ghosts. Like, that sounds weird to me. Like, who are you talking about? I don't believe those things, and I don't see how logically I'm supposed to believe those things. Nothing about my beliefs pushes me in those directions. Nor is belief in ghosts in and of itself a heresy. I think it can be problematic for a number of reasons. I think that demons take advantage of your belief in ghosts to manipulate you and lie to you about the afterlife. But, yeah, there's nothing that inherently sad. The real claim here is that it comes from paganism. Does it come from paganism? And can we show perhaps that in the Old Testament there is this idea and the new of the immortality of a soul, of souls living on after death? Death. And I think we can. I think we can show this in both cases. You know, Jesus's story about Lazarus and the rich man? There's, there's this. The story indicates consciousness after death. You could have statements about the afterlife in Daniel. You have statements about the afterlife in other passages of scripture. One day I got to do a video on this Old Testament affirming afterlife, because I think that's a really good and important topic. Anyway. Yeah, my opinion on this, to answer your question, is simply, no, this is not biblical to just. This is name calling. This is trying to scare people away from a theology that you don't agree with, using name calling and scare tactics. Right? What if I just tell you, for instance, you can't believe in the mythohistory view that William Lane Craig supports. I just told you guys earlier about it, because it calls God a liar. So you're calling God a liar. Well, obviously I'm not going to call God a liar. I'm not going to believe in a view. But that's not what the view isn't. God lied. That's not the view. It's not the view. The view is a belief on the genre analysis of Genesis. And if you think it's wrong, you think it's wrong. But you're not calling out a liar there. You're just misunderstanding. Worst case scenario, you're misunderstanding Scripture. That's it. It's just scare tactics. I don't, I don't. I'm not into that kind of stuff at all. There are times to be scared, right? You deny that, Deny the, the salvation that Jesus brings on the cross? Yeah, you should be scared. We should use our scare tactics when they're appropriate. All right, question number four for, for his service 23 asks a family member does yoga for stretching, but in that quiet time, meditates, prays and worships God. I know yoga for stretching is fine, but what is worshiping while doing yoga? Is worshiping while doing yoga an issue because of Deuteronomy 12, 30, 31? All right, I'm going to say a couple things. The first thing I'll say is this is I don't know that much about yoga. As someone who has not looked deeply into it. I say that as a way of you going, ah, now I can see why you got it wrong, Mike, because you haven't looked deeply into it. That may be the case. My understanding is just that my sort of common sense approach is that there isn't a bad rhythm on a drum. You can't just say, well, that rhythm is of the devil. And I don't think that there are physical stretches that are inherently evil or exercises that are inherently evil like that. That seems common sense to me. That seems like it holds true. But yoga in its Eastern context is a lot more than just stretches. It's a whole philosophy and a whole religious thing. Now, can you take the same stretch as they do and separate it from all of that? Yeah, I imagine you could. But now you're talking about something more complex, which is incorporating worship while you're doing these yoga stretches, when in fact that's a little more similar to what they're doing in the Eastern stuff that is ungodly, but you're doing in the name of God. And then you bring up a perfect verse to talk about in relation to that, which is Deuteronomy 12, verse 30 and 31. God telling the Israelites that when they dwell in the land, when they come to the new land of Israel, he gives them a warning. He says, take care that you do not be ensnared to follow them. The pagans, the polytheists, the ammonites, all the ITEs, you know, the Hittites and the Moabites and all that. And after they have been destroyed before you, and that you do not inquire about their gods. This is interesting. Don't even ask, how did these nations serve their gods, that I may also do the same. Now you might be thinking this is just God saying, don't ask about Asherah worship so that you can also do Asherah worship. Don't do that. Don't ask about Baal worship so you can copy their Baal. But it's that plus more. Verse 31, you shall not worship the Lord your God in that way. Ah, don't do for God what they did for their false gods. Don't take the ritual for BAAL and make it a ritual for Yahweh. Don't do that. That's a really specific command. This is part of why, I mean, in my video on the physics of Heaven, this book presented and promoted by, at least until my video, they stopped promoting it. But the book that had been historically for many, many, many years, promoted and presented and endorsed by Bethel and by their leadership and by their School of Supernatural Ministry and Chris Valatin and Bill Johnson and Banning Liebscher and all those guys, that book which says it's going to take New Age practices and just point them at God and do them for God. Now, that book violates this policy here. Don't copy the methods others have in their false worship of false gods. That seems like a good principle to hold true. Now, there's specific reasons for it in Deuteronomy, right? Because they're doing abominable things and the Lord hates what they've done for their gods, for they even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire to their gods. So can you extend the Deuteronomy? Here's the question of interpretation and application. Can you extend the Deuteronomy prohibition to every abominable thing that they do? And burning their children in the fire, sacrificing and killing their children for their false gods? Or can you extend it far beyond that to just anything that they do? So, for instance, let's say that you find out in the BAAL worship stuff, they sing a song about how BAAL is better than the other gods. Can you sing a song about how Yahweh is better than other gods? Or is that too close to. Like this feels Pharisaical, where you get to the point where you're like, we're going to split hairs. What's everything the pagan has ever done? Now, some people go too far with this stuff. They find out that the Asherah poles were these decorated trees. They weren't really trees. They were wood cut and then decorated. And they go, well, you can't have a Christmas tree because you're copying pagans who did that. Or some who say, you can't give gifts at Christmas or gifts at a birthday or anything else, because pagans in their pagan rituals would often give gifts. And I think here we have to learn to distinguish between what is uniquely pagan versus what is just something a pagan did, right? Pagans hug their children. So you can't hug your kids because pagans hug their children. You have to distinguish these things. In the worship of their false gods, they would have feasts. So they would have a feast to baal. So you can't have a feast to Yahweh. Yet God commands feasts in the law. He makes Israel do these feasts. Do you know that ancient Egyptians would baptize? It was one of the pagan things they did. They had baptisms for pagan reasons. God has Israel doing baptisms in the first century, but for his own reasons. So what distinguishes between a practice that can be copied versus not copied? The question is, is it distinctly pagan or is it coincidentally pagan? Distinctly pagan is the offering of false worship that involves theology that we can't believe practices that are abominable to God. Coincidentally pagan is like it's not even really. It's just something a pagan did. Now can you stretch while praying? Well, we can pray without ceasing. Scripture says I could do stretches and I could be having times of prayer and thinking about the Lord while I'm stretching or while I'm running. I often go on walks and I walk while I pray. That could be exercise related worship and prayer. So I'm not going to lay down a gauntlet on people where it's like, you can't do that. But let me just say this. If this derives, this is a big deal to me. If this desire to do stretches while meditating and praying to God, if this derives from some internal desire to copy what the yoga people are doing, because you kind of like it, you think it's exciting, you think it's kind of, it just kind of grabs you. Some people are just drawn to stuff in a way where you're like, I'm not sure why, but I'm just drawn to astrology. I'm just drawn to Eastern meditation practices. I love the chanting and the bells and the things that I saw the Buddhists doing. And so then you start trying to, you are trying to copy. It's not coincidental. It's actual copying. If there's something in your heart that is drawn to these things, you're drawn to Eastern paganism. Don't do anything that represents it. Don't even take footsteps in those directions. Because that's what Deuteronomy was worried about. It was like, hey, you are drawn to copy the ungodliness of those around you. And this is how you learn the methods. And then you do it and you say it was Yahweh. So I mean, you might think I'm giving contradictory advice here, but I think if you listen Carefully, maybe watch what I said again. You'll hear what I'm actually getting, as I think, wisdom. So let's go to the next question. This is number five. Don Miguel says, Does Colossians 1, verses 19 through 20 suggest that Christ's sacrificial death can be applied to fallen angels? Can angels be saved by Jesus? Sacrificial death? Let's go. It says here, for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. It is true that the Bible extends the cross, the sacrifice of Jesus, then the redemption that he brings beyond just humans. It is true, but your question isn't, does it go beyond humans? It's does it go to angels? And when Colossians here says things on earth or things in heaven, is it including entities in heaven such as angels? Now you can combine Colossians 1 with Romans 8, which talks about how creation was subjected to futility and creation itself is crying out for the redemption that the sons of God. So we have another New testament book, Romans 8, that specifically applies this idea of Jesus reconciling all things. It applies it to creation, but not created beings, not like angels, for instance, but creation itself as a category. And that may just be all that Colossians is talking about. But when you look at the nature of Jesus redemption, there's reasons why we don't usually apply it to angels. One of those reasons is that Jesus comes in human form as a human to represent humans. The implication here is that Jesus these sort of morally accountable creatures, whereas I don't consider even a rat a morally accountable creature or a dog. But humans are, and angels are the kind of cognition that they have and the moral responsibility they have. They're morally accountable creatures. But when it comes to morally accountable creatures, there had to be an identification with becoming human. He became human. He dies on the cross for mankind. There's nothing about that that immediately gets applied to angels in some sense, right? In Adam I fall, and in the new Adam, the second Adam, the last Adam in Christ, I am restored. There's this Adam Christ parallel in Scripture, and this doesn't work with angels as morally accountable creatures. It can work with creation, because creation was subjected as well, underneath Adam, so to speak. Then when you've got angels, we don't have any examples of redeemed angels that I'm aware of. And there's no statement anywhere in Scripture that affirms angels losing their place and Then getting it back. We even have implications of the permanence of angels fall. So we, we read about this in the New Testament. You read about it in, Is it Second Peter and Jude, or is it First Peter? The angels that do not choose to keep their proper place, how they're reserved in chains, waiting for final judgment. Revelation talks about these things and it says, like, there's a war in heaven. The devil and his angels fought against Michael and his angels and he's cast out. This is at the end. It's implying that this is like, you're not getting redeemed here. This is like you chose a side. That's the implication with angels. Now some say, well, why can humans be redeemed and angels not? Why don't they get a chance? I want to caution us against doing the like teenager. That's not fair to God. Like, God certainly knows what he's doing. It's fair. God's doing it. It's fair. That's a good enough formula for me. I trust God. And you should too. You should trust him with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding. But I don't want to lean on my understanding, but I do want to use my understanding. So why is it that humans have a chance at redemption and angels do not? That seems to be because we are born into sin. We are born into these lives. Adam and Eve went from a state of innocence, right. But also a state of like sort of a type of naivety. They sinned, but then the rest of us were born into that. And it's beautiful and wonderful that God gives us an opportunity to be saved. So we have basically from birth, I have no chance to have heaven or have God. And then I have in Christ one chance. I have a chance through him. Angels, it's different. They're all cognizant of God. They see God, they're aware of God, and they individually make, each of them make a decision to reject that presence of God and the goodness of God and the love of God, so that that seems more irredeemable. Just a theory. It's a difference, at least between humans and angels. There's a few thoughts on that. All right, number six, found something says, is feeling the spirit moving biblical? That's a good question. I think it can be. But I gotta admit, before I make a little case that I think you can feel the spirit moving. Kinda. Kinda. I want to say that I've seen countless examples in my life, in a practical way, of people who felt the spirit moving and they didn't feel anything other than their own desires and their own wishfulness and their own hopes. It was them. They felt themselves being emotional and they assumed that when they felt good emotions, it was the Holy Spirit. That I don't think is biblical. Good emotions equals the Holy Spirit is not a biblical concept. I don't see that. But it would be kind of almost muzzling the Holy Spirit. That sounds horrible to say, but to put it that way, but at least in my mind, I'm putting a muzzle on the capability and the capacity of the Holy Spirit to move and communicate to me and to work in my life. If I say you can never feel the Spirit moving, that as a category to reject it entirely is, I think, an error. But. But to realize that more often than not, at least in my own life, when I hear people saying, I think the Spirit's doing this is they're just talking about their own emotions, their own emotions. Not emotions inspired by God, emotions directed by God, created by God there, but just their own. You see this most commonly if you do youth ministry for as long as I did. When people feel the Lord show them who they're going to marry and coincidentally they're going to marry that person they're super attracted to and it's like going to be them. And almost always they're wrong. I say almost always because not always, not always. God may tell you who you're going to marry. For most believers, that's not the case. He doesn't. And so we shouldn't. We should recognize the errors that come. So in Acts, Paul is in Athens, and he there is provoked in his spirit. When he sees all the idols, he's provoked in his spirit. Now, it doesn't there say the Holy Spirit. He felt the moving of the Spirit. But the whole situation in Acts there, it seems as though God was using his emotional provocation at seeing how the city's given over to idols to stir him up to go and preach the gospel. And it becomes one of the few times in the early church where they preached the gospel and it was actually recorded in the book of Acts. So it seems as though there's divine inspiration just in the fact that it's recorded as one of the preachments in Acts. So in Athens, it's provoked in his spirit. That's how it is. There was like an emotional response that was happening there. That was in fact, God was in it. I'll put it that way. That can happen. You can have the zeal for your house will consume me. When Jesus was there and he flips over the money changers, temples. He is not calm. This is he. He is emotional. And he flips over. He drives them out. And it says that this is fulfillment of scripture, that zeal for your house will consume me. He says, you've made my father's house a den of thieves. It was supposed to be a house of prayer. There's other times in scripture, Joshua, when he was not Joshua. Jonathan, Saul's son, King Saul, his son, Jonathan. He just gets zeal from the Lord. Zeal of the Lord. He's not even sure if it's from God or not. He goes, I don't know if this is. I'm going to paraphrase. I don't know if this is God or not, but I think we should run up there and we should attack the enemies of God and let's just see if he gives us victory. So they do a little test. And he shouts up and there's a deal where he says to his squire, he's like, if they tell us, come up here and find us, then I think it was. Then we'll know it's God. And if they say, wait there and we'll come down, then we'll know, maybe this isn't God and we'll just get out of dodge. But this is like a feeling, thinking he's feeling the move of the spirit. I don't know what else to call it. It's not Pentecostal in that sense, but it is the sense of emotions and zeal maybe indicating that God is leading you to do something that can be the Lord. Okay, it can be. But if you think you always hear from God that way, then my only question would be this. And I'm very sincerely, very seriously, are you very honest about your track record? Because I've known people who say God's showing them things who were never honest about their own track record. They're never honest about it because it hurts too much to look back at things that you said God told you to do and see that maybe that wasn't the Lord. It was just you. You had an emotional thing going on. We're fallible people. I'm incredibly fallible. And so I'm very slow to say, God, show me this. But there are times, in fact, I'll say, when I started this YouTube ministry, this online ministry, stuff this, you know, it was because I felt that God was showing me something, that the beginning of this ministry was very much a thing where I felt like God was revealing something to me about what I should do. And I had no idea how that was going to pan out. And that's why I started doing online ministry stuff. And the Lord really blessed it, tremendously blessed it. I can't believe how successful this is as far as reaching people and ministering to people that changed lives and the testimonies we see. So, yeah, there's a few examples. So I gave you Jonathan, I gave you Jesus, I gave you Paul, and I acknowledged that most of the people who say that they feel God's spirit moving need to be more careful about when they say it, in my opinion. So there you go. Number seven. Hi. Hi. Has a question. It says, are we guilty of sins we do, we don't know we've committed? And now you give a verse here. Let's go to Leviticus and then I'll share one from Jesus here. Leviticus 4:27. It says, if any one of the common people's sins unintentionally in doing any one of the things by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done and realizes his guilt or the sin which he's committed is made known to him. He shall bring for his offering a goat, and he brings an offering. So he, in other words, he was still accountable for the thing he did, even though he didn't know he wasn't supposed to do it. It was unintentional sin, but there was still a degree of accountability that was there because an offering still had to be presented. Then there is Leviticus 15:17. And every garment and every skin on which this is the verse you wanted. 5:17. Forgive me, guys, there's nothing wrong with that verse, but in mixed company, without any preparation. I don't want to just jump into it without letting you guys know what we're about to talk about. Leviticus 5:17. If anyone sins doing any of the things that by the Lord's commandments ought not to be done, though he did not know it, then realizes his guilt, he shall bear his iniquity. Now, what's interesting here is that it doesn't say he's guilty when he still doesn't know it. Both of these examples are of someone who, when they become aware of the thing, then they're held accountable to it. So how does that apply to us on the Day of Judgment? I've committed many sins without realizing it. I'm sure I have. I know enough people that do it. I'm probably guilty of it as well. I'm sure I'm guilty of it as well. And there's plenty of Times in my life where I realized after the fact that what I did. Marriage does this to you. Afterwards, something's going on, My wife's upset. And then finally she tells me, well, you did this and this and you did that and that. And I feel like those were being. You were being unloving to me. And I go, you're right. Like, this has happened multiple times where she's got this issue with me, and she finally tells me, and I go, you're right. This has been going on for, like, two weeks. I've been funky about this, and I'm sorry. I genuinely didn't realize I was being that way. But guess what? I was still being that way. I look back at it and I know for me, I go, even though I didn't intend it, I still did it. It was still a problem. Now, it would have been worse had I done it maliciously. So I'm not saying it's the same. It would have been worse. But this is why we have things like neglect, criminal neglect, where somebody is negligent in a way that they're culpable of. And even though they go, well, I never meant for that to happen, and we believe them, you didn't mean for it to happen, but you're still accountable for creating a situation where you should have stopped it and you didn't. So we understand this in our culture. Let me see if we can find this verse that I'm thinking of. Just a second. I'm looking for it, I'm looking for it. Okay, here we go. This is the one I was thinking of. This is Jesus speaking here about judgment. And here it seems to apply to final judgment. Not just do you need a sacrifice under the Old Testament law, but final judgment. So the servant who knew his master's will and did not prepare himself or do according to his will shall be beaten with many stripes. But he who did not know yet committed things deserving of stripes shall be beaten with few. For to everyone who is to whom much is given, from him much will be required. And to whom much has been committed of him, they will ask the more, all sin is not the same. All sin is not punished the same. That is a myth. It is not scriptural. And I have a video on this. I'll link it below. Why we should stop saying that all sins are the same. It's very damaging, I think, when we do this. But this doesn't mean there's no accountability for those sins that we do. Without knowing you're accountable, you're just not as accountable as the guy who knew better. Why? Because you're still a sinner who did a bad thing. Maybe I randomly throw a rock off a cliff because I'm goofing off with my friends, and I just like watching rocks fall off cliffs because I'm a guy. Or. Okay, we all like this. It's a guy thing. We all like. I mean, girls, maybe some of you like it, too. I'm sure some of you do. But almost all of us guys, we just want to push a boulder off a cliff. Why not? And then I find out later that that boulder built up speed and it came down and it hit somebody's house and it killed them. They died. Now, if I had done it intentionally, that's murder. But if I did it unintentionally, that's manslaughter. That's different. I'm still accountable, though, aren't I? Because what I did was wrong. I still did something wrong. And just because I was so defective that I didn't even notice it, didn't even think about it, that doesn't make it okay. I think that's. It's. It's the reality of life. We reap what we sow. And only Jesus, only Jesus can get us forgiveness for the things that we have done. Only he who took the penalty and the stripes, he took the beating. For everything we did while knowing, and while not knowing, he took it all. And if you trust in him, you can be forgiven. Let's go to the next question, number eight. An anonymous question here. How long should prayers be? I see many people online who need prayers, and I want to pray each night for everyone. It feels tedious and repetitive, but it feels wrong to pray for them. Once thoughts. My first thought, honestly to you, as a brother in Christ, a sister in Christ, my first thought to you is to say it's not healthy that you're going through this experience with your prayer life, that prayer is tedious. Have you guys thought about this? The psychology of where we're at with our prayer life? There's things that are unhealthy in our prayer life. Now, you might hear me say that and think, oh, I should feel guilty and bad about it. No, I didn't say that. Because if your prayer life is all about you feeling guilty and bad about everything, that is an unhealthy prayer life as well. I want you to have a healthy prayer life, not an unhealthy one. One of the things that's unhealthy in prayer is to be plagued with the constant thought that God's not listening to you. To continually be plagued with that and not to confront it and face it and defeat it makes an unhealthy prayer life for you. Another unhealthy prayer life is to think that continually thinking that your prayers aren't good enough because you aren't fancy enough with your words, that this is a pointless exercise. You, you think God is far too easily impressed with fancy words. You think very low of God's mentality towards prayer, that he is like, wow, that person prayed really special with their big words. And like, as if God would be impressed by that. That's an unhealthy prayer life and it will hinder your prayers. There's other unhealthy things in prayer, like being unforgiving towards others, being a husband who mistreats his wife. The Bible says your prayers will not be heard properly. That's. Then. That's right. How you treat your wife affects your relationship with God. One of the things that could be unhealthy in your prayer life is this idea that prayer is a burden and you're responsible for praying for everybody and for praying for everybody's needs all the time. And then it becomes a challenge and a difficulty for you instead of an act of worship and love towards God. So can I tell you this? Social media changes the game here. You cannot pray for everybody all the time. It's not possible. It's the same for me, like with local ministry. When I was just doing local ministry, literally everybody in the church had my cell phone. I put my cell phone in the bulletin when we would announce events and stuff, so everybody knew and could contact me for events or questions and stuff like that. If I did this online, if I flashed my cell phone number right now, it would be impossible for me to live. Social media takes the situation and says, if you open the door, you have to know how to close it. You've got to know how to say, it's not my job to pray for every single person on the planet or every single person who asks. Try to recognize the sphere of your own relationships in life. Pray more for the people who you know personally, the people in your own fellowship. Pray more for them. Pray more for your family and all that. Pray for people online selectively. It should be selective. They have lots of other people they can ask. And if we all burden ourselves with thinking we have to pray for every single person out there all the time, it's going to limit and hurt our prayer life. It really is. I just think, recognize that social media Changes the game here. You can't watch every Bible study that's online and you can't pray for every person that asks for it online. You just can't. So it's okay to pray for somebody and then say, for the health of my prayers, I need to have a limited prayer list. I just can't pray for everybody all the time. I hope that I've encouraged you to have a healthier mentality about prayer. I hope that helps you. Number nine, Danny Boy TV says, is Revelation 14:12 talking about salvation by works? No, Revelation. We haven't read it yet. Hold on, hold on. Let's read it. I'll try not to be biased. Okay. Revelation 14:12. It says, here is the call for the endurance of the saints. Here is a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus. And I heard a voice, I'm gonna read a little more from heaven saying, write this, blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on. Blessed indeed, says the Spirit, that they may rest from their labors. For their deeds follow them. So what in here would we say is teaching the idea that you must do works in order to earn or merit your salvation. This is different than saying, like I could say the phrase, you must do works in order to prove the genuineness of your faith. I could say that that's entirely different than saying, you must do works in order to earn or merit your forgiveness. Very, very different, very different concept here. It just says, here's a call for the endurance of the saints, those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus. Now, are there those perhaps who have a category where they truly keep their faith in Jesus, real, genuine faith, yet they do not keep the commandments of God? Not really. I mean, first, John, yeah, we all sin and we have an advocate with the Father when we sin. But there is not really a category of someone who just lives in perpetual, continual sin and has genuine faith in Jesus. Biblically speaking, this category doesn't really exist. That person, they need to put real faith in Jesus. As James says, they have a dead faith. What's that going to do? You have intellectual belief, you have the belief that the demons have and they tremble because they know judgment's coming. By the way, that's another verse about angels being saved, about salvation being available to non humans who non human, morally accountable agents. It's a mouthful. Is the idea that if the demons believe and tremble, James is only using them as an example because they're Known to be unsaved permanently is the implication. Anyway, I don't see Revelation 14:12 as providing a anything other than here's a call for the endurance of the saints. And who are the saints? They are those who keep the commandments of God and their faith in Jesus. But if you reject what God says and you just live your own life, do you really even have faith in Jesus? That's James 2. That's a dead faith. That's not biblical, real faith. Because real faith is not just intellectually believing that Jesus died on the cross for your sins. There's a commitment. I am committed to this. God responds to that commitment by giving you his Holy Spirit and working in your life. And you start to have a changed heart and a changed life. You can still sin, and you probably still have sins you struggle with on a regular basis. But that's not the same as I claim to have Jesus, but I just live however I would if I wasn't making that claim. My life is unchanged. Then you. Then you think, well, then you don't really have faith. You just have knowledge of Christ in the sense of mental awareness. All right, let's go to the next question. This is number 10. Mashed Potato says, is there a way for me to go from an intellectual belief in God to a relationship with God, or do I have to wait on him for that? Wow, what an amazing question to ask after the last question and the things I just talked about, maybe the Lord's in the timing of that. I hope so. And I hope my answer helps you. Going from intellectual belief in God to relationship with God. There is a way here, and I've alluded to this already. Let's take the idea of relationship and let's hold on to it. But let me talk about something related. The New Testament, it gives these analyses, these way of analyzing how a person is really saved or not saved. So James 2 talks about it. 1 John throughout the book of First John talks about it. It's a scary book to read for a lot of people who say, I deal with sin issues. You read First John and it's like he who practices, you're just living and practicing sin. You're not saved. That's scary. But I can't change what Scripture says because I pastorally want to make people feel better. And I see people do this all the time. And I think that it's an understandable impulse. I want to minister to people, but I will not give false hope. Giving false hope to people in condemns them because it keeps them in darkness while telling them they're in light. You cannot do this. It's spiritually dangerous for them and you. So first John, First John. What it gets at, it doesn't say how to tell the difference between belief in God versus a relationship with God. Obviously those are two sides of a different coin. That's not a phrase. Those are two different categories. If you just believe in God versus you actually have a relationship with him. Demons believe, but they don't have a relationship. But the way that the Bible gives as indicators or things to pursue is genuine repentance over sin and giving your heart over to God in the sense of, I'm going to follow you now. So that a person who says, I want a relationship with God, it can be said, well, what should you do about it then? You should probably do the actions that cultivate a relationship with God and, and that reflect genuine faith in God. So things like, I'm going to be attending church. Hopefully you'll find a good church. I know that can be a struggle, but you stay committed until you do. Until you find at least a decent church. Decent's good enough. At least find a decent church. And then you need to cultivate your time reading the Word and praying. Do these things. These things feed into relationship. You know, I want to have a relationship with my dad. I got to call him. I can't just never talk to him and be like, I wish I had a relationship with my dad. I never talked to him. That wouldn't work. Do prayer and get in the Word. Other things you can do. Repent of obvious sins. There's maybe obvious sins. You're still sleeping with your girlfriend. You guys aren't married. You're still sleeping together. This is a no brainer. You repent of that. You're still cheating on your taxes and lying to your customers as a construction worker or something like that. Or a guy who's doing handyman services and you're lying to your customers on a regular basis. You're like, you want to be genuine? Stop lying. These types of things are very practical. But what they do is they come from the overflow of a heart that says, yes, I'm actually serious about this. And then God is the one that gives you relationship with him and you position yourself for it. But God is the one who entirely single handedly gives you real relationship with him by washing of your sins, by giving you the Holy Spirit. And then perhaps what you might be, I'm just guessing here, mashed potato, what you. But perhaps what you may be longing for is more of an emotional sense that you have a relationship with God. I think everybody's wired differently. People have different experiences. And to be honest, sometimes our experiences with our parents and our experiences with family and friends do change the way we process our experience with God. And our first experience with relationships is with people. And then later we come to know God. Sometimes we carry baggage from those things into this one, you know, and that can be a problem. What's encouraged my relationship with God has been reading the Word and realizing that God really does love me like this. This hits my heart in a way that is real. God actually loves me. I've heard people tell me God loves you. And so often that just sounds like white noise. It's never really white noise. It's the most glorious truth of reality. But when I read it in Scripture and I see God's love for me because I see he sends his son to die on the cross for my sin. Because I read in the law how bad my sin actually is, how much it really deserves judgment. And then I see Jesus on the cross, and I'm like, God knows me. He knew me. He planned me from the beginning of creation that I would exist. And Jesus, knowing all that I would do, he goes to the cross for my sin. I actually take this personal, and you should. He really died for me. When I put my faith and trust in him. He really washes me of my sins. He really gives me of himself. Makes me not just someone who won't go to hell. So much more than that makes me someone who he fills with his own spirit so that he could conform me to his own image, so he can make me more like Christ who gives me gifts to bless others. Maybe you're not realizing this, but if you are a Christian, you have an incredible relationship with God. And maybe you're saying, I feel like I don't have a good relationship because you're not feeling the emotions of it that much. When really the relationship's not defunct. It's your emotions that are lacking, but you're taking them as the only dictator of truth. Whereas I know my relationship with God because I read it in His Word. This is what Scripture says. That's my relationship with God. Now I'm feeling good about it. I don't look at my emotions to tell me what my relationship with God is, because they go up and they go down. They go all over the place. And it's just. This is perhaps part of what's meant by the phrase, trust the Lord with all your heart. My emotions, they can sometimes condemn me. Sometimes they tell me I'm not condemned. But I know that I will take those emotions. I will trust God with them by believing what His Word says about my forgiveness, about his grace, about his Son, about his love, about His Holy Spirit. I'm going to trust those things. I hope something I said there helps you. Don't get frustrated. Don't do that. Instead, double down on the simple basic truths. Maybe some things that you would say. I already tried that. Maybe try a little more patiently and continue pressing forward with those things. I hope that that helps. Alright, this is the last stream of the year. I will not see you guys till next year, 2025, which is of course going to be a great year with no problems whatsoever. No, I don't even know. Just brace yourself for whatever's coming next. We'll see. All right, let's pray. Father, we thank you for your holy, holy word. We thank you for the love that you've given us. We know you love us because you sent your son to die on the cross for us, to save us and redeem us. And you called us to yourself. To be your saints, to be your church, your bride, the body of Christ to have eternal life. Lord, we have with Christ. We have an amazing relationship with you. Help our hearts to recognize it so we can give you the glory and the praise you deserve. And we can walk in the confidence and in the peace that Christ has given us. In Jesus name, Amen. Amen.