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Hey, Bible nerds. This is Dr. Manny Arango and I'm your host for the Bible department podcast powered by Arma.
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This podcast follows a Bible reading plan.
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We created to help you read the.
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Entire Bible in a year.
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You can head to the show notes or thebibledepartment.com to download our reading plan.
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And join the journey.
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To all my fellow pastors, I've got a question for you. Does your city know that your church exists? Listen, I get it. You're preaching, you're leading, you're discipling, you're doing ministry. We are in the same boat. And let's be honest, social media and marketing, not your strong suit. Not mine either. And that's probably the last thing on your mind. And that's why we chose to partner with Church Candy Marketing for our church Plant the garden. We out here, y'all. They help churches get more actual guests walking through the doors on Sunday without.
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Your eye having to stress over ads.
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Or algorithms or trying to crack the social media code. Right now, Church Candy is helping nearly 400 churches reach their communities with simple invite ads. And it works.
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It's super effective. I can tell you from firsthand experience.
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So if you're tired of being your city's best kept secret, how about you do this? Go to churchcandy.com Manny and book a free consultation book a discovery call. Their team will break it all down and show you how to start seeing new faces at your church this Sunday. I'm in the trenches with you trying.
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To grow the church.
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And how about we just start a whole campaign? No more empty churches. So let's partner with Church Candy and get our churches full.
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The glory of Jesus. Let's go. We are rocking and rolling through Genesis and I'm loving it. If you can't tell, Genesis is one of my favorite books of the Bible. We got Genesis, chapter 15, 16, and 17. We've got a lot of ground to cover. And so if you have not done the reading, stop the video, stop the audio, Go do the reading. It's only three chapters of Genesis that we gotta read and then come on back. If you have done the reading and you're on a streak, I'm proud of you. Let's jump in. I'll do context clues first and I'm actually going to compare chapter 16 and 17. What I'm about to point out is like, really, really obvious. I think if you're reading in context, but I think if you're just like plucking verses out of the Bible, this is not like, obvious and like, you know, I'd love to know from you guys if you saw this. Okay, so let's. I want us to see what happens in chapter 17 in the context of what happens in chapter 16. So what happened in chapter 16? Sarah, Abram's wife, had bore him no children, but she had an Egyptian slave named Hagar. So she said to him, the Lord has kept me from having children. Go sleep with my slave. Perhaps I can build a family through her. Abram agreed to what Sarah said. So after Abram had been living in Canaan 10 years, Sarah, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave her to her husband to be his wife. This is the exact same language as Eve taking the fruit and giving it to Adam. Okay? Sarah, his wife, took her Egyptian slave Hagar and gave, take and give, take and give. So I'm actually going to come back to what happens with, with Ishmael as our nerdy nugget. Hagar gets pregnant. And I need us to like, just think about this. Was there any consent here? Like, at any point did Abraham and Sarai like, or, you know, Sarah go over, I mean, like, hey, Hagar, we got an idea. You know, what do you think about this? No, there's no consent. There's absolutely no consent. Hagar is, as a slave, she's. She's property. And I think this is a massive injustice, like towards Hagar that nobody really talks about. We talk about this as if it's a sin on Abraham's part. And it's a lack of faith. It's operating in fear. There's a lot of things we call this, but what we don't call this is non conceptual, non consensual sexual activity with a, with a slave. That's what we don't call this. And I think there's a little clue that God is not pleased with this, okay? Because Abraham uses a very specific part of his body to violate Hagar and to impregnate her. And so chapter 17 rolls around and what do we get? Chapter 17, verse 1 says this. When Abram was 99 years old, the Lord appeared to him and said, I am El Shaddai. I'm God Almighty. Walk before me faithfully and be blameless. Then I will make my covenant between you between me and you, and will greatly increase your numbers. Abraham fell face down. And God said to him, as for me, this is my covenant with you. You will be a father in many nations. No longer shall you be Abraham, you shall be Abram. Verse 11. You are to undergo Circumcision. And it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you. Circumcision. You are going to cut the foreskin of your penis. Sir, I cannot not read this in context of what just happened with Hagar. Now, I want us to see the. The beauty, if we can use that word, the beauty of God's solution here. Because we are living in a world of cancel culture. And if all of us got to vote on what we would want God to do with Abraham, it would be full castration. Dude, you just violated your slave girl named Hagar off with the whole thing. Like, what are we talking about? But God knows just the right amount of flesh to remove. He doesn't go for a full castration on Abraham, even though that's what he deserves. He goes for circumcision. And there's a lot of us, I think we're living in a culture that is always pushing to castrate when God is pushing to circumcise. And I actually think that's the context for what's happening in these chapters of Scripture, that God has to do something. So in his justice, he has to do something, but he also has to remain true to the promise. Because if God castrates Abraham because of this sin, then there could be no Isaac, and there could be no promise. And then God has to start over. And God knows that Abraham doesn't need to be castrated, but he does need to be circumcised. And there's a lot of us that, like, your tongue needs to get circumcised, your sexuality needs to get circumcised, your sec. Your sexual urges need to get circumcised. And there's a lot of us who want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. I had a roommate in college that was really struggling with pornography. And one day, just in a. In. In just a frustration that he was sinning against God, just threw his laptop out the window and obviously fell multiple stories, and his laptop broke. Then a couple days go by, and he wants to use my laptop to do some homework. And I'm like, buddy, what you needed were circumcision. What you opted for was. Was castration. Because extremes are always easier than the tension of holding things and doing things with balance and nuance. Man, if there was a big. I don't want to get into a timeless truth too early, but we are living in a polarized culture that needs to learn the art of circumcision, that God is a God of circumcision, and the the, the deal with circumcision is that just a small amount of flesh has the ability to be the separator between having a calloused heart towards God and having a sensitive heart towards God. That Abraham, so close, he's using the right member of his body in the wrong way. And God has to honor his word. And so now God had already promised him, your seed's blessed. So even though Abraham has now placed his seed into the womb of a woman who's he's not supposed to be having sex with, that seed is still blessed. And today Muslims trace their lineage back to Ishmael. Okay. Because God can't go back on his word who. Which means gifts come without repentance. Like, the same influence that Bishop Jakes has is the same gift. It's the same. It's the same anointing. It's the same, like, thing that someone like Dave Chappelle has. It's the ability to move people with words. Dave Chappelle isn't bad at talking just because he hasn't yielded that gift to King Jesus. No, he's still good. It just means that he's not able to build what God would ultimately want him to build. And I'm not saying that everybody needs to be a preacher or that there's not space to be a comedian like, but what I am saying is that Ishmael is going to be blessed because of the promise that God has made to Abraham. And Abraham should have been way more careful. And so the way that God now disciples Abraham gets Abraham to be who he ultimately needs to be is by circumcising him.
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Bible nerds. I have an announcement. My brand new book, Crushing Chaos releases May of 2025 in pre orders are officially open. When I began to learn Genesis in its proper context, I learned that the creation account is not primarily about God creating something out of nothing, but rather God bringing divine order to the chaos of the cosmos. That one nugget was a game changer for me because I've been preaching to all the kids in my youth group that peace was a solution for their anxiety. But really God's solution to chaos is.
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Never peace, but rather order.
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Peace isn't something that you stumble into. It's something that you intentionally step into. And that starts with aligning your life with God's order. I think that this book is a game changer. It's nerdy, it's practical, it provides a very contextual understanding of the book of Genesis. And if you grab a copy, you'll learn why There's a huge dragon on the COVID Head to the link in the show notes to pre order or head thecrushingchaos.com to see the really dope trailer that we made for this book. I think it's time for you to crush the chaos in your life. And that starts with grabbing a copy of this book.
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Now back to the podcast. Now let's move to our nerdy nugget. Remember way back a couple days ago, we had this plot in Genesis chapter 3:15, where God was saying to the serpent that he was going to put enmity between the serpent and the woman, between the offspring of the woman and the offspring of the serpent. And now as Genesis unfolds, we're going to get descriptions about certain characters. And so I want you to go to Genesis chapter 16 and you could go to verse 11. This is the angel of the Lord is talking to Hagar. You are now pregnant and you will give birth to a son. You shall name him Ishmael, for the Lord has heard of your misery. He will be a wild donkey of a man. A wild donkey man. If the Bible is good at using images and symbols to show us whether or not somebody is a son of the beast or a son of the serpent, or a son of humanity, or a son of man or son of the woman, I don't know what else is this close. And remember two loops ago, Cain was a son of the serpent. He was a beast. He acted like a beast towards his brother and his brother essentially got sacrificed. Now if we've got another son of the beast, then wouldn't we be looking for a moment where his counterpart Isaac gets sacrificed? Oh yeah. Abraham has to take Isaac up a mountain and sacrifice Isaac because Isaac is going to be a son of Eve, a son of the woman, a son of humanity, a son of man. That is actually going to come down the line where we're going to eventually get the Messiah and Ishmael is going to be a son of the beast. So we've now seen this in multiple loops. And as the story of Genesis continues to unfold, you'll see this over and over and over again. Because here's our nerdy nugget. Eastern texts speak with images and symbols. So the Bible's never going to say, oh yeah, hey guys, Ishmael is a son of the serpent, he's a son of the dragon. Nope, it's just going to describe him with animal like language and let you connect the dots. All right. A timeless truth. Here we go. Verse 13 of chapter 16 Hagar gave this name to the Lord who spoke to her. You are the God who sees me. For she said, I have now seen the one who sees me. That is why the well was called Beer Lahai Roi. It is still there between Kadesh and Bered. That name for God is El Roi. You are the God who sees me. I don't know if you felt invisible, but our time was truth. Today is that we serve the God who sees us. He sees the pain that nobody else sees. He sees the injustice. He sees the mistreatment. He sees the neglect. He sees the abuse. There's nobody coming to Hagar's rescue. There's nobody who is empathizing with her. There's not even a cultural context for what Abraham and Sarah did is, like, wrong and just. And before we, like, think about it, what they did is. Is legal, but it's still wrong. It still violates God's moral law. You're not supposed to treat slaves this way. And in a world where nobody sees Hagar, Hagar realizes that you are the God who sees me. So my time is true. Today is. God is the God who sees you. He's the God that sees the single mom who's going from job to job trying to make ends meet. He's the God who sees the dad who wishes they had more time with their kids. He's the God who sees what society doesn't see. He's the God who sees your gifts, your talents, your potential. He's the God who sees your real identity. He's the God who sees. He's the God who knows everything. And the reason that he's able to be judged is because he sees everything. The reason that we're not able to judge is because we never know the whole story. We never know the whole truth. But God always knows the whole truth. And he knows you and he sees you. And the key to real love is to be fully seen, fully known, and yet fully accepted and fully loved. God sees you good, bad, flaws and all the good, the bad, the ugly. And he still loves you. And so there's nothing more comforting to say to a. To a invisible victim. Like a person who's been victimized. And no one sees them. No one sees their value. They just see Hagar as someone who can help them have a child. In my current world, you know, me and my wife, there's a show that we really, really like. It's super disturbing, called Handmaid's Tale. And I can't not think about Handmaid's Tale when I When I. When I hear or read the story of Hagar. But for any person who's ever gone through pain, abuse, neglect, trauma, I want Hagar's words to ring true, that he is the God who sees. And. And then she takes it a step further. You are the God who sees me. Okay, so you're El Roy, not El Roi, like El, the word for God. And then Roy, E L, space, R O I. She says, you are the God who sees me. And then she takes it a step further. I have now seen the one who sees me. The fact that God sees you is true. The fact that you can acknowledge that God sees you is the next layer of truth. And the fact that you can see the God who sees you is the ultimate level of truth. I want to lay those three out for you, okay? God sees you. That's a fact. Okay, next we build on that. Can you acknowledge that God sees you? That can you believe that God sees you? Is it enough for you that God sees you? Or do you also need people to see you? Okay, and then lastly, do you see the God who sees you? Do you see yourself the way God sees you? Do you see God seeing you? Do you notice him noticing you? Do you see him? Are your eyes on your pain yourself, or are they on him? He's looking at you. But are you looking back? Do you see the God who sees you? Are you locking eyes with him? Because it's one thing for him to see you. It's another thing for you to know that he sees you and to find comfort in that. It's another thing to say, oh, no, I see the God who sees me. All right, that's our Thomas truth for the day. We got a context clue. We got a nerdy nugget. We got a timeless truth. I hope you never think about circumcision the same way ever again. That was Genesis chapters 15, 16, and 17. I'll see you right here tomorrow. We got Genesis chapters 18, 19, and 20. I can't wait to dig in with you. I love you guys. Till next time.
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Thanks so much for joining us on the Bible Department podcast. You can find us online and learn.
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More about the show at the Bible.
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Department and on Instagram.
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Hebibledepartment.
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If you enjoyed this episode and want.
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To dive deeper into the Bible, you.
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Can get free access to our library of courses@thebibledepartment.com.
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We'Ll see you back here tomorrow.