Father Stephen De Young:

Now as the people were in expectation, and all reasoned in their hearts about John, whether he was the Christ or not, †John answered, saying to all, “I indeed baptize you with water; but One mightier than I is coming, whose sandal strap I am not worthy to loose. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in His hand, and He will thoroughly clean out His threshing floor, and gather the wheat into His barn; but the chaff He will burn with unquenchable fire.”

So the people are wondering, "Okay, is he the Messiah? He's coming, he's teaching. He's baptizing people, is he the Messiah?" Notice they don't actually ask him. Just St. John is aware that this is what they're thinking, right? And so he tells them, first of all, no. There's someone else coming who is greater than he is, and that while he's baptizing them with water for the forgiveness of sins, this person will baptize them with the Holy Spirit, with the Spirit of God, and with fire. These are images of judgment. These are images of judgment. We tend to sort of jump ahead because we know where things are going and think about the Holy Spirit coming in and dwelling, the disciples and that kind of thing.

But going all the way back to the book of Genesis, I know this was like four and a half years ago, so I know you probably don't remember, but in Genesis 3, after Adam and Eve have sinned, and God comes looking for them. Remember, God comes in the garden and they're hiding from Him. What it says there in the Hebrew is that God came

ruach ha-yom, which is usually translated “in the heat of the day” or “in the warmth of the day”. But the word ruach in Hebrew is “spirit”. It actually says that God came to them “in the spirit of the day”. When God came into the Garden of Eden, what was he coming there to do?

When God says to them, “I was looking for you. Why were you hiding?” It’s not that he didn’t actually know where they were, right?

Interlocutor: Is He coming to redeem them?

Fr. Stephen: Well, Jesus is. Yes, but that day in the garden, He wasn’t. He came and put the curse on the serpent, put the curse on Eve, put the curse on Adam. That was judgment. But judgment also includes positive judgment, right? Judgment includes both. But so, there’s this idea that the Messiah, who’s coming, the one who’s greater than he is, who’s coming, he’s saying He’s going to bring judgment. Remember in Matthew there was that place where Jesus said He didn’t come to bring peace, but to throw fire upon the earth, right? We skim over those because we’re kind of like creeped out by them. That doesn’t sound nice and kind and warm and Jesus-y, right? But the truth is, once again, the Gospel is both. The Gospel cuts both ways. And so that’s where St. John is going when he says His winnowing fan is in His hand and He will clean out the threshing floor. What that’s talking about is when you go and harvest wheat, you go and you cut down the wheat, right? You’ve got the wheat kernels and then you’ve got the stock, the other piecesÖ that’s the chaff, it’s useless. So you need to separate the wheat from the chaff. So what they would do is they would go to a threshing floor, which is a large stone floor, and they throw all the harvest wheat there and they would take a thing like a fan, they called it a winnowing fan, but it looked more like a rake. It wasn’t made out of metal, but like a rake. And they would use that to beat and throw the wheat, to break out the kernels. And then the chaff will get thrown, it would get blown away, they’d separate it out.

So that’s the image here; it’s what Jesus is coming to do when He comes to the people of Judea, right? Remember in their heads what’s He coming to do? “Rescue us from the Romans because we’re all the good guys, the Romans are the bad guys.” St. John is saying “That’s not what He’s coming to do. He’s coming to judge his people.” All the wheat He’s going to gather in the barns, the chaff He’s going to burn away because it’s useless. And so, again, when they ask if he’s the Messiah, he not only says, “No, He’s coming and He’s greater than I, it’s someone else.” But also, “When He comes, He’s bringing the judgment that I’ve been talking about.”

And this is important because we’re going to see this play out in the rest of the Gospel of Luke and into Acts. What St. Luke is doing here is he’s telegraphing to us how he understands what happens with the people of Judea and Jesus. Because what he and what St. Paul and the other apostles had to deal with was, this turn of events where Israel’s Messiah comes to Israel and most of Israel rejects Him. And then a whole bunch of Gentiles accept Him, which is counterintuitive for them, right? Why did they reject it? And so part of the way we’re going to see in both Luke and Acts, that St. Luke is going to deal with this is by the understanding that what Jesus came to do was not just to gather together all the people who are ethnically Jewish, descended from Abraham, to deliver them from material oppressors, but He was also coming in judgment. That there’s this remnant that we heard over and over again. Remember in the prophets where the prophets said, God is going to come and judge His people. There’s going to be a remnant that’s going to be purified by that judgment. The fire is going to purify them and then these others are going to be burned away.

And so, St Luke is going to understand the coming of Christ in that way. So those people in ethnic Israel who don’t accept Jesus, they’re the chaff, they’re the non-believers, they’re the ones who weren’t repentant and weren’t following God already. So, at this point, when St John comes, you’ve got all these people in Judea, right? Some of them righteous, some of them wicked, some of them faithful, some of them faithless, and they’re all mixed together. And when Christ comes, when God comes back to them, Christ coming to them, that event serves to separate out the one group from the other group. And so, the one group falls away, the other group receives Christ, receives salvation, and then becomes the basis for the church. So that’s already being telegraphed here in the preaching of St John the Baptist. When he brings up the children of Abraham, when he brings up here Christ coming and winnowing the people, he’s already laying the groundwork for that.

And with many other exhortations he preached to the people. But Herod the tetrarch, being rebuked by him concerning Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife, and for all the evils which Herod had done, also added this, above all, that he shut John up in prison.

Notice that theme again, right? Herod didn’t suddenly become wicked. Herod was already wicked. He’d done a whole lot of evil things. One of the big ones was marrying his brother’s wife. And so, St. John publicly rebukes him for that, publicly says this is wrong. And so Herod adds to all the other things he’s done by then throwing St. John in prison. So Herod has the textbook bad response to what St John is preaching. What St. John is preaching it’s pretty harsh, right? It’s pretty harsh. I almost want to say unforgiving, but there is a possibility of forgiveness there with baptism, right? But it’s harsh. What he says to the tax collectors is harsh. What he says to the people is harsh. But it has the purpose of trying to bring them to repentance.

Well, it doesn’t bring Herod to repentance. Herod just gets angry and has St. John thrown in prison. He just rejects it and opposes it. And this is a theme from the Old Testament, and it’s one that we still struggle with a lot today. Remember over and over again, we’re told in the Psalms and Proverbs that we should want to hear the truth and even rebuke from a wise person more than we want to hear flattery and good things from a wicked person. We should have that insight. It’s better to have St. John the Forerunner tell you you’re a miserable sinner. And to hear it and to repent then have all kinds of wicked people telling you how great and how wonderful and how smart and how pretty you are, right?

But that’s counterintuitive to us as human beings. And in the day of the Internet and social media, it’s even more counter to us because now we can sort of carefully craft our environment. We can unfollow people on Facebook. We can choose where we listen to our news, choose where we read our stories on the Internet, choose where we get our information, right? So we can make sure that it’s all just congenial to us. We never hear opinions we don’t want to hear, we disagree with, we never hear from people who might have a different point of view, who might want to question us or correct our decision making, right? We never have to hear any of that if we don’t want to. We can just surround ourselves with positive people. Positive, supportive voices,

Interlocutor: Go to your safe space.

Fr. Stephen: [Laughter] Go to our safe space. And the problem is, how will we ever repent? How will we ever bring forth fruits of repentance? How will we ever change in a positive way, at all, but in a positive way? Every change in a positive way or grow, if we never face any adversity, we never see any other point of view or opinion counter to our own. We never spend any time with anyone who’s different from us. It’s destructive.

But there’s always a temptation when someone comes and rebukes us, when someone comes and criticizes us. My first instinct, at least, is more like Herod’s with St. John, right? “Who do you think you are, telling me this? You can’t talk to me that way!” Especially as a priest. “You need to respect me, I’m a priest! How dare you!”

And the problem is, when I receive criticism that way, it’s destructive to me. It’s destructive to me. I’m the one who doesn’t hear the truth. I’m the one who isn’t able to repent and change. I’m the worse off for it. I think I’m protecting myself, but I’m actually destroying myself, just like Herod here thinks he’s protecting himself by trying to shut John up and get him out of the picture. He’s protecting himself, protecting his position. What he’s really doing is destroying himself. That’s what St. Luke’s telling us. He’s adding one more wickedness to the list when judgment is right around the corner.

When all the people were baptized, it came to pass that Jesus also was baptized; and while He prayed, the heaven was opened. And the Holy Spirit descended in bodily form like a dove upon Him. And a voice came from heaven which said, “You are My beloved Son, in You I am well pleased.”

So now Jesus comes to be baptized, we’re tipped off as to who He is. We already knew because we read the first two chapters, right? But St. John and the people around him, St. John actually already knew, remember, he knew in his mother’s womb, who Jesus was. But the surrounding crowd is tipped off, right? This is that person who St. John was just talking about. Notice St. John baptizes them with water, but then what happens? The Holy Spirit descends upon Him, identifying Him as the one who’s going to baptize the Holy Spirit and with fire. And then God the Father identifies him as his Son.

Notice we also see the Trinity here. We see the Trinity here. This is another place where you could take people, a lot of people say, even good Christian people, even well-meaning, well-educated Christian people will say, “Well, the Trinity is not in the Bible. That’s something we came up with to explain what’s in the Bible.” Well, no, we’ve already seen a couple of places. I mean, Matthew 28, remember the name singular of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit. Well, here’s another place. Jesus is being baptized. So He’s obviously not the one talking from heaven, The Holy Spirit is descending upon Him. So the Holy Spirit isn’t talking from heaven and the Holy Spirit isn’t Jesus because He’s descending upon Jesus. And the voice that’s talking isn’t Jesus. And isn’t the Holy Spirit.

Interlocutor: How can the Father speak without going through the Logos?

Fr. Stephen: You’re taking that too literally, first of all. And you’re bringing in St. John’s Gospel. We’ll get there when we get to John 1, we’ll talk about what St. John means by the Logos. But so, you see, we’ve got three persons here, right? We’ve got three persons. We’ve got God, we’ve got the Son of God, we’ve got the Holy Spirit. But remember, again, we hear the Holy Spirit and we think of Acts. Acts is volume two, right? We haven’t read this yet and nobody had read any of it at the time this happened. So, Holy Spirit is referring back to in the Old Testament, the Spirit of God, right? The Spirit of God that was hovering over the waters in creation, the Holy Spirit that came to dwell in the prophets. So the Spirit of God is God, right? Someone’s spirit is them. I don’t talk about “me and my spirit”. Like if “spirit” is not me, right? So we’ve got three persons who are God.

This is why in the troparion, in the hymn we sing at Theophany, when we celebrate Christ’s baptism, we talk about how in this moment the Trinity was made manifest, was revealed to everyone, right? Here it is.

So now we’re going to get a genealogy. There are a few interesting things, a couple I’m going to comment on before we read it.

First is, notice where it comes. Remember, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, it starts with the genealogy, which is sort of what you’d expect, right? In the Old Testament, that’s what we had, remember? In the Book of Genesis, you’d have a genealogy and it would lead up to whoever’s story you are about to tell, right? You get a genealogy it leads up to Noah. And then you have the story of Noah. You have a genealogy of Abraham, and then you get the story of Abraham. So, St. Matthew is sort of following that pattern. You get the genealogy of Jesus, and then we go to the birth of Jesus. We read about Jesus.

Notice, St. Luke has moved it has moved it here. It wasn’t at the beginning, before Jesus’s birth. Why might that be? Why does he go through a genealogy right before Jesus starts HisÖ Jesus here is about to begin His public ministry? So he puts the genealogy here, not before His birth. But the reason is, for St. Luke, the genealogy isn’t serving the purpose of showing where Christ came from. It’s serving the purpose of giving Christ credentials.

This is His CV, His resume, right? The source of his authority. Because he just introduced Him. Now, we already saw the prophecies surrounding his birth, but now very clearly here through St. John and through his baptism, “Okay, Jesus is the Messiah, here He is.” Well, if you’re going to say that Jesus is the Messiah, there are certain requirements He’s going to have to meet based on the Old Testament. What’s the biggest one? His genealogy, right? He’s got to be from the line of David. So what St. Luke is going to do here is he’s giving Christ credentials. He’s using his genealogy to establish who Christ is, not where He came from, who he is and what his authority is.

So they serve two different purposes, and that’s going to be part of I’m going to talk about this a little more after we read the genealogy. It’s part of, not the entirety, but a part of why the genealogy here in St. Luke’s Gospel is different in places than the one in St. Matthew’s Gospel, and that has cost no end of consternation to people. But we’ll talk about that a little more after we finish reading it.

Now Jesus Himself began his ministry at about thirty years of age, being (as was supposed) the son of Joseph,

So another thing to notice here, St. Luke is going to do his genealogy backwards. He doesn’t start back in the past and work up. He starts now and works backwards, he’s getting the credentials. And we talked before, I think, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the 30 years of age here, remember, 30 is the year at which under the Torah, a priest began his service. And in the case of Ezekiel, because the temple was destroyed at the time Ezekiel lived, when he hit 30 years of age, that’s when he was called as a prophet and began his prophetic ministry.

So, Jesus is following that same pattern from the Old Testament. So, Jesus is supposed to be the son of Joseph,

the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melchi, the son of Janna, the son of Joseph, the son of Mattathiah, the son of Amos, the son of Nahum, the son of Esli, the son of Naggai, the son of Maath, the son of Mattathiah, the son of Semei, the son of Joseph, the son of Judah, the son of Joannas, the son of Rhesa, the son of Zerubbabel, the son of Shealtiel, the son of Neri, the son of Melchi, the son of Addi, the son of Cosam, the son of Elmodam, the son of Er, the son of Jose, the son of Eliezer, the son of Jorim, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Simeon, the son of Judah, the son of Joseph, the son of Jonan, the son of Eliakim, the son of Melea, the son of Menan, the son of Mattathah, the son of Nathan, the son of David, the son of Jesse, the son of Obed, the son of Boaz, the son of Salmon, the son of Nahshon, the son of Amminadab, the son of Ram, the son of Hezron, the son of Perez, the son of Judah, the son of Jacob, the son of Isaac, the son of Abraham, the son of Terah, the son of Nahor, †the son of Serug, the son of Reu, the son of Peleg, the son of Eber, the son of Shelah, the son of Cainan, the son of Arphaxad, the son of Shem, the son of Noah, the son of Lamech, the son of Methuselah, the son of Enoch, the son of Jared, the son of Mahalalel, the son of Cainan, the son of Enos, the son of Seth, the son of Adam, the son of God.

So we go all the way back. Notice that’s actually a difference from the one in Matthew. The one in Matthew’s Gospel starts with Abraham, it goes from Abraham. It doesn’t go all the way back past Abraham. Now everything past Abraham is presupposed by genealogies in the Old Testament, you could say, but he doesn’t explicitly make a point of it. Remember also at the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel, he has this structure he imposes on it. Remember where there’s 14 generations from Abraham to David, 14 generations from David to the exile and 14 generations from the exile to Jesus. And we talked about at the time how he fiddles a little bit with the generations to make it match that because the point he’s making is you have six sevens and then Jesus is born and he’s the 7th. Seven is his birth. So he’s sort of doing a numerological pattern.

We also have to remember that the genealogies in the Old Testament and in the New Testament, Jewish genealogies in general, were not comprehensive. The goal was not to cover every single person who lived. You would mention people of significance, right? So the people you listed, you listed because they were significant in some way. We saw that that was true at the beginning of St. Matthew’s Gospel because as we saw, St. Matthew made some interesting picks in terms of who he mentioned. Remember, he mentions three women. St. Luke doesn’t mention any. St. Matthew mentioned three women and they weren’t exactly the women you necessarily pick, right? It was Rahab, remember, who was a prostitute and a Gentile, a Canaanite who had come into the faith. And he mentioned Tamar, remember Judah’s daughter-in-law who tricked him into having a baby with her by pretending to be a prostitute? He picked some interesting people to include as significant, and we talked when we went over the Gospel of Matthew that’s posted on the website, too. You can listen to that again if you want to, but talked about why he picked those.

So make no mistake, St. Luke here isn’t just reporting, right? “I went to the archives and found all the names and right here they all are, in case you’re curious.” He’s listed these names for very particular reasons. He’s been selective. Remember, again, he’s giving his credentials. So a couple of points. A lot of these names, once you go past Joseph, aren’t recorded anywhere else.  So we’re not sure exactly why, until you get back to about Zerubbabel, remember, who is the descendant of the Davidic king in exile. So we go back to him in the exile. So that track back is essentially to establish that he’s in the line of David, right? Remember, that’s the primary credential you have to have if you’re going to claim to be the Messiah. So that’s why this link back to Zerubbabel is significant. And then he goes back to David again for the same reason. But then notice he keeps going, I think he’s going it doesn’t just say, okay, so see, he’s descending from David, so he’s the Messiah.

He goes back next to Abraham. We talked about this a little with Matthew. Why is Abraham so important? Not just because he’s the first Hebrew, but remember, and St. Paul is going to make a big point about this in Galatians, that the promise of salvation was to Abraham and to his seed. And in the Septuagint, in the Greek translation of the Old Testament. And St. Paul is going to quote the Greek directly and notice, it’s singular. The promise isn’t to Abraham and his seed plural. Just like in English, the word seed in Hebrew can be singular or plural, right? You could say one seed, or you could say he scattered seed. But in Greek it’s not. In Greek, it’s either seed or it’s seeds. So St. Paul is going to point out it’s singular. Meaning to “one seed” the promise is to Abraham and his seed, singular, forever, as we saw Mary say in chapter one, that’s who the promise is to.

So, St. Luke here, having already put that in chapter one, is reminding us, not only is he the Messiah, the descendant of David, he’s also the seed of Abraham, because as St. John just made clear to the people, again, being the seed plural of Abraham doesn’t mean anything. Why? Because the promise wasn’t to everybody descended from Abraham. The promise was to this one particular seed, this one particular descendant who he’s now establishing with this genealogy part that Jesus is.

But then he doesn’t stop there. As I mentioned, that’s where Matthew starts, right? He goes all the way back to Adam. Why? And points out that Adam was the “son of God”, calls Adam the “son of God”, right after Jesus has been called the Son of God in his baptism. So what’s he doing? He’s setting up a parallel between Jesus and Adam. He’s setting up a parallel between Jesus and Adam, which has a couple of significances. First of all, doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or a Gentile. If you’re living on this Earth, you’re descended from Adam. If you’re human, you’re descending from Adam. Meaning, Christ isn’t just the fulfillment of the Davidic line. He isn’t just the fulfillment of the promises to Abraham for the Jewish people. He goes all the way back. He’s the fulfillment of what God started in creation. So remember, St. Luke’s Gospel has this bigger audience. He’s writing to Jews and Gentiles who have come into the Church, whereas St. Matthew’s audience was primarily Jewish, primarily a Jewish audience. So, the point being, it doesn’t matter if you’re a Scythian or a Parthian or a Judean or a Roman. If you look at this genealogy, you can find where you’re connected to Jesus. He’s related to everybody. He’s related to everybody.

And this is also setting up, though, very subtly, and it’s not being developed here, but very subtly, what St. Paul is going to develop in Romans 5:12 and following, he also talks about in 1 Corinthians 15, that there’s this parallel between Adam who sinned and through whose sin all die, and then Christ, who is righteous, and through his righteousness all live in the resurrection. So he’s bringing out that by calling Adam the “son of God”, which he isn’t referred to as in Genesis, he’s referred to here right after the Father says, “This is My beloved Son, in Whom I’m well pleased.” That sets up this parallel. Christ as a new Adam. He’s a new Adam, again, not just for the people of Israel, but for everyone who’s ever lived because they’ve been connected to Him through this genealogy.

So hopefully from those themes I just brought out, you can see well, okay, St. Matthew is constructing a genealogy to communicate certain things over here. St. Luke is constructing a genealogy for Jesus for these reasons and with these purposes and these themes over here. And so, the differences between the two are based on the differences between the themes and the purposes that they have, what they’re trying to bring out. What they’re trying to bring out.

And so, when someone comes along named Bart Ehrman or something else, whatever they might be named, and they say, “Oh, look at this, see, they couldn’t even get their genealogies straight. Bunch of these names are different or in a little different order! They just made it up! They tried to say he was the Messiah connected to David, so they just made up this genealogy. And look, they didn’t even get their story straight between two different Gospels!” As we talked about last time, first of all, there’s a presupposition there, again, that if God inspires the text, it’ll all be identical. Which, again, why would there be two? Why would he inspire two, if they were going to be identical, what would the point of that be? And as we’ve talked about with the Gospels in general, the biggest reason we have four Gospels is we get four different perspectives on Jesus, not the same exact identical perspective four times, right? It’s we get four different views of the same person, Jesus Christ. But four different perspectives. Four different perspectives.

Just like if you talk to four different people who know me, they would tell you different stories, right? They would have different impressions of me, right? And if you’ve never met me, you just talk to those four people, and you were trying to be very strict about it. You said well, this person said “A”, this person said “B”. How can he be both A and B? He must be imaginary, right? I’m imaginary. It’s true. But you see that any human person, right? Jesus is a divine person, so even more so. But any person is a deep thing, and as one Orthodox theologian said, every person is in some sense absolute. Meaning, you can’t fully comprehend any other human being. I don’t even understand myself most of the time [Laughter], but let alone somebody else, right? Let alone somebody else. To really know as well as I know my wife now, I’m sure, 30 years from now, if I live that long, well, I’ll know her even better, right? But I still won’t know every nook and cranny, I mean, other than God, her creator, you know what I mean? And so, why would we expect any different from four different people? In the case of St. Luke, he’s compiling a whole bunch of people’s testimony, a few dozen people who knew Jesus while he was alive or who encountered Jesus while he was alive. Why would we expect that to all just be very neat and identical? If he’s real, we wouldn’t expect that. If He’s imaginary, we would expect everybody to get together and get their story straight. But if He’s a real person, we’d expect there to be all kinds of even conflicting sort of, “Well, wait, he said that, but He also said this.”

So what we have in the Gospels and these differences are exactly what we would expect if they’re true. And if Jesus Christ is a real person. Not the opposite, the way people tend to argue. But they’re arguing based on these bad presuppositions, that Jesus is just sort of this flat character who could be described in so many terms, and that if God is going to inspire four books about them, they need to be identical. Which, again, why four then?

Interlocutor: If the Bible is a law book, laws need to be internally consistent and logical, things like that.

Fr. Stephen: Well, but the Bible isn’t a law book.

Interlocutor: Yeah, but if it’s a mystical text describing someone you can never fully know, then it makes sense for it to not beÖ

Fr. Stephen: Right, and this is something I’ve said several times, but it always bears repeating. We can’t come to the Bible with our ideas of what the Bible needs to be, because on one side you’ve got somebody like Bart Ehrman, who has come and said, “If the Bible is inspired, if the Bible is the Word of God, that means it has to be this, that and the other. And so, if I come to the Bible and it’s not ABCDEFG then that means it’s not the Word of God and it’s not inspired.” You’ve got him on the one side. On the other side, you’ve got a fundamentalist, a fundamentalist Christian who approaches the Bible basically the same way, right? “If the Bible is the Word of God, that means it has to be ABCDEFG. And if it seems like it’s not, I have to twist it around and to make it ABCDEFG because otherwise it’s not the word of God.”

And so both of them, especially if you get the two of them in a room, can waste their whole lives arguing about whether the Bible is or isn’t what they assume it should be. And how is that productive?

The Bible, sort of like Christ, there’s only one of them. There’s nothing else we can compare it to. There’s only one. And so when we go and read the Bible, we need to ask the question. We need to see what the Bible is, what it is, and accept it and try to understand it for what it is. So if we go toÖ how controversial do I want to be? I’ll be controversial. If we go to the Book of Judith, which we hold to be part of the Old Testament, a lot of our Protestant brothers and sisters don’t. Some do, but most don’t. Now we look at the Book of Judith, and the Book of Judith telegraphs to us at the beginning that it’s not a historical narrative, it’s not telling us about historical events. It’s a parable, essentially a long parable about God delivering His people. Then we accept that God chose to give us this book for edification, it’s an extended parable and isn’t a historical narrative. We don’t come to it and say, “Well, if this isn’t historical, it’s not really part of the Bible.” Or, “Because this is part of the Bible, it has to be historical. So I’m going to bend history around to try and make Nebuchadnezzar an Assyrian emperor. People have done that to try to prove it’s historically accurate. So we take the Bible that we’ve been given, we learn from what we understand.

So, yeah, the Old Testament has all kinds of genres, as we saw. It has poetry in the Psalms, it has wisdom literature in Proverbs. It has historical narratives like First and Second Samuel, First and Second Kings. It has prophecy, where they’re recording visions, some of which got a little wild in Ezekiel and Daniel. There’s the Torah, the Pentateuch, first five books of the Bible, combine all kinds of things. You’ve got historical stories, you’ve got laws, you’ve got all kinds of things. And we take it for what it is. We learn from it. We don’t try and force it all into one mold.

One of the common things that Jewish readers of the Old Testament do is try to turn it all into law. So all the stories become illustrations of the law. So the story of David isn’t about David, it isn’t about the Messiah, it isn’t about the relationship between David and God. The story of David is about “Bad things happen to you if you commit adultery. We gave you the command, ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’. Now we’re going to give you a story that shows you what happens if you break that command. See, look, your family goes crazy, you lose your throne.” And they just reduce it all, the law.

But you could also a lot of Christian fundamentalists reduce it all. The history. This is all history. We got to go find the ark on Mount Arart, right? We got to goÖ it’s just all history, and you miss out on everything else. There’s history there, but there are also all kinds of other things. They read a Psalm and obsess about when in David’s life did he write the psalm. Read the poetry! It’s a poem. It’s communicating something. You can’t flatten it out to us. So we can’t try and flatten out the Bible like that or come to it with a set of demands. “Well, if you’re really the word of God,” we saw the Pharisees doing that to Jesus all the time. “If you’re really the Messiah, why don’t you do XYZ?”

We can’t do that with the Scriptures either. “Well, if you’re really the word of God, why don’t you blah, blah, blah?” And, “Everything has to make sense to me. I need to be able to make everything fit together. I need to be able to take the four Gospels and fit them all together perfectly and figure out what events happened in what order.” Who told you that? Who told you the Bible has to do that? Bible didn’t tell you that. Church didn’t tell you that. We read them separately. So we need to get rid of those presuppositions and just come to the Bible, open to what it is that God wants to tell us, not looking for the answers to our questions or telling the Bible what it has to be, or telling God what He has to say, because we’ve decided that’s what He needs to do to be God, but come to it with the openness to say, “Okay, what does God have to say to me today in this passage we’re reading?”

And timewise, since we’re at the end of chapter three, this seems like a good place to hit pause for the week.