A link to Sunday night’s Youtube LIVE episode recording

Hey everybody, hope you had a blast at church today! In today’s email, I’ll give you three things:

1. A link to tonight’s Youtube livestream

2. A look at the Moabite stone mentioned in this past Wednesday’s episode

3. Part two of my series on how to be a weird bible reader

To start, if you listened to my latest episode, I mentioned that I wanted to break the mold a little bit this week. Over the summer, we did about 6 or 7 episodes on Spiritual Legal Rights. It was a fascinating topic, but there was so much to talk about, I had to break it up into a lot of smaller lessons, which is why it took us to long to cover everything.

I had a few requests to take all that content and make one looooooong episode that basically puts it all together in one place. This won’t, of course, be >30 minutes like my typical episodes. And if you’ve been a faithful listener the past few months, none of this will probably be new information for you.

But if you would like to join me for a recap and review of all the material we’ve covered lately, you are welcome to join me either LIVE on Youtube tonight (or just catch the audio recording on this Wednesday’s episode). Can’t wait to hang out with you all, for those who want to join the live stream, and you can join in with me right here!

Leave a comment, let me know your name and where you’re listening from!

See for yourself: the Moabite Stone

If you listened to this past week’s episode, you may remember it was a mailbag episode.

In this episode, we discussed several topics- including this fascinating story from II Kings 3 where King Mesha of the Moabites performed a human sacrifice, unleashing a spirit (or many spirits) of fear upon the Israelites. Despite having been prophesied to win the battle, this abominable act caused the Israelites to give up and run home. You can read the whole story here, but this verse is the key part I focused on:

II Kings 3:27 - Then he took his oldest son who was to reign in his place and offered him for a burnt offering on the wall. And there came great wrath against Israel. And they withdrew from him and returned to their own land.

One interesting historical tidbit- in 1870, an archaeological finding called The Moabite Stone was discovered in Jordan. It is written in first person by King Mesha himself, giving a biography of his life. This ancient chronicle was also engraved with this story of the battle between the Moabites and the Israelites- just from the Moabite perspective.

This historical record- also known as The Mesha Stele- talks about how the false god Chemosh- whom Mesha had sacrificed to- aided the Moabites in fighting off Israel. It includes these words:

And the king of Israel fortified Jahaz, and occupied it, when he made war against me, and Chemosh drove him out before me, and I took from Moab two hundred men in all, and placed them in Jahaz, and took it to annex it to Dibon.

I don’t know about you but I always find these intersections with secular history and the Bible to be fascinating!

Alright, now let’s get into today’s main topic: How to Be a Weird Bible Reader. This is part 2 of 3. If you didn’t receive part 1, you can catch yourself up right here:

Click here to read last week’s newsletter

Now let’s talk about the second principle you must hang onto if you want to be a Weird Bible Reader…

2. The Bible Means Exactly What it Says

When you read something weird in the Bible, you shouldn’t try to reinterpret it to mean something else.

Sometimes it would be too strange, embarrassing, or awkward to just take the Bible at its word. If the plain words of Scripture are just too bizarre to be taken literally, sometimes we simply “rewrite” the Bible in our heads and move on. Perhaps we rework it to match our “superior” 21st Century sensibilities.

But God doesn’t lie. God means what He says and chooses all His words carefully. And God isn’t embarrassed by a single one of them.

So when the Bible says a donkey spoke, it means a donkey spoke. Some Bible teachers will try to get around this fact. They’ll say, “The question isn’t whether a donkey actually spoke; the question is what can we learn from this story.” With all due respect- by which I mean, no respect- that is LAME.

LAME.

That’s as strong as a word as I’m going to use here. But I feel strongly about this: God said what He said for a reason. He doesn’t lie. We are not to approach the Bible like we would Aesop’s Fables or a nursery rhyme. These are true stories. And God isn’t embarrassed by a single one of them, so we shouldn’t be, either.

Yes, it’s important to find application in anything we learn. But that should be the last question we ask, not the first. Application is key, but we won’t get proper application unless we first do proper interpretation.

So yes, people got up out of their tombs and walked when Jesus died on the cross in Matthew 27:52. Yes, Jonah was legitimately inside a whale for three days, and then he was spat out on dry land, dusted himself off, and went back to work. Yes, a flood covered every inch of planet earth. God didn’t stutter, and He’s not writing fairy tales. The Bible means exactly what it says.

On the 90’s TV show The West Wing, a political drama, the characters had a phrase they often said about their president: “Let Bartlett Be Bartlett.” It meant: let him be himself and govern his own way- and not squeeze himself to fit anyone else’s mold.

We should approach the Word the same way. Let God be God, and let the Bible be the Bible.

And that brings us to the third key principle of how weird Bible readers should approach God’s Word, which we’ll cover in a forthcoming email…

Hope you can join me in the Youtube Bible study tonight, have a great week- and a weird Wednesday!

-Luke