SPEAKER_04 0:07

Welcome to Tech Support, the podcast of the Memphis of the Church of Christ, where we equip and encourage people to interact with the biblical text. We are your host, Tim Martin and Brian the Master.

SPEAKER_01 0:17

Welcome. We are doing something unique today. We are adding a camera. So if you're listening to us right now, we want you to know that if you want to watch this episode, you can head over to Tech Support YouTube channel or Spotify where you can see the video as well as uh you can stay with audio if you prefer as well. Today we're doing something brand new, Tim and I. Yeah, we got two. Yeah, we're just getting crazy. We also have a special guest with us. We have Stan Wilson uh with us today. He holds a PhD in biblical studies in the Old Testament, uh, and from Old Testament and Hebrew uh from Ambridge. He's also a minister of Christian formation over at Hendersonville Church of Christ. Uh one thing that I thought was cool that I wanted to add in here as well is Stan and his wife have been uh background extras in multiple seasons of The Chosen. Anything you want to add to that, Stan, before we jump in here?

SPEAKER_02 1:09

Oh man, you sure you want to open that door? Um We only got 45 minutes. Yeah, I'll just give you the thought. We'll get all the player. We'll get all the time. Uh you don't we don't have a single speaking line, we're not we're not movie stars. It is at our expense, so it is a ministry type donation situation. But let me tell you, the scriptures come alive in a way that is just unbelievable when you're when you're in that environment. Because it's it's recreating it, it's a situation where we're dressed in period dress, we're on set, you see a man that might be what Jesus looked like, you have the crowds, nobody has glasses, nobody has sunglasses, nobody has phones, nobody has anything that that would that would be anachronistic to the scene, and all of a sudden you're hearing the words of scripture and you're like, oh my goodness, this is probably what it felt like to be there.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah. Well, that's awesome. And y'all know one another as being, I guess you could say, co-workers to some degree, right? Yes.

SPEAKER_04 2:01

Coworkers and we're co-students at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 2:03

Yeah, we were in PhD classes together.

SPEAKER_04 2:05

Yeah, yeah. Sometimes when they made me go over to Old Testament type stuff.

SPEAKER_02 2:08

Made you, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Hey, we are continuing our series looking at decoded, where we want to look at a couple of different words that we see in scripture that we definitely often hear, but maybe we don't fully understand in the full context. So this is gonna be a two-part um kind of series here, uh, I guess you could say mini series. We're gonna look at Old Testament here in this episode with Stan, and then next week we're gonna be looking at sin in the New Testament. So, Stan, let's start with the basic. What is sin?

SPEAKER_02 2:37

What is sin? So we're gonna go with the kind of umbrella concept here. Um I would say that sin is when you know uh how to be, how to conduct yourself, how to represent God, and you don't. That would be my general Wilson definition. Um I've got seven words for you in Hebrew because that was the question. Oh, yeah. Yeah, go ahead. What is what is since you're gonna do that?

SPEAKER_01 3:03

Yeah, I was gonna ask you if you got different words maybe that we see in Hebrew, or is there just one main word?

SPEAKER_02 3:08

Well, there's one general word, hata, which is basically what we would say is sin. That that's uh it can mean intentional or unintentional, but there are nuances of sin in the Old Testament through the other Hebrew words, and so you've you've got a Hebrew word like Pesha that means uh a premeditated transgression. Um you have uh aeon, which is basically iniquity or crookedness, uh deceit, that type of thing. You have um uh sham, which is guilt, and also comes into the guilt offering. You have ra, which is the term for evil, um, which can be used in multiple ways, not always just about sin. It kind of is expanded uh beyond sin. And then you have uh toava, which is abomination, and you also have uh shagah, which is unintentional sin, where you didn't realize that you had made a transgression. So it's a little bit more difficult, but yet like we do oftentimes with biblical terms from the original languages, whether it be Hebrew or Greek, uh sometimes in English, like love, for example, we just use one word. And so sin becomes the catch-all word in English. But we all know, I think, that there are variations of sin. There's things like I mentioned, premeditated things that you've decided you were going to do. Uh there's bold sin where you know what you're getting ready to do, whether you premeditated it or not, is wrong and you've decided to push forward anyway. Um and we see different stories in the Old Testament that reflect all of those.

SPEAKER_01 4:41

From an English reader's perspective, obviously there's different layers to that, but if they approach, I guess, those different words, does it really I guess I'm wording that kind of poorly, but do they lose some of the meaning if they don't understand c some of the unique things that maybe each of those words mean?

SPEAKER_02 5:02

But like you guys say in your text support, you know, context is important. So the meaning comes back even if you're unaware of the nuances of the words once you read in context what's going on. I mean, for example, you have um early on in Genesis and creation, you've got disobedience in the garden, but everybody's aware that they don't have the law yet. So they haven't explicitly, as far as we know, been told do not do not steal, do not lie, do not covet, do not honor your father or mother. They haven't been told any of those things, right? But yet they knew what they were doing they shouldn't have done. So that's the nuance, is understanding the context, because then after the law is given in Exodus, now they have a different uh vocational assignment, which is to go and be the people of God and act like them in the world for the sake of the others, and they have certain things that if you're going to represent Yahweh, you're gonna do, and so sin gets expanded there because there's more things now that they're aware of that they should be doing in his representation.

SPEAKER_01 6:07

One thing that I found unique when studying with different people who didn't grow up in a Christian environment, the concept of sin can be difficult to understand. Where, like for me, I grew up in a Christian environment, so that was just something I always just knew as a part of my ethics and morality and things like that. And talking to people who don't have that, that can be a struggle to kind of understand how that comes into play and and who it impacts and who it doesn't. So I guess a follow-up question to that is like what maybe ingredients are required for sin to occur? Like you think of maybe in our circles, you may hear that term like age of accountability, or maybe you think of different people with different like learning capabilities. Like can you kind of speak to a little bit of that of like when does sin kind of like occur or not occur in the Old Testament based on people?

SPEAKER_04 6:58

Like when is maybe like guilt for that sin incurred? Yeah, yeah. There could be a difference. Like you might be at a certain age and you may do something wrong, but when is it that that begins to be incurred against you, maybe? Is that what you're asking? Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

Yeah. Well, I I understand what you're saying. And and while you were asking the question, I was thinking and sort of smiling at you at the same time, because I was thinking, you know, a lot of times what happens is people have the big sins that they're able to eradicate from their lives as they start following Jesus, right? So they start going into the area that we would call sanctification or transformation. Um they they don't have any urges or tendencies anymore, if they ever did, to do any of the things that are blatantly obvious. And so that people could get to the point where they think, well, maybe I'm not sinning. And the answer is no, you definitely are, because you're falling short, you're missing the mark of something that being a full image bearer of God would do. But you know, you're not killing people and you're not lying, hopefully, and you're not cheating, and you're not committing adultery, and you're not doing these other things. So you so you think, well, I'm I'm I'm doing pretty well. And that's where I think it gets slippery slope or trip trips people up, is because they're they look at their lives and think, I'm really a good person and I'm trying really hard, but then they fail to see that there is always something every day that Jesus would do differently than we choose to do. And that's our our arrow aiming at that bullseye target falling short, which is kind of the sort of the metaphor Paul used. But to your question about what ingredients are required for sin to exist or or occur, and you specifically said people with special needs, mental illness, age of accountability, knowledge of God, etc. Um, I was thinking through that earlier today, and I I wanted to just say this is a challenging topic to discuss, and it requires a lot of clarity, a lot of uh phraseology so that people understand and don't walk away with a misunderstanding of what's being said. I I think that Yahweh does not hold people accountable for what they cannot know. And then when we sit with that for a second and we think, well, does that mean that just an ignorant person then has a much easier time in life? Uh and and uh the concept of uh if you want to talk about judgment or whatever, I I'm not suggesting that people stay ignorant on purpose. I'm just saying that we're not we're all at different places on the journey, we're all at different places in our in our understanding, we're all at different places in our experience. God's the only one who knows all that. And he knows what we do know and what we don't know, and he also knows those who are seeking him versus those who are just kind of stagnant, right? And I think all of that comes into play even before we talk about things like what if somebody has a a learning disability. Um God is just and God is fair, and he's not gonna say, well, too bad that uh you're at a disadvantage, I'm still holding you at the same level of accountability as somebody who's not. And I think the scripture shows us that from Luke 8, 18, where Jesus Himself articulates the truth that if we receive his word and his teachings in such a way that we labor to understand them and we believe them and we cherish them and we live them and we make them part of our lives, then he'll give us more. And if we don't, then we might even lose what we had. So when you bring sin into that, uh I often tell people that unfortunately what we do is we know better and we choose not to do the better. And whenever that happens, either for uh complacency or for laziness or whatever it is, then we have fallen short of what a full representation of God would be. And there's plenty of stories for that, which we'll probably get to with some of your follow-in questions, but I'm thinking Jonah at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

Yeah, and I guess one of my questions, and you're kind of going there as well, is when people think about maybe the lack of knowledge and they maybe wrestle with not necessarily Israel, but those surrounding nations, like how do we how should we understand their relationship with God and some of that punishment that came their way?

SPEAKER_02 11:15

Yeah, that's a fair question. So Israel is interesting when you read the Old Testament closely, you find that Israel corporate is called the Son of God. It's mentioned in Hosea 11.1, it's it's mentioned in other places. And when you s you scratch your head and you say, Well, what does that mean? Well, that means that that group of people are his hands and feet, his embodiment in the world. And they're supposed to be representing him to all of creation for the sake of those in the surrounding nations that will come out and come back to him, right? So when you think about that responsibility, that's why they're to be a holy people, Leviticus says, God is holy, therefore you be holy. It's not that you'll be perfect because we won't. It's that we will be whole. That that word is, in my opinion, poorly translated into English, because people say, Oh, look, it says be perfect like God, we'll never be perfect. It means be whole like God, to be made up of everything that makes you a representative of Him, which is what they were charged to do. But what did they do? The story shows us that they looked around at the other other nations and they wanted to be more like them. They wanted a king, they wanted all the same things that they had. They followed after the gods of the other nations because they wanted the things that those nations said their gods gave them. They did anything but stand apart to be that example. So that that therefore is corporate sin compared to individual sin. Yet the singularity of the Son of God, it's sort of both and at the same time, because they took the covenantal oath that they were going to represent him. They were going to be a kingdom of priests and they were going to represent him to the rest of creation, and then in many ways they don't.

SPEAKER_04 13:03

Yeah, they kind of fell down. And I I think, you know, what you said earlier made me think about we definitely, for example, other nations, the Neo-Assyrians, the old Babylonians, whoever you want to assign, it wouldn't they certainly could be guilty of what we might call sin. I I think about like the Romans I indictment that hey, you started off even though you should have been able to see from my creation my divine nature and worship the true God, but you you didn't do that, and then as a result of you taking that step towards what we would call idolatry, you went off the wagon on all these other things, sexual immorality, all these other things. And so I don't think you were saying this earlier, but that they would still, just like people today, we would say, even though people that don't know the gospel, I do agree God is righteous and just I don't know how he's gonna handle people who've never, you know, the man on the deserted island who never heard the Bible. But also we do know that people even before Torah and and non-Israelite, non even descendants of Abraham, God said, you know, like in the days of Noah, you guys got off the wagon and you should have in had there's some inherent knowledge of him. They would not have known uh I'm not gonna move my neighbor's boundary marker or something, maybe specific rules, but there were things that that were against God and unholy, and God seems to indict them for that, uh, even though they were apart from the law. Any Gentile, even in the New Testament era, would be guilty of some of those things as well.

SPEAKER_02 14:32

Yeah, I mean you allude to a lot, uh, which is very helpful. I mean, you you think about Cain and Abel. You know, uh Cain is concerned about the people who will retaliate and kill him because he killed his brother. So there's this moral understanding that killing your brother is wrong, even though we don't see a a law yet that says that. But to your point, you go over into other places in the ancient Near East, you look at something like the Code of Hammurabi or something of that nature, and you see that they also understood things that were wrong. They also had ways to to mitigate that, but most of theirs were because the deities were were uh offended or somehow not uh not upheld the way they they thought they wanted to be. And a lot of times it was a a question of confusion, like they didn't know what they had done necessarily. They just realized that if some calamity happened to them, like a famine or back to Jonah, like the sailors on the ship, they go down to Jonah and they're like, okay, we've prayed to every God we know. We're crossing all these territories on a ship, which they thought gods were were connected to their territories. We must have forgotten one, and that's why there's this storm. Let's go down and see who that guy on the belly of the ship is, who his God is. Maybe he's got one we don't know, and maybe we need to ask that one about getting rid of this storm. And in a weird way, that's exactly how it goes. But Jonah's answer is throw me off the ship, because he's his God is the creator God that will that you know has all the territories, has everything. But the but the point is that a lot of times these other civilizations where they understood something like sin, they did not understand it in a covenantal relationship to representing the God. They just saw it as the gods angry with me about something, and therefore I've either been struck dead, or I have a famine, or I have uh some sort of earthquake or some natural disaster of some kind, and we've got to we've got to appease the gods for that and it'll go away.

SPEAKER_04 16:25

My understanding, too, in the ancient Near East was in some civilizations, like for example, you mentioned Hammurabi in the old Babylonian society, that the gods expected the king to regulate the people and and to keep them behave themselves. And I've told my classes often they didn't believe in adultery either because it messed up inheritance. If you didn't know that that was your son, if your wife had committed adultery, it really messed things up in an inheritance situation. But I'd always heard kind of the king was responsible to the deities for keeping order, stability, uh a good, stable society that was functional and people didn't hurt each other, and that and they worshiped the deities. I'd always understood the king was kind of the the responsible person to manage that. Is that a correct understanding? Yeah. Yeah, I think it is because the king was considered the son of whatever the deity was.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Like like Solomon is called a king of a son of God. Right. Solomon's called a son of God. Uh Ray is called the son of God in in Egypt. So there's there there is that that connection, but you know, now you're on to something very interesting that's even applicable to today, and that is that oftentimes we see people even in our time that they they try everything that they know, and what do they say? Well, we've tried everything. I guess we need to pray. Like the same thought process is we can handle it all with our king and with our representative and in our society until we can't. And then when we can't, then we need to look for a deity that's above us and break the glass.

SPEAKER_04 17:53

We break the glass and pull the fire.

SPEAKER_02 17:55

Right. And what Yahweh was inviting Israel to do is not that. He was inviting them to have him live with them and for it to be human flourishing in it to show the rest of the world what human is actually capable of being in relationship with the Creator. Instead of just, well, he's just the ultimate powerful God that we call on when we've exhausted all of our other op uh other options.

SPEAKER_04 18:18

When we need rain, we pray to Yahweh and it doesn't come, we will pray to Baal. Right. You know, we'll we'll keep we'll hedge our bits until we come along, but we may not humble ourselves before God and just plea to him, hey, we need you type thing.

SPEAKER_01 18:30

Right. So knowing Israel was different than the surrounding nations and their deities, how how did sin impact that relationship? What can we learn maybe about God and people through that interaction in the Old Testament? Um, focus name mainly on sin.

SPEAKER_02 18:48

So I think the short is uh sin separated us from God, right? He he can't it depends on who you ask and how they want to to verbalize it. But uh clearly when the disobedience happens in the garden, which is very interesting because you think about that scene and you think, why didn't they just say to the serpent, hang on a second, we got somebody we can ask, you know, and let's go let's go vet this and see if this is actually what we should do. No, they decided that they would decide for themselves, and they were enticed by you'll be like God. Well, interestingly, Yahweh does want us to be like him, but in his way, with his timing, not ours, right? And so in a very strange way, uh Tim mentioned idolatry earlier, they sort of they sort of uh put themselves in the place of idolatry because they made themselves sort of God to make the decision that they would take the advice of the serpent and that they would do that. And so when that happens, uh plus there's a whole bunch we don't have time to get into about the curse and and the ramifications of that in chapter three, but um when that happens, then they're separated from God, and really heaven and earth, if you go with like the Bible project view, um they're they're also they still have a uh what's it called, a Venn diagram. They still have some overlapping of heaven and earth with the tabernacle, with the temple, ultimately, obviously in Jesus, and now today I would would argue with the body of Christ and the world with the church, but they're still separated from what they will be and what they were, right? So Eden was this place where God walked in the cool of the night, and this other being that was clearly not human, whatever the serpent is, however you want to look at that, and like I said, we could talk about that for a long time, they're all in the same place because everything was connected together. Sin enters in my mind, and what I teach in in the Genesis class is it enters in both realms. The being that was also created by Yahweh that decided, nah, we're not gonna let this happen. We're not gonna let these humans be the ultimate imager of Yahweh, so we're gonna put an end to this. And they rebel. So they've sinned. So there's sin in the unseen realm, there's sin in the visible realm with Adam and Eve, and so now you have this separation that occurs, and that's really the overarching and probably biggest um damage from sin itself. But then you also have one of one of your questions, and I think you're maybe alluding to it in what you sent me ahead of time, um, is corporate versus individual, right? And just when we think we've got things figured out, right, you you're reading along in scripture and you're saying, well, I don't know that I've seen that before, or if I saw it, I either forgot about it or I didn't study it closely enough. You know, you go to Joshua, and we have the success at Jericho, and the conquest is taking place, and God's giving them the land that he promised. And then in chapter seven, they lose. They go into Ah and they don't they don't know what happens. And Joshua's face down in front of God praying, you know, why have you brought us out here and not been with us and whatever? And God says the most interesting thing. In verse seven. And 11, he says two interesting things. He says, uh, Israel has sinned, he says in eleven. And I think in seven he says something to the effect of um Israel has he he has burning anger against Israel because they have sinned. And you're thinking, well, what did they do? Well, Achan disobeyed and took some of the spoils of the winnings of the battle of Jericho that were supposed to be reserved for Yahweh and took them and put them in his tent. But because he's a member of Israel and it's the singular son of God as the people group who represent Yahweh, they're all they're all tarnished, they're all guilty. So really, when when you guys asked me the question in the email, is sin individual or is it corporate? I just put yes.

SPEAKER_04 22:45

Because it because it is splatters on everybody with a corporate sense of Israel.

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Yeah. Um and so they just weren't taking their uh job description seriously, which you know we teach at another university I teach for. We teach that vocation is actually the same for all of us. We are image bearers of God that we are supposed to represent Yahweh to the creation and to everyone we meet and what we do and what we say, right? And then we have blessings of occupation. Some of us can, you know, do numbers, and some of us can do science, and some of us can do um, you know, whatever it is uh that that you've been blessed with. And God often says, Yeah, I've equally gifted you with both of these things. You pick, either one's fine. Just do it as my representative when you're doing it. And that keeps people from losing their identity when they quote unquote retire. Because I I don't know about you guys, but I've seen people who retire and then they have no idea who they are because they've been this thing their entire life that is defined by really an occupation. But if we're defined by our vocation, which is an image bearer of God, which is what y'all Yahweh asked Israel to do, then you never lose that identity. Because it's never been about what talent you had or what skill you had, especially in the fallen brokenness that we're in now, where maybe you start out as a young person and you're really good at something, and then as you get older, that decreases, right? But you never are less than the image of God. Actually, as we get older, hopefully we're wiser and transformed more and more sanctified, and we're actually more like Christ than we were when we were younger. So they missed all that. They don't understand that it's not just between me and God. It's between me and God on whether or not uh how I answer the question of who do you who do I say Jesus is? Yeah, that that's up to me. But community-wise, we're all supposed to be working together, which is why Paul uses the metaphor of the body with the foot not telling the eye or the hand or the ear that we don't need them, right? And all of a sudden, the Bible starts to make a whole lot more sense, and dots get connected, and points in the Old Testament seem to highlight things that make the New Testament make more sense. And sin does change and yet it never contradicts. Like we've we've hinted all around it today. It started with things that we can point to and say, well, they didn't have a rule, but they knew that disobedience was wrong. But then by the time we get over to Paul in Romans, and he says, Well, I wouldn't have known what covetousness was unless the law told me what it was, and now I realize I covet, you know. So clearly sin gets expanded, but it's always the same thing, which is something that keeps us from being in fellowship and in community with with God.

SPEAKER_01 25:36

Yeah, and I'm glad you brought that up because I wanted to get there, because I think the idea of corporate sin is sometimes hard for people to understand today because we live so individualistically as a society, but also spiritually to some degree. Like, well, if Tim messes up, like that's that has no idea. Like, yeah, that's yeah, not my problem, or even family members and stuff like that. So it you I think you alluded to this a little bit. Is there still kind of that idea in the New Testament carried over, or more just the identity of being part of a community?

SPEAKER_02 26:08

Like, I think there's still uh I still think that's carried over. Um probably would have to to for detail go to the city.

SPEAKER_04 26:16

Yeah, I would think about like First Corinthians. When like I think Paul looks at the whole group as guilty because of the person who is sleeping with I hope his stepmother, you know, that there's a sexual sin going on and you guys tolerate it. So they're they're painted under this guilty brush, and I think it's like he said, we do think so individualistically in the West. Whereas even today in the East, there's much more of a community mind that all of us, you know, the honor, the shame that we have, it brings it on our neighbors, like Aikensin contaminated a community of tens of thousands because of one guy, maybe even hundreds of thousands really, because of one guy. I think we still see that, and we think about the letters to the churches. Not everybody in there was always guilty. Like I think about even in Revelation Laodicea. Was everybody there guilty of those wrongs? But everybody gets lumped into things, and we we we don't think about the church as a community. And in many ways, many of our sins today, even uh adultery, which is very personal, can affect so many people around you and hurt the community and the family, and even hurt the church's reputation, or lying, or whatever that may wind up being. And so I think we've lost that, but I think that it does continue essentially in a very community-minded, a very kinship-minded world of the New Testament, just like it was uh in the Old Testament, even though it's m much more strictly confined to one group of people.

SPEAKER_02 27:43

Yeah, I agree. I don't know if you were thinking, Brian, while he was saying that. Remember when we were in school and teacher'd come in and chastise the class about something, and you're like, oh man, did I do that? You know, and you're sitting there and thinking, wait a minute, I didn't do that.

SPEAKER_03 27:56

I always guilty I was the guy, Barrix, that made everybody do push it.

SPEAKER_02 28:02

Yeah, well, so that was the I was always sitting there trying to trying to think if I had actually done it or not. And then yet you still to your point, I mean my mouth should be my mouth shit. That was an easy answer for you.

SPEAKER_03 28:12

I wasn't narking out my friends and I wouldn't volunteering uh uh volunteering that I had done it.

SPEAKER_02 28:16

But I just think that what happens with your question is that we because we're in the I generation, iPhone, I this, I that, me, me, me, you know, uh uh individualistic. And and you'll hear people say, well, that you know, that you do you, I do me. That's between you and God, and God and I have my um our own thing. But to some extent that's true. Yeah, you know, I can't I can't do something to save you. You know, you need to agree to believe in him and be saved yourself, right? But iron sharpens iron. There's gotta be there's gotta be some reason for us to be in community. And then I you can't represent God by yourself any more than I can, right? It's all of us, it's the world. I I saw something the other day, I've forgotten exactly what it was now, but all the denominations were coming together for something. They were in support of a concert or something that was going on. And somebody said, you know what? I I I think the most impressive thing about that is the watching world goes, wait a minute. All those people who don't agree on Sunday and go to their respective buildings, did something together, and they got along, and they're like, wow, now I'm interested. You know, that's that's different because and I think I think that's why you've got to have other people, because we all are equipped differently and we can't represent God singularly.

SPEAKER_04 29:39

We all have responsibility. I think about like even the Shema. We got to teach our children. I don't know that you know that's not just on coming up on parents, that's upon everybody. And even like when when in Titus, older men teach younger men, older women teach younger women. There's always a village it takes a village to raise a Christian or it takes a village to raise a person of God. And so uh I'm glad you mentioned that.

SPEAKER_01 30:01

Um and being able to think in a community mindset. This question I have, I don't think we alluded to it beforehand, so you can pass on it if you want.

SPEAKER_03 30:11

This is unfair.

SPEAKER_02 30:12

Or we can hit pause. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 30:15

But my question is as I think about Israel and kind of like their closeness to God, but then there's periods of times where it seems like they've completely forgotten about the law. Is there anything that we can kind of grasp from their history of did their understanding of sin drastically change throughout the Old Testament, or is it pretty much the same as just their willingness to be faithful or not?

SPEAKER_02 30:42

Well, it might be a little bit more complicated than just an either or, right? There is a period of time where they seem to have forgotten about the law because it's rediscovered, right? And then they're like, hey, look, we found the book of the law, and then and then they realize that they haven't had a Day of Atonement for uh decades. I can't remember off top of my own.

SPEAKER_04 31:03

You're talking about Josiah and Yokaiah Financial.

SPEAKER_02 31:05

Yeah, I can't remember off topic of the yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:09

It's been decades, yeah. If not more.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

And I think that does I understand your question, but I'm gonna turn it around. I think that I think the first thing it shows us is the faithfulness of God to us, right? Yeah. Because he could have done something during those decades and been like, hey, you know, one more time and you guys one more time and this is all off. You know, so he so that's that's interesting. But number two is that does it does sin change? No, um and yes. You know, no, it doesn't change, it it doesn't contradict, it doesn't change the f the the general definition of what it is. But uh the closeness or the distance from God, I think, points to the the type of sh shortcoming or falling that the people were doing, right? They they wanted you go back to go back to Samuel, they wanted a king like the other nations. And what did God tell them? You this is not gonna go well for you. You know, he's gonna take your sons and enlist them in the in the military, he's gonna take your daughters and move them into the courts, he's going to tax you, he's gonna do all these other things you don't really want, and they want to do that anyway. And the patience of God to let all of that play out is what you're really saying in that in that span. And then ironically, when they finally get back on track, they think, you know, you go over to to um Ezra and Nehemiah, and you start reading about they rebuilt the temple and the Shechaniah doesn't come back, the presence of God doesn't fill the the Holy of Holies, and they're like, What what now? Because it's it's already been foretold or prophesied that one's coming with the Messiah in the future, and they don't, you know, they don't understand that. So I don't know that I would say that uh well I do know that I would say that sin didn't didn't change by definition, but it might have changed in its nuance of expression, if that makes sense. Because when I was doing some of the seven words that we went through at the beginning of the episode, I I went and found an interesting thing. Not all seven, but five, four or five of them occur in the first four verses of Psalm 51. David sits there and says, You know, uh, I have sinned by intention, I've sinned by omission, I'm a sinful person, and uh I'm guilty. And, you know, it's comparing it's comparing him and his actions to God's Hesed, which is his faithfulness and his uh steadfast love and his mercy, and you know, there's just so many English words that fit into that term because that's his character. And it's fascinating that that those Hebrew words for the nuances of what sin is and the variations of those, the shading of those, is all written in basically one description. And then he says, You know, please don't take your Holy Spirit from me. Um I'm a sinful person, but he's he's repenting and he's asking for forgiveness. And they do all of that as a people. They just do it over the span of like, what, two thousand years, right?

SPEAKER_01 34:09

Yeah. And part of why I asked that question, I was thinking back to what you said earlier when you're talking about their surrounding nations and sometimes their influence over Israel. I just wonder at at what point do they lose sight of some of what sin is in that personal relationship with God to some degree, as opposed to, oh, just trying to maybe please God per se.

SPEAKER_04 34:30

But seem not to care, maybe it's what you know when we were talking earlier about Josiah and the discovery of the law. But the the idolatry continued. You know, we think about the the failure. I often say if you look at the New Testament, the one sin that the Jews do not commit is idolatry. They they stay away from anything. We're not gonna eat food sacrificed idols, we're not gonna eat somebody's house that's an idolatry. I think they learned their lesson from their forefathers, but it seems to be in the in the Hebrew scriptures that there just becomes a a a callousness to it. I just I don't care we're gonna continue to to do these things, even though they may not have had or had been carrying on like they're supposed to, teaching their children the law generation after generation. I I do think that we could assume that the existence of Yahweh is the one true God was something that would have been talked about. And like I said, I don't always say the guy out there plowing the field uh in in North Israel was as guilty of sin as you know Jeroboam would have been. You know, he may have just been going through his day every day and just taking care of business and not he wasn't uh committing sin. But we do see even the rural areas, they they move over to what I call syncretism. They may not have abandoned Yahweh worship, but they tried to coalesce it with the worship of other deities and things along the way. And so uh it seems to be just like a maybe just an indifference uh to that, and maybe they maybe over generation after generation after generation that they just began to be apathetic about it.

SPEAKER_02 36:03

Well, you're on to something interesting now, because you're you're switching sort of over to monotheism, you know, thought process, and yet all throughout the Bible, and I would say this is really painful to say today in 2026, but um it's all it seems like like like think about the golden calf situation. What do they say? They say these are the gods. Now what who? Well, a lot of a lot of scholars think that one of those in the plural that he's saying is Yahweh, and then there's another one that that helped, you know, the cow, the the calf, which would have been reminiscent or or uh representative of other things. And if you go forward and you think about, well, well, yeah, and uh Rachel sat on the household gods and told Laban that she didn't know where they were, right? And that then there was another thing. So it's interesting that seems to be what happens is Yahweh's not enough. It's got to be Yahweh and and if we think about that, then there's a lot of opportunity for sin there, right? Because it should be Yahweh is enough. It should be Jesus plus nothing, right, for our salvation, not Jesus plus I also need this, I'll also need that. And I'm not gonna say the things because I might offend somebody listening to this or watching this, because they may not be at a point yet where from the Old Testament and the New Testament they could see some of the things we have today that are not gods, they're not deities, but we hold on to them as importantly as we do Yahweh and Jesus, right? And I think that's what you're pointing out to they did in the Old Testament. They weren't they weren't fully bought in to Yahweh being enough. And if you look at the story, it stayed that way all the way to when the religious leaders in the New Testament should have been the ones that recognized Jesus and they were the very ones who didn't see who he was.

SPEAKER_04 37:59

I always try to think it maybe it's henotheism. I try to think about where you you you're not polytheistic, but you have like this integration of your different gods uh in the way they think about it. I like how you put it towards modern day application as well. Um But sometimes it just gets so ingrained, like you talked about the leaders of Israel should have recognized Jesus. But Paul didn't. And I would say Paul is someone who even looks at himself as blameless according to law, but he just was blinded to it maybe because he had so much presupposition of what this Messiah was going to do and in that nature, and and then he looks at himself as a sinner because he persecuted the church. But he didn't look at himself as a sinner in in in Acts chapter eight. And so he he would he would have thought himself a good person until after nine, then that's right. There was a certain point in nine wake-up call.

SPEAKER_01 38:49

Uh this is not a natural flow next question, but something I want us to capture before we uh run out of time here. When we think about sin and it breaking different like laws and commandments of God in the Old Testament, is there anything that we can kind of point to and be like, in our human minds, this is logical, or these are reasons why God said to do X, Y, and Z? Or do are they random, or is it just one of those like his ways are higher than our ways? Um, because I know sometimes people wrestle with that of like, okay, I I may understand why God says, well, you can't have other gods, but why some of these other rules that maybe is about I guess keeping peace as a society, or you know, like, or you gotta do this in the Holy of Holies, or you know, like all that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_04 39:39

I think about the dietary laws. I hear Jews would say, we just, you know, there's all kinds of Christians that talk about why he didn't do a dietary law is because of food-borne bacteria and all that. Jews simply say, he told us not to eat those things and we're not gonna eat them. You know, we don't have to have a reason. The reason is God said don't eat them.

SPEAKER_02 39:55

Well, I I don't have it right readily off top of my head, but even to that, to what Tim's saying, some of those things that they didn't eat was because some of the people groups that they're trying to show their distinctiveness as followers of Yahweh did eat those things, and those things could have been used in things that are not representative of God. It was never about it was never actually about the you know, you can't eat shrimp. You know, it was not that the the the shrimp all of a sudden after Jesus become somehow different creatures and now we can eat them. It was who was eating the shrimp and why not eating the shrimp was making them more distinct of the other cultures. But that's just on the food laws, but but no, it was never random. It was never random. It was always it was always purposeful that, you know, think about the first charge to Adam and Eve. Go out, be fruitful and multiply, and subdue the chaos and extend Eden basically over the rest of the globe, is what they're supposed to do. And they didn't do it. We don't know exactly how long they made it. Some people think that was just a few days, other people think it was a long time. I don't I don't really know. But they only made it two chapters into the into what we have this day.

SPEAKER_04 41:04

That's right.

SPEAKER_02 41:05

Yeah, they didn't make it very far. And so you you had that command, which was supposed to be subdue the chaos, it was supposed to be be agents of of Yahweh, be representatives of Yahweh, be the priest, be the interface between everything else and Yahweh, because we are the ones who represent him the most out of everything that he's made, right? And all of that was supposed to be to, if you look at the minor prophets, it was supposed to be about his justice and his love and um human flourishing and for the for the good of the people. So the problem is we come along and think that certain things, somebody said this to me yesterday, the things that we don't want to do the most are the things that would actually help us the most, usually. The laws and the things that God put there weren't put there as just tests. They were put there for our good. And if we had followed those, we would find that the life on the other side of doing those would be better than the life we think if we're in control that we would get to. And sin messed all that up because um I would say back to your individual individualistic society of today, people now fully believe that if they're in the driver's seat, up until the point that they've got to reach out because they're approaching death or there's something out of their capabilities, um, they know better than than any of this ancient literature could tell them, right? But really nothing's changed. The more we've moved, I uh in my in my dissertation work, I did this example on the introduction. Um we think, unfortunately, a lot of people think, that people in the Bible, like a uh like an Adam or an Abraham or a Moses even, that they just weren't that smart. Like we're so much smarter than them. But really, I don't think that's true. I think if you take us out of our context, we're equally pretty much the same. Because the things that they think we're smarter on are because we have technology and because we have all this understanding of things like the cells that are inside us in space, and we've got side lights flying around us right now, and and all this the internet that people are listening to this and watching this on, right? So therefore we've got to be smarter. But when you think about it, the world on this side of the cross is different than the world on their side of the cross. And so I I in my dissertation I pulled I suggested that somebody pull out their cell phone and say, now try to explain this thing to Abraham. I can talk to anybody on the planet anytime I want to. Invisible things come through the air and I can see people on this. I can get messages from people. They have no idea. But we know that that thing is just as real as the things that were real to him that we say hogwash, boulder dash to, because we're we think we're so far removed it couldn't happen, right? Like these other gods and these other things we're talking about in in the Old Testament. But you've got to get, you've got to get to Colossians 2 15. You've got to get to what Jesus accomplished on the cross when he said it's finished, and then he says in Matthew 28, now all authority in heaven and earth has been given to him. That means that the authority wasn't totally his before, and the world has now changed. So sure, on our side, we're looking at things that we don't see thankfully happening anymore, and we're saying they were that was just that was just their immature, uneducated way to try to explain what was going on. No, that was reality for them, just like our phones are reality for us, but our phones would never be reality for them. And that's how far apart we are. And I think that is one of the reasons that even though the concepts don't change, sin changes its its transportation method. Now we sin through technology and the internet and what we shouldn't be watching and what we shouldn't be doing and whatever else and how we get in arguments with people on the internet. And I saw that this morning. Maybe one of the things that does more damage to Christianity is Christians getting on the internet thinking that they're going to prove their point, which makes other people just say, I don't want to have anything to do with them. Well, they didn't have the internet. They did that same problem and sinned that way some other way, right? Before the telephone and the and the internet and satellites and all that, if I if you're following anything that I'm saying here. But the sin is still the same. Disunity, uh uh slander, gossip. They can still do those things. They just did them in a less technical way than we do. Right.

SPEAKER_04 45:25

You can cyberbully now and it hurts other people. And that's what a lot of God's you were asking earlier. A lot most of God's laws, we think about what Jesus summarized them in. Yep. I'm either honoring God or I'm loving my neighbor. And everything kind of goes into that bucket of things. Uh, we had a question in class yesterday about covetousness and what it meant. I was like, well, i y you want something else that your neighbor has, and it's not that I want something like my neighbor has. In a limited resources environment, I want what he has, his wife, his donkey, whatever whatever it is. Right. Not that I want a donkey like his now at the donkey dealership. I I want it I want his donkey, but that's going to hurt him because it's going to take away from his ability to conduct his life.

SPEAKER_02 46:05

Which that's really fascinating. Because you know, Jesus comes along and says a phrase that we always need to pay attention to, which is you have heard it said. Which he's referring to Old Testament. By the way, his Bible was the Hebrew Bible, right? Um and then he does something with it. Like you've heard it said that you should not, you should not commit adultery. And then he says, But I tell you, you know, you shouldn't even look upon somebody else and have lust in your heart for them because it's the equal thing. Well, until you just said that, I'd never thought about covetousness as kind of the precursor to stealing.

SPEAKER_04 46:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 46:35

You've decided with limited resources, I want that thing that you have. And if I actually act on it, I would say I've stolen it. But even if I haven't act on it, I shouldn't even I shouldn't even want the thing that you have. Shouldn't even desire.

SPEAKER_04 46:47

So it was there the whole time. Because I'm mentally going I I'm doing something in my mind that's going to hurt my neighbor. Right. In thinking through that. And and I know Jesus may have been putting a hedge around the law and some things that he was teaching, but anyway, I think that was just fascinating. I know we're running short on time, Brian.

SPEAKER_01 47:01

Yeah, Stan, I appreciate you joining us. We like to wrap up with kind of one closing thought. So it may be one thing that jumps out to you, or it may be answering this question what's one thing you wish people understood a little bit more about sin in the Old Testament? Sixty seconds, you got it.

SPEAKER_04 47:17

Well, this is your legacy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 47:20

Hope not. Um I would just say, you know, sort of repetitively, I know, but sin is falling short of what God and the Holy Spirit have led us to see and how we should how we should conduct ourselves, how we should love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbors, ourselves, as Tim just said. And when we choose not to do that, or if we are ignorant and don't realize we're not doing it, but we're not seeking out more, you know, knock and you shall the door shall be open to you, seek and you will find. But you have to do those things. You have to knock and you have to seek. And he will get he will reveal more and more to you, which will, which will quicken your sanctification. But if we're just stagnant and we're just sitting here going, well, I'm not doing the big things, but I'm not really interested in trying to actually follow my rabbi and to become more and more and more of him, then that and that in and itself is sin because we're we're stopping our transformational process. So great thought to end on.

SPEAKER_01 48:21

To our fellow students of Scripture, thank you for joining us for tech support.

SPEAKER_00 48:25

We hope you will join us next week. This is a podcast of the Mount Juliet Church of Christ. You can find more personal growth resources like this one at mountjuat.org slash resources. The Mount Juliet Church of Christ exists to glorify God and make disciples by helping people grow in Christ, love one another, and serve others.