Latest / Reformed Thinking / Serving the One Master Reading Scripture Without Western Cultural Blinders

Transcript

Serving the One Master Reading Scripture Without Western Cultural Blinders · Reformed Thinking

• 0:00
  Imagine for a second that you you walk into a room and you're
• 0:03
  wearing a pair of bright yellow tinted sunglasses.
• 0:06
  OK, I'm picturing it. Right.
• 0:08
  So you sit down, you start reading a book, maybe you strike
• 0:11
  up a conversation with someone across the table, and you know
• 0:13
  you stay in that room for hours. Eventually your brain does this
• 0:17
  fascinating biological trick where it completely color
• 0:20
  corrects your vision. Oh, right.
• 0:22
  Yeah, your eyes just adjust. Yeah.
• 0:24
  You forget you even have the glasses on.
• 0:26
  You look around and you just assume the walls, the furniture,
• 0:29
  the light coming through the window.
• 0:31
  You assume the room itself is naturally inherently yellow.
• 0:34
  Because that's all you can see. Spot on.
• 0:36
  Welcome to Reformed thinking. Today you, the listener, are
• 0:39
  taking a seat at the table with us for a deep dive.
• 0:42
  As we attempt to, well, take off those glasses, we are looking at
• 0:46
  a stack of analytical sources concerning how our modern
• 0:49
  Western cultural filters completely obscure the original
• 0:52
  meaning of ancient biblical texts.
• 0:55
  And it is a massive issue. It really is.
• 0:57
  We all have these yellow glasses on when we read, and the mission
• 1:00
  of this deep dive today is to unmask the hidden cultural
• 1:03
  assumptions that color how you read.
• 1:06
  We want to see how our modern obsessions with money, status,
• 1:10
  and the nuclear family twist what these texts were actually
• 1:13
  saying, allowing the ancient texts to critique modern culture
• 1:17
  rather than the other way around.
• 1:18
  That analogy of the tinted glasses is, I mean, it's a
• 1:21
  brilliant starting point for what we are looking at today.
• 1:24
  When sociologists or historians look at human behavior, they
• 1:27
  often talk about the concept of mores.
• 1:29
  No worries, the morphase. Like the Folkways?
• 1:31
  Yeah. Exactly.
• 1:32
  Well, I should say precisely. Mores are those unquestioned
• 1:36
  societal folkways and basic moral assumptions of a society
• 1:39
  that are so heavily baked into a community that they go entirely
• 1:42
  without being said. They are the rules of society
• 1:45
  that you inhale like oxygen from your earliest childhood.
• 1:48
  Wow. Yeah, like breathing.
• 1:49
  Right. A fish does not know it is wet,
• 1:51
  and a human being rarely knows the specific cultural air they
• 1:55
  are breathing. The danger here, especially when
• 1:58
  it comes to reading ancient sacred texts, is a theological
• 2:01
  trap called isagesis. Isagesis, which is basically the
• 2:06
  opposite of exogesis, yes. Spot on.
• 2:08
  It is the practice of reading your own cultural norms, your
• 2:12
  own yellow tint into the text, rather than pulling the author's
• 2:16
  actual intent out of it. We project our modern standard
• 2:20
  onto the page, and then, you know, we pat ourselves on the
• 2:22
  back when the text seemingly agrees with our modern
• 2:25
  sensibilities. Right, and that is what makes
• 2:27
  this so difficult to catch. I keep coming back to those
• 2:30
  sunglasses. How do we even begin to spot
• 2:33
  these invisible lenses if they're all we have ever known?
• 2:36
  It's incredibly hard. I mean, if a western reader is
• 2:39
  trained by post Enlightenment rationalism to view the world in
• 2:43
  rigid scientific categories, or say, trained by a capitalist
• 2:47
  society to view certain economic behaviors as normal and good,
• 2:51
  we're going to look at a 1st century document and completely
• 2:54
  misunderstand the instructions on the.
• 2:55
  Page Oh, entirely. We read it through our filter
• 2:58
  that the original author could never have imagined.
• 3:00
  So where do we even begin? To start spotting these lenses,
• 3:03
  we have to look at the most prominent idol of the modern
• 3:06
  West. We have to look at money and we
• 3:08
  have to look at the concept of allegiance.
• 3:10
  OK, money. That's a big one.
• 3:12
  It is. If we turn to the Gospel of
• 3:14
  Matthew chapter 6, verses 19 through 24, we find the famous
• 3:19
  passage where Christ commands his followers not to lay up
• 3:22
  treasures on earth. And he concludes that thought by
• 3:26
  stating that no man can be a slave to 2 masters.
• 3:30
  OK, I'm going to stop you right there because I want to be
• 3:32
  honest about how I, and probably most of our listeners naturally
• 3:36
  read that text. Go for it.
• 3:38
  When a modern Westerner hears Do not lay up treasures on Earth,
• 3:42
  we immediately shrink the scope. We really do.
• 3:44
  We think of private budgeting advice.
• 3:46
  We think of a financial advisor telling us to diversify our
• 3:50
  portfolio, or maybe a gentle nudge from the pulpit to put an
• 3:54
  extra $20 in the offering plate. It feels like a polite
• 3:57
  suggestion to prioritize spiritual things over material
• 4:00
  things. Polite suggestion, yes.
• 4:03
  But looking at the historical record of the sources we have,
• 4:05
  that is a massive under reading of the text is it not?
• 4:08
  It is a staggering under reading.
• 4:10
  It completely ignores the historical realities of 1st
• 4:13
  century wealth. Jesus delivered the Sermon on
• 4:15
  the Mount to people living under heavy Roman occupation.
• 4:18
  Right, they weren't sitting in a suburban living room.
• 4:20
  Not at all. In that world, wealth was not a
• 4:24
  number on a digital screen. It was not a four O 1K that
• 4:27
  compounded in the background while you slept.
• 4:29
  Wealth was tied directly to a brutal patronage system.
• 4:34
  A patronage system? How did that work?
• 4:36
  Well, the Roman elites gained their advantage through
• 4:39
  cooperation with imperial structures, taxing the lower
• 4:42
  classes into oblivion for the peasants, the fishermen, the
• 4:45
  widows sitting on that hillside listening to Jesus, they lived
• 4:49
  with a level of insecurity that modern Westerners can barely
• 4:52
  comprehend. Just constant vulnerability.
• 4:54
  Exactly. In a highly unstable agrarian
• 4:57
  society, physical treasure meant actual food, land, honor, and
• 5:02
  literal protection from starvation or debt slavery.
• 5:05
  Money was a concrete social reality.
• 5:07
  It was a master that commanded unquestioned allegiance because
• 5:10
  your physical survival depended on it.
• 5:12
  So when Jesus talks it's about earthly treasure being destroyed
• 5:16
  by moth, rust and thieves, He is not just giving a quaint
• 5:20
  metaphor. No, he's not.
• 5:22
  He is using terrifying realities for that specific audience.
• 5:25
  Precisely. In the ancient Near East, your
• 5:28
  clothing was a primary form of currency.
• 5:31
  If you had wealth, you wore it or you buried it in the dirt
• 5:34
  under your house. Buried your clothes?
• 5:36
  Yes, or your precious metals. The Greek words used their
• 5:40
  describe the literal decay of garments by moths.
• 5:43
  The corrosion of metals or stored grain and the physical
• 5:47
  breaking in of thieves. In fact, the word for thieves
• 5:50
  breaking in literally translates to digging through because
• 5:54
  thieves would dig through the mud brick walls of a peasant's
• 5:57
  house to steal whatever was hidden inside.
• 5:59
  Oh wow. Literally digging through the
• 6:01
  walls. Yeah, Jesus is addressing the
• 6:03
  human hoarding impulse. The fallen human heart attempts
• 6:06
  to secure itself through accumulation.
• 6:08
  You hoard because you are trying to guarantee your own future in
• 6:11
  a dangerous world. You're trying to build a
• 6:13
  fortress against vulnerability. That makes so much sense.
• 6:16
  But then the text shifts and Jesus uses a fascinating
• 6:20
  anatomical metaphor. He talks about the eye being the
• 6:23
  lamp of the body. Wait, I need to push back on
• 6:26
  this, or at least admit my own confusion here.
• 6:28
  Sure, whenever I have read that part about the bad eye in
• 6:31
  Matthew, I automatically assumed it meant looking at sinful
• 6:34
  things. I assumed it was a warning about
• 6:37
  lust or maybe watching terrible things on the Internet.
• 6:39
  Which is how almost everyone reads it today.
• 6:42
  Right. Are you telling me this entire
• 6:44
  passage about the eye is strictly about money and
• 6:47
  economics? How did we lose that
• 6:49
  translation? That is a perfect example of the
• 6:52
  yellow sunglasses. We read our modern
• 6:54
  individualistic, moralistic concerns into the text, but we
• 6:58
  have to look at the ancient Jewish idioms.
• 7:00
  Idioms like what? Well, in the biblical vernacular
• 7:03
  of the 1st century, a healthy or single eye was a well known
• 7:07
  idiom for generosity and an undivided intention to bless
• 7:10
  others. Really.
• 7:12
  Generosity. Yes, and a bad or evil eye was a
• 7:16
  specific idiom for envy, greed, and a stingy disposition.
• 7:21
  You can see this in the Old Testament in places like
• 7:23
  Proverbs, where it talks about a man with an evil eye hastening
• 7:26
  after wealth. The heart's treasure dictates
• 7:29
  moral perception. So it's about how you see the
• 7:31
  world financially. Spot on.
• 7:33
  A person ruled by money does not just make a wrong choice while
• 7:36
  seeing the situation clearly. They actually see the situation
• 7:39
  wrongly because they love the wrong thing.
• 7:41
  Their internal categories are darkened.
• 7:43
  This is blowing my mind a bit. So if your eye is bad, if you
• 7:47
  have this stingy hoarding disposition, you look at a
• 7:50
  situation of aggressive hoarding and you do not see greed at all.
• 7:53
  You look in the mirror and you see wisdom, you see prudence,
• 7:56
  you see a person being fiscally responsible.
• 7:59
  That's it. The darkness within you relabels
• 8:01
  your sin as a virtue. And that brings us to the climax
• 8:04
  of the passage, the total impossibility of dual
• 8:07
  allegiance. The text states you cannot
• 8:10
  submit to both God and Mammon. Mammon being wealth.
• 8:13
  Right, and the grammar of the Greek text here points to the
• 8:16
  literal legal reality of human bondage.
• 8:20
  The term behind this concept belongs strictly to the language
• 8:23
  of slavery. A slave in the 1st century Roman
• 8:25
  Empire did not freelance between different owners.
• 8:29
  You couldn't just have a side hustle.
• 8:30
  No, you could not work 20 hours a week for one Lord and 20 hours
• 8:34
  a week for another. Rival masters make rival total
• 8:37
  claims on your life. Mammon is wealth personified as
• 8:41
  a false God, a claimant to your loyalty.
• 8:44
  It demands everything. Yes, it promises you the
• 8:47
  security and comfort that only God can actually provide, but in
• 8:51
  return it demands your trust, your fear, and your total
• 8:54
  obedience. This is where the Western blind
• 8:56
  spot becomes blindingly obvious. Oh, completely.
• 8:59
  Our culture treats ambition and aggressive wealth accumulation
• 9:03
  as entirely neutral or more often as highly virtuous traits.
• 9:07
  The covetous person in our society really feels covetous,
• 9:10
  as you said they call their hoarding wisdom.
• 9:12
  They get praised for it. We write entire books praising
• 9:15
  people for their aggressive accumulation to capital.
• 9:18
  We invite billionaires to speak at leadership conferences to
• 9:21
  teach us how to be just like them.
• 9:23
  We idolize the very thing Jesus called a rival God.
• 9:27
  And we bring that specific capitalist cultural lens right
• 9:30
  to the biblical text. A modern reader will take the
• 9:34
  absolute total claim of Christ and reduce it down to a minor
• 9:38
  adjustment in their personal finances.
• 9:40
  We think, well, I will just balance God and Mammon.
• 9:42
  I will give a percentage to God and I will let Mammon dictate
• 9:45
  the rest of my life. We domesticate it.
• 9:47
  We do, but the text says balancing them is biologically
• 9:50
  and spiritually impossible. You will hate the one and love
• 9:53
  the other. If our culture treasures
• 9:56
  individual autonomy and financial independence above all
• 9:58
  else, passages condemning greed or demanding radical generosity
• 10:02
  will seem incredibly harsh to us.
• 10:04
  Or we will just explain them away as metaphors.
• 10:06
  So what does this mean for a modern congregation?
• 10:09
  If our cultural eye is bad, does that mean we confidently mistake
• 10:13
  our own darkness for light? Tragically, yes.
• 10:16
  I mean, we police certain sins extremely loudly.
• 10:19
  We will excommunicate someone for a sexual scandal and a
• 10:22
  heartbeat, but we entirely ignore economic vanity.
• 10:26
  We would never dream of confronting someone for blatant,
• 10:29
  unrepentant greed. We just asked them to join the
• 10:32
  Finance Committee. That is the reality.
• 10:34
  A Western church might aggressively denounce theft or
• 10:37
  fraud because those disrupt the economic system we love, but we
• 10:40
  will openly praise a business ambition that is functionally
• 10:43
  covetous. Because it works for us.
• 10:45
  Right. The greatest danger is confident
• 10:48
  ignorance. If believers only notice and
• 10:51
  condemn the sins that their own secular culture already
• 10:54
  dislikes, their eye is not yet healthy.
• 10:57
  They're just echoing their society.
• 10:58
  They're not reading the text. The text is just a mirror
• 11:01
  reflecting their own cultural preferences.
• 11:03
  OK, if money acts as this invisible master dictating our
• 11:05
  values and darkening our perception, we have to ask how
• 11:09
  our cultural lenses dictate other areas of life.
• 11:11
  We definitely do. If we're getting money wrong,
• 11:14
  what else are we getting wrong? If the early church was dealing
• 11:18
  with the social pressures of wealth, you could bet those same
• 11:21
  societal hierarchies were bleeding into how they viewed
• 11:24
  relationships in the household. So let's look at First
• 11:26
  Corinthians Chapter 7 and the surprising status of singleness.
• 11:31
  To grasp the staggering weight of what the Apostle Paul writes
• 11:34
  in First Corinthians 7, we have to spend some time looking at
• 11:37
  the ancient extremes he was navigating.
• 11:39
  The Greco Roman world was entirely dominated by the Potter
• 11:43
  Familias. The father of the family.
• 11:44
  Yes, the absolute life and death legal authority of the male head
• 11:49
  of the household. Marriage was not just a romantic
• 11:52
  choice, it was a civic duty. In fact, Roman laws like the Lex
• 11:56
  Julia enacted by the Emperor Augustus actively penalized
• 12:00
  unmarried adults. Wait, there were laws against
• 12:02
  being single? Oh, severe laws.
• 12:04
  Augustus was dealing with a post civil war population decline and
• 12:08
  moral decay among the elites, so he enacted laws that hit
• 12:11
  bachelors where it hurt their wallets and their social
• 12:14
  standing. If you were unmarried, you faced
• 12:16
  heavy taxes and you were legally restricted from receiving
• 12:19
  inheritances. So they basically taxed you into
• 12:21
  getting married. Pretty much.
• 12:23
  The empire demanded that citizens produce legitimate
• 12:26
  heirs. Celibacy was viewed as bizarre,
• 12:29
  antisocial and a failure of your duty to the state.
• 12:32
  Let me get this straight. In the broader Roman culture,
• 12:36
  being single was practically a crime, or at least a massive
• 12:39
  financial and social liability. You were viewed as a defective
• 12:44
  citizen if you are not married and producing children for Rome.
• 12:47
  Yes, that was the crushing pressure on one side, but on the
• 12:51
  other side, within the religious, philosophical realm,
• 12:53
  you had these Eastern mystical cults which later influenced
• 12:57
  various ascetic movements. And what did they believe?
• 13:00
  They viewed the physical body, and the material world in
• 13:03
  general, as inherently evil. They taught that to achieve true
• 13:07
  spiritual enlightenment, you had to abstain from physical
• 13:10
  intimacy entirely. They demanded celibacy, teaching
• 13:13
  that marriage and physical relations were corrupt and
• 13:16
  dirty. So you have this massive culture
• 13:17
  war. Exactly.
• 13:19
  Paul is writing his letter to a church in Corinth that is caught
• 13:23
  in a vice grip between Roman social mandates that demand
• 13:26
  marriage and ascetic philosophical pressure that
• 13:29
  despises the physical body. And Paul's instruction cuts
• 13:33
  right through the middle of both of those extremes in a way that
• 13:36
  must have given both sides theological whiplash.
• 13:39
  Oh, it was radical. I mean, on one hand, he fiercely
• 13:42
  defends the marital bed against the ascetics, saying that
• 13:45
  spouses should not deprive one another, affirming that the
• 13:48
  physical body is good and made by God.
• 13:50
  But then he does something that would have absolutely shocked
• 13:53
  the Roman civic mind. He elevates singleness not just
• 13:56
  as an acceptable option, but as a specific sovereign gift.
• 14:00
  He uses the word charisma. That is a critical linguistic
• 14:03
  key. Paul recognizes both marriage
• 14:06
  and singleness as distinct charismatic gifts of grace
• 14:09
  distributed by the sovereign Spirit of God as he sees fit.
• 14:12
  Neither is second class. Right.
• 14:14
  Neither is the second class status, but Paul expresses a
• 14:17
  clear, undeniable preference for singleness in the context of
• 14:21
  what he calls the present distress, and he gives a very
• 14:24
  specific reason why he uses an incredibly rare Greek adverb, a
• 14:29
  Paris pastas. A Paris pastos.
• 14:32
  Let's break that down because I know that means I'm distracted,
• 14:34
  but there is a lot of weight behind that word, isn't there?
• 14:37
  There is immense weight to it. That specific word appears only
• 14:40
  here in the entirety of the New Testament.
• 14:43
  If you look at extra biblical Hellenistic literature from that
• 14:46
  era, you find this word used by ancient Stoic philosophers like
• 14:49
  Epictetus. And how do they use it?
• 14:51
  It describes a state of being entirely free from being dragged
• 14:54
  in a dozen different directions by worldly anxieties and
• 14:57
  obligations. Paul is asserting that the
• 14:59
  unmarried believer possesses a unique, unencumbered capacity to
• 15:03
  focus their energies entirely on the affairs of the Lord.
• 15:06
  Undistracted devotion. Exactly.
• 15:08
  An unmarried person is not divided by the necessary God
• 15:10
  ordained duties of pleasing a spouse and managing the complex
• 15:14
  logistics of a household. They possess a freedom for
• 15:16
  Kingdom work that a married person simply does not have.
• 15:20
  I want to pause here and let this land, because the contrast
• 15:23
  between this ancient text and our modern evangelical culture
• 15:27
  is jarring. It really is night and day.
• 15:29
  In the modern West, particularly in conservative circles, we have
• 15:32
  functionally idolized the 1950s nuclear family.
• 15:36
  We treat marriage and having 2.5 kids as the absolute pinnacle of
• 15:41
  human flourishing. We make it the ultimate goal.
• 15:44
  Yeah. And the unintended side effect
• 15:45
  of this is that single adults, especially those in their late
• 15:48
  20s or 30s, are often treated with subtle suspicion.
• 15:52
  They were viewed as incomplete citizens in the faith, like they
• 15:56
  are missing out on the real Christian life.
• 15:58
  The irony is striking, and it is a perfect example of a cultural
• 16:02
  more overriding the biblical text.
• 16:04
  The sources highlight the stark contrast the Western Church
• 16:07
  reacted against the secular sexual revolution over the last
• 16:09
  few decades by heavily elevating the family.
• 16:12
  Which makes sense as a reaction. Right.
• 16:13
  Defending the family is a good thing in principle, but in doing
• 16:17
  so they created a cultural atmosphere that directly
• 16:20
  contradicts the Apostle Paul. Singleness is rarely viewed as a
• 16:25
  charisma today. It is rarely celebrated as a
• 16:28
  divine gift for radical, undistracted devotion to God.
• 16:32
  It's treated like a problem to solve.
• 16:34
  Yes. Instead it is viewed as a
• 16:36
  waiting room. It is viewed as a transitional,
• 16:39
  somewhat pitiful phase you have to endure until you finally
• 16:42
  achieve the real status of marriage.
• 16:44
  That is so convicting. Have we turned a divine gift of
• 16:47
  undistracted devotion into a social waiting room?
• 16:50
  Sadly. Yes, by obsessing over romance
• 16:52
  in the nuclear family, modern readers have functionally
• 16:55
  rewritten Paul's letter. We read First Corinthians 7 that
• 16:58
  we almost apologize for it. We say things like, well, Paul
• 17:01
  was just having a bad day, or Paul thought the world was
• 17:03
  ending tomorrow, so he was overly pessimistic about
• 17:05
  marriage. We make excuses for the Bible.
• 17:07
  Exactly. We completely miss the
• 17:10
  eschatological advantage he is describing.
• 17:12
  We miss the fact that he's saying a single person is a
• 17:15
  living, breathing testimony that the Kingdom of God is more
• 17:18
  satisfying than the American Dream.
• 17:20
  We miss it because our modern cultural lens demands that
• 17:23
  ultimate human fulfillment is found in romantic realization
• 17:27
  and domestic stability. If you tell a modern Westerner
• 17:31
  that a single person has a distinct tangible advantage in
• 17:34
  Kingdom work, it sounds bizarre. It sounds almost defensive to
• 17:38
  our family centric sensibilities.
• 17:40
  It does. We assume the text needs to be
• 17:43
  softened or contextualized away, but the text is clear Singleness
• 17:48
  is not a curse to be cured, and marriage is not the ultimate
• 17:51
  identity of a human being. Both are temporal earthly
• 17:54
  realities meant to point to a greater eternal Kingdom.
• 17:57
  Well, this tendency to bring secular social hierarchies and
• 18:00
  cultural expectations into the faith does not stop at the
• 18:03
  family dinner table. No, it bleeds directly into
• 18:06
  everything else. Right.
• 18:07
  It bleeds directly into how the community gathers for worship.
• 18:10
  Let's look at what people were wearing and turn to First
• 18:12
  Timothy Chapter 2 and the hemlines of gold.
• 18:14
  The Pastoral Epistles, including First Timothy, were written to
• 18:17
  regulate the conduct of the gathered church.
• 18:20
  To understand Paul's highly specific instructions regarding
• 18:22
  women's apparel in Chapter 2, we cannot look at modern purity
• 18:26
  culture. We have to look at the ancient
• 18:27
  culture. Right, we have to look at the
• 18:29
  ancient Roman convivia, or banquets.
• 18:32
  In the secular Roman world, a public gathering was not just a
• 18:35
  place to eat, it was a highly orchestrated venue for
• 18:38
  establishing and displaying social hierarchy.
• 18:41
  Set the scene for us. What did one of these banquets
• 18:44
  actually look, sound and smell like?
• 18:47
  Imagine walking into a Roman dining room, a triconium.
• 18:51
  The seating arrangement was strictly dictated by class.
• 18:54
  The elite patron, the wealthiest person in the room, sat in the
• 18:58
  place of highest honor. So everyone knew who the boss
• 19:01
  was. Oh.
• 19:02
  Immediately, his clients, the people who depended on him for
• 19:05
  their livelihood, sat in lower positions and the food was
• 19:08
  distributed based on your status.
• 19:10
  Wait, they didn't all eat the same food?
• 19:12
  Not at all. The patron might be eating
• 19:14
  imported delicacies and drinking vintage wine, while a poor
• 19:17
  laborer sitting at the far end of the room was served cheap
• 19:20
  watered down wine and stale bread.
• 19:22
  That is wild. Everyone in the room knew
• 19:24
  exactly who was in charge and who was subservient, and a
• 19:27
  massive part of this display was what the elites wore.
• 19:31
  They felt a social duty to flaunt their status through
• 19:33
  specific sumptuary markers. So church gatherings in the 1st
• 19:37
  century, which often happened in the large homes of these very
• 19:41
  same wealthy patrons, were at a high risk of just mimicking
• 19:45
  these secular banquets. That was a danger.
• 19:47
  The wealthy patron becomes a Christian, hosts the church, and
• 19:51
  intuitively tries to run the Lord's Supper the exact same way
• 19:54
  he ran his Friday night dinner party.
• 19:56
  Exactly, and the women of the elite class displayed their
• 19:59
  massive wealth through their appearance.
• 20:01
  Paul specifically prohibits intricately braided hair.
• 20:04
  Which sounds so minor to us today.
• 20:07
  We hear that today and think of a simple French braid, but in
• 20:10
  the Roman world this referred to towering architectural
• 20:13
  hairstyles that required gold wire and took teams of slaves
• 20:16
  hours to construct. Teams of slaves just for a
• 20:19
  hairstyle. Yes, Paul also prohibits gold
• 20:22
  and pearls. According to historians of the
• 20:25
  era, pearls were the supreme symbol of immense wealth and
• 20:28
  aristocratic pride and antiquity.
• 20:30
  They were imported at astronomical costs.
• 20:33
  The mechanism of what Paul is doing here is fascinating.
• 20:37
  He commands orderly apparel, reverence and self-control.
• 20:41
  But the strict prohibition of the gold, the pearls, the
• 20:43
  expensive slave constructed braids?
• 20:46
  That is not a rule about sexual modesty.
• 20:48
  No, it's not. That is a direct, crushing
• 20:50
  rebuke of economic arrogance. Paul is saying that the ground
• 20:53
  at the gathering of the Saints must be entirely level.
• 20:56
  You leave your secular status symbols at the door.
• 20:58
  You check your wealth at the door.
• 20:59
  When a wealthy woman walked into the assembly looking like a
• 21:02
  Roman aristocrat, she was functionally forcing the poorer
• 21:05
  members, who might literally be her slaves outside the church
• 21:09
  back into a subservient societal role.
• 21:12
  She was destroying the spiritual equality of the room.
• 21:15
  Yes, the visual display of wealth in the sanctuary imported
• 21:18
  the secular hierarchy of the city into the household of God.
• 21:22
  It was an assault on the unity purchased by the blood of
• 21:25
  Christ. The command is to substitute
• 21:27
  economic ostentation with the true adornment of good works
• 21:31
  which befit those professing godliness.
• 21:33
  And here is the massive Western blind spot.
• 21:36
  The yellow sunglasses again. Right.
• 21:38
  Modern Western churches are highly vigilant about sexual
• 21:41
  modesty. We have endless debates, youth
• 21:43
  group rules and dress codes about hemlines and necklines.
• 21:47
  Now, sexual modesty is absolutely rooted in biblical
• 21:50
  principles, but we are completely blind to the mandate
• 21:53
  for economic modesty. We don't even see it.
• 21:55
  Believers will walk into a Sunday gathering flaunting
• 21:58
  designer clothes, carrying luxury handbags that cost more
• 22:01
  than a single mother's monthly rent, driving 6 figure luxury
• 22:04
  vehicles into the church parking lot and no one says a word.
• 22:09
  We have essentially turned the gathering into a wealthy social
• 22:11
  club. It is a profound contradiction.
• 22:14
  Well, a massive contradiction, I should say.
• 22:17
  We read our modern anxieties about sexuality into the text,
• 22:21
  which are valid concerns, while entirely ignoring the very
• 22:25
  specific financial rebuke staring us right in the face in
• 22:28
  the Greek text. Because we don't want to see it.
• 22:31
  We have allowed capitalist Moors to interpret the Bible for us.
• 22:34
  We assume that acquiring wealth and displaying it is the natural
• 22:38
  God bless reward of hard work, so we see no contradiction when
• 22:42
  it enters the sanctuary. It makes me think of modern
• 22:45
  seeker sensitive church models. Absolutely.
• 22:48
  Many of these massive organizations use sophisticated
• 22:51
  demographic marketing to attract specifically wealthy attendees.
• 22:55
  They design the architecture to look like a high end corporate
• 22:58
  campus. They brew artisanal coffee.
• 23:00
  The pastor wears $1000 sneakers on stage, all engineered to
• 23:04
  appeal to affluent suburbanites while functionally ignoring the
• 23:07
  poor in their own city. It's demographic targeting.
• 23:10
  Why is it that we can instantly spot a hemline that is 2 inches
• 23:13
  too short, but we are completely blind to a hemline woven with
• 23:17
  thousands of dollars of excess? Because confronting the $1000
• 23:20
  hemline would require us to dismantle the very economic
• 23:23
  system that funds our comfort. The biblical text demands that
• 23:27
  the church be a countercultural community.
• 23:30
  Supposed to look different. When the wealthy executive and
• 23:33
  the minimum wage laborer sit side by side in the assembly,
• 23:36
  perfectly equal under the Word, with no visible markers of
• 23:39
  status dividing them, it is meant to baffle the outside
• 23:43
  world. When we flaunt wealth, we erase
• 23:46
  that visual testimony of the Gospel.
• 23:48
  So far, we have looked at external markers.
• 23:51
  We have analyzed the subtle tyranny of money, the cultural
• 23:54
  mandates regarding marital status, and the clothing we wear
• 23:58
  to the gathering. Right, all very visible things.
• 24:00
  But what happens when a cultural norm is not just an idea, but
• 24:03
  something so viscerally embedded in your biology that violating
• 24:07
  it literally makes you sick to your stomach?
• 24:08
  This is where it gets incredibly intense.
• 24:10
  Let's turn to the narrative hinge of the early church, the
• 24:13
  visceral nausea of Acts chapter 10.
• 24:15
  Acts 10 is the moment the gospel door swings wide open to the
• 24:18
  Gentiles. But to get there, God has to
• 24:21
  completely shatter the worldview of the Apostle Peter.
• 24:24
  The trance on the roof. Yes, the scene involves Peter
• 24:27
  praying on a rooftop, growing hungry and falling into a
• 24:30
  trance. He sees a sheet descending from
• 24:33
  heaven, filled with all kinds of quadrupeds and reptiles, animals
• 24:37
  that were strictly forbidden by the Levitical dietary laws.
• 24:40
  The divine command is shocking. A voice from heaven gives him
• 24:44
  urgent, immediate commands. Rise, Peter, kill and eat.
• 24:48
  And Peter's response is an emphatic, culturally conditioned
• 24:51
  negative. He says by no means Lord, for I
• 24:54
  have never eaten anything that is common or unclean.
• 24:57
  He appeals to his lifelong adherence to the Jewish dietary
• 25:00
  laws. Which was a massive.
• 25:02
  To understand the weight of Peters refusal, we have to
• 25:05
  recognize that this was not a casual diet.
• 25:07
  This was not a 1st century equivalent of doing keto or
• 25:10
  being a vegan. This was the core of covenantal
• 25:13
  identity. It was who they were.
• 25:14
  During the intertestamental period under the persecution of
• 25:17
  Antiochus Epiphanes, the Maccabean martyrs had literally
• 25:21
  shed their blood over this exact issue.
• 25:24
  Hellenistic rulers tried to force Jews to assimilate by
• 25:27
  making them eat pork. Men like Aleizer were tortured
• 25:30
  to death because they refused to let Swines flesh past their
• 25:34
  lips. It was drilled into their psyche
• 25:35
  from infancy. The thought of eating this food
• 25:38
  or entering the House of an uncircumcised Gentile to share a
• 25:41
  table would not just defend their intellect, it would induce
• 25:45
  physical stomach level nausea. Physical revulsion.
• 25:49
  I want to try to make this real for you, the listener.
• 25:51
  Imagine a booming voice from heaven suddenly ordering you to
• 25:54
  eat something utterly abhorrent to your sensibilities, like a
• 25:57
  live cockroach or a rat. Just thinking about it is awful.
• 26:00
  Your stomach would turn, your gag reflex would kick in, you
• 26:03
  would physically recoil. That is the level of intense
• 26:06
  biological disgust Peter is experiencing when looking at
• 26:09
  that sheet. That physical revulsion is what
• 26:11
  makes the divine overriding so monumental.
• 26:14
  The voice from heaven declares what God has cleansed no longer
• 26:18
  consider unholy. A total paradigm shift.
• 26:20
  In a single sentence, the external boundary markers of the
• 26:23
  Old Covenant, the ceremonial laws that kept Israel separate
• 26:27
  from the Pagan nations for centuries, are absolutely
• 26:30
  dismantled. God demands that Peter violate
• 26:33
  his most heavily held visceral cultural more in order to
• 26:37
  demonstrate that the dividing wall of hostility has been
• 26:40
  crushed. The wall is gone.
• 26:41
  The ceremonial law had functioned its purpose, and now
• 26:44
  the reality of Christ had arrived.
• 26:46
  Think about the implications of that.
• 26:48
  If God demanded Peter crush his most visceral, historically
• 26:51
  justified cultural revulsion for the sake of unity with the Roman
• 26:55
  centurion, what does that say about the societal dividing
• 26:58
  lines we refuse to let go of today?
• 27:00
  It is a devastating critique of how we naturally segregate
• 27:03
  ourselves. If the shed blood of Christ was
• 27:05
  sufficient to unite kosher, keeping 1st century Jews with
• 27:08
  pork eating, Roman gentiles, people with massive historic,
• 27:12
  religious and political enmity, it is undeniably sufficient to
• 27:15
  unite believers of any background today.
• 27:17
  It has to be. Our fellowship must be based
• 27:20
  exclusively on that shared redemption, not on shared
• 27:24
  cultural preferences, socioeconomic status, or ethnic
• 27:27
  backgrounds. When modern believers self
• 27:29
  segregate based on class, race, or political affiliation, they
• 27:33
  are attempting to stitch the temple veil back together.
• 27:36
  They are calling unclean what God has declared clean.
• 27:40
  We have covered so much ground here, tearing down these walls,
• 27:43
  but if human cultural traditions, prejudices, and
• 27:46
  deeply ingrained dividing lines are to be completely obliterated
• 27:49
  in the community of faith, we cannot just try harder to be
• 27:52
  nice to each other. No, effort won't do it.
• 27:54
  We have to look at the only figure capable of actually
• 27:57
  breaking down those massive walls.
• 27:59
  And this brings us to the theological core of everything
• 28:01
  we are discussing the perfect submission of Christ.
• 28:04
  This is the most critical warning in this entire
• 28:06
  discussion. Reading these texts about money,
• 28:08
  singleness, modesty and dietary laws is not an exercise in moral
• 28:12
  improvement. It's not a self help checklist.
• 28:14
  It is not an exercise in comparative sociology where we
• 28:17
  try to build the perfect culturally sensitive utopia
• 28:20
  through our own effort. If we view it that way, we will
• 28:23
  either become incredibly proud of our own enlightened cultural
• 28:26
  awareness, or we will fall into complete despair because we
• 28:30
  constantly fail. Right, we just create a new set
• 28:32
  of yellow glasses. Exactly.
• 28:34
  Every single text we have discussed must drive the reader
• 28:38
  away from themselves and toward the perfect active obedience of
• 28:41
  Jesus Christ. Yes.
• 28:42
  Let's look at how Christ fulfills each of these areas
• 28:45
  where our culture fails, starting with singleness.
• 28:48
  We talked about Paul's desire for the unmarried to have
• 28:51
  undivided devotion to the Lord. Jesus Christ perfectly embodied
• 28:55
  that instruction. He lived his earthly life as a
• 28:57
  single man with absolute, undivided devotion to the
• 29:00
  Father's will. He was not distracted by earthly
• 29:03
  obligations, yet his singleness was for a distinct redemptive
• 29:07
  purpose, securing an eternal bride in the Church.
• 29:11
  So human marriage points to that.
• 29:12
  Human marriage is a temporal fading shadow of that eternal
• 29:15
  cosmic reality. Christ succeeded where we are
• 29:18
  constantly distracted. And regarding wealth and the
• 29:22
  warning against Mammon, we talked about the hoarding
• 29:25
  impulse and the bad eye. The King of Glory laid aside
• 29:28
  unimaginable heavenly riches. The Apostle Paul writes in
• 29:32
  Philippians 2 that Christ took the form of a bond servant.
• 29:36
  A slave. He did not cling to his cosmic
• 29:39
  status or leverage it for his own comfort.
• 29:41
  He lived in poverty, relying on the generosity of others, and
• 29:44
  died naked on a Roman cross. In doing so, he exposed the
• 29:49
  total bankruptcy of mammoths. That is such a vivid picture.
• 29:52
  Think about the irony. Silver betrayed him, soldiers
• 29:55
  gambled for his few earthly garments, and the political
• 29:58
  leaders protected their status by condemning him.
• 30:01
  Every rival master gathered at the cross to destroy him, and
• 30:04
  Christ conquered them all by his obedient suffering.
• 30:06
  What about the dividing wall, The visceral nausea and
• 30:09
  prejudice of Acts 10? As Ephesians 2 states, Christ
• 30:12
  Himself is our peace. His blood is sufficient to wash
• 30:15
  away all defilement. He abolished in His flesh the
• 30:18
  enmity, the law of commandments contained in ordinances.
• 30:21
  He did the work. The destruction of cultural
• 30:23
  prejudice is achieved solely through His atoning sacrifice.
• 30:26
  He tore down the middle wall of partition between hostile
• 30:29
  cultures, creating one new man in place of the two.
• 30:32
  We do not achieve unity by organizing better sociological
• 30:35
  systems. We receive unity because Christ
• 30:38
  already purchased it. This totally reframes the
• 30:41
  conversation. It is not about you, the
• 30:43
  listener, trying harder to become culturally aware or
• 30:47
  reading a bunch of history books just so you can feel
• 30:49
  sophisticated at your next small group.
• 30:51
  That's not the point at. All it is about yielding to a
• 30:53
  king who already conquered these rival Lords.
• 30:56
  It is about recognizing that your cultural lenses are broken,
• 30:59
  that your eye is naturally bad, and submitting to the one who
• 31:02
  sees all things perfectly and who gives you his own
• 31:05
  righteousness. The gospel appeal is never
• 31:08
  simply try harder to treasure heaven.
• 31:10
  The appeal is to come to the King who treasured the Father's
• 31:13
  will above his own life, who died for culturally captive
• 31:16
  sinners, and who alone can free you from bondage to every rival
• 31:20
  master. The aim of removing these
• 31:22
  blinders is worship. We want to see Christ more
• 31:25
  clearly, hear His Word more faithfully, and love what He
• 31:29
  loves entirely free from the distortions of our era.
• 31:33
  So with the invisible lenses unmask and the ultimate solution
• 31:36
  identified in Christ's finished work, what are the concrete
• 31:39
  steps for you, the listener, moving forward?
• 31:42
  Practical application is key here.
• 31:44
  Let's recap the invisible lenses we have taken off today.
• 31:47
  We looked at the subtle tyranny of money and how Westerners
• 31:50
  often relabel their own greed as prudence.
• 31:54
  We examine the idolization of the nuclear family, which turns
• 31:57
  the divine gift of singleness into a second class waiting room
• 32:01
  right. We discussed our absolute
• 32:02
  blindness to economic pride, where we aggressively police
• 32:05
  sexual modesty but ignore hemlines woven with thousands of
• 32:09
  dollars of excess. We look at the visceral nature
• 32:11
  of our prejudices and how the blood of Christ obliterates
• 32:14
  those deep seated dividing lines.
• 32:16
  If you want to continue spotting these blind spots in your own
• 32:18
  life, there is highly actionable advice you can follow from the
• 32:21
  sources. The first step is to practice
• 32:24
  what CS Lewis called reading old books.
• 32:27
  Reading old books. Read the Puritans.
• 32:29
  Read the reformers, Read authors from entirely different
• 32:32
  centuries and continents. No single generation has all the
• 32:36
  blind spots. The writers of the 16th century
• 32:39
  had their own cultural blinders, but they are entirely different
• 32:42
  from ours. So they balance this out.
• 32:44
  Yes, by reading old books. The contrast exposes the
• 32:47
  narrowness of your own modern assumptions.
• 32:50
  Second, when you were reading your Bible and a passage feels
• 32:52
  incredibly obvious to you, and it perfectly confirms your
• 32:56
  modern social instincts. Slow down.
• 32:58
  That is a red flag. That is a massive warning sign.
• 33:02
  Ask yourself what assumptions you are projecting onto the
• 33:04
  page. Are you letting the text speak
• 33:06
  or are you just using the Bible as a ventriloquist dummy to echo
• 33:10
  your own culture? That is such a vital practice,
• 33:13
  slowing down when a text feels too comfortable, because comfort
• 33:16
  usually means we are reading our own reflection.
• 33:19
  Because of the cultural norms of 2000 years ago, the massive
• 33:23
  Roman banquets, the strict Lex Julia, the ancient Jewish
• 33:26
  dietary laws, if they were completely shattered and judged
• 33:29
  by the biblical text, and our modern norms today are equally
• 33:33
  judged by it. I won't leave you with a final
• 33:35
  question to Mull over. Something to think about.
• 33:38
  What unquestioned moral certainties of the year 2026,
• 33:41
  those things we consider so obvious, so normal, and so
• 33:43
  virtuous today will look like blatant, absurd idolatry to
• 33:47
  believers 100 years from now. Remember those tinted
• 33:50
  sunglasses? You have had them on a very long
• 33:53
  time. It is time to let the Word of
• 33:54
  God take them off.