Latest / Red Couch Theology / Aaron Takes the Mic (and the Scenic Route) on Revelation

Transcript

Aaron Takes the Mic (and the Scenic Route) on Revelation · Red Couch Theology

• 0:01
  Hello friends, welcome to the Red Couch Theology podcast.
• 0:04
  This week we flip seats, Aaron preach the sermon.
• 0:08
  I get to moderate the conversation, and it is a fun
• 0:11
  one. We'll be looking at the last two
• 0:13
  chapters of Revelation, answering all sorts of questions
• 0:17
  around what is this eternal city and a bunch of rabbit trails
• 0:21
  that Aaron chose to follow. Enjoy.
• 0:27
  Going live. Oh wow is so dark, what
• 0:31
  happened? Why is it so dark?
• 0:34
  Because we're talking about Revelation, I keep.
• 0:37
  Fixing this and then it like our new camera is bad.
• 0:41
  Wait, we bought a camera that's bad.
• 0:43
  And we didn't buy a camera. We got a new.
• 0:45
  Camera I don't invest in this podcast.
• 0:49
  We got a new camera that's worse than the camera we had before.
• 0:52
  No, it's not better quality camera, but it doesn't save its
• 0:56
  default mode so I have to like set it up each time which makes
• 0:59
  it bad. Yes, for you.
• 1:01
  For me, because now we're like in the dark.
• 1:03
  Because then you got to prepare. Yeah, exactly.
• 1:08
  You know, that's that's going to really bother the couple of
• 1:10
  people that yeah. Look at that.
• 1:14
  So much better already. Yeah.
• 1:16
  Crisis averted, Yeah. Oh yeah, I think I found the
• 1:19
  verse you were talking about before we went on air.
• 1:22
  Oh yeah, 2215. Yeah, weird, weird.
• 1:27
  Let's do some. Let's talk about some weird
• 1:29
  stuff. There's so much weird stuff.
• 1:31
  We should call this episode We Are All Weird.
• 1:34
  Well, I learned a lesson on Sunday because I joked on the on
• 1:39
  during the sermon. Oh, by the way, hello Ray Couch
• 1:42
  podcast people. We just.
• 1:47
  You are going to have an intro that you're going to record.
• 1:49
  Hey, you're supposed to be hosting today.
• 1:51
  Why do I feel all this burden to host?
• 1:53
  I never agreed to that. Welcome Red Red Couch theology
• 1:59
  podcast. Welcome, welcome, Welcome to the
• 2:01
  red couch theology podcast. We are today talking about the
• 2:07
  Book of Revelation that we went back to after weeks of not,
• 2:12
  which was always the plan. Yeah, to kind of come loop
• 2:15
  around and talk about that last little piece of it after we
• 2:19
  talked about the cities and gods like mandate for us to build
• 2:22
  stuff and how we do that. Well, sometimes we often do that
• 2:26
  badly. And all the ways that we see
• 2:28
  these broken stories, especially in Genesis, right?
• 2:30
  I mean, a lot in Genesis. It's like really like, and this
• 2:33
  is going to be interesting as we get to Revelation because you
• 2:36
  know, if there's two books more linked than Genesis and
• 2:41
  Revelation, I would like to find them.
• 2:43
  Maybe Luke and act as like a direct follow up.
• 2:47
  But like Genesis and Revelation are like, like there's a weird
• 2:53
  mirroring thing going on, right? To a degree.
• 2:55
  It's like storylines that started back there flow all the
• 3:00
  way to this one. And then they're like they're,
• 3:03
  they're kind of dealt with closed.
• 3:05
  Maybe you'll continue. Maybe.
• 3:09
  Yeah, and it it makes the book so difficult to talk about
• 3:14
  because every third word is a hyperlink back to Genesis.
• 3:18
  And you're like, well, am I preaching Genesis or Revelation
• 3:22
  or the entire Bible? And every time you're in Genesis
• 3:26
  or Revelation, you could literally just follow the rabbit
• 3:29
  trails forever. So if you're listening and
• 3:32
  unfamiliar with the term hyperlink, think on your
• 3:35
  Internet when you're told to click on something and it takes
• 3:38
  you to somewhere else and you're supposed to read all that stuff
• 3:40
  to understand the stuff you're doing now.
• 3:43
  Like when you're saying yes to Apple's terms and conditions and
• 3:47
  you go read it all to make sure you know, you don't read it all,
• 3:49
  you go and you just click agree because you trust Apple for some
• 3:53
  reason and and then you go back. So a lot of these things in the
• 3:57
  scriptures, especially in the New Testament, are nudging back
• 4:01
  to an old story. And so they have an expectation
• 4:05
  that you kind of know that story, which in a 1st century
• 4:07
  culture you almost certainly would.
• 4:10
  But in our culture now it can feel very much like burdensome
• 4:14
  to go and figure out some of those things.
• 4:16
  So, so Aaron's tension is, yes, there's, there's the thing
• 4:20
  you're talking about, but there's the thing that your
• 4:23
  thing is talking about. And how can you not talk about
• 4:26
  that thing? Because the thing you're talking
• 4:28
  about is talking about that thing.
• 4:29
  Exactly. So it's it's mind blowing.
• 4:33
  And so Sunday I joked with the congregation, like if you're a
• 4:36
  list person to we checked off 2 series in one day.
• 4:41
  Yeah, so check off 2. Two things, so.
• 4:43
  So I will say this, I have occasionally said we have this
• 4:49
  area that I'm not going to be able to cover.
• 4:52
  Check into the Red Couch Theology podcast.
• 4:55
  And then you didn't want up that you ate up to that by
• 4:59
  referencing about 8 different things to check out the red
• 5:03
  couch. Yeah, that's what I did.
• 5:05
  And I even said on Sunday, I need to mention the podcast
• 5:11
  right now. Not for you.
• 5:13
  Like this isn't an advertisement thing.
• 5:15
  It's like for my psychology, I needed, in order for me to let
• 5:20
  go of things that I really want to say, I need to say that I
• 5:24
  might say them elsewhere and then I can move on.
• 5:27
  Well, you don't even have what I have, which is usually like
• 5:30
  multiple weeks in a row where I'm like, I cannot do that to
• 5:33
  next week and talk about it. Then you're like, you got to get
• 5:36
  it all in. And and I felt like I was
• 5:39
  closing both series and talking about maybe two of the most
• 5:43
  iconic. It's like Genesis one through 3
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  and Revelation 2122 might be the most foundational ideas in all
• 5:53
  of the scriptural story. And then you could start making
• 5:56
  cases for other things. And what about the sermon
• 5:58
  amount? What are those?
• 5:59
  But like in the sense that where we came from and where we're
• 6:03
  going is like so, so foundational.
• 6:06
  So I felt like this huge burden. Could you imagine the scriptures
• 6:09
  without sin? We just have like a short
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  pamphlet like Genesis 1 and 2, Revelation 21 and 22.
• 6:16
  Everything else is missed out. Yeah.
• 6:19
  And and then you start to get to see some of the like, so some of
• 6:22
  what theologians, philosophers have talked about is that like,
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  is a world that's been redeemed by God richer than a world that
• 6:29
  was just created and always good.
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  Like, I know some question marks there.
• 6:34
  Yeah. Like when you lost.
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  Time in my theology class where really nerdy theologians have
• 6:40
  massive debates about little tiny questions like that.
• 6:45
  So, yeah, broad summary of what you talked about before we get
• 6:50
  to the long list of stuff that you said you'd talk about.
• 6:53
  Yeah, broad summary. What did you talk about?
• 6:55
  You started with a story. Yes, about me in my underwear.
• 6:58
  Yeah, which everyone loved. Yeah, I'm sure.
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  Yeah. Mental picture.
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  Click click delete it I. Did get one negative review on
• 7:07
  the story. What was the negative review was
• 7:10
  from? I think from my daughter, No,
• 7:13
  no, it's actually for my wife. And here's the negative review.
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  I didn't mention that the underwear I was wearing more
• 7:20
  bright neon orange, which I did mention when I told the story to
• 7:25
  the youth group at a different occasion.
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  And for some reason, the specificity of the color, like
• 7:31
  brought it to vivid memory. And I told her, yeah, I don't
• 7:35
  particularly want them picturing me in my underwear too much.
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  Like, it's, it's a funny anecdote to add it just for the
• 7:41
  humor sake. But do I really want them?
• 7:43
  Like vividly picturing my underwear?
• 7:46
  No one else wants that. Like, well, now on the for you
• 7:49
  guys in the podcast, you can vividly picture me in my bright
• 7:53
  orange neon underwear. This podcast's gonna get
• 7:57
  flagged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
• 8:03
  yeah, yes. So.
• 8:06
  A bunch of sub questions based on that, but yes, you've nudged
• 8:09
  it with those clothing choices a little bit towards comedy.
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  It's almost a clown costume at this point.
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  So it is so so. The story was really centered
• 8:19
  though around. Locked doors, open doors, which
• 8:24
  I didn't. I, I don't know if I said it
• 8:28
  this way on Sunday, but I what I told the staff before I preached
• 8:33
  was the thing I'm most excited about in this passage.
• 8:37
  I'm barely even mentioning. Yeah.
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  And so the, the idea that the gates are wide open in the city,
• 8:44
  that just boggles my mind. And it's so fascinating to me.
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  And I mentioned it, it was like 1 little movement in the sermon,
• 8:52
  but it wasn't the highlight of it, so.
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  My my aunt. So my aunt was a farmer, so we
• 9:00
  used to go visit every summer. We'd stay there for like a while
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  and it was just a great place just out in the countryside.
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  Felt like there was nobody around except like famous
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  musicians living over the road and stuff like that.
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  But but there was no lock on the door when you left.
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  But you couldn't lock it. Like you could lock it from the
• 9:18
  inside. I think there was a bar that you
• 9:19
  could put across at night, but like in daytime, if you went out
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  door was like, I mean, it was closed, but it was just open,
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  just walked through because there was no one around.
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  Like there was No Fear of anyone coming in to steal anything.
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  Farm. There wasn't really a lot to
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  steal, to be honest. And there was a huge great dog
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  that used to lie next to the door.
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  It's like a a bit of a deterrent.
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  So I think like microcosm, you see occasionally those people
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  that live in a way that seems to be without fear And, and the
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  closer you get to the city, the rarer it is.
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  I have some friends that always used to leave their house
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  unlocked whenever, wherever they went and and they were, you
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  know, well off like wonderful people really love Jesus and
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  they always used to just live with a philosophy.
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  Someone steals that stuff. They must need it more than we
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  need it. But those are rarities.
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  Those are like occasional. Yeah.
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  And like the story that I told sort of it's a funny story, but
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  if you're actually paying attention, you realize how much
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  worse it could have been. And I, I'm sure there's moms or
• 10:29
  dads in the room who are thinking this is deeply
• 10:32
  irresponsible for one of our pastors to be living this way.
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  And they're not wrong in one sense.
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  Like it's not, it's not necessarily wise given our world
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  to just leave doors unlocked when you have a 16 year old
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  daughter in the basement or whatever.
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  I don't. So, but that's part of the
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  tension that I was trying to draw out is like, the world's
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  can be a scary place and like. But also, we should point out,
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  to make you feel less irresponsible that you live in
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  Highlands Ranch. Two.
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  True, which is what I joked about with the idea that I grew
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  up in a war to my country. If there's no machine guns in
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  the back, sure. Yeah.
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  It's so safe. Yeah.
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  So strong. Absolutely.
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  So and then the and then the punch light of the sermon is
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  like there aren't going to be any locked doors.
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  So who's who's right is like wife right that see, I didn't
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  say it explicitly. I wanted to at the end.
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  See babe, no locked doors in heaven.
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  So we should not lock him now. What else can we say that about?
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  I win. It's in the Bible and.
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  That's what marriage is all about, winning, isn't it?
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  I hope she's not watching. I'm going to be in so much.
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  You can win then. That's the key to sermons, is
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  that you win. You don't have to talk about
• 11:41
  community this week, which is the opposite of winning, where
• 11:45
  it's kind of winning, but it's not personally winning.
• 11:48
  So, So yeah, interesting thing going on there, isn't it?
• 11:53
  So you talk generally about this idea that there's there's a new
• 11:58
  Jerusalem that concludes the Scriptures that the tree of life
• 12:03
  is in the middle of it, right? I think.
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  And it comes down and it's like Eden restored.
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  Yes, which we barely even mentioned at all.
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  The the framing that I I gave the message just by way of
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  review is this is the city we all actually long for and part
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  of the case. I didn't say this explicitly,
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  but whether you believe it that this is what you long for, this
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  is what you long for. And so I just traced several
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  movements. It's not a place of chaos,
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  meaning the natural disasters that are are in the world now
• 12:39
  that just rob humans of of safety and peace and all those
• 12:43
  sorts of things. And the chaos that is like life,
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  just the everyday chaos of like messiness and oh man, car
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  accidents, tsunamis, which is what I talked about drawing in
• 13:00
  David Bentley Hearts towards the sea.
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  So this is a place without chaos.
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  It's marked by his presence, which is like sort of the
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  leading story in this chapter that all of the other things are
• 13:13
  true about the city because Jesus is there in the most
• 13:17
  profound way. So we talked about presence.
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  What's that mean? What comes with this presence?
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  We said it's a it's completely safe.
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  It has no evil. In other words, the evil bad
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  guys are banished outside the city.
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  They they're consigned is the word that that the translation
• 13:35
  gives us. We didn't get a chance to talk
• 13:37
  about that a lot because it's people's tendency will be to
• 13:41
  hyper focus on that. And I moved on really quickly.
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  And then it's abundant provision.
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  So this is the tree of life waters literally just flowing
• 13:51
  down the center of the street, producing fruiting trees that
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  never run. Very Ezekiel 47, very light, you
• 14:00
  know, river of life. 7 All that stuff.
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  And then the challenge that I said for us that we we don't
• 14:09
  want to be a people that just says, all right, let's grin and
• 14:12
  bear it today because sometimes we get to check out and get to
• 14:15
  go to this future city. I think all throughout this
• 14:18
  entire these two chapters, he doesn't tell us about this so
• 14:21
  that we have hope to survive how bad this world is currently.
• 14:26
  It's actually an invitation to start creating that city to
• 14:30
  today in this. World So this is an interesting
• 14:32
  tension though, isn't it? Because there's this like
• 14:35
  historical movement that if you're listening, you may or may
• 14:38
  not be aware of that like is taking place early part of the
• 14:43
  20th century. So roughly it's more than 100
• 14:46
  years ago because it's specifically before the war,
• 14:50
  19141918. So, so, so suddenly there's this
• 14:53
  moment like, and actually it's recovered after the First World
• 14:58
  War as well. It's like, we're going to get
• 15:01
  there. We're going to create this thing
• 15:03
  like industrial revolution is happening, like quality of life
• 15:08
  is going up, but like scales like unheard of.
• 15:12
  It's suddenly like, oh, no, we can do this thing.
• 15:15
  We can create a utopian world. Like this is going to be like,
• 15:18
  and we're going to have one big war maybe.
• 15:20
  And that's going to kind of sell who's going to run this whole
• 15:22
  thing. But then like it's just going to
• 15:24
  be upwards and to the right, like stock market style, like
• 15:27
  everything's going and, and then like the First World War happens
• 15:34
  and then it happens again. And then like society actually
• 15:38
  doesn't get better. It gets worse.
• 15:42
  And so suddenly you hit all of this sense of like, suddenly
• 15:45
  there's nuclear weapons that are thrown in the mix.
• 15:47
  Like one goes R2 go off and then there's others on the table and
• 15:51
  they stockpile and stockpile and stockpile.
• 15:53
  There's the Cuban Missile crisis when missiles are literally on
• 15:57
  the doorstep that could get loose to any moment.
• 15:59
  And people genuinely go to sleep wondering if the the thing will
• 16:04
  just blow up overnight like this.
• 16:07
  Huge question marks. And then there's like questions
• 16:10
  around financial stabilities. There's, there's like the
• 16:13
  crashes of like the 90's, the early 2000s, two, 1008.
• 16:18
  There's all these different things that suddenly are like,
• 16:20
  huh, like, is this thing getting better or is it getting worse?
• 16:25
  How do you deal with that kind of like downturn without giving
• 16:30
  up on keeping on working towards?
• 16:33
  This yeah. And actually this is again,
• 16:34
  another rabbit trail that I could have gone down because I
• 16:36
  did a ton of historical study because there's there's all
• 16:40
  throughout church history and human history, there been
• 16:43
  multiple waves of people saying let's bring the city of God
• 16:47
  today. Calvin's Geneva.
• 16:50
  Yeah, even like. Samuel Moore's Utopia, like,
• 16:55
  there's been like, all sorts of like.
• 16:57
  Or different monastic sects who are kind of like, let's, let's
• 17:02
  exit the world and be like these moral utopian environments.
• 17:06
  Or so humans have a propensity to read things like Revelation
• 17:10
  2122 or Acts hearing about the early church or Genesis 1 and 2.
• 17:17
  And they're like, let's just go do that again.
• 17:19
  Let's become gardeners where everybody loves each other and
• 17:23
  takes care of each other and everything's happy and all this
• 17:25
  stuff. And most of those experiments
• 17:28
  are complete failures. Well, actually, that's not true.
• 17:35
  Most of those experiments are a mixed bag, just like your the
• 17:39
  series that, I mean, you preach the rest of the sermon series,
• 17:42
  just like all throughout the sermon series that you preached.
• 17:45
  All these cities are a mixed bag.
• 17:47
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 17:47
  They're like terribly distorted and destroy human thriving and
• 17:55
  the arts were created or they're deeply wounded and they cause
• 18:02
  like the oppression of the poor and yet they feed more people
• 18:07
  than the the drought situation. Like the the maybe one of the
• 18:13
  highlight city experiments in the entire Bible is ironically
• 18:18
  Egypt. Yeah, yeah.
• 18:20
  Under Joseph's, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 18:22
  The leadership where the power of like the consolidation of
• 18:26
  human ingenuity is put to good use to feed the nation.
• 18:31
  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You don't get that without a
• 18:33
  city. No, no.
• 18:35
  And so like all throughout this whole series, there's this weird
• 18:38
  push and pull like, well, our cities bad or are they good?
• 18:41
  Or, you know, they're definitely bad.
• 18:42
  No, wait, but they do this. But they're what?
• 18:44
  Like, no, they're really bad. But no, wait, they kind of
• 18:46
  accomplished this. And then the big irony at the
• 18:49
  end of the series, the things we build is you'd expect it to go
• 18:54
  back to a garden and instead it's a Garden City and it's this
• 18:58
  weird. Which there's a couple of couple
• 19:02
  of viewpoints around, isn't there, as to whether that's like
• 19:05
  a change of direction or that's the inevitable ending of like,
• 19:10
  so you know, are multiple gardens, Are they a city?
• 19:15
  Is that just what happens when you when you string millions of
• 19:19
  gardens together? Or is God actually now like
• 19:24
  saying no, no, this city is a broken thing?
• 19:27
  Like are cities fundamentally bad or are and and gardens
• 19:34
  fundamentally good? And some some of the experiments
• 19:38
  in human history said Yep, cities are fundamentally bad.
• 19:40
  Let's exit the city and go garden and love Jesus and pray
• 19:45
  in gnostic situations. Others see like no cities can be
• 19:52
  good depending on who's leading them.
• 19:54
  So let's try find a try and find a political leader who's not bad
• 19:57
  and like, raise them. Up and this is the tension so
• 20:00
  there's this story in England that I kind of wrote about in in
• 20:03
  my thesis these two guys one's a poet 1's a writer Southie and
• 20:09
  Southie and Southie Southie and and courage they go out and they
• 20:13
  create this thing called pantisocracy, which is like.
• 20:20
  No one's in charge. We're all just the same and
• 20:23
  everything just we're going to do this by like, you know,
• 20:25
  whatever. And so they go out and start
• 20:27
  this thing together and they take some people with him and
• 20:29
  then like a few years later, Suthi just leaves.
• 20:33
  Why? Because Coleridge drove him
• 20:35
  nuts. Like the guy that he was like we
• 20:39
  could create a utopia together with.
• 20:41
  He got a few weeks in and he a few months in, he was like 3
• 20:44
  years in and he was like, I can't stand this guy.
• 20:47
  He's getting in the way of everything this thing could be.
• 20:50
  And so he just gets up and he just leaves.
• 20:52
  Like, I mean, that's just a mild story of just how hard it is to
• 20:55
  create something like that. And the reason being, and so
• 20:59
  this is part of the heartbeat of this message.
• 21:01
  So my my big idea or main point or thesis for Sunday was we
• 21:07
  build well when we're unafraid, provided for and loved.
• 21:14
  And the reason no human city has in human history has ever been
• 21:19
  all good is because we're afraid or we don't have everything we
• 21:26
  need. Like provision wise, we are, we
• 21:28
  think we don't and we are skeptical that we are.
• 21:33
  Humanity is deeply valued and loved by others around us.
• 21:37
  And when when we when we have those things, like the worst
• 21:40
  part of humanity comes out to try and mitigate those emotional
• 21:45
  things, which is what you've kind of I put did you see that I
• 21:48
  put words in your mouth on Sunday too?
• 21:50
  No, I did. I even.
• 21:52
  Told. Him I said, yeah, so I I made
• 21:56
  this I said this is Alex's thesis for this whole series.
• 22:00
  He didn't tell me this I I shouldn't put words in his
• 22:02
  mouth, but I'm going to anyway. Like this is how I said I you
• 22:06
  know, it's fun. I'm so rabbit trail to this this
• 22:09
  morning. I feel like the like our
• 22:12
  friendship we have like this like almost like boxing match
• 22:16
  when we preach. I don't know, it's kind of fun,
• 22:17
  playful. Yeah, it.
• 22:18
  Actually, it's a boxing match where I don't realize the round
• 22:21
  started yet. You just throw punches at me.
• 22:24
  I. Know well that's what happens
• 22:26
  when you don't listen to the sermon.
• 22:28
  I can throw punches and you can't protect yourself.
• 22:30
  So this was your thesis. Did you know this?
• 22:32
  I did not know this. I'm intrigued.
• 22:34
  This is. Your thesis for the series What
• 22:37
  We Build reflects why we build it.
• 22:40
  Yeah. And this is where you, you said
• 22:43
  you had this curiosity about we were gardeners and then we
• 22:46
  became city builders. And the emotion component, I
• 22:49
  think each week that you've been leading us through the series,
• 22:53
  you've been saying that this, the deep seated emotions that
• 22:56
  drove the creation of the city weirdly whip lashes back on the
• 23:03
  city itself. So what we build reflects why we
• 23:05
  build. So how'd I do?
• 23:07
  Yeah, that's really that's pretty good.
• 23:08
  Yeah, all right. I got endorsement.
• 23:11
  I was not like I put words in his mouth, but it wasn't the
• 23:14
  worst. Thing, Yeah, yeah.
• 23:16
  So Cain builds out of fear, and the city becomes a city that's
• 23:20
  driven by fear. And the shame.
• 23:23
  Built out of ambition. It's a city that, you know,
• 23:26
  crushed by ambition. So.
• 23:29
  So then. So then then my thesis at the
• 23:31
  end of the series is essentially the only way to build good
• 23:34
  things as human beings is to be unafraid, fully provided for.
• 23:40
  Like provision is abundance. Like imagine a world where you
• 23:45
  don't have to work because at every turn is enough food,
• 23:51
  enough resources, enough comfort, enough safety,
• 23:54
  whatever, and then deeply love like that.
• 23:57
  Your actual humanity, not the one that you project to
• 23:59
  everyone, but your actual humanity, is fully seen and
• 24:03
  fully embraced. If that's the scenario, humans
• 24:09
  have the capacity to create the most unimaginably beautiful
• 24:13
  things, and as soon as we we one of those variables falters.
• 24:19
  Humans, because of the way God made us, have the ability to
• 24:24
  create unimaginable destruction. And and that takes.
• 24:28
  Creative destruction. Yes, yeah, yeah, sure.
• 24:31
  And and to get there, you can see why ultimately, for that
• 24:35
  thing to happen, it needs a work of God in us.
• 24:38
  That's distinct. You know, we, we see, we Paul
• 24:42
  uses language like we see through a, like a veil, like a
• 24:46
  through, through almost like a through like a Vale of water,
• 24:51
  almost like you see darkly, you see uncertainly.
• 24:55
  And, and we do that with other people.
• 24:57
  We don't see the real them both because of the full self that
• 25:01
  they, we, we, a lot of us portray.
• 25:04
  I mean, I might even say all of us.
• 25:06
  I'm sure there's someone out there that's perfect.
• 25:09
  But a lot of them we posture, we create something that we think
• 25:12
  is acceptable to the world around us and and we actually
• 25:16
  don't have time to see other people as they really are.
• 25:20
  I, I remember CS Lewis line, I think in we until we all have
• 25:24
  faces where he says maybe it's maybe it's something else
• 25:28
  actually, But but he talks about how if you could only see your
• 25:32
  neighbor for who they really were, you'd see a creature that
• 25:36
  actually, you'd have a have a tendency to bow down and worship
• 25:41
  rather than anything else. You'd see something beyond
• 25:44
  splendid in your eye. And yet, because of how we're
• 25:47
  masked, we don't see it. Yeah, like I think that was one
• 25:52
  of the things that I loved about the class that I keep talking
• 25:54
  about on the show is the 1st 2/3 of the classes about
• 25:58
  anthropology or what is a human. And this professor who actually
• 26:03
  has a very low anthropology, meaning he's not very optimistic
• 26:09
  about what humans are in their broken state.
• 26:13
  He wrote his doctoral thesis on Nazi Germany and how the church
• 26:17
  showed up or did not show up in Nazi Germany to take care of the
• 26:21
  the needy and the and whatever. And he could have picked
• 26:24
  multiple. Yes.
• 26:25
  So it's just he he's he's an expert on some of the deep
• 26:31
  brokenness in humanity. But he spent a ton of time doing
• 26:37
  what you just did, talking about this innate dignity that is
• 26:42
  being human like we are. The human beings are so glorious
• 26:47
  in what God made them to be that it's unimaginable.
• 26:51
  Like we can't even fathom how beautiful and glorious a human
• 26:56
  being is because of what God designed them to be.
• 27:00
  And that gives us unparalleled dignity in the, in the, in the
• 27:04
  cosmos. And yet brokenness is such that
• 27:09
  all of that goodness and beauty can be funneled towards like,
• 27:14
  like I said, creative evil. Like we are creatively bad.
• 27:20
  We bring all of these powers as creatures into the world and we
• 27:25
  leverage them to make extra evil things.
• 27:29
  It's such a devastation. This is why the fall of man is
• 27:32
  and sin is so bad, is that it? It takes all of this glory and
• 27:38
  it funnels it towards evil. It's so I I've just been re
• 27:41
  watching one of my favorite movies and it's one of those
• 27:44
  movies that we'll say is is a touch violent at times.
• 27:48
  Not not super in a in a like an awful way.
• 27:50
  Now in a, in a, in a way that makes sense given what the movie
• 27:55
  is about. And it's a movie that is only
• 27:58
  good if you watch the directors go because the the theatrical
• 28:02
  cut is not good. It's called Kingdom of Heaven,
• 28:06
  and it's about Jerusalem during the Crusades.
• 28:09
  And it's about a whole series of events where humans tried to
• 28:13
  create the Kingdom of heaven in Jerusalem in the worst ways
• 28:19
  possible. And so this character that
• 28:21
  enters into it is a guy who's experienced personal loss, has
• 28:24
  experienced trauma, and he comes in because he, through some
• 28:29
  strange means, finds he's actually the son of a Lord and
• 28:32
  like, attains this title. And he has a house in Jerusalem
• 28:36
  and house in the lands. And he comes in with an attitude
• 28:39
  of God has abandoned me. I don't hear him speak.
• 28:43
  And he happens to come across someone who's a faithful
• 28:46
  follower of Jesus who says to him, you know, through religion,
• 28:50
  I've seen like, the worst of humanity, like, following Jesus
• 28:55
  is in right thinking and right action.
• 28:59
  Like, it's about what you do here and what you do here, like,
• 29:01
  which he might agree with or disagree with, but he goes into
• 29:05
  everything he experiences with that philosophy.
• 29:07
  He's told, protect the king of Jerusalem.
• 29:09
  If the king is dead, protect the people of Jerusalem.
• 29:12
  And there's this scene where they fought to defend the city,
• 29:14
  and they're about to hand it over with a deal with the
• 29:18
  Saracen leader, Saladin. The deal is that they'll be able
• 29:23
  to leave, but he's the only one that knows that this is a
• 29:26
  possibility. And as they're about to leave,
• 29:28
  the the the the Bishop of Jerusalem turns around to the
• 29:31
  mall and says, this is what you do.
• 29:35
  Everyone convert to Islam, repent afterwards.
• 29:40
  And the main character turns around and he looks at him and
• 29:42
  he goes, you've taught me a lot about religion, which is like
• 29:47
  such a devastating life. And the priest, like, is this a
• 29:50
  compliment? The bishops is like, is this a
• 29:52
  compliment or this is not? Is this not a compliment?
• 29:55
  But but actually like, it's like a microcosm in the story of all
• 29:59
  those that hold religious positions actually come with
• 30:04
  some of the worst morals and some of the worst ways to create
• 30:08
  the Kingdom of God. Their concept of what the
• 30:11
  Kingdom of God looked like, looks like is deeply broken.
• 30:16
  And unfortunately, I think that's what what what maybe
• 30:18
  people have seen over the years. They've seen religion do some of
• 30:23
  the worst things and the church, to your point, show up in some
• 30:26
  of the worst places or show up in the worst ways and some of
• 30:31
  the worst places. Yeah.
• 30:32
  And I think partially the reason that is, is that if we treat our
• 30:39
  religious framework as a means by generating like mitigating
• 30:46
  fear of punishment from a angry God and a a way of providing for
• 30:54
  my needs because of some sort of powerful platform that I develop
• 30:59
  or whatever. And a way of finding I feeling
• 31:04
  loved because I'm acknowledged as a church leader.
• 31:08
  What kind of city do you build based upon Alex's thesis?
• 31:11
  That's not his thesis. The things you build reflect why
• 31:15
  you build them. If you build them to mitigate
• 31:17
  fear of moral moral dangers or fear, or to provide for yourself
• 31:24
  or your identity. You build a monstrosity and then
• 31:27
  label it. Yeah.
• 31:28
  Yeah, yeah. Like religious goodness, it's
• 31:31
  like a double edged sword it it cuts even deeper because
• 31:35
  everyone flocks to it thinking it's the safe and beautiful and
• 31:38
  glorious thing and then it like whiplashes back with a shame
• 31:43
  creating monster. Yeah, we, we, we, we do that all
• 31:49
  the time in so many ways. We create churches that are
• 31:55
  built on shame, built on fear, built on ambition, and a
• 31:59
  surprised when they don't look like the Kingdom of God.
• 32:02
  Yeah, and if you think that we're talking about that from
• 32:04
  our high horse because S Fellowship Church isn't that
• 32:07
  way, that's I'd like to think that we are in a slightly
• 32:14
  healthier place. But let's be honest, like every
• 32:17
  human environment is a mixture of both the broken and the
• 32:23
  beautiful. And I've been in some of those
• 32:24
  churches that are broken and the pastor of those churches and
• 32:28
  those in leadership are like, isn't everything amazing?
• 32:30
  Look at this. It's wonderful.
• 32:31
  Like we're just, we got everything right right now.
• 32:34
  So when you're in a church that you think we have a right
• 32:37
  posture over some things, well, you know, maybe but but.
• 32:42
  But I can tell. But maybe not.
• 32:44
  But I can tell you like there is a constant push pull for me
• 32:48
  every time I step on that platform, that whether it it am
• 32:53
  I building my Kingdom or the Kingdom of God, and there's a
• 32:56
  constant push pull on any given day.
• 32:58
  There's a goodness in it and there's another good day.
• 33:01
  It's it's an evil. And this is what it means to be
• 33:04
  human in a in a fallen world is to navigate these environments
• 33:09
  that are like this mixture. And anytime you're you know,
• 33:14
  anytime your income, salary, purchasing of a house, family,
• 33:20
  eating tied to what you do for the Kingdom of God, it's hard to
• 33:26
  maintain a sense of you know. Yes.
• 33:30
  This is, this is like this is purely altruistic.
• 33:34
  This is purely out of the advancement of the Kingdom.
• 33:37
  The only thing Alex and I ever do is purely from the overflow
• 33:41
  of our love for this community and for God.
• 33:44
  Nothing ever selfish happens at this place from our leadership.
• 33:48
  So, so I think the best best you can do there is you can notice
• 33:51
  it. You can notice your your flaws
• 33:54
  and your weaknesses and your tendencies and you can you can
• 34:00
  constantly hold them up, hoping that that God will mitigate some
• 34:04
  of those broken tendencies. Yeah, and and I guess something
• 34:08
  my dad said to me when I was maybe 18 or something like that,
• 34:12
  he said don't panic when you make mistakes, panic when you
• 34:18
  stop staying in the game. Eyes like that was so freeing to
• 34:25
  me when it came to my battle with battles with sin or my
• 34:28
  spiritual formation and journey. The point the point being is
• 34:33
  like if you're on a journey with Jesus and you're at least semi
• 34:37
  engaging him, even if it's with a little bit of frustration and
• 34:42
  angst like the psalmist God, where are you?
• 34:44
  What's going on? It's when you become indifferent
• 34:48
  and exit the journey completely. That's the greatest danger to
• 34:52
  the soul. It's sin isn't disengaging from
• 34:58
  the the presence of God because every good perfect thing comes
• 35:03
  from him. He's the only source of life and
• 35:06
  hope. He's the only one that can
• 35:08
  create the city we all want want.
• 35:11
  So the the greatest risk of your life isn't sin, it's escaping
• 35:15
  him. OK, So yeah, we got a pretty
• 35:18
  good summary of what you talked about.
• 35:21
  There's this new Kingdom that's coming our our the thing that we
• 35:25
  are called to do is work towards it.
• 35:27
  Like I used to use this language of like, like an Isaiah 66
• 35:33
  Kingdom will come that God does. There's an Isaiah 65 Kingdom
• 35:36
  that we can work towards. But same thing like, yeah, we're
• 35:39
  not just waiting to get out of here.
• 35:41
  It's not just like what? What's the word like cosmic
• 35:47
  evacuation that we're waiting for?
• 35:50
  Like beam me up, Scotty. I used to call that kind of
• 35:53
  theory around eschatology the Arnold Schwarzenegger theory.
• 35:57
  You know, Arnold Schwarzenegger always has that movie line where
• 36:00
  he's like, we've got to get out of here.
• 36:03
  That's that's not what we're called to do.
• 36:06
  We're in this thing. And actually our goal is if
• 36:10
  anything, like over history has been expressed as we don't need
• 36:17
  to worry about what happens to us.
• 36:19
  Like there were stories during the Titanic sinking of followers
• 36:23
  of Jesus that swam around saying does anyone here not follow
• 36:26
  Jesus and offering their life jackets to them because they're
• 36:30
  aware that they had nothing to fear, you know?
• 36:33
  So all sorts of interesting things going on there.
• 36:36
  So you talked about that you left a bunch of like potential
• 36:40
  rabbit trails. So let's play the game of which
• 36:43
  rabbit trail do you want to to go down first because you've got
• 36:47
  25 minutes. So if there's 8 rabbit trails
• 36:49
  lined up, we can imagine 12345678.
• 36:52
  Yeah, yeah, yeah. OK.
• 36:53
  Which one do you want to follow? OK.
• 36:55
  All right, well, one because you.
• 36:57
  Promised it, not me. Yeah, before I'll preface this,
• 37:01
  I, I said in the in the sermon, I need to move this to the
• 37:06
  podcast for me to, to not talk about it.
• 37:09
  And then I said, please, if you have questions about this, reach
• 37:12
  out and to the podcast. So what I found out is that the
• 37:17
  things that I was angsty about not including no one else cared
• 37:20
  about no questions. So first of all, I'll preface
• 37:24
  like all my little nerd moments that I had to like set aside, no
• 37:28
  one else had questions about them, at least not questions
• 37:31
  that were strong enough for them to actually write them in.
• 37:34
  So, So all right, so maybe all the rabbit trails I want to talk
• 37:38
  about now, no one cares. How's that?
• 37:42
  Maybe they just don't know that they care.
• 37:43
  Yeah. Yeah, So, well, I, well, how
• 37:49
  about this? The the first, we can just go
• 37:51
  top to bottom in the in the chapter and I can just notice
• 37:54
  things. I one of them was that I
• 37:55
  mentioned that the C isn't necessarily a literal C, So
• 37:59
  there's, OK, there's a ton of stuff going on there.
• 38:04
  The sea represents chaos and disorder and destruction.
• 38:07
  It did from the foundation. We could trace that all
• 38:10
  throughout. So Genesis 1, right?
• 38:11
  Genesis 1, it's formless and void.
• 38:14
  The spirits hover, hovering over the face of the deep.
• 38:18
  Different stories in the Gospels where Jesus calms the sea.
• 38:22
  It's not just that he calms the sea.
• 38:25
  There's like a subconscious undercurrent there that Jesus is
• 38:29
  the one who brings order, where there is chaos.
• 38:31
  Yeah. So so.
• 38:33
  We could make a a biblical theological case that the sea
• 38:36
  may not be literal, but because, you know, I know how much you
• 38:39
  love the ocean, I think you should make some of the case.
• 38:42
  Yeah, I so, so my favorite place on Earth is ocean.
• 38:46
  Like I love water in general, but ocean in particular.
• 38:50
  I love that like just the the it's big and small.
• 38:54
  Like you can sit at the edge of it and this the tiniest trickle
• 38:58
  and then you've got these giant rolling waves coming in.
• 39:01
  So if you ever get a chance to go to Cornwall, England, take
• 39:05
  that chance. So so I long for C to continue
• 39:10
  just for the joy and beauty of it.
• 39:12
  But but if you lived in an agrarian, sort of.
• 39:17
  Inland. Yeah, yeah.
• 39:19
  Desert nation predominantly. Yeah, but but even even like
• 39:24
  needing the sea for travel in an age where travel was not safe,
• 39:28
  needing it to transport goods for trading, all those things.
• 39:31
  Yeah, well, the sea was a place where ships were destroyed.
• 39:35
  Where you are out of control, there is no predictability.
• 39:39
  Who knows what's down there? We see weird creatures down
• 39:41
  there. Even like this language in Job
• 39:43
  41. Can you catch a sea monster by
• 39:46
  using a fish hook? Can you tie its mouth shut with
• 39:49
  a rope? Can it be LED?
• 39:50
  Which is literally the word dragon, but.
• 39:51
  Yeah, sure it is. Yeah, it's in this, it's.
• 39:54
  Well, the trend the. Leviathan.
• 39:57
  Which I mean I meant in the in the LXX dragon.
• 40:03
  Uh huh. So so so so for any of you that
• 40:06
  don't know what LXX is. It's.
• 40:08
  Greek translation of the Old Testament.
• 40:11
  Yeah, Yeah. And so, like, these are things
• 40:16
  that are out of control. These are things that are
• 40:19
  powerful beyond your imagination, even even like when
• 40:21
  you look at like we know more about space then we know about
• 40:26
  the oceans that we are surrounded by.
• 40:30
  And so I think there's this like there's this mystery to that
• 40:35
  that that is spoken about here. If the sea in Genesis represents
• 40:38
  chaos and God forms something out of the chaos, well then what
• 40:44
  is it for chaos to to come to its conclusion?
• 40:48
  God heals the chaos and all now is under his control.
• 40:54
  So I think there's this like thing going on there that that
• 40:58
  that seems like a natural healing.
• 41:00
  So, yeah, like, so Sunday, I mean, again, I, we, I don't
• 41:03
  think we have time to do a full scope even on this show.
• 41:07
  But I, I made the case that this sea represents chaos.
• 41:10
  It could be a literal sea. Fair enough.
• 41:11
  Fine. If that's your hermeneutic, you
• 41:14
  can go there. But I think if you just think
• 41:17
  it's a literal sea, FYI, there's no ocean.
• 41:21
  Yeah, if that's all you read this thing, then you're missing
• 41:24
  what I think the actual agenda of this text is, is to refer to
• 41:28
  Kate. And there'd be a danger with an
• 41:29
  apocalyptic, apocalyptic man, apocalyptic text.
• 41:36
  You don't preach one week and you.
• 41:40
  Lost my ability. Oh, you did preach.
• 41:42
  Yeah, you did preach. That's.
• 41:43
  Why apocalyptic text to read things literally as a default.
• 41:52
  We've read so much metaphor to suddenly believe, oh, we're in
• 41:56
  the last couple of chapters, it must suddenly all be literal,
• 41:59
  right? Would be a dangerous, dangerous
• 42:02
  premise. Totally.
• 42:03
  Or premise, seeing as I can no longer say things correctly.
• 42:08
  So, so so I think that's interesting.
• 42:10
  When you talked about the dragon, did you talk about, I
• 42:12
  think I mentioned a storyline in the show I'd been watching.
• 42:17
  It's a show called Fargo, and there's this moment when this.
• 42:23
  No, I did. I actually pulled it up, got a
• 42:26
  screenshot of the show, found the clip, was gonna show it in
• 42:29
  this in the thing and I cut it because of time.
• 42:32
  So in in this show, Fargo, there's this really intense
• 42:36
  character who turns out is an assassin and he's leaving town
• 42:42
  and he gets pulled over by this cop, like really nice guy,
• 42:45
  played by Tom Hanks, his son Carl and Hanks.
• 42:48
  And they're like kind of going back and forth as he's asking
• 42:53
  for his license. And then like after asking him
• 42:57
  just to let him go. Billy Bob Thornton's like his
• 43:00
  his attitude just changes. And he says, you know, he says
• 43:05
  like, just think about this. Like years ago, on the edge of
• 43:08
  maps, they used to write here be Dragons, and we don't write that
• 43:12
  anymore on maps. But that doesn't mean the
• 43:14
  Dragons don't exist. And years later, you could
• 43:18
  either be sitting. You could be sitting with your
• 43:20
  and he names his wife and he names his son.
• 43:23
  He says you could be sitting them with them enjoying old age,
• 43:26
  enjoying grandkids, or you could continue to ask me for my
• 43:30
  license and registration. And you see Colin Hanks face
• 43:33
  just change. Now.
• 43:35
  The, the language that I love is this is the acknowledgement that
• 43:38
  actually we, we have this sense that there's something out there
• 43:42
  that we're still afraid of. It's in places that we don't
• 43:46
  fully understand. So there's this lurking
• 43:49
  awareness as as as human beings that we, the world is a mystery
• 43:55
  still. Yeah, the the universe is a
• 43:57
  mystery. And somewhere this conclusion in
• 44:02
  Genesis in in a revelation is, is starting to say, no, no, God
• 44:05
  is going to create something where to your point, there is no
• 44:09
  longer fear. Yeah, yeah.
• 44:12
  So anyway, that was one of the rabbit trails.
• 44:14
  I felt like I could have traced the sea and and tried to make a
• 44:19
  biblical theological case that this is representative chaos and
• 44:22
  stuff. Instead I said, you can take it
• 44:24
  or leave it. I think this means chaos and
• 44:26
  here's the implications of that. We talked a little little bit
• 44:28
  about the problem of evil, natural evil from some quotes
• 44:32
  from David Bentley Hart in The Doors of the Sea, which has made
• 44:35
  an appearance on the show a couple different times, but he
• 44:38
  talks about this. The absurdity of evil is one of
• 44:45
  the things he addresses in the book.
• 44:47
  And so I think that that's all the sea.
• 44:50
  The sea sort of encapsulates this idea that the world is just
• 44:54
  messed up and it's just chaotic and this is a place where
• 44:58
  there's no longer any sea. So that was 1 rabbit Trail.
• 45:03
  One of the other rabbit trails was this thesis that is brewing
• 45:07
  in me and I, I like started the reason I cut it honestly, or one
• 45:13
  of the reasons I cut it. I, I was planning on cutting it
• 45:16
  before I had life group and then after a life group.
• 45:20
  I talked about it a bunch at life group and confirmed this is
• 45:24
  not fully blossomed in my own mind in order for me to
• 45:27
  articulate it to anyone because my life group was kind of like
• 45:30
  huh, that's weird, you made no sense talking about that.
• 45:34
  And I was like, huh, I should definitely cut.
• 45:36
  Your life thought your orange underwear were less weird than
• 45:39
  your thesis. So it's this that the I think
• 45:46
  there's something to this, and I don't know how to articulate
• 45:49
  this. So this could be a mess.
• 45:50
  I think that the walls of the city here are human beings in
• 45:56
  Revelation. Now, again, not in the literal
• 46:01
  sense. There might be actually walls
• 46:04
  made of jewels and diamonds and rubies and stuff like it talks
• 46:07
  about in this chapter. Fair enough that that absolutely
• 46:12
  could be the point. But again, in this rich world of
• 46:15
  apocalyptic literature full of metaphors, I think that there's
• 46:19
  a meta theme through the entire Bible of what was supposed to be
• 46:24
  our wall versus what we actually built as.
• 46:28
  Well. So starting all the way back, we
• 46:31
  can talk about the whole women in leadership conversation the
• 46:35
  the word Azer. In Genesis, when God makes Eve
• 46:39
  an Azer, he forms Adam out of the soil.
• 46:45
  It's pottery imagery. It's like a Potter and a clay
• 46:49
  and he builds Eve into an Azure, which is a close relationship of
• 46:56
  what gets built in city walls. And then I wanted to make this
• 47:00
  case, and I think that this is an easier case to make.
• 47:02
  It just was too time consuming that without exception, at least
• 47:08
  in the Hebrew text, when they say city, it's always walled
• 47:11
  city. I did.
• 47:13
  I had a whole Greek slide picking apart the Greek word
• 47:17
  it's Semitic origins. When they said city it always
• 47:22
  was walled city. There was larger gatherings of
• 47:26
  human beings in the ancient world that they wouldn't call
• 47:30
  the city. Why?
• 47:31
  The only reason is it didn't have a wall.
• 47:33
  Well, and you still see some of that, like in England, it can't
• 47:36
  be a city unless it has a university or a cathedral.
• 47:41
  Yeah, yeah. Like so there's even then it's
• 47:42
  like cities have like there's a defining function defining
• 47:48
  attribute to a city. And so that's that's hard for us
• 47:52
  to understand when we've got like, why is Littleton a city I.
• 47:56
  Don't. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 47:57
  City, it's not the same as Denver.
• 47:59
  I mean, it's clearly different. Yeah, and I had all these
• 48:01
  fascinating observations I could make.
• 48:04
  The modern equivalent of a city is a government and a military.
• 48:08
  Yes. And the, the there, there's
• 48:10
  really practical reasons for that.
• 48:12
  Basically air, air raids. Yeah.
• 48:15
  Yeah. The only reason we still don't
• 48:16
  have walls is they just don't work.
• 48:18
  Yeah. Back in the day, they were very
• 48:20
  effective for keeping humans safe.
• 48:23
  And the reasons we don't now is because of the of airplanes.
• 48:27
  And you just fly over the wall and attack that way.
• 48:30
  So huge. Nuclear weapons.
• 48:32
  Exactly so. But so the modern equivalent of
• 48:35
  a walled city is a government and its military.
• 48:39
  Yeah. And so we still build cities
• 48:41
  with walls. We they're we have to
• 48:43
  extrapolate the modern quibble up.
• 48:46
  So, but anyway, the idea is this, if I can semi articulate
• 48:53
  it, part of the reason why God is not a huge fan of cities, in
• 48:58
  other words, walled cities is he already gave humans a wall.
• 49:05
  He gave Adam, Eve. And it's not that specifically
• 49:09
  females are walled entities. I think that there's a beautiful
• 49:16
  thing that there that we can talk about.
• 49:17
  But and it's even the content of one of the weddings that I
• 49:21
  officiated most recently was drawn from that idea that we
• 49:25
  that man and woman theologically are made to be each other's
• 49:30
  safety. And how's that like?
• 49:34
  Again, the part of the rabbit hole is this confusion of like,
• 49:37
  how can we be each other's wall literally in in because we can't
• 49:43
  help but think in the more safety thing like how would a
• 49:48
  how would how is my wife the equivalent of the locked door to
• 49:51
  prevent the 14 year old from coming in our house?
• 49:54
  And so it gets a little bit abstract, which is why I felt
• 49:56
  like it was needed to be cut. But if you trace the idea
• 50:00
  throughout the scriptures over and over and over again in
• 50:04
  Isaiah and all and different prophetic texts, he's hinting
• 50:08
  that you shouldn't need walls because you're supposed to be
• 50:12
  each other's fortress. And then Fast forward to
• 50:14
  Revelation track chapter 21. If I throw it on the screen
• 50:17
  here, it helps if I actually turn this off.
• 50:25
  If you look at 2111 and mirror image, enter screen.
• 50:37
  So you said and he carried me away.
• 50:40
  So so John is being carried away in the spirit.
• 50:42
  He goes and he sees he showed me this holy city, Jerusalem coming
• 50:46
  down out of heaven from God. It's shown with glory and it's
• 50:49
  brilliance. Da da da da, verse 12.
• 50:52
  It had a great high wall with 12 gates and the 12 gates angels at
• 50:56
  each gate. On the gates were written the
• 50:58
  names of the 12 tribes of Israel.
• 51:02
  So now we're talking about the gates of the city.
• 51:05
  The names of the 12 tribes are written on them.
• 51:09
  Interesting. OK, there were three gates on
• 51:12
  the E, 3 on the on the N, 3 on the South.
• 51:16
  And this is the exact layout that the people of Israel were
• 51:20
  camped around the Tabernacle, which if you then so again, he's
• 51:26
  hyperlinking back to the Tabernacle store.
• 51:28
  If you go and study those passages, you start to realize
• 51:32
  some of that is has some spiritual metaphor even back
• 51:35
  then. But it was also a protective
• 51:37
  thing that they didn't have walls.
• 51:40
  They had they were protecting each other with their own
• 51:45
  humanity and providing for each other with their very.
• 51:49
  It works if it's a metaphorical level, right?
• 51:52
  I mean, no one wants to be the the wall literally for all
• 51:56
  eternity, but we're talking about like.
• 51:59
  But so the reason why it's so abstract is we can't help but
• 52:03
  think of physical safety like a bad guy's coming in and I'm the
• 52:09
  front of the line and I get stabbed so that my neighbor
• 52:12
  doesn't get stabbed, that that's where we go.
• 52:14
  But this place doesn't have that kind of threat because because
• 52:21
  metaphorically speaking, what we, we don't actually need
• 52:24
  physical safety in this context. What we need is emotional
• 52:28
  psychological safety. And human beings can be an
• 52:32
  emotional, psychological wall where physical walls can't.
• 52:37
  And then you keep going. The walls of the city had 12
• 52:41
  foundations, and on them were the names of the 12 apostles of
• 52:44
  the Lamb. So you have Israel and the
• 52:48
  Gentile church are the walls. What's going on there?
• 52:54
  And I think it would it, I think it would take an entire book or
• 52:58
  doctoral thesis to unpack all the implications of this.
• 53:03
  And I was like, obviously not going to make the cut for a
• 53:04
  Sunday sermon because I can't even articulate on the podcast.
• 53:08
  But metaphorically speaking, what do we we should be human
• 53:13
  beings, should be each other's safety net.
• 53:17
  We should be each other's comfort.
• 53:21
  And if we're functioning correctly, there's no danger.
• 53:26
  There's no bad guys trying to get us because we are the bad
• 53:30
  guys healed in this city. OK.
• 53:34
  Am I is that making any sense? Yeah.
• 53:36
  You can see why it didn't make the cut.
• 53:37
  I can it. Was a good cut.
• 53:39
  Good cut anyway. So here, here's the question
• 53:42
  that I have. Yeah, we got 5 minutes left.
• 53:45
  Yeah. What's going on in Revelation 22
• 53:52
  verse 15? Another rabbit drill.
• 53:56
  I didn't even mention this one. I mentioned the 21 verse where
• 54:02
  it says the bad guys are banished at to the lake of fire.
• 54:05
  I think that's 20, isn't? It 2121 I thought.
• 54:09
  It was 20. No, 21/8.
• 54:15
  But the cowardly, yeah, the cowardly, the unbelieving, the
• 54:19
  vile, the murders, the sexually immoral, well, it actually shows
• 54:22
  up in 20 as well. And so anyway, those who
• 54:24
  practice magic arts, idolaters, liars, they will be consigned to
• 54:30
  the fiery lake burning. Sulfur 2015 Anyone whose name
• 54:34
  was not found in the Book of Life was thrown into the Lake of
• 54:37
  Fire, and then you get to 20. 2215 This is wild.
• 54:42
  Right at the end. This is one of those things
• 54:44
  like, I ain't got no time to address this, but look at this,
• 54:47
  2215, almost the very end of the book.
• 54:51
  Outside are the dogs. So hold on, you have 14.
• 54:54
  Blessed are those who wash their robes that they have the right
• 54:57
  to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city.
• 55:01
  Plus 15. Outside are the dogs, those who
• 55:06
  practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers,
• 55:11
  the idolatrous, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood.
• 55:16
  Yes, so. So there's bad guys out these
• 55:20
  out of these walls. Who weren't thrown into the Lake
• 55:23
  of fire. No, they they are.
• 55:26
  But they're still there. Exactly.
• 55:31
  So what's up with that? So these same bad guys that are
• 55:34
  thrown in the Lake of Fire are dogs and outside the walls.
• 55:39
  So what is is it a literal lake of fire?
• 55:43
  And if so, why aren't they dead and gone?
• 55:47
  And if if it is A and yet some of them still survive and are
• 55:52
  outside the walls. Again, apocalyptic literature.
• 55:56
  We're on very shaky ground if we try and over literalize this.
• 56:00
  But here's what I think is going on.
• 56:02
  And please, please hear me. Please don't pull out quotes
• 56:06
  from this episode and put them down as Aaron's Theology of the
• 56:10
  End Times, because this is highly hypothetical theology
• 56:15
  that I did not have time to vet out.
• 56:20
  But NT Wright has this intriguing perspective of the
• 56:27
  eternal state of human beings or hell or whatever that I think
• 56:33
  you and I have talked about a couple different times in other
• 56:36
  behind other conversations not on the show, but there's
• 56:40
  multiple views. There's like the eternal
• 56:42
  conscious torment view of eternal damnation and the the
• 56:49
  fire language of 21 fits that framework much easier.
• 56:56
  It's the down. The weakness of that view is a
• 56:59
  little bit that it's driven more by Dante's Infernal than by the
• 57:05
  Bible. There's only a few loose texts
• 57:08
  in Revelation and then one in Peter.
• 57:12
  First Peters. Well, Jesus uses the Gehenna
• 57:16
  language, yes. So there's a question as to what
• 57:19
  exactly that means. Yeah, but there's there's
• 57:21
  another sort of maybe more pointed like theologically
• 57:25
  weighty idea that or text that I that's drawing, I'm drawing a
• 57:29
  blank on what it is that talks about like the destruction of
• 57:32
  the. World Passage I.
• 57:34
  Don't know why it's drawing, but anyway, but the majority of the
• 57:38
  eternal conscious torment, it was actually driven by a
• 57:41
  medieval Dante's infernal language.
• 57:44
  But another, there's other theologians who hold to an
• 57:48
  annihilation view that people who do not ultimately embrace
• 57:52
  Christ as savior and Lord will eventually just cease to exist.
• 57:55
  This starts to venture into a little bit more of ACS Lewis
• 57:58
  land where they sort of like shrink and shrink in their
• 58:03
  humanity shrinks until they cease to exist.
• 58:07
  There's definitely like a punishment or an existence or
• 58:10
  whatever. And then there's the everyone
• 58:17
  gets saved view and that eventually everyone sort of all
• 58:24
  universalism. I I can say with a little bit
• 58:28
  more confidence for Alex and I, we we don't tend to think that
• 58:31
  that's got enough biblical weight to it to just hold to a
• 58:34
  universalist view. But I'm pretty intrigued by some
• 58:38
  sort of hybrid between annihilation and NT writes
• 58:45
  slight modification of annihilation.
• 58:49
  Here's what I think it is. He refers to them outside are
• 58:55
  the dogs. Now that's human beings are
• 58:58
  called dogs various times of the Bible, but there's some if you
• 59:03
  look at the entire theological basis of what it means to be
• 59:07
  made in the image of God. If you divorce yourself from
• 59:13
  God, that's what it be means to be human.
• 59:19
  So that if if being made in the image of God is part of being
• 59:23
  human, then you say I reject God, you decide to no longer be
• 59:28
  a human. Yes, yeah, OK.
• 59:31
  So I don't think it's necessarily as strong of a
• 59:35
  coincidence that he says, look outside of the dogs, he almost
• 59:39
  subhuman them because they've rejected thoroughly God and
• 59:46
  therefore there aren't human. They're still creatures.
• 59:49
  They are sentient. They are human looking physical
• 59:54
  beings. They may build things or create
• 59:56
  things. Anyway, I'm getting in super
• 59:57
  hypothetical land here, but maybe which is?
• 1:00:00
  What a podcast is for. There's maybe some humanish
• 1:00:05
  things, and the only reason they're human ish is because
• 1:00:09
  they've completely rejected God and they're left to their own
• 1:00:12
  devices, meaning they have to build their own, they have to
• 1:00:15
  protect themselves, provide for themselves.
• 1:00:17
  And we know from human history how good well that goes.
• 1:00:20
  It's wars, it's violence, it's people taking advantage of other
• 1:00:23
  people, all of that stuff. And then the fiery lake of 21,
• 1:00:30
  that language there in the Greek is this idea of refinement or
• 1:00:35
  burning up the things that are bad and leaving the remainder,
• 1:00:39
  just like the passage in that I quoted in First Corinthians that
• 1:00:44
  talks about like chapter 3, Yep, in First Corinthians 3.
• 1:00:48
  So all evil will be banished from the city of God.
• 1:00:54
  Yep, including the evil in US. The evil in US will be burned up
• 1:00:58
  in the lake of fire. I'm.
• 1:00:59
  Trying to remember, was it Augustine, one of the the the
• 1:01:03
  church fathers was on his deathbed reportedly, and his
• 1:01:08
  eyes were closed and he seemed to be slipping away.
• 1:01:11
  And the story is that suddenly he kind of like his eyes opened
• 1:01:15
  wide and he looked at the people in the room and he said, I have
• 1:01:18
  seen the Lord. Everything I have written is but
• 1:01:21
  straw, like there's this moment where he like all of these
• 1:01:25
  writings that we still refer back to and talk about, like
• 1:01:27
  foundational. He's like straw.
• 1:01:31
  Like they don't matter. Yeah.
• 1:01:32
  Like like so so like. And even like even in Revelation
• 1:01:35
  where it's like we get these crowns, God gives us a crown and
• 1:01:39
  we're like, we cast our to go and see because we, we start to
• 1:01:44
  see what the crown actually is. Like all the rewards we get in
• 1:01:47
  heaven, he gave them to us in the 1st place.
• 1:01:50
  And you start to realize I actually every single good thing
• 1:01:55
  if we, I want to hang a ton of weight on that passage that says
• 1:01:58
  every good and perfect thing comes from above.
• 1:02:00
  That means every single good thing that you've ever done
• 1:02:03
  actually came from God. And so to divorce yourself from
• 1:02:08
  every good thing means you are ceased to be human.
• 1:02:13
  And then you, you're part of this other infrastructure that
• 1:02:16
  continues to live in a physical, physiological sense.
• 1:02:21
  So. This.
• 1:02:23
  Now you're touching. I don't know.
• 1:02:24
  Now you're touching on a a fascinating like movement within
• 1:02:28
  church history. It's been fascinating to me.
• 1:02:33
  So how can I phrase this well that there has been a tendency.
• 1:02:40
  So, so let's take start with Paul's comment about what he has
• 1:02:43
  seen. He talks about I think the
• 1:02:46
  Second Corinthians, he says, I know a man few years ago and it
• 1:02:50
  seems like he's talking about himself.
• 1:02:52
  We went to the 3rd heaven. So they had an idea of like the
• 1:02:56
  the sky immediately the sky be be on the firmament beyond the
• 1:03:00
  blue as we would look at it. And then somewhere else, some
• 1:03:04
  like breaking of time and space. And I saw the things that God
• 1:03:10
  has planned for those that love us.
• 1:03:12
  And he says no idea. No, no eye has seen, no ear has
• 1:03:16
  heard what God has in store for those who love him.
• 1:03:19
  He talks about the impossibility of describing it.
• 1:03:21
  So Revelation is trying to do the impossible.
• 1:03:25
  It's trying to give us a picture of eternity, though we can never
• 1:03:29
  fully grasp. So if you have a sense of
• 1:03:32
  certainty over, oh, this is what it's going to be like.
• 1:03:34
  Well, you know, take into account what Paul said like it's
• 1:03:37
  it's a it's metaphorical explanation over history.
• 1:03:42
  There's been different movements in churches and for some parts
• 1:03:48
  of church history, the, the imperative, the invite, the
• 1:03:54
  following Jesus has been, there's this thing that we're
• 1:03:58
  moving towards that you don't want to miss out on.
• 1:04:03
  God is calling you to be something beyond anything you've
• 1:04:05
  ever imagined. He's calling you to return to
• 1:04:08
  how you were originally made. And the prize is the New
• 1:04:11
  Jerusalem and you're invited into this thing.
• 1:04:14
  And so follow on to this story, get into it, like receive that
• 1:04:19
  invite. And in other periods of church
• 1:04:21
  history, the invite has been there's this lake of fire,
• 1:04:26
  there's this terror, there's this death.
• 1:04:28
  You don't want to be in that. So anything's better than that.
• 1:04:33
  So so go the other way. Like like escape so.
• 1:04:37
  One's like fear and the other one's hope.
• 1:04:39
  Yeah, and I, I don't know that I, I want to say that one's bad
• 1:04:43
  and one's, and I actually, I think in Jude, you know, Jesus
• 1:04:47
  brother writing this letter says that actually some save, some
• 1:04:51
  save essentially with hope, Some save with fear, like, like the
• 1:04:55
  some that will respond to the fear of what they'll lose and
• 1:04:59
  some that will respond to the hope of what they'll gain.
• 1:05:03
  So, so I'm not saying 1 is right or wrong, but I do think it's
• 1:05:06
  been significant. And, and I think we live in an
• 1:05:08
  age right now where as soon as there's any language that
• 1:05:12
  suggests like not a focus on eternal conscious torment, that
• 1:05:19
  we've lost something of the message.
• 1:05:21
  Yeah, Yeah. Well, I think that that's
• 1:05:24
  pendulum has swung pretty hard in certain facets, yes, but the
• 1:05:29
  traditional, the person who grew up in church for 20-30 years,
• 1:05:34
  like you're my generation and older, we want to cling to the
• 1:05:39
  eternal conscious torment framework for a couple of
• 1:05:43
  different reasons, which you could do some church history
• 1:05:45
  study on. I think we're actually a
• 1:05:47
  minority in church history if you're in that space.
• 1:05:51
  But yes, yeah, I agree with you in that sense.
• 1:05:53
  So, yeah. So what else were you saying?
• 1:05:55
  If you are, if you are interested in pursuing this more
• 1:05:59
  on a slightly academic level, I believe, let me see if I can
• 1:06:05
  remember this source. There is a book written about 15
• 1:06:11
  years ago called 4 Views on Hell.
• 1:06:15
  It specifically pushes into that language that you could check
• 1:06:20
  out. There's another one that's
• 1:06:22
  actually not the one I'm thinking of because this one's a
• 1:06:24
  little more and I might have to post that because I'm not sure
• 1:06:31
  if there are one. But there are resources that
• 1:06:33
  examine like how that's been like seen over history and how
• 1:06:37
  language has been. Yeah.
• 1:06:38
  And so I think that what's interesting about the scriptures
• 1:06:41
  and now we're way over it. Now I'm going to way over, I'm
• 1:06:44
  going to blame the fact that you're the moderator of the
• 1:06:47
  conversation. It's not the fact that I am long
• 1:06:49
  winded when you invite me to talk.
• 1:06:51
  Interesting. That's an interesting viewpoint.
• 1:06:57
  It's totally wrong. Alex and I were talking about
• 1:07:01
  this coming Sunday and he decided he was going to preach a
• 1:07:03
  little bit shorter. I'm not going to tell you how
• 1:07:04
  short he was said he was going to preach because I don't want
• 1:07:06
  to hold him to it. But I was like, now you're just
• 1:07:09
  showing off because he actually can go short.
• 1:07:13
  I am incapable. It is it is a greater level of
• 1:07:17
  formation that I've yet to attain to go short anyway.
• 1:07:20
  But the scriptures do both. They seem to to highlight the
• 1:07:26
  terror and the horrendous nature of evil and sin and highlight
• 1:07:33
  the absolute majesty that is the new heavens and new earth.
• 1:07:37
  And so I don't want to let go of either one of them.
• 1:07:40
  And so regardless of whether did you, you become sort of
• 1:07:43
  annihilation or turn of conscious torment or whatever,
• 1:07:45
  the point is, sin is so, so, so, so, so bad in any framework that
• 1:07:52
  it, it's the equivalent of. And even if you're an
• 1:07:56
  annihilation space and you, you can leverage all that language
• 1:08:01
  because we know that the First World War, the Second World War
• 1:08:06
  war and like the atrocities that we see in human history where
• 1:08:11
  where human beings torture other human beings in unimaginable
• 1:08:16
  ways. The Rwanda genocide, the
• 1:08:19
  apartheid slavery in America where where human beings like,
• 1:08:23
  rape and pillage and dehumanize other human beings in
• 1:08:28
  unimaginable ways. OK, if that's not hell, I don't
• 1:08:32
  know what is. That's the result of Syria.
• 1:08:35
  If you know what it metaphorically, it feels a lot
• 1:08:38
  like fiery furnace stuff to me. If you just look at history.
• 1:08:43
  Oh yeah, the worst parts of humanities.
• 1:08:45
  And yet so that. Stuff is banished from this.
• 1:08:48
  City, regardless of how you read these things and.
• 1:08:52
  Outside of that. City, there might be still human
• 1:08:56
  like creatures that are still living inside that fiery furnace
• 1:09:01
  that is human depravity. Yeah, yeah, that might be what's
• 1:09:05
  going on in verse. 15 and the answer.
• 1:09:08
  Is we don't know. We don't know we're.
• 1:09:10
  Trying our best to pull things out of this complicated text
• 1:09:15
  wrestling towards some sense of what we think.
• 1:09:18
  Goddess, aren't you guys glad I didn't talk about all that on
• 1:09:21
  Sunday? It would have been.
• 1:09:22
  Like a 7 hour service. Look at that.
• 1:09:24
  Were those wise choices? That's only.
• 1:09:27
  Three of the rabbit trails I could have chased.
• 1:09:29
  Well, we're already. 10 minutes over, I know primarily your
• 1:09:31
  fault. We should stop.
• 1:09:32
  Primarily Alex's fault. You're the moderator.
• 1:09:36
  Cut me off. We'll see you guys.
• 1:09:38
  Later. Oh yes, now I.
• 1:09:41
  Got to point the button, it's totally my fault.