Latest / Relish: a Christian podcast / Rabbit’s Feet, Ouija Boards, and the Danger of Idols

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Rabbit’s Feet, Ouija Boards, and the Danger of Idols · Relish: a Christian podcast

• 0:00
  Are things like rabbit's feet or other charms like that sinful or harmful to
• 0:04
  our faith? Do you want the short answer or the long answer?
• 0:08
  Can a Christian who accepted God be possessed by a demon or a non-holy spirit?
• 0:15
  ...by Joseph in one of the very last lines of the book when he says,
• 0:20
  You all intended this for evil. Yes.
• 0:22
  He says this to his brothers. But God has used it for good to save many lives. ...
• 0:28
  Relish. Pleasing or zestful flavor. A quantity just sufficient to flavor,
• 0:33
  to be pleased or gratified by, enjoy.
• 0:36
  We are hoping that what we bring to your table today might add some spice to your life.
• 0:42
  Welcome back to another episode of Relish. I am your host, Rowan Miller,
• 0:46
  and today we have a special guest with us.
• 0:48
  Have Don Patterson as usual, but to my right over here, we got Corbin Weaver
• 0:53
  Bushart, who is the Bible teacher at Hillcrest Academy. Your teacher. My teacher as well. Yes.
• 0:59
  Yeah. Teaches everybody in the school, actually. So that's cool.
• 1:03
  Yeah. Even the young ones.
• 1:04
  Even the young ones. Brian Neuschwander does the sixth grade.
• 1:07
  But yeah, seventh through twelfth is my territory.
• 1:10
  So yeah. Cool. Glad to be here. Yeah. Praise the Lord.
• 1:15
  And so, oh yeah, we'll start with one of these. All right.
• 1:19
  Just me or Anthony? You and Corbin, and maybe I'll have to, we'll see. Okay.
• 1:24
  How have you used the time, money, and opportunities God has given you?
• 1:28
  So it's seeing what God has given you as a gift and how have you used it?
• 1:33
  Yeah. I mean, I'm not sure I have much of a gift for this, but I've been,
• 1:38
  I've had this opportunity to step in and take Alex's role when he got a little busy.
• 1:43
  So I've enjoyed doing it. And I'd say that's definitely the first thing that
• 1:48
  came to my mind. Yeah, definitely a lot of fun. Yeah, good.
• 1:52
  Yeah, and yeah, I even think of
• 1:56
  my old cars as gifts that God has given me that I can use for his glory.
• 2:00
  And when I'm cranky, I just go
• 2:02
  and find one of them and give them a crank instead of cranking on others.
• 2:06
  It's smart. Or being cranky in general. Yeah.
• 2:12
  Corbin, you want to answer that one? Man, it's one of those that it's hard because—,
• 2:16
  You don't want to sound boastful, which I don't hear either of you being.
• 2:21
  We're very humble. Yeah. Sure. Yeah.
• 2:24
  Yeah. I don't know. I mean, things that came to mind for me when you started
• 2:28
  talking about wrenching on cars made me think about, well, yeah,
• 2:33
  for me, soccer has always been a big hobby and kind of a skill to craft and
• 2:37
  to try to pour some excellence into.
• 2:41
  Not that I feel particularly excellent at it, especially the older I get.
• 2:45
  But that's one place that I think God meets us is in these arenas of our hobbies.
• 2:51
  That's true. Where we can test our mettle a little bit. Maybe pull your mic
• 2:54
  just a little bit closer.
• 2:57
  Your voice isn't as big as mine. Fair enough.
• 3:03
  All right, I believe we'll jump
• 3:04
  into the question section for these two guys. Okay, I brought them on.
• 3:09
  I was looking forward to this. I wonder how it's going to play out.
• 3:12
  Yeah, we got some good ones. These are the questions continuing from the Hillcrest
• 3:17
  Academy Chapel that we did, all the student body submitted questions,
• 3:21
  and that's part of the reason why we have Corbin on.
• 3:23
  He gets to answer his own students' questions. Wow.
• 3:27
  Some pretty deep ones on here, I think. Whoa. I didn't bring my question.
• 3:32
  I should enjoy these. Are things like rabbit's feet or other charms like that
• 3:38
  sinful or harmful to our faith? Wow.
• 3:42
  Yes. Do you want the short answer or the long answer? Some of both, maybe.
• 3:47
  Basically, anything that distracts from God and would put the power or the...
• 3:55
  Nuance by which we engage the Almighty through something else.
• 3:59
  Even to the point of, if you go in the Old Testament, when Moses raised up the
• 4:06
  serpent, the brass serpent, that was a big deal, and it brought a lot of people healing.
• 4:12
  But when you get back to the time between the Testaments, no, it's right after.
• 4:19
  Can you remember the time? Because all of a sudden, they destroy it because
• 4:23
  it is being worshiped rather than the worship going to God.
• 4:27
  And so the brass serpent was destroyed so that it would not be a stumbling block to Israel.
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  And I have not got that scripture in my head. We were talking about that ahead
• 4:37
  of time, but it was after David's time.
• 4:40
  It was after Solomon's time.
• 4:43
  So it had to be in the time of the kings. Yeah. Funny. Somebody else just brought
• 4:49
  that same topic up to me a couple days ago.
• 4:53
  But yeah, the way that this snake, the bronze snake becomes an idol later in
• 4:57
  the story that needs to be, yeah, dismantled.
• 5:01
  In the question, was it also, so he said rabbit's feet and- Just like other
• 5:05
  charms or things of, I don't know, that you could- Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
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  But definitely second Don's answer on that.
• 5:14
  Um, and, and when we talk about charms, I mean, that, that to me also starts
• 5:20
  to sound a little bit like, uh, are we getting into sort of spellcraft and,
• 5:24
  and some of those darker, um,
• 5:27
  practices that, that the Bible is, it's pretty clearly trying to steer his people away from.
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  Um, and, uh, yeah.
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  And we have to be careful of those kinds of things. It's in second Kings 18
• 5:39
  when it's broken up by Hezekiah, King of Judah.
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  We have to be careful about anything that would be a distraction between okay
• 5:47
  is our faith in Jesus Christ.
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  If it's in Jesus Christ, is it
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  also anchored in God? Because even in the Trinity, we can get off on it.
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  So when you think of the fact that if we could be drawn to one side or the other,
• 6:03
  Holy Spirit or Jesus from God the Father,
• 6:07
  how much more is it dangerous to take a rabbit's foot or a Ouija board?
• 6:14
  Yeah, right. I mean, that's a really—I've seen people in spiritual bondage by a Ouija board.
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  And so, yeah, those are dangerous things. Keep looking to God.
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  Understand who Jesus is in light of who God is, because He is God.
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  But understand God in the form of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
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  One topic that came up at Hillcrest a couple weeks ago was the term strongholds.
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  Yes. And how we framed it that week, our Spanish teacher Sierra Cheney was speaking into this too.
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  But understanding our identity as people who are made in the image of God,
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  who are called children of God, and that in the context of God's household,
• 7:06
  we are known, we are seen, we are loved.
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  And also we are afforded spiritual blessings that break all bondage and all
• 7:16
  strongholds, whether that's the...
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  The internal issues that today we might just get psychological insecurity,
• 7:25
  stress, anxiety, those kinds of strongholds that keep us, or external things,
• 7:29
  whether they be principalities or powers or systems of evil in the world.
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  But as we root ourselves in our identity and God as image bearers,
• 7:41
  ultimately fulfilled in Christ, we find that the rabbit's foot is maybe not
• 7:47
  really that necessary. Exactly. Exactly.
• 7:51
  Yeah. And I think that's really important. I found that when I,
• 7:54
  I guess I went through some kind of spiritual renewal in 2020, 21,
• 7:59
  I found that in that, that my identity in Christ, I mean, I'd been,
• 8:05
  I'm a little bit older than you. I'm even older than your dad.
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  And knowing my identity in Christ and then reaffirming it, I guess it was re-finding
• 8:17
  my identity in Christ that made all the difference in my spiritual renewal in that period of time.
• 8:22
  Because before that, yeah, I was a preacher and I was all these things,
• 8:25
  but it was as if I had to re-anchor.
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  Who am I? Who am I in light of who Christ is?
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  And a lot of study of Romans 6, 7, and 8 were part of that understanding that
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  Christ gave me the freedom in which I live but in him my identity happens and.
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  That means I move ahead differently than I did before because of who I am.
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  I'm not keeping that spreadsheet.
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  I mean, I think before that, I lived with a spreadsheet mentality of,
• 9:03
  okay, I've done this many sins, I need to confess, and then I make the spreadsheet
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  clean again, and then, oh, boy, here, I send this, this, this, this.
• 9:12
  I've got to clean the spreadsheet again, that kind of thing.
• 9:15
  And understanding my identity in Christ means that, wait a minute,
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  it's under the blood already.
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  And so I do the best I possibly can to reflect who Jesus is in my life.
• 9:28
  And that changed my perspective from a spreadsheet to the cross.
• 9:37
  Very good. That's the long answer. I liked it. I liked it. Sounds like good news.
• 9:44
  Can a Christian who accepted God be possessed by a demon or a non-Holy Spirit?
• 9:51
  Not possessed can be oppressed. Okay.
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  Because you as a Christian, having given your life to Christ, cannot be possessed.
• 10:01
  In other words, your life cannot be taken by Satan and as his possession, as his ground.
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  However, you can be oppressed because there can be things that maybe you have
• 10:12
  let loose of or have surrendered, at least momentarily, into Satan's will.
• 10:19
  And so then you need to reclaim that. And that's part of what we do through
• 10:24
  healing prayer and those kind of activities where we break those chains.
• 10:28
  We break those bondages.
• 10:30
  We break those strongholds that, uh, the devil is able to oppress us through.
• 10:39
  He's not able to possess us through.
• 10:43
  So can the Christian? Yeah. So not like entering into us, but can still like
• 10:49
  act upon us. Act upon us, oppress us.
• 10:53
  One of the things that Marcus Warner does is illustrates it by a land study.
• 10:58
  Okay. So say you're 160 acres of land and the title has been given to God and
• 11:05
  he's got ownership of that, but you also have a certain domain over it.
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  And, okay, this part back here that's got trees and it's not needed anyway.
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  And Satan says, you know, I'd like that.
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  And you say, well, I'm not using it anyway. So you let Satan use it.
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  Doesn't mean he has a title to it, but he's got use of it. And then he says,
• 11:27
  well, I need access to it.
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  And then so Satan has this way of weaseling himself in through his logic.
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  And sometimes we We accept that logic and we give him access to it.
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  And then, of course, he needs a little bit more.
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  We then can legally call that back with God's help.
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  And that's what we do in that process. It's not that he owns it,
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  but we've surrendered, if you will, use of it for a period of time. We've got to get it back.
• 12:03
  So it's not possession. but it is oppression.
• 12:09
  Don, I know in brief conversations we've had, you've been engaging in more healing
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  prayer circles, maybe in this season of your life.
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  Have you had a chance to talk about that on this podcast and to share a little
• 12:24
  bit about it? And maybe it's for another time.
• 12:26
  No, I haven't. I'm just curious if that might be something that you guys do
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  in the future. Have we done that?
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  I think maybe talked about it, but well, the healing prayer thing I am finding
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  it is much more beneficial.
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  I was trained counselor, family systems therapy, used it 40, 40 years in ministry.
• 12:45
  Uh really thought i
• 12:49
  had some good things going and then uh was uh exposed to healing prayer marcus
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  warner's work with deeper walk and uh got trained as a uh to do healing prayer
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  and what i'm finding is i can get more done in a person's life.
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  By bringing them to God through healing prayer. More work is done at healing in people's lives.
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  I mean, things like anxiety, fear, relationships.
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  There's so many different kinds of bondages and basically things that we have given up control of.
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  Or some of them have been ancestral. Maybe we didn't give control of it,
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  but somebody in our family line has given.
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  And that's where family systems I always thought was helpful,
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  because you would address those things that happen from generation to generation.
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  Rabbi Friedman was the one that wrote generation to generation,
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  exposed us to that generational concept of what happens before us affects us.
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  And the healing prayer part is miraculous.
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  What I find is so fascinating is I usually include somebody else,
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  maybe some young people, to set in on these sessions.
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  And we engage in prayer.
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  And all of a sudden, we do experience that Jesus shows up.
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  He speaks into the session. And it's amazing that all three of us hear the same
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  thing from Jesus at the same time.
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  And it changes things. It just changes things as you leave them before Jesus,
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  as you ask Jesus to, hey, speak into our lives and give us what we need to hear.
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  In other words, it's not me being the counselor, but me being the facilitator
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  of a prayer where we can meet Jesus.
• 14:58
  Ah, it's good stuff. Yeah, it really is.
• 15:03
  I enjoy it. But it sounds, I mean, I think so much of our prayer and spiritual
• 15:09
  life can be like this, where it becomes the seal on that previous conversation
• 15:13
  we were having about rooting our identity in Christ, knowing our belovedness,
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  knowing God's purpose for us.
• 15:21
  But then if that's true, then maybe we could expect that if we come before God
• 15:27
  in practical ways through spiritual practice,
• 15:30
  that actually those blessings will be quite imminently available for us on earth as it is in heaven.
• 15:36
  Yes. And a dynamic way to...
• 15:40
  Embrace our faith rather than a religion and more of a relationship.
• 15:45
  I have this relationship with Jesus and I can actually come to him in prayer and expect something.
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  And it's not like, I mean, in a sense it's miraculous or magic,
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  but in another sense, it's very mundane.
• 16:00
  It's very everyday. It is actually, heaven is not so far as we might normally think.
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  And I always like to add something to those prayers, it's not for my benefit
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  that I pray this, Lord, but that somehow through the answering of this prayer,
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  all honor and glory and praise is yours.
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  And as if we're living our life, a gift before Almighty God that He's given,
• 16:27
  life is His, and we give it back and say, hey, whatever you do in my life,
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  I want to make sure I give all the glory and all the honor and all the praise
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  to Almighty God who gave it, gave me life in the first place.
• 16:43
  Ah, so yeah, it's relationship.
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  Did I address the healing prayer thing? Yeah, no, I appreciate.
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  So if you're in this community, we're actually developing a group of people
• 16:55
  in the community in the Kelowna area who are able to do healing prayer and intercede.
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  And it's great because it's interesting. We have been trained in different,
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  I mean, Suzu and others trainings in this group.
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  But when we meet in the room, we're using the same skills.
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  And Jesus shows up and is a part of that.
• 17:20
  And I think, you know, so often we get territorial, you know,
• 17:25
  you've got to have it from Dr.
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  Warren, you know.
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  And surely nobody else is that way but me.
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  And it's not that way in this group. We acknowledge.
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  I was with a fellow pastor. Aaron! And we were sitting down in healing prayer,
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  and he was using the same stuff that I had just been learning and was a wonderful
• 17:50
  dynamic moment. It's great.
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  No, all good. It's the preacher in me.
• 17:58
  I think we'll close with one more here. Can Satan control the weather?
• 18:04
  Don, over to you.
• 18:08
  Well, sometimes I think I'm just thinking of all the things that do contribute
• 18:16
  to the control of the weather.
• 18:17
  I lived in Kansas, and when I was young, there were no interior lakes in Kansas.
• 18:24
  And so the relative humidity was like 13%, 14% in harvest time.
• 18:28
  And then all of a sudden, they built all these reservoirs. And now in the 2015-20,
• 18:36
  the barometric pressure, relative humidity never gets below 30%.
• 18:41
  And man did that.
• 18:44
  So can Satan influence the weather? If man can influence the weather,
• 18:50
  probably Satan has a little bit to do with that as well.
• 18:53
  That being said, ultimate control is God's.
• 18:58
  Ultimate control. There's nothing that Satan can do that God has not somehow given permission for.
• 19:06
  Of course, that's going to open up a whole other question, but it has to follow.
• 19:11
  Nothing can happen unless it falls within God's domain and his permission.
• 19:17
  I think we see a lot of that in Job, sort of a better understanding that, okay,
• 19:23
  Satan can't do it unless God's given
• 19:26
  a little leeway for him to do of course satan's good
• 19:29
  at finding all the loopholes in that but uh
• 19:32
  yeah i i can't do it without god
• 19:37
  making provision for that to be yeah i was trying to rack my brain for um some
• 19:43
  kind of scriptural reference to like yeah satan or or some kind of spiritual
• 19:47
  evil uh dictating weather but yeah probably probably job is like the closest
• 19:54
  thing we could get to it let me maybe a good example,
• 19:56
  at least off the top of my head, that God allows Satan to influence,
• 20:03
  yeah, a variety of sort of elemental factors in Job's life.
• 20:10
  Yeah. And then we have Elijah on the other side. So Elijah at the end of 1 Kings
• 20:15
  says, well, it's not going to rain.
• 20:18
  It's not going to rain until I say it's going to rain.
• 20:21
  And that's alluded to in James chapter 5.
• 20:25
  That Elijah was given the freedom to say that in light of what God had given him as a prophet.
• 20:31
  And it didn't rain. It didn't rain
• 20:34
  until the time at Mount Carmel and the absolute proof that God is God.
• 20:42
  And then he gave permission to rain. He had to run ahead of it.
• 20:47
  So, I think God's ultimately taking care of the rain.
• 20:53
  It makes me wonder what was driving that question.
• 20:57
  Like, I wonder if it's a—are these all Hillcrest questions?
• 21:00
  Yeah. If it's a student wondering about sort of natural disasters or that kind
• 21:04
  of thing, and how do we make meaning out of those moments or just that part
• 21:09
  of God's domain, you know, here?
• 21:12
  Those are hard questions. I just had a friend who lost—a friend's associate
• 21:18
  lost their son in a tornado in Michigan.
• 21:22
  And he's feeling that pain for his brother.
• 21:27
  How can that be God-ordained? How can God allow this 12-year-old to die in a tornado?
• 21:34
  We have a hard time answering those questions from this side of the throne.
• 21:40
  But I still believe in the middle of that, God has a plan.
• 21:45
  I come to that from my own life experience when our son was taken,
• 21:50
  and God gave me James 1, verses 2-4.
• 21:55
  Consider it pure joy, my brothers, when you endure trials of many kinds,
• 21:59
  because you know the testing of your faith develops perseverance.
• 22:02
  And perseverance, when it has finished its work, leaves us mature,
• 22:07
  incomplete, not lacking anything.
• 22:09
  God's provision is for us to not lack anything. And sometimes these life experiences
• 22:14
  add depth that we wouldn't have gotten otherwise.
• 22:19
  That's also affirmed in Romans 5, verses 1 to 6. Yeah. One thing that's been striking me recently—.
• 22:28
  Going back through Old Testament class with students and going
• 22:31
  through the book of Genesis is how much of the baseline pattern of God's plan
• 22:39
  for creation is laid out in Genesis and then summarized by Joseph in one of
• 22:44
  the very last lines of the book when he says, you all intended this for evil.
• 22:49
  He says this to his brothers, but God has used it for good to save many lives.
• 22:53
  And it acts as a summary for for the book of genesis but it also kind of in
• 22:58
  the sense that genesis it lays down the the pathway for the whole bible it kind
• 23:02
  of summarizes the whole bible,
• 23:04
  and and it's also right out of his own life where he never could have he and
• 23:09
  his brothers never could have imagined uh what would have become of that choice
• 23:14
  to uh throw him in a pit right and And yeah,
• 23:18
  the breadcrumbs that lead him to being sold off.
• 23:21
  But then, you know, by the spirit of God at work in that story,
• 23:24
  Joseph ascends to this place of rulership, of like really fulfilling his identity
• 23:32
  as someone who bears God's image.
• 23:34
  And God uses him to not just for one act of good, but for a multitude of good for many nations.
• 23:42
  And there's something I think we're being invited to meditate on as an act of
• 23:46
  faith in that we're in the midst of the hardships and the questions,
• 23:51
  the things that we don't know or understand, that we aren't given insight into.
• 23:56
  To continue to trust in the goodness of God that we can see.
• 23:59
  That the testimonies of how God has multiplied his goodness and continues to
• 24:06
  move creation towards a goodness and glory that we can't see.
• 24:13
  But it takes big faith. It takes big faith.
• 24:16
  Especially those hard days or in our moments of suffering and tragedy.
• 24:19
  Hebrews chapter 11. But there is...
• 24:23
  A vision cast by scripture for us to really sit with.
• 24:29
  Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly. We so often want to see our life day to day and
• 24:35
  we don't carry a chapter 11 Hebrews faith that for a hundred years you build
• 24:43
  a ship that you don't know it's ever going to float.
• 24:46
  But the long-term vision is God's and we need to have enough faith to share in it.
• 24:54
  Good word good word very good
• 24:57
  i affirm what he said yeah yeah made it well
• 25:00
  that was meant for sognus if you didn't want all righty
• 25:05
  well thank you both for joining us today thank you guys watching and maybe share
• 25:10
  with somebody and yeah we can use shares give us some feedback on that also
• 25:15
  so and maybe give corbin a rating for coming out on his list i give him uh give him a one,
• 25:22
  a one out of five? A one is being the best.
• 25:26
  I was thinking forensic judging of, yeah, that's what I used to do.
• 25:33
  Speaking events, a one is really good. All right. One rating.
• 25:38
  There you go. Thank you guys for joining us. And we'll see you next time. Lord willing.
• 25:45
  Thank you for joining us for this podcast. Feel free to become part of this
• 25:48
  ministry by sharing it with others. Our goal is to help each other grow deeper
• 25:52
  in our understanding of who God is and his calling to us in our daily lives.
• 25:56
  Thank you again for joining us and may God bless your day.