“That’s a Different Show”
EPISODE 229
Look to the Bible for Answers
Get excited, we’re into the second session of our Square One guided study! It’s the Bible Geeks talking about ... the Bible! What it is, why it matters, and how it answers life's biggest questions. How’d this amazing guidebook for our lives come to exist, and why is it still relevant today? Plus, we provide “definitive evidence” (or not?) for all those mysterious topics like the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. Join us on this journey to better understand the Bible and its significance to our lives. Let's get into it!
Takeaways
The Big Idea: The Bible answers our biggest questions about who we are and why we're here.
This Week's Challenge: If you haven't already, get a Bible or download a Bible app, and orient yourself to how it’s organized.
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Ryan: not that I've really researched any of this stuff. Let's just be like, I don't really have a strong take
Bryan: I was starting to get real excited about where we were headed here.
Ryan: sorry, that's a different show.
Welcome to the Bible Geeks Podcast
Bryan: Well, hello everyone and welcome to the Bible Geeks Podcast. This is episode 229. I'm Bryan Schiele
Ryan: I'm Ryan Joy.
Bryan: and thanks so much everyone for tuning in.
Square One Series: Session Two Introduction
Bryan: We are back in our Square One series here. We're into session two. After last time we redid session one from last season, it's been a, I feel like one of those weird conditions in like time travel movies where you're not sure if you're in the past or the future.
You're like, wait, this is deja vu. I've done this already. But session two is not something we have talked about yet. It is brand new this season and we're really excited to talk in the next session of this conversation about what the Bible has to do with me. That'll be the big question that we're dealing with here.
Ryan: Yeah, and we're going to be pulling out all the things the Bible has to say about every subject we deal with.
Why Turn to the Bible?
Ryan: So before we get too deep into that, we wanted to pause and talk about why are we turning to the Bible? What is the Bible? Maybe someone has no background with the Bible, or maybe they're pretty familiar with it, but we'll ground them and the conversations we're going to have in looking to scripture for the answers, right?
That's the whole idea
Bryan: Yeah, the last conversation, you know, as we were talking about like what's broken we opened up the Bible and we read from it and we had a good conversation there, and now, maybe it's time to make sure that orienting orienting ourselves around this book is something that we all feel like is important. And so before we can proceed, I think it really is valuable use of our time to establish that this book matters.
Part 1: Kickoff and Icebreaker
Bryan: And thinking about things that are easy to digest, that is kind of the purpose of the kickoff section here, part one, where we'll get into a little bit of a hook in an icebreaker question.
Square One - 2: This is Square One. "What does the Bible have to do with me?" Ever since a paper printed a blurry photo in 1933, people have wondered if a lake in Scotland called Loch Ness has a sea monster. It's the kind of thing that drives supermarket tabloids and the hundreds of TV shows about unexplained mysteries.
As an old fictional show about aliens loved to tell us, the truth is out there. We know so much more than we used to about how things work, but there are some mysteries science just can't solve. We're not talking about Bigfoot, the Bermuda Triangle, or Little Green Men. We'll leave those to the latest reality TV expose.
What concerns us are questions about who we are, where we come from, why we're here, and where we're going. Significant questions that should affect how we live. But before we start with our real questions, we brought it up. So let's take a second to talk about it. Do you have a take on the story behind any of those weird mysteries?
The Bermuda Triangle maybe? Or Nessie?
Part 1 Discussion
Bryan: All right, so Ryan, the icebreaker question, what do you think? Do you have a take on like the Bermuda Triangle or Nessie or any of these things? Like, what do you have your tinfoil hat on about?
Ryan: I do think there's a lot of things we don't really understand. I think most, you know, like I think Bermuda Triangle, not that I've really researched any of this stuff. Let's just be like, I don't really have a strong take
Bryan: I was starting to get real excited about where we were headed here.
Ryan: sorry, that's a different show. The Bermuda Triangle, I think is like where a lot of traffic was and there was like, you know, there's storms.
I think there's real things that happened there, but nothing, you know, where you hear the X-Files song playing in the background and, you know, Nessie, I don't know. I think it's probably a blurry photo, but maybe there's some kind of a weird creature that we're still finding new species of things in a deep sea kind of a context.
Who knows? about you? Do you have a strong, are you like taking your stand for Bigfoot or something here?
Bryan: Listen, nobody takes a stand for Bigfoot except for Bigfoot.
Ryan: Oh, that's true. He needs no one else.
Bryan: No, it's funny because growing up, my family spent a lot of time, we have family up in Montana and there's this big giant lake up there, Flathead Lake, and the Flathead Lake monster is a thing.
Ryan: It's a thing.
Bryan: It's not Nessie, they call it Flessie, which is like a terrible marketing name. Whoever came up with that should probably be fired. But, you know, this is like a, it's a big deal up there. Is it fact? Is it fiction? Like, they've got all kinds of, museum exhibits pointing to different aspects of like what they've found related to the Flathead Lake monster.
I, of course, don't know if it exists or not. I would like to think that it does. If for no other reason than I like the feeling that we just don't know everything. Like, we seem to know so much like that discussion in the hook talked about, like we have a lot of answers, but I do like the idea that we just don't know some things.
So whether it's the Bermuda Triangle or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness monster or anything like that, who knows, man? I think God had something to say about that to Job, by the way. You don't know anything.
Go read the end chapters 38 to 40 or whatever of Job. Whenever you start thinking you've got it all figured out and you'll bring some humility to these unanswered questions.
Part 2: Let's Get Into It!
Bryan: All right. So let's move this square one conversation along and to part two where we'll get into a little bit more meat in this conversation.
Square One - 2: Alright, now let's get into it and consider where to seek answers to those significant questions. Science can't tell you what'll happen to you after you die or what your purpose is. We have to look elsewhere to find out if there's meaning to anything that happens or if everything's a giant cosmic accident.
Is there a god behind all this stuff we see? If so, what's godlike? Aren't those questions worth pursuing, even if the pursuit leads us to reconsider everything we thought we knew? Jesus constantly turned to what the prophets wrote in what we now call the Bible. He offered the Bible's answers to the big questions people asked him, and everything he did lined up with its wisdom.
To Jesus, the Bible provided practical help for the trials he faced. So when the devil tempted him in the desert again and again, Jesus replied, "It is written," promoting the Bible to overcome. And that same wisdom can guide us today. So here's the big idea. The Bible answers our biggest questions about who we are and why we're here.
You've probably noticed already that we're looking to the Bible in this study. It's a misunderstood book for sure. Some consider it boring, while others see a book of suffocating rules and regulations. But many have found in it what Jesus saw. A gift from God, full of timeless, divine guidance and answers to questions we can't answer on our own.
So what's your take on the Bible?
Bryan: All right.
Part 2 Discsussion
Bryan: So the reach out question that we had there What's your take on the Bible, Ryan?
Ryan: hopefully this is obvious in what we're doing here, but I love it so much. I love this book. I love it. it's endlessly deep and rich and weird and wonderful, you know, like it's just so constantly interesting. And, like I'm right now I'm preparing to teach on Ezekiel, which is weird and deep and interesting and wonderful.
there's so much to the Bible. It's just big enough that you can spend your whole life and not have enough time
and it's more than interesting, right? It's not just about that. It's really like wonderful to think about, but it solves problems for you. it teaches you how to do life and how to do life into eternal life. And so the wisdom of it is counterintuitive sometimes, but then you find yourself understanding and living in a different way that just starts to make sense and become the new normal.
This book is how we know Jesus, how we know God in order to have this rich relationship we come to have with him.
Bryan: Yeah. The richness is a word that kept coming to mind while I was thinking about this too. my take on the Bible is like you said, I'm for it. Okay. So just so that we're not like confused about where I stand here. But of course, this is like the most important book addressing the most important purpose in my own life.
And like you said, every time you open up the book, there's something new and different and there's something relevant and applicable to everything that's going on. I was thinking about Swiss Army knives. know, Swiss Army knives are really useful and they're really important. But like the scissors on a Swiss Army knife are terrible.
Like, you know, that's the worst toothpick you've probably ever used is in a Swiss Army knife. But you know what? At least it's there. you would never want to use those things in a Swiss Army knife for like,day to day use, right? you wouldn't want to cut your steak with the little knife of a Swiss Army knife.
It would be terrible. But like, that's what so many books try to be or so many, self-help books or so many advice guides or blogs or anything like that. They try to take on so many of life's topics in likean important and meaningful way. And all of them are just like a Swiss Army knife where likethey might cover a lot of breadth, but the depth is not there.
Like the power is not there. And the Bible is the Swiss Army knife that's actually useful, like in every single aspect of what it deals with, of its relation to history, of its relation to helping us understand who God is in relation to helping us understand who we are and what our purpose is and how we relate to other people and like how we change.
And everything the Bible wants to do to help shape us and mold us and inform us is done perfectly. And so many different, you know, broad goals that the Bible has all centering in on the one most important purpose, which is Jesus. But everything it does is so, perfectly done.
Ryan: And that's something that you really were kind of like standing on the table fighting for in this study to make sure that in this session, it was not only like how we got the Bible and what is the Bible and how is the Bible made up? Like we wanted to kind of loosely touch on enough of that, that you could get a sense of it, but you really wanted it to be about the personal relevance.
So everybody understands this is for me, this matters to me. And, and so that's what we've tried to focus on in this aspect.
Bryan: Okay.
Part 3: Into the Book
Bryan: So I think it's probably a perfect time then in this whole discussion for us to actually get into the book and dive in here to a reading. So let's get back into the square one conversation and we'll come back and we'll read together.
Square One - 2: Let's get into the book and read Ephesians 3 verses 1-10, noticing what God has revealed to the writer, the Apostle Paul. He wrote it while imprisoned for teaching both Jewish and non-Jewish people, Gentiles, about Jesus. We want to notice what he says here about apostles and prophets.
Each book of the Bible was written by someone who worked as a prophet or an apostle. So who are they? Jesus chose and empowered a special group of early leaders, men who witnessed his resurrection, calling them his apostles. They were his ambassadors, sent to speak on the king's behalf. God also communicated through prophets who spoke and wrote words as God's Spirit directed them.
Let's see what Ephesians 3:1-10 teaches us about the mystery and how we can understand it. Before we get into the reading, take some time to discuss it. What do you learn from this passage about how God communicates?
Bryan: Okay.
Part 3 Discussion
Bryan: So the question there was, what do you learn from this passage about how God communicates? So Ephesians three verses one to 10, let's read that together. And then we'll tackle this big question.
Ryan: Okay. So starting in verse one "For this reason, I, Paul, a prisoner of Christ Jesus, on behalf of you Gentiles, assuming that you've heard of the stewardship of God's grace that was given to me for you, how the mystery was made known to me by revelation, as I've written briefly, when you read this, you can perceive my insight into the mystery of Christ, which was not made known to the sons of men in other generations, as it has now been revealed to his holy apostles and prophets by the spirit.
This mystery is that the Gentiles are fellow heirs, members of the same body and partakers of the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel."
Bryan: "Of this gospel, I was made a minister according to the gift of God's grace, which was given me by the working of his power. To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given to preach to the Gentiles, the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God, who created all things so that through the church, the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places."
I love Ephesians. I mean, we did a whole guided study on Ephesians, so super good.
Ryan: Yeah. So let's get into this question, Bryan, what do you learn from this passage about how God communicates?
Bryan: You ever been geocaching?
Ryan: I think I did it a couple of times.
Bryan: Yeah. So, the whole idea of geocaching is like somebody has basically hidden something in plain sight. It's like a little treasure or like a little log book that you have to go sign. It's somewhere that you may walk by all the time.
Obviously, I think there are geocaches that are in more rural locations that you have to travel for, but like you never notice it unless you're actually looking for it. And so, finding like the coordinates online for some geocache or maybe you heard about it from a friend, like the search is on. Andwhen I see this verse in Ephesians 3 verses 1 to 10, God communicates kind of in that same way, like not like hide and seek game with the Bible, but I think it's so cool how we see in this verse how God has passed information down in like shadow and mystery, as Paul talks about it here, until somebody like Paul is able to shine the full light of the truth upon it.
the truth has been there hiding in plain sight for so long and for God to hand this information down from generation to generation through the scriptures. And then Paul is able to pick it up and basically then say, " let me connect all the dots for you and show you exactly what's going on here."
It's just so cool how the truth has been out there for a very long time and it wasn't until, Paul and others were able to open it up and unveil it.
Ryan: The truth is out there as we said earlier. Yeah. I did a whole series of lessons I called hidden in plain sight, all about this idea of like six or seven lessons on how we find the truth and how Jesus describes it as available. And yet we having eyes to see, aren't seeing it and that it's available in a book as we're talking about here, the old, reading rainbow thing, right?
Take a look. It's in
Bryan: was wondering when we were going to get there.
Ryan: but don't take my word for it. Right. He would always say. And so there's this, idea here in Ephesians that is, is very clear throughout the Bible and in the essence of the Bible itself that God uses people. Paul wants them to know the mystery. God wants them to know the mystery.
It's not meant to stay mysterious, but he didn't download it into each of us. Instead, he showed it to Paul and others, you know, specific people, and then they have written about it briefly. And when we read, we can understand their insight into it. That is God's not too complicated plan for how we knowall the things we know.
And so like it could be written in the stars, it could be geocached somewhere. And if we find that location, it's,It could be downloaded into us, or we just always intuitively knew it could have been a movie that he gave us, but instead he gave us words that were written down and that whenever we read it, we get it.
and whenever we think about the Bible, it's just so easy to think of it as you know, the golden book coming down or that, you know, Paul always had a King James version in his back pocket or whatever. instead of the idea that this was a process by which God working with all of these different people across all these different ages and scenarios and areas of the world, different purposes, as we're going to talk about, he gave these people books.
And then slowly God's people, as they talk about it, they treasure these books and they learn from them and they pull them together and make them into what we have. So just, it's like such a simple way of explaining, here's how you know what God wants you to know. You don't just get it. It is mysterious, but I'm going to write it.
You read it. You get it.
Bryan: Just such a cool picture. So let's move into part four here.
Part 4: Going Deeper
Bryan: If you didn't think we could get any deeper, we're going to go a little bit deeper here. And we'll get into our section here. Here's the story. And this will be some stories about this great book called the Bible.
Square One - 2: Ready to go deeper? Have you ever wondered how we got the Bible? As we learn its backstory and see the experiences and views of its writers and earliest readers, we can understand better what kind of book it is.
It all started with Moses, a man who God used to speak to face to face as a man speaks to his friend. He would often go into the tent of meeting to meet with God and a pillar of cloud would descend on it. Then God would speak to him. At some point, God had him write down the things he wanted people to know about.
Laws, ideas, stories, and instruction. Where did he start? At the beginning. The first chapters of the Bible answer some of our biggest questions. Who is God? Where did we come from? Why are we here? And how did we lose our way and let things get so messed up? These writings became the Bible's first five books, sometimes called the book of the law.
Now let's jump centuries later to a time when people had tragically lost their copies of Moses' writings. They lost their way without the book to lead them, even forgetting how to worship God the way he instructed. But when a young king named Josiah commissioned a project to restore their run-down house of worship, someone found the book in the rubble.
It was a big deal. And their response was surprising. The king read it and ripped his clothes in sadness at how far they drifted from what Moses wrote. From that day, he enacted initiatives to align themselves with the book. A generation later, God continues to give the Jews other books through the prophets like Jeremiah, to whom the word of the Lord came.
He partnered up with a scribe to construct a masterful book, the longest in all the Bible. Jeremiah's book predicted that the kingdom would soon fall to Babylon. But Josiah's son, King Jehoiakim, heard it read, and cut the book up with a knife and threw it in the fire. So the Lord told Jeremiah to take another scroll and write on it all the former words.
Despite Jehoiakim's efforts, we still have that book today. And looking back, we can see that it all came true. These books were made to last. So prophets and editors organized them into the first section of the Bible, the Old Testament. Reading these books, you could see how all these early writers, separated by hundreds of years, were telling parts of the same story.
But it was an incomplete story, full of promises and events that foreshadowed a future king and the very different kind of kingdom he would bring. Jump ahead in our Bibles, past that page dividing the Old Testament from the New Testament. For now, we'll zoom past the life of Jesus all the way to a time when Paul traveled around to tell people about Jesus.
From town to town, he went to Jewish places of worship and reasoned with them from the scriptures, explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead and saying, "This Jesus, whom I proclaim to you, is the Christ." Though many rejected the teaching, some received the word with all eagerness, examining the scriptures daily to see if these things were so.
They let the prophets' writings decide what they should believe. So when they heard something challenging, they checked it, and themselves, against the Bible. Though the words were from the mind and pen of a person, they saw them as from God too. They called books of the Bible "scriptures" or "holy writings," believing that God breathed into them so that these were living and active words that could pierce right through a person like a sword.
As Paul traveled and taught, something happened in those who heard and believed. The message changed people. Paul wrote over a dozen letters to help guide early Christians. They collected those, along with the writings by other apostles and prophets, assembling them into the library of 27 books we call the New Testament.
That completed the Bible we have today. A collection of books, each with their own purpose and original audience, yet all united in one story. Though originally written to other people in other languages, God has preserved them down through the centuries for us. So here's the big question. Are you open to exploring the Bible's answers for your life?
Bryan: All right.
Part 4 Discussion
Bryan: So we dealt with there the big question, are you open to exploring the Bible's answers for your life? Ryan, are you open to exploring the Bible's answers for your life?
Ryan: Like,
you are constantly finding new answers for new issues and then you have to crack your mind open to those issues. And openness is not a default setting. it's something you have to intentionally bring again and again to what you're learning from the Lord.
And we've focused in here on answers a lot in this this whole session, I guess, we've talked about answers and that's shorthand way of saying there is a problem we don't have solved on our own, There are things that we just don't know that we need to know.
And there is revelation from God about it. I wouldn't want anyone to like, get the wrong idea about the Bible that it is, you know, you just read something and well, there it is. You read a verse and that answers it, or you obey that verse. The Bible is giving us wisdom as we're reading these stories, but it doesn't all apply to every question and every situation.
that it needs someone who bears the image of God, right? Who is led by God, you know, who is seeking his wisdom in his word to interpret and to work with it. And I'm not trying to make it complicated, but I'm just saying it's, it's this collection of all these different writings and stories. And so we're talking about it as answers to our lives, because that is what it gives.
But as we'll continue to see, it weaves and turns and bobs and zigs and zags. And
Bryan: it's
Ryan: so the Bible, and it's weird and you're trying to get a sense of, okay, what does this mean for them? And then, okay, what does this mean for me? And we start with the context and then we know it was as that, place we ended in that story of the Bible, it was not written to us.
Each of these writers had a specific audience. It's not in our language. It's not in our,our worldview exactly, but it was for us. God wanted us to have it. And he means for us to think it through because it is eternally, timelessly relevant to us. And this is just such a fun story to tell and to pull all of these pieces into like, not the story of the Bible, like the story it tells, but the story about the Bible, how it works and how it came to us.
So how about you, Bryan, are you open to exploring the Bible's answers for your life?
Bryan: I think you hit the nail on the head that sometimes openness is not our default state. Yeah.And I think a lot of people, myself included, come to the Bible with a very particular view of what it is. we bring to the Bible a lot of our assumptions, a lot of presuppositions,
but opening ourselves to the Bible and what it's really trying to tell us is a challenge. It is a perspective shift. It is asking you to see what the Bible actually is versus what you think it is. and seeing how it's been brought to us, I think is one of the things that really just helps me understand, like, this is a book I need to open myself to exploring.
It's exciting. It's interesting. You know, all the way back from Moses meeting with God face to face and writing these things down, all through the story of Josiah and the people just realizing what they had done when they forgot about God's law, all the way up to Paul, as Paul is basically explaining to people about the scriptures and reasoning with them and how the Bereans are going and searching the scriptures.
And it's so important. it's been important for a very long time. And God gave this message direct from God to prophets and apostles, like we talked about here. And for me, that just means that I'm interested. Like, this is a book that's unlike any in the library.that has no match or comparison.
Everything else is a terrible, cheap Swiss army knife. this is the book that means the most. And for me, when I see how it got here, when I see the stories about how this book showed up in my lap, on my table, on my computer, I realize that this is the ultimate work of God to communicate his answers to life's most important questions.
This is God's way of connecting to me, training me for everything I need to be trained in.
and the storyline of this, that you kind of outlined as you brought it down, that I'm so glad we got each of these little pieces. There's, it's hard to find which stories to talk about, but like the idea that Jehoiakim, he's trying to get rid of it and they just make another copy. And the idea of,editors, writers, partnering up, and then they assemble all of these different oracles coming down and then I always love it whenever people say, well, what year was this book written? And it's like, well, if you're writing a master opus, like even just if I was working on a big book, or if, you know, you think about, you know, how long did it, what year was Moby Dick written?
Ryan: Well, it was probably written over like eight years. I don't know. and these are lifetime works of Jeremiah and Isaiah and all of these prophets. And then that's just one writer contributing to this collection. The book of Psalms goes from a Psalm written by Moses to all of David's to things way later.
And so just to see how all of this comes together into not like the word Bible, Biblia means books. It's like, it's not one book, it's a library, but it's also one book because it's unified by God as the author. So
Bryan: told you the Bible geeks would have a lot to say about the Bible,
Ryan: there's, I've, we are scratching the surface. I just want to like do a whole episode on how we got the Bible much deeper, but that's not what this is about. And I think that as we get into, the next section and think about the wrap up and then how we lead it, hopefully we're leaving people with an introduction that's not overwhelming, but that has them curious and interested and a little more settled in or oriented to what the Bible
Bryan: All right.
Part 5: Wrapup
Bryan: So, let's move into our last section here, which is part five, where we wrap it all up together and offer a blessing at the end of the conversation.
Square One - 2: So if you haven't already, get a Bible or download a Bible app and orient yourself to how it's organized. You'll notice two testaments, the Old Testament beginning with Genesis and ending with Malachi, followed by the New Testament starting in Matthew and ending in Revelation. Within those are the 66 books organized into chapters and verses.
As you explore, consider flipping to famous passages like the 23rd Psalm or John 3:16. The goal is to start getting comfortable using your Bible. As you start the next conversation, take a moment to talk about what you noticed. Next time we'll watch the central purpose of the Bible story unfold and get a sense of how it all fits together.
Until then, may God help us as we seek to understand the mystery as He has revealed.
Bryan: Okay.
A Closer Look: Leading Session 2
Bryan: So, as we've done in past conversations, we are going to go back and we're going to have a little bit of a closer look at this session and our thoughts on leading this discussion.
All right. So, we go back here in this study, all the way back to the icebreaker. And of course, we talked about like the Loch Ness Monster and Bigfoot and all kinds of things there. Don't get sold on it overly much. If you don't love it, replace it. Have your own way of pointing out mysterious things that we don't know the answer to or something like that. But either way, this hopefully was a good segue into this not being a book like stories about the Loch Ness Monster or fables or fiction, like that this is a true book with all the reasoning and weight behind it of fact.
Ryan: As you said that I just got this image of like my dad trying to lead this study and starting with the Loch Ness monster. And it'd be like, I don't even know what we're talking. What are we doing?
What
Bryan: doing?
Ryan: here?So yeah, you can, if that's, it needs to fit you and what you're trying to get into. And, but it's, you just want to do something to kind of establish rapport and then move on into it.
And for a lot of people, hopefully the idea of mystery leads into our mystery and the idea of what's unknown leads into starting to have revelation.
Bryan: Yeah. And the Jesus starter, I think that we honed in on, again, we're trying to introduce Jesus. We're trying to talk about Jesus, roughly speaking, in the beginning of this series. We talked about him in the last session, about him being the great physician. So, bringing up the fact that he quoted during his temptations that it is written three times is really like the touchstone of this particular section.
he used this book too in all the things he went through.
Ryan: Yeah. And that's a key because as we start to build faith in Jesus, you know, we're going to talk next time about that the Bible is all about Jesus. And then we'll talk about why we believe in Jesus and focus on the resurrection. Well, if Jesus did raise from the dead, if he is who he says he was, and this is how he viewed the Bible, that just really stabilizes all the more.
So Jesus is intentionally at the center of this, even though this is a conversation about the Bible itself.
Bryan: Yeah. And I feel like maybe it would be important for us as we move on, thinking about this reading here, this end of the book reading, as we start to look here from Ephesians 3 and some of the more complex words that Paul offers here. Peter said it himself in 2 Peter 3 verse 16, like, sometimes Paul's got the difficult way of wording things.
I don't know what your thoughts are. We chose Ephesians 3 here to read together. Is this verse too challenging for people? Did we kind of push them a little bit?
Ryan: Yeah. And you could certainly choose an easy to read version. Like sometimes I'll use the children's version of the Bible. You know, if you're using the Bible app, you can pick from, I wouldn't do like a full on paraphrase, but one that breaks things down simply.
there's lots of simple versions you could use, but we tried to define some of the terms ahead of time, like Gentiles. I didn't know, like it's not that weird of a word, but, you know, we said, okay, non-Jews who are Gentiles and apostles and prophets, that's pretty unique. But there is a lot, there's a lot of, it's dense, like you said, and we intentionally let it go into this even more dense idea of God's mystery hidden for the ages and the manifold wisdom of God.
maybe allowing it to kind of peek over the limits of what you see right now. So you can see there's something up ahead. You know, there's a horizon and the road goes on and we're going to keep getting further on. I think that's maybe okay too.
Bryan: I also look at times where Jesus didn't hold back from people and, challenge them sometimes. Often he was challenging like people who should have known better, like the Pharisees, but then we moved into here's the story and we have this section in our discussion when we get real deep we move through these, I guess, like touchstone moments in the history of the Bible as these people like Moses, as we talked about, Josiah, Jeremiah.
and then, of course, Paul at the end telling these stories, talking about how God spoke to them, how God communicated these words. We deal with a lot of people here that maybe the person you're talking to aren't familiar with. I don't know if everyone's going to be overly familiar with the story of like, Josiah or Jeremiah or anyone like that.
So maybe you could be prepared to like provide a little bit of context if they have questions about these people. Hopefully you won't need to, but definitely something to have in your back pocket, I think, if you need to actually talk about these characters and who they are and what they did.
Ryan: Maybe like a factoid or like the year they were, they were living or something, but yeah, don't let it derail things. Don't let it get into a conversation. Like this is intentionally meant to just zoom through so that they're getting it in story form, which most of us understand. And yeah. Having a little bit of information might be helpful, but don't let it slow you down and get into a long conversation about Josiah.
Bryan: absolutely. And, you know, we're leading here to the big question, which is, I think, maybe the most important question here in this conversation. Are you open to the Bible? Are you open to to thinking through these things?
Because if somebody isn't totally sold on the Bible, then that might be more of an obstacle to overcome than you're going to be able to accomplish in the upcoming sessions. But, you know, and not that it all has to be clear and solid at the end of this conversation, like the next session, session three, is going to also kind of do some similar things looking through the Bible, except from the lens of Jesus.
But it's not really going to establish like the authority of the Bible as much. So definitely something good to be clear on here in this conversation, to kind of be open and ready for questions that might come up as a result of this. Are you open question?
Ryan: And that's an intentionally low bar for a commitment. it's meant to get them to affirm something without demanding something they're not ready for and to get them, to say you're open isn't to say I am completely sold at every level and I'm, I am,I put my faith wholly in this book.
Bryan: fully agree.
Ryan: that would, yeah, that's the ultimate goal. That's the win. That's where we want to go. But right now we're just trying to crack the door open and keep moving forward. like we talked about the importance of openness. And so if they start affirming throughout each of these big questions, they're going to move down a road to where they are making their own commitment.
And they could say, no, I'm not open to what the Bible says. In which case, like there's some follow-up questions, like, okay, is there anything that could make you open? And if you think of like the visual of the conversation tree and if they come to every intersection and it's no, no, no, at some point, why are we continuing this study?
Okay. Well, thanks for taking this time. But if it's like, yeah, I'm not there and I'm not open yet, but I'm open to being open. if you could show me why to believe maybe there's, a different tack to take. And, that leads you to an off-ramp to a different conversation,
Bryan: I think that's well said. You know, being open to their openness is just, you know, it's a meta conversation about how you should be open to their level of openness. But anyway, the challenge here that we didn't really get a chance to talk about, but I think is one of my favorite pieces of this conversation, thumb around the Bible, you know, just like orient yourself to the map is really the idea here.
Just encourage them to like, take a look around, you know, poke around, see what you find. And it can lead to a lot of questions, obviously, but it can lead to a lot of reliance that they have that they're starting to get familiar with it. Ifif they make sure that they're able to find things in the Bible, if they've got familiarity with their paper Bible or their app that they're using or whatever, I love this challenge. I think it's really good, especially as somebody who's getting familiar with the Bible for the first time.
Ryan: as you get into the next one, you're hoping that they have their own Bible or Bible app and, and you might have a way you want to work with this. This could be when you give a gift Bible to them. If you didn't, you might say, Hey, have you ever, I've got this queued up on the app store.
Have you ever looked at, the Bible app, like the U version, maybe is,is something good to get them started with. And you could ask them, which do you prefer and help them with that? Or if they're comfortable. and I think that the important thing for this whole big conversation is just making sure that you are oriented to the purpose of this conversation of all of whatever you're in, just making sure that you are, you're not trying to do more than what this is trying to do.
You're trying to get them to get that the Bible has answers that matter for our lives. And this is what the Bible is. And to just get them prepared for 10 more weeks of us looking to the Bible and thinking through it. and maybe, you know, I find that a lot of times we talk about how the Bible is God's word, just in the church.
If you're with kids that are growing up in the church, I'm going to teach this class, the square one sessions to our middle school class. And so these are kids that have heard the Bible, most of them, all their lives, but there are some different ways of talking about the Bible that are happening here.
And the more they can start to get their arms around what the Bible actually is, and just thinking about it, maybe in a different way. I think that could be
Bryan: you know, there's a lot of, like you said, context that's going to be helpful in this discussion. So, all of the work that you may have done with somebody to like understand where they come from, what their background is, may give you a better on-ramp here in this discussion of, you know, understanding where to go.
So, you've got somebody who knows a lot about the Bible, you know, like you talked about some young person who's grown up in the church. This challenge is going to be a softball challenge. But if you have somebody who potentially, you know, doesn't know very much about the Bible, then a challenge like this, or even this whole discussion is going to be hopefully pretty eye-opening and enlightening.
So, yeah, so that's our conversation here about session two, dealing with this question, you know, what is this book all about? And hopefully this has been helpful. This has been episode 229 of the Bible Geeks podcast. You can find us on our website at biblegeeks.fm. Find show notes for this episode in your podcast player or at biblegeeks.fm/229.
You can also sign up for our newsletter, check out our blog. You can go to biblegeeks.fm/squareone to find this session and more. And if you have any questions, you want to reach out to us, click the link at the top of our page and you can get in touch with us. You can send us an audio question, whatever it might be.
We'd love to hear from you. until next episode, see you later, Ryan. May the Lord bless you all and keep you. All
Ryan: Shalom.