What Is The Rapture? - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Mike Clement and Michael Glebb.

Michael Clement
But we're gonna continue on where we were. And I got a little long-winded last time. It was a hard time stopping. And we were talking about the person in the work of the Lord Jesus Christ, and we were talking about the fact that Jesus is coming again. And then related to that, there are two other issues that are greatly debated by just, you know, not just little weird groups in one sense or another, but churches that are Orthodox and hold to the gospel and hold to the Bible. But they look at things differently. They understand things differently. And we were talking about the rapture, first of all, and not every group holds the same position on the rapture. Jesus said he would come again, but he, in the book of 1 Corinthians, it says, "that the dead in Christ will be raised first and that we who are alive will be caught up together with him. And so shall we ever be with the Lord." That may not be 1 Corinthians, but it's living believers that are caught up. And we go to meet the Lord in the air. And if you take a literal interpretation of the Bible, and if you recognize the idea that Israel are the descendants of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. And that the church is made up of Jews and Gentiles, bond and free, male and female, and had its beginning pretty much at, on the day of Pentecost, and is a very unique entity. So there's a difference between Israel and the church. If you hold to those truths, take the Bible literally, difference between Israel and the church, you're gonna come up with a pre-millennial or a pre-tribulational rapture. Now, there is what's become popular today, brother Mike, and you probably have heard this, is the pre-wrath view. And the pre-wrath view used to be called Mid-Tribulational. And there was a fellow who was the head of, I believe it was Friends of Israel. And, in fact, he's been to this area. And he wrote a book on the pre-wrath rapture changed his position, stepped down from his position in that organization, because that was a pre-tribulational view that they held. And they became very popular talking about the pre-wrath rapture, mid-tribulational. Now, the tribulation period recorded in the book of Revelation is a seven year period. And when you look at it, there are a number of references to that mid-period, three and a half years. Something pretty interesting happens at that three and a half year period. And that comes outta scripture, but it's not clear that that's when the rapture takes place. But there are many that hold to that position today. And then there's a post-tribulational rapture. And what you have in the Book of Revelation, you see at the end of the book of Revelation, there's a great resurrection, and it's called the First Resurrection in scripture. Well, and, and many have said, well, that's the rapture. You know, because obviously something takes place there. It says that people are raised, but it doesn't make reference to the translation of living believers. That living believers are now, their bodies are changed to the same body that Jesus had when he was raised from the dead. But those three views are found in Christianity with regards to the rapture. Now, there's also the whole area of, when is the second coming supposed to take place in relationship to the millennium? The millennium is a period of how long Brother Mike? A thousand years? That's what millennium means. And the Bible talks about this millennial period. It's a period when Jesus will, again, if you take it literally, that Jesus will physically rule and reign from Jerusalem over the entire Earth. All kinds of things will be changed. People will live through that whole millennial period. There will be true justice. And that's just a lot of things that'll be exceptional during that period. So there are those that have debated in Christianity. Well, when will Jesus come in relationship to the millennium? And there was a view that was very popular at the turn of the last century in the early 1900's. It was called Post-millennialism. And post-millennialism was the idea that Christians would gradually have such an impact on the world, that the world will become Christianized. That it will get better and better and better. And one of the evidences of that was, World War I. Do you remember what World War I was called? The Great War. The Great War was also called "The War to End All Wars." And in fact, at the end of World War I, our government took a lot of battleships and sunk them because that was gonna be the last war that the world ever had. Because Christianity was making all these changes, and people just held on to the idea that things were just gonna get better and better and better. And we're not gonna need all this. Right. Because, and that was a byproduct of Post Millennialism. Well, World War II, Korea and Vietnam pretty much killed that idea, at least for a while. But interestingly, it's coming back. There are people that are holding to the idea, that in fact, Christianity is gonna change the world. And that eventually, it'll be just like what the Bible calls Millennium.

Michael Gleb
There's a movement now, and you can see this with social media sort of gearing us and turning us towards Christian nationalism. And I think that a Christian culture is a good culture. I think that is obviously the right culture. But nothing changes the heart outside of a personal relationship with Christ. And you can be in a Christian culture and not know Jesus. And so that's the biggest issue that I see with that. But that's coming back. You're right about that. And I didn't make that connection, but there is now a lot of talk about Christian, sort of, nationalism. We talk about America in terms of a Christian nation, because of its foundation, and that's a good thing. But again, being born in America is not saving anybody.

Michael Clement
It gives you a better chance.

Michael Gleb
That is true.

Michael Clement
A better chance of hearing the gospel here in America than anywhere else in the world. I just came back from a trip to my son and his family down in Brazil. And that is a whole different culture. I think every American should spend at least a week in a third world country. And they would get off the plane and get on their knees and kiss the ground and thank God for the country that they have the privilege of living in. Anyway, post Millennialism has the idea that there'll be this, in bringing in of the millennial kingdom by the church, by missions. And then eventually the world will be Christianized, and at the end of that, Christ will come, and then he'll judge the nations, and eternity will begin. Then there's a millennialism, and sometimes that's been called realize millennialism. And there's a number of ideas, and I really don't want to misrepresent it, but one of the ideas is that, what happened in 70 AD with the fall of Jerusalem, that was the tribulation. That all the things that are said in the book of Revelation, about the judgements and all that, that took place in 70 AD and now, since 70 AD we've been living in the Millennium. The millennium is a time when Christ reigns, but it teaches, well, Christ is reigning in the hearts of men. He's reigning through the church, he's making his influence known through the church. And that there will come a time in the future sometime when Christ will physically return again. But this is the millennium now, which means Satan is bound now. And there's a lot of people, including me, that have a hard time wrapping their heads around that idea. So anyway, there's all these different views of the individual details, timing. One of the things that scripture encourages us, is that we need to be ready. You know, we always need to be ready. When I was first saved, there was a lot of talk about the second coming of the Lord. I mean, oh, there was just, you know, the signs and Israel became a nation and, oh, there was just all this talk about the second coming of the Lord. There were prophecy conferences and a group of churches in northern New Jersey had a round robin prophecy conference. And they got guys like John Walford and some other guys who, they would be at one church one night and another church another night, and they just rotated these guys around. And boy, everybody was talking about it, and everybody was excited. Well, I came home, we lived in this trailer court, and I came home from a youth group activity, and I'm walking through the trailer court and I happened to look up in the sky, and the moon had a ring around it. I had never seen the moon with a ring around it. And I didn't know a whole lot about the Bible, but I remembered something about there being signs in heaven before the second coming of the Lord. And I thought, "my goodness, Jesus is gonna come! What do I need to do?" And right nearby was the trailer of a friend of mine, and as far as I know, they didn't know the Lord. And I ran over to their door, and I pounded on the door. And this friend's mother came to the door, she said, "mike, what's wrong?" And I pointed up in the sky and said, "Look, look, look!" And she looked up and she said, "oh yeah, ring around the moon. Haven't you ever seen one of those before?" "No, I haven't."

Michael Gleb
Jesus is coming back!

Michael Clement
That's what I'm saying. I was expecting any moment to hear the trumpet. I heard a pastor one time say that, you know, "scripture says that in the twinkling an eye, at the last trump, that Christ would come." And he said, "scientists have actually tried to figure out how quick the twinkling of an eye is. And it's, like, nanoseconds." You know, just instantaneous. He said, "but the sound of a trump will take a few seconds," he said, "so I got a two second message." He said, I hear a trump and I'm gonna say, you better all get saved right now, I'm going to heaven." And boom, off he goes.

Michael Gleb
And it's interesting when you think about, when we talk about this, I've always been kind of same with you as we had a lot of talk about prophecy. And some people wanted to camp on prophecy. And there was maybe this over-emphasis on it. And some people, I think, really just wanted to scare people. I really, truly, think that was what they desire to do. And the return of Christ should not scare any Christian. It shouldn't be a frightening thing. It should, matter of fact, I think it's Paul that writes and he says, you know, "comfort one another with these words." And this is a comforting thing, but you know, what are we to do? Well, it's simple. You know, I've told our church before, I said, "there's the wake up walk with the Lord." Commune with Him. Love the people that God has placed in your life; abstain from sin. That's a pretty good day in the life of a Christian. And so that's what we do. And if you can tell somebody about Jesus, I mean, that would be another important thing to do, because every single day, it's a day closer to that day.

Michael Clement
And John Walford once made the comment, and it was back in the early 60's when all these conferences were going on. He said, "isn't it sad?" He said, "if we have a prophecy conference, tons of people will come out. If we have a conference on holiness, on prayer, on evangelism," he said, "you don't get the response." And yet that's the reason for prophecy. You know, that these things should motivate us in our Christian life.

What Did Synagogue Worship And Teaching Look Like?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline Johnathan Hernandez and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
So here's the question that came our way: "We are doing an overview of the New Testament in a Bible study. The subject of synagogue worship came up and someone asked what that involved, assuming there was teaching that took place. Who did the teaching? Was it a scribe, a Pharisee, or a member of some other Jewish religious sect?" Jonathan, what were you able to come up with on this question?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah, so I guess we kind of see in the New Testament that they record 10 occasions on which the ministry of Jesus took place in synagogues. The gospel records, you know, as we read through those. And it's a good, you know, good place to kind of start and think about looking back at all those occasions and what took place, what happened. But as we get into the question, you know, what is the synagogue? You know, how's it differ from the temple? You know? The temple itself, you know, only the Levites and the priests could enter into the temple. But here in the synagogue, it was more of a community center, so to speak. And so all members of the Jewish community could participate in community life within the synagogue. And so that, you know, was one of the big differences for me to look at. Some of the traditions hold that this was a place of assembly for a study of the Torah. You know, during their services, we would see the service take place on the Sabbath. And then also, I believe it was on Mondays and Wednesdays, I think it was, where the city markets were to take place. And so when all the people from outside of the town would come in to the markets, then they would spend time in the synagogue also. And there'd be times of, the same thing of teaching out of the Torah and then out of the prophets. And then also, they would have the prayers of benediction, I think that's how you say it. They would have those moments. And so as we look through this, you know, the adult males of the Jewish community could be part of the synagogue, but only males from the age of 13 and up could be elders within the synagogue. And so they would have the opportunity to be able to read out of the Torah and then read out of the prophets and also say the prayers. If we were to see that take place, I guess they would have a seat, which they would've called the seat of Moses. And I think we hear, you know, as we look back at some of these passages in scripture, we'd see where Jesus sat down after he read the, you know, read out of the Torah. And that he would take that seat, and then he would teach. And usually the teaching would take place, but it was never really, like for us, you know, we have a sermon in our Sunday services. And a sermon could take, you know, I don't know how long you guys preach, but there's some that I've seen that are 15 minutes and some that are an hour and a half, you know? And so, from my understanding is most of the time, the teachings were quick, you know, a few minutes long. And so they would read through whatever they were reading through, and then just have a few words afterwards. So that's kind of what you would see take place during these times. And so one of the things I really liked about, you know, as I kind of just dug through this, is how they really, everything in the synagogue was about relationship. It was about community, you know? The school would, you know, the school was usually within the synagogue. The community events were there. Obviously, the services were there for reading the Torah, you know, reading the law. You know, all of that stuff was there, the government things were there. And so everything was wrapped around this ideal of community. You know, and I still love that thought process, and hopefully that would, you know, for us as believers now, how do we? But the big thing that I got out of this was, how do we maintain, or how do we keep that atmosphere of community within our churches? You know, within our community here? How do we, you know, even here with us, you know, we have two kind of separate camps that we come out of in a sense, you know, in some areas. But we can continue to have community. And so, how do we have community as other churches coming together too? So, yeah.

Gary Schick
Really, really good stuff. Yeah, the words, "church," "synagogue," we think of them as places. But actually, synagogue means, "gathering," and church actually comes from the Greek word εκκλησίασμα, which means, "congregation." So it's really about people. And I think one of the questions that you kind of delved a little bit back into is, you know, the difference between synagogue and temple. Of course, throughout the Old Testament, the temple is the heart of the nation. But the synagogue, which we read about in Jesus' time, actually has its roots to the time when the nation was in exile in Babylon. And so during that time, they couldn't have temple worship. There was no sacrifice going on. In fact, there was a real risk that the Jewish faith, which was so centered in the temple worship, could be lost. And so how was this to be preserved? And it was preserved on the Sabbaths, particularly. But as you mentioned, at other times as well, in the gathering of the Jewish community for essentially the reading of the word, prayers, fellowship. Those three things: prayer, scripture and fellowship. And of course, praise of the Lord, singing would've been all involved. And as you pointed out, not only Jesus, but also Paul utilized the synagogue worship. Because the temple, once again, it's in one place, it's in Jerusalem, even once the people are back from exile. This idea that had caught on of taking the Lord's day to gather together in the synagogue, if you weren't going to the temple, became important because this is the place where little ones are trained up on how to read the word and so forth. And where the men of the community would take turns in reading and expounding upon the word, and where the educational process continued to take place. Luke 4 I think, is a great passage illustrating Jesus and his ministry in the synagogue. It says, "and he came to Nazareth where he had been brought up, and as was his custom, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, and he stood up to read. And the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written, 'The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has appointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind. To set at liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.' And he rolled up the scroll and gave it back to the attendant and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. And he began to say to them, 'today, the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." So as you pointed out, really the reverse of today. The preacher stands up to preach while the people sit and listen. In those days, the people stood to listen while the preacher sat down to teach. And he was sitting symbolically in the seat of Moses, which is the place from which the word of the Lord had come. And so here we have Jesus, one greater than Moses, sitting down to teach. And we see that again in the Sermon on the Mount. "And he sat down and began to teach." He wasn't just, oh, sitting down casually with the guys, "and by the way, here's some thoughts," then ended up being the Sermon on the Mount. No, no, no. This is a very specific symbolic act of, "Okay, pay attention. Jesus is getting ready to teach," when he sat down. We have from the Mishnah, five actions that were performed in synagogue and probably go back to the time of Jesus. And before, apparently you needed 10 male adults to have enough of a quorum to have synagogue, worship. Women and children would've also been present, but in a different section. The men worshiped up close, and the women and the children were kind of back behind a screen. The recitation of the Shama hero is, "the Lord our God, the Lord is one." There's recitation of the fefela, which was prayer, which was done standing again. We do it so differently. We are praying, sitting down, heads bowed, hands folded. The early Christians followed the tradition. They not only stood standing, but heads uplifted and hands raised in anticipation of the Lord's return. The priestly blessing, "the Lord bless you and keep you," from Leviticus. The reading of the Torah, the law, and the reading of the prophets. Well, and then as you pointed out, basically anybody who had been to the Jewish version of confirmation, you know, had been through bar mitzvah. Had been trained in the law, was now accepted as a man in the community, even at the age of 13. Could hopefully rightly handle this, as Paul would say, the word of truth. And there are so many parables in the Christian community, because of course, the Christians just naturally followed the pattern that had begun in Judaism. And how appropriate, because we are outside, we are in exile from the heavenly temple from the place where we will meet with the Lord in all eternity. And so we have the Christian Church, it's kind of a Christian version of synagogue. A place of instruction, a place of prayer and praise, a place of fellowship. Where we continue the reading of the, you know, they read the law and the prophets, you know, we would add the gospels and the letters. And some churches are more formal about that. They actually have specific readings from every part of it. Some churches are a lot looser. I tend to read the passage I'm going to preach on and make that the focus of the day. But you know, there's no wrong answers here. There's no commandment, "and this is how you do synagogue worship." That wasn't in the Old Testament. There's not a commandment, "this is how you do Christian worship," in the New Testament. But these are the natural ways that we gather for really these three purposes: prayer and praise, hearing and expounding of the word, fellowship and mutual encouragement, and building up of one another in the Lord in Christ. So, great to spend a little time being built up with you as we've dug into the word today.

How Should We Battle Spiritual Attacks?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley, Tim Hebbert and Brad Kilthau.

Gary Hashley
If you were to ask, I believe the average believer today, who at least is really striving to walk with Jesus and serve Him well, they would probably say it seems like the attacks of the enemy have grown. Whether Satan himself, whether it's society that Satan has a vast influence in and he will use against us. Whether it is our own sinful flesh that he stirs up and attacks us through ourselves. Maybe it's other believers that he can use at times to attack us. The question that we're going to talk about over these next few minutes, in knowing that we as Christians are experiencing many spiritual attacks, "how would you counsel believers in the ability to battle the spiritual attacks?" Well, my mind immediately goes to Ephesians 6 where Paul says that we're to, "be strong in the Lord and the strength of his might." We're to, "put on the whole armor of God, that we may be able to stand against the schemes of the devil. For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. Therefore, take up the whole armor of God that you may be able to stand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand firm. Stand therefore, having fastened on the belt of truth, having put on the breastplate of righteousness and as shoes for your feet, having put on the readiness given by the gospel of peace. In all circumstances, take up the shield of faith with which you can extinguish all the flaming darts of the evil one; and take the helmet of salvation and the sort of the spirit, which is the word of God, praying at all times in the Spirit with all prayer and supplication to the end, that you keep alert with all perseverance, making supplication for all the saints." That's the English standard version, if you're wondering, "what is he reading from." It's the one I prefer, and the one I preach from. But I think one thing we get, and I'm gonna start with this and then turn it over to Brad and then to Tim. One of the things in answering the question is, yes, there are great attacks. So yes, we need to be prepared. And Paul talks about the armor of God. You know, you think of a soldier, and I never was one in the sense of being in the military. But they enlist, they train, and they fight. You know, I enlisted when I put my faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I became a part of God's team, or as we would sing, one of his Christian soldiers. You know, I've been trained in the word in church, Sunday School, Bible college, studying on my own. And then of course, fighting is involved. And, you know, soldiers train their bodies and their minds. They go through basic training, they do the calisthenics. They work their bodies hard, running and carrying and all those things to build up their strength. They build up their minds, they learn their jobs that they'll be doing as soldiers, and then they gear up for battle. They put on the equipment and they get ready with the equipment to fight the battle. And here in the armor of God, we find how to gear up. And I, at the cost of sounding simplistic, basically the gear that Paul talks about is truth (the belt of truth), righteousness (the breastplate of righteousness). Something to do with our solid footing, because he talks about footwear of the gospel of peace. He talks about the shield of faith. He talks about the helmet of salvation on our heads. He talks about, you know, the sword of the spirit (the word of God or scripture). And then he talks about prayer. So really, if we're gonna gear up as those who are soldiers in the army of Christ, so to speak, we need to commit ourselves to truth, God's truth. Not man's truth, God's truth. Living out our faith in a way that is in accordance with the standards we learn, that God has given us in His word. We need the solid footing of being on the solid rock, and having our feet shod in such a way that we are standing solid and not being tripped up by everything the world is throwing at us. We need to be committed to people of faith, to be people of faith, no matter what is happening in and around and the attacks that are coming. We need that helmet of salvation, cause I don't know about you, but Satan plays games in my brain, and I need to have that mental commitment to the assurance I find in the truth of the word of God. Of course, we need scripture, which that kind of fits with truth to start with, and then we need prayer. And I guess if we are going to be ready to battle the attacks of the enemy, we need to train and we need to gear up. And as someone has said, we need to decide ahead of time where we're gonna stand. We need to decide ahead of time how we're gonna stand and what we're gonna stand for. And so, yeah, if we're going to be ready for battle against the enemy, like a good soldier, we need to gear up with truth, righteousness, the right footing, faith, assurance, scripture and prayer. We need to be prepared because the enemy's out there, and Brad, talk to us about another aspect of this.

Brad Kilthau
Well, if you're gonna be a soldier that's prepared, which is very good and obviously clearly stated in the word of God, as you alluded to already, Gary. We also have to be alert, very alert. You know, we can be equipped, we can have a knowledge of the word, we can have, those parts of our life that were involved in the church and committed to the church. But if we're not alert to the attacks of Satan, he's gonna sneak up on us and he's gonna cause a lot of harm. And you know, I think about sometimes the thought as Christians. We can come along and think, "well, you know, God's got this. He's our sovereign God. It's all in control." We've read the end. We know he's gonna finish and be victorious over Satan, and the enemy and all of that. And I think sometimes as Christians, we can get into that gear of confidence, which is okay in a sense, but then use that as an ability to say, "well, I don't need to really, really worry about my daily time in the word. I don't really need to worry about walking this way and that way because God's got it handled and it's all gonna work out." But that's what Satan wants us to do. He wants us, as Christians, to not be alert to his schemes. He wants us to get kind of wrapped up in what we're doing on planet earth and not worry about the spiritual aspect of things. And I think as Christians, sometimes it's easy for us to do. We can get involved in being at everything that our kids are doing. We can be involved in politics, we can really get involved in raising our status and our job or making money. And then as we're focusing on that, we don't realize, that our peripheral vision is not working very well. And that's what Satan wants. He wants to sneak up alongside of us and to hit us with something that we're not prepared for, because we have been just nonchalant walking along as a Christian. We've gotta be, not preoccupied with the things of this world, but we've constantly got to be in prayer and in the word. And, you know, some of those illustrations that you were giving, Gary, we always teach those to the kids, don't we? We always talk about teaching them the armor. And we love to do that because it's easy to put on the outfits, and that really kind of gets the kid's attention and that's good. But we also always have a verse that we kind of throw in front of the kids. And that's Psalm 119:105 that says, "your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." And we've gotta have the word. I'm thinking, described here as a light that you get, you need to have the word to tell you what your next step is gonna be. Because if you're not looking down, if you're not alert, you'll step in something that Satan has got; that snare that's out there waiting for you. And then I think another thought, before I turn it over here to Tim, is I was thinking about 2 Corinthians 10, and also Paul talks about spiritual battle. But in verses 3-5 he says, "For though we walk in the flesh and we do not war according to the flesh," he said, "for the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, but mighty in God for pulling down strongholds and casting down arguments in every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God and bringing every thought captive to the obedience of Christ." Just something that I want to throw in here is, Paul is primarily telling us that the battle that, usually we are fighting, this spiritual battle is in our mind, it's in our heart. It's not a hand-to-hand combat with Satan. It's not a hand-to-hand combat with demons. And so what do we need to do?

Brad Kilthau
Well, we need to be trained in a way as, even we learn in the word to defend our faith. In this day and time, we have to have a biblical worldview too, because, you know, they were accusing him of using human tactics to draw people into Christianity. And he's saying, "no, I don't use those. I use the power of the Holy Spirit." But that's what they were using. And most times when we come into conflict or issues and spiritual attacks, there is a human element, a human argument that we need to address. We can't ignore that. And we need to be knowing how to defend that this Bible is true. We need to know how to share that Satan's true hell is real. Those kinds of things. We have to be equipped, in that sense, to defend our faith. And especially in the world we have today. Because so many people can just Google, you know, and they've got all their arguments from Google. Well okay, good for them. But why don't we have our argument ready to defend our faith from the word of God? And so we have to be constantly, like you were saying, training and equipping ourselves as those soldiers. So that's my 2 cents on that. I hope our listeners can take in their ability to fight against those spiritual battles. What do you wanna say to us, Tim?

Tim Hebbert
I wanna go back to that very first verse in that passage, guys, "be strong in the Lord and in His mighty power," Ephesians 6:10. I think in the world we're living in today, and I think you guys would agree with me in that, I don't think in the day and age we're living in, spiritual attacks aren't going to do anything but increase. So, what's our answer to that? Are we going to, pull the covers over our heads, so to speak, and either wait to pass away or wait for the rapture? Or are we gonna be strong in the Lord and in not our power, but His mighty power? I got to thinking as we were preparing for this, when I was a young grade schooler, I think I was afraid, other than being at church, I was afraid of everything. But when I was with my dad, and you guys knew my dad, my dad was a big imposing figure. I had no fear when I was with my dad. And that's the relationship that our Father God wants to have with us. "I'm not sending you out there by yourself," I love that passage. First chapter, one of my dad's favorite chapters in all the scripture was that first chapter of the book of Joshua. "Be strong and courageous." And if you really analyze that, He doesn't say it to him once. He doesn't say it to him twice. He says it to him three times. But each time, He increases what he's saying. "Be strong and courageous." This is why, "be strong and very courageous, because here's what I'm gonna do." But then at the end He says, "This is my command. This isn't a suggestion. 'Be strong and courageous,' for I'll go with you wherever you go." And He gives us assurances in the Old Testament. Isaiah 52:12 says, "you won't ever be alone, for the Lord will go ahead of you. Yes, the Lord God of Israel protect you from behind." He not only goes before us---God was the very first one ever to say, "I got your back." He also promises that no matter what the devil throws at us, in terms of a weapon, it will not prosper in our lives. Isaiah 54:17, "but in that coming day, no weapon turned against you will succeed. You will silence every voice raised up to accuse you. These benefits are enjoyed by the servants of the Lord. Their vindication will come from me. I the Lord has spoken." That's a powerful passage. But I want to end on this, Gary, this whole passage is one of my favorites. And it reminds me of why, one of the several dozen reasons I love the Apostle Paul's writings, but he's the master of metaphor. He takes something that you understand, and he teaches you through it. And the thing that everybody in that world would've known at the time was the Roman army. So he uses the Roman army, the soldier, the foot soldier and what he's wearing, to prepare himself for battle. He uses those as his indicators. And I want to close with this passage, it's from Romans 8:37. In the time, they would've known what a conquering army looked like, because they saw the best one the world had ever seen before. And he tells us in Romans 8:37, "knowing all these things, we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us." He's basically saying, "you see that army over there? When you have the power of God in you, be strong. Be courageous. Don't be afraid, because God is greater than anything that this world can throw at you." And I guess, before we close today, if you're listening today, I just ask you to ask yourself this question, "are you living today as a victim or are you living in victory?" God didn't call his people to be victims. He called them to be courageous, to be aware, to put on the armor and to do things through Him, for Him and because of Him.

Why Do We Believe That Jesus Is God And The Only Way To Salvation?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline Johnathan Hernandez and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
So great to be with you guys. Great to have you back, Ben, we were just joking before the show that we're gonna make Ben do all the heavy lifting and answer the question by himself. Hey so, last week we looked at evidence for why we believe that God exists today. We kind of wanted to follow that up with the question, "So why do we believe that Jesus is God and the only way to eternal life?" So there's our question, and I think it's a legit one. I think we kind of talked about last week how most people, even atheists, actually believe in God because they spend all their time denying him, and mad at him for not existing. "Why is the world the way it is? Must be God's fault whether He exists or not," right? So, we saw that there's actually a whole lot of evidence, including our gut reaction, that not all is right. That tells us that there's a reason to believe in God. But why Jesus? Why not many roads to God? And what makes him the unique representative of who God is? Jonathan, could you get us started on that question?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. So I guess, as we dig in and look at, you know, do we believe this? You know, I look at it and I see some of these same attributes that are in Jesus that are in God. And so that's, you know, kind of my evidence, I guess, in that we're seeing this Jesus is eternal. John 1 affirms that, "in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God." And so we start seeing these, you know, Jesus wasn't just there when he was born, but he was there always right? He's self existent as a creator of all things. And we see this in Colossians 1:17, it tells us that Christ is before all things, and in Him, all things consist. He's everywhere present. "Where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there in their midst," Matthew 18:20. He's all knowing, you know? So we can, like, walk through these attributes of God and see that these same attributes are there within Jesus. Also, He's all powerful, He's sovereign. Like, you know, we can walk through these! Jesus is sinless. And so, like, walking through and lining these same attributes that we would describe God with, I'm seeing those same attributes in Jesus Christ. And so it's like, for me, these evidences line up and say, "okay, well, if these are the attributes of God," and, you know, God was the only one that could be everywhere all the time, right? And I know some people will say, "well, the devil's all over the place." No, no. Like, it was only God that is everywhere at all times, right? And so we're seeing that same attribute within Jesus. And so for me, that was enough evidence to start saying, "you know what? Jesus is truly God!" And, you know, I mean, there's those multiple other things that we could go through, also throughout scripture and look at those things. But those were some of the things that really helped me say, "okay, well I'm seeing these things in one part of the Trinity, and now I'm seeing them in these other parts." And so yeah, that's kind of where, you know, I hang my hat, I guess.

Ben Cline
Yeah, that's great. And, you know, there's, so much information, I think, about this topic that's out there. It's hard to kind of boil it down into just a small section, and in the amount of time that we have this morning. But one of the questions that I ran across is, you know, as far as that question, "Is Jesus, God? The question that's out there is, "did Jesus even claim to be God?" When you look through the pages of scripture, I think as Americans, maybe we tend to be this way. That we want things to be so cut and dry. We want him to be, you know, clear. And the words, you know, "I am God," are not in there. When you look through the pages of scripture, however, he did make the claim that he is God. Just because he didn't use those words that we would've expected him to use, doesn't mean that he didn't make that claim to be God. So there is that claim from Jesus. John 10:30 is one of those places it says, "I and the Father are one." And if you look at the context of that passage of scripture, he's speaking in, at least in an arena where the Jews are overhearing, the religious leaders are overhearing this take place. And just by their reaction to him, you know, that he is actually making that claim that he is God. A few verses later, you look at what the Jews said back to him. They're basically saying, "you are blaspheming, because you're claiming to be God." And in verse 33 it says, "you, a mere man, claim to be God." And so Jesus is making that claim that he is God. And then in John 8:58, is another example, "Jesus says, "I tell you the truth, before Abraham was born, I am." And again, he's not saying, "I am God," in the way that us Americans might want him to say, "I am God," but he is saying, "I am God," by just using those two words, I am. And really, what he is referencing is all the way back to the Book of Exodus, is chapter 3:14, where God revealed Himself as the I am. And really, what that means is that He is the self existent one. So there can't be, you know, two self existent ones who don't need to have reliance on anything else. So, you know, Jesus is definitely making that claim that he is God, and then his disciples also make that claim. Jonathan, you mentioned this: as the Apostle John wrote his book, he started off chapter one in that way. You know, even down into verse 14, he says that God came and dwelled among us. You know, these are evidences from the scriptures and from Jesus' followers, that he did make that claim to be God, that He is God. Thomas is another one. We give him the name, Doubting Thomas, because of the way that he, you know, acted in the end toward Christ. But as Jesus came back and revealed himself, you know, as the risen savior to Thomas in John 20:28, Thomas saw that evidence, right? The evidence with the nail prints in his hand and the hole in his side. And he bowed down and worshiped him, and he said, "my Lord and my God." And the interesting thing about that is that Jesus didn't correct him. Jesus didn't tell him, "no, you don't need to call me that." Jesus accepted that worship as God. And so, there's just so much evidence, and this is all biblical evidence, of course, but this is all, you know, evidence that Jesus is God. And then, you know, we talk about the second part of that question. Is he the only way to eternal a life? Well, the provision of salvation itself is evidence that Jesus is God. You know, I might let you get into this, Gary, if that's the direction that you're heading on answering that second question. But, you know, the salvation that we need because we're sinners, the Bible talks about the fact that we are sinners because we miss the target. We miss the mark when it comes to living according to God's law, according to His righteousness. And so we are sinners, and that sin means that we cannot be in God's presence. There's that separation that has been made because, you know, we're not righteous in and of ourselves. We can't be in God's presence. And now we look to what Jesus Christ provided, you know, with his sacrifice on the cross. And you have to understand that it is only God who could make that provision of salvation for this situation that we're in, you know? To fix that relationship that's broken. And so there's some evidences for, you know, why I believe that Jesus is God.

Gary Schick
And I think it's really interesting, you know, we're kind of looking at this as believers looking at the scripture and saying, you know, as Jonathan pointed out, here's Jesus doing the things that God does, and showing those attributes. And, you know, I think it's really interesting in terms of the claim...let's think about where Jesus was. He was in Israel, he was among the people who were monotheists. They believed in one God. They didn't believe in, you know, all the gods of the pantheon, that the gods had come down to earth like the Greeks did. And so Jesus, in order to get that across, would have to reveal it in a certain way. Not only so that it would click, but that it would be believable. And I think for any of our listeners who maybe aren't Christians or are believers but you kind of, you know, "we have questions, we have doubts." I think this is a helpful question to ask. And so as I was kind of looking at it, you know, is Jesus, God? Well, what would we expect if he was God? And number one, I think we've all kind of addressed it, he would in some way claim to be. We do see evidence of this in, really all four gospels. For example, Matthew 11:27, Jesus says, "all things have been handed over to me by my father, and no one knows the son except the Father. And no one knows the Father except the son, and anyone to whom the son chooses to reveal him." So he is identifying with the Father in a very unique relationship that says, "you know what? You can't know the Father. I mean, only I know the Father and whoever I reveal Him." That's quite a God claim there. Or Mark 2:5-7 and in Luke 5:17,26 both tell the same story of how some men brought to him a paralyzed man carried by four of them. They dug a hole through the roof, pretty dramatic, to get through the crowd. Lowered him down through the roof, and before Jesus heals this man it says, "when he saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'son, your sins are forgiven.' Now, the scribes who were there immediately saw what that meant. They said in their hearts, 'why does this man speak like that? He is blaspheming! Who can forgive sins, but God alone?" Jesus, first of all, reads their minds. He knows what they're thinking. Well, you might say anybody might know what they're thinking at that point, but he asked this interesting question, "well, which is easier? To forgive sins, or to say, 'rise and walk?" He has just said, "I forgive your sins," a God claim. And then he says, "now, rise and walk," which shows there's something behind that claim. And then, as Ben, as you pointed out, there's so many statements in John's gospel. Again, going back to what you mentioned there, where Jesus said, "I solemnly declare it before Abraham came to be, I am." So two things there: as you pointed out, he's identifying himself with the God of Exodus 3:14, where God replied, "I am who I am." But also he's saying, "and before Abraham was, I am." Well, the Jews are looking at him and saying, "Hey, you're what, 30 years old? How is it that you were alive and well before Abraham?" So they were catching it. Again, you pointed out John 10:30, "I and the Father are one." John 14:9, "whoever has seen me, has seen the Father." And then there's these many clear statements about himself that are basically God's statements. Jesus said, "I am the bread of life," John 6:35. "I am the light of the world," John 8:12. "I am the gate," John 10:9. "I am the good shepherd," John 10:11,14. "I am the resurrection and the life," John 11:25. "I am the way, the truth and the life," John 14:6. And, "I am the vine; the life giving one," John 15:1,5. So, does that prove Jesus was God? Just because, in so many words he said, "I am God," no. But if he's God, we would expect him to be making those claims. And then you kind of ask the questions that C.S. Lewis asked, "well, is he saying this because he's off balance in some way?" Everybody around him saw that Jesus was very sane. And as we read the scriptures, he comes across as very balanced, very sane. Was he some kind of a significant liar, you know? Just kind of a pathological liar? Well, there again, that's not how Jesus comes across. So he is either Lord, lunatic, or a liar. Is he telling the truth or not? But again, we don't have to stay with what he says. There's also the evidence of the miracles. And it's interesting. Even his most arch-enemies, none of them doubt that he does miracles. And so Jesus himself said in John 10:37, 38, "if I am not doing the works of my father, then don't believe me. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me because of the works, so that you may no and understand that the father is in me and I am in the Father." John 14:11, "believe me, that I am in the Father and the Father is in me. Or else believe on account of the works that I do." So Jesus said, "look, if you don't believe my words, look at what I've done." And of course, we can look back now, 2000 years later, and we can compare the two sides of the Bible. You have the Old Testament, where there's many prophecies of the Messiah, and the New Testament where Jesus fulfills them. In fact, as I kind of did a little research into this, conservatively speaking, Jesus fulfilled at least 300 Old Testament prophecies of who the Messiah would be and what he would do. Now, I did a little more research. And what do you expect the odds would be that Jesus would not fulfill 300, but maybe say eight prophecies? He probably said, "well, that probably wouldn't be too hard." Actually, the chances that Jesus would fulfill just 8 Old Testament prophecies is 1 in 10 to the 17th power. So, you wanna know how big a number that is? That is one out of, and then you put a one with 17 zeros after it. I don't even know how you say a number like that! You know, what is that? A gazillion? Or a Google? It's huge! One into something with 17 zeros after it, are the chances of just fulfilling eight. And Jesus fulfilled conservatively, something over 300. And then of course, there is the final detail, the thing that brought Thomas to his knees, saying, "my Lord and my God." The resurrection. You know, the 11 remaining disciples, we know Judas committed suicide after he betrayed Jesus. But the other 11, they all went to their deaths, rather than deny that Jesus---they saw him alive, risen from the dead. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us that on one occasion, more than 500 people saw him alive. And when Paul was writing that, most of them were still alive, and they could be verified with, they could be talked to. So is Jesus God? He makes the claim. He did the works that showed he was God. He triumphed over death. You know, there have been other great leaders, thinkers, religious people. These people, they were honest enough not to make such a claim. Buddha never claimed to be God. Mohammed never claimed to be God. Buddhists talked about enlightenment. Muhammad talked about being a prophet. Jesus is the only one who says, "and by the way, I am He." And so, you know, we come back to it. Was He the Lord? Was he out of his mind? The least trustworthy of all the religious leaders that have ever existed? Or was He exactly who He was saying He was? He only makes that claim, and he's the only one also who promises us heaven. The others basically said, "well, here's what I think. Here's what I have found. Here's what I'm trying to do." But none of them had been to the other side. Jesus alone says, "I've come from the other side and I've come to bring you to where I am." So some powerful statements and some very powerful evidence that not only can he make such a claim, but that he's done what is necessary to bring us home, friends. After looking at it, I have to be honest. Presented with the facts about Jesus, for me, it takes more faith not to believe that Jesus is the Christ than to believe that he is. And that's pretty powerful stuff. What an awesome savior!

The Bible Is Spiritually Discerned - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Mike Clement, David Clement, and Michael Gleb.

Michael Clement
We've decided that we're gonna continue on with what we were already doing, which was talking about the fundamentals of the faith. And the first one is the Bible, as the word of God. And what we've already talked about is inspiration in being inherent, in being preserved, and in being authoritative; which means it's not optional. They're called the 10 Commandments, not the 10 suggestions. And this is what God's word is. What he uses to judge cultures, to judge individuals. And so here we have it in front of us today. Another thing that we wanted to point out is that the Bible is spiritually discerned. I wanna read from 1 Corinthians 2:14. It says, "but the natural man," that's talking about somebody that's unsaved. Somebody that doesn't know Christ as their Savior. Somebody that doesn't have the Holy Spirit living in them. It says, "the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him. Neither can he know them, because they're spiritually discerned." There is an aspect of God's word that cannot be understood by somebody who doesn't know Christ as their Savior. Now, they may know what the words mean, they may be able to put it down. They may be able to repeat it. But that inward knowledge and understanding is something that only comes through the Holy Spirit. And the good news is that every person who's come to know Christ as their Savior, the Bible tells us, is "indwelleth with the Holy Spirit." Jesus said, "when the Holy Spirit would come, he would guide us into all truth." And that he would also remind us of the things that he spoke of. So the Bible is spiritually discerned. And another thing that we said is that the Bible is culturally independent. Now, we have a film by a missionary by the name of Otto Coning who said he went to this people group that was in Dutch New Guinea. And it takes a long while for a missionary to be able to, uh, get through. Oh, no! I'm thinking of another person. Ouch. Peace Child, the fellow who wrote the book, Peace Child. He went to this people group, took him a long while for him to get the language down. And once he got the language down, then he began to communicate the message of the gospel. And when he told them how Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, the people began to laugh, because they honored and worshiped treachery. So when they first heard the story of Jesus, they thought Judas was the hero. But it was because their culture was so twisted. That, uh, in their culture wrong was right and right was wrong. And the Bible actually has a verse that talks about that, that says, "woe unto those that call wrong right, and right wrong." But the Bible stands outside of a culture and passes judgment on it. And that's God's perspective. Just because you were told something was right that doesn't necessarily mean that it's right. If we want to know universally what's right or what's wrong, then we can go to the word of God. So it stands outside of the culture, and it stands in judgment over a culture. And then, another thing that we point out is that the Bible needs to be understood, literally. Now, I'm trying to remember the exact phrase. "It's the literal, grammatical, historical, interpretation of scripture." There are things that have certain meaning in a certain time in history, and they're used of something in a historical context. And then there are figures of speech. A hyperbole is an overexaggerated statement to make a point. And there are other figures of speech that you find in the Bible. But there're obvious. I mean, that it can be, it's to be understood. It can be understood through those things. And so when we come to the Bible, we need to recognize, "Yeah, there are historical context. There is literary, grammatical uses." But it needs to be understood literally. Otherwise, it doesn't mean anything. I kind of, I have a problem with when somebody says, "well, this doesn't mean that. It means something else." Well, okay. What does it mean? And they'll offer an opinion, and you ask, "well, how do you know that?" And it comes down to, "that's what I wanted to mean."

David Clement
Well, one of the things that's interesting, you know, along those lines, is the kind of debate we see in Christianity today about the Old Testament, you know. Where we're living in the New Testament age. And so the Old Testament doesn't really apply to us, but we don't really have to look at it. The interesting thing is, if you look at the words of Jesus, a lot of them are from the Old Testament. First of all, he was quoting the Old Testament.

Michael Gleb
So did Paul. Massively.

David Clement
Yeah, and someone once told me, and I haven't necessarily taken the time to look it up, but someone once told me that for every New Testament truth and every New Testament doctrine, there's an Old Testament example. And I haven't, like I said, I haven't taken the time to look it all up.

Michael Gleb
But I'm sure that's the case.

David Clement
I've seen several fo them myself. And if you look at the Old Testament, the way that God dealt with the children of Israel is how He's dealing with the individuals in the church today. And so you see how God would lead them through, you'd see how God would discipline them as a nation from time to time. A lot of times you can see a direct, polar, or parallel to believers today. And so, just not saying that it's a picture necessarily, but it's again, how God has written these things down for them at that time. You know, there are some things that, again, you know, talking about crossing the Red Sea, I'm not sure I need to know about, necessarily that aspect, because I don't cross the Red Sea literally. But there is a spiritual application there. Which is our trust in the Lord. There are some historical things, but again, it does apply to us to date even the Old Testament.

Michael Clement
Okay, good deal. And your view of the Bible is critical to everything else. Because everything else is what the Bible teaches us about. You know, we're gonna talk about the trinity. Well, how do we know that there's a trinity? Because the Bible says so! Now there is, I think there is validity in saying, what has Christianity taught for 2,000 years? But let's face it, the church's denominations, organizations, individuals, schools at times, they stray. They start going off. And when you find great movements of God that are oftentimes called revivals, great movements of God amongst His people, one of the things that happens is people come back to the Bible. They get their lives straightened back up based on what the Bible has to say.

Michael Gleb
That's exactly what a revival is. There's been a lot talk of revival, even in the news these days. But if it doesn't begin with agreeing with God and agreeing according to His word, I hate to say it, but it's truly not revival. I mean, let's just be honest. It has to be based in the word of God. Unlike this culturally independent thing here. And it's a sad thing where I believe that Satan has got a lot of people convinced that there are, you know, this somehow is an American religion. Or this somehow is a white man's religion, and it's just not the case. This is a word of God for mankind. This is His word to mankind. It's a sad, sad thing. But it rises above anything that I would put onto my own identity. It rises above that. And like you said, this is where we can find truth. As I was growing up, there was two things from a Christian education that I remember very importantly was that, "what is culture?" Culture is a way of life of a group of people. That's why one of the first things I learned. The second thing I learned was, "well, what's the most important part of culture? Is how that culture relates to God. Some cultures don't relate to God. Some people have decided to remove Him from their thinking, as we see in Romans one. How they relate to God; the most important part of any culture. And so, anyway. If that helps at all.

Michael Clement
And you see how God's word, the gospel of God's word, improves any group, any people. When was the last time you saw a hospital that was built by a group of atheists or named for a famous atheist? You know, I don't think there's a Madeline Marie O'Hare hospital anywhere. Oftentimes, what secular thinking people do is, "well, let's preserve that culture." You know, "we don't want to destroy that culture." Yeah, you let them eat one another still, and you let them do all these horrific things. Wherever the Bible has gone, wherever the gospel has gone: it's brought healthcare, it's brought education, it's brought law, it's brought a decent way of living. We had a guy in our church years ago, and we were in Sunday school. I don't remember exactly what it was we were talking about, but he had said something I wrote down on a piece of paper. I still have it on my desk somewhere. And he said, "Every person wants to be treated the way the Bible commands us to treat one another." I was like, "Wow! Yeah, that is so true." You know, that is so true. Everybody wants to be treated important. Everybody wants to be treated decently. Everybody wants to be treated honestly, and with respect and so forth. And those concepts may be found other places, but it's pretty rare. Where it's indoctrinated right into the gospel message.

Michael Gleb
I was listening to one of our missionaries' letters the other night, and William Carey had gone to India. And one of the practices of that was when a husband died, a wife would have to be burned alive on top of her husband's corpse as they floated it down the river. That was the culture. And William Carey came in and changed that. How did he change it? Through the word of God. Not because he was a silver tongue dude, you know? He changed it through the word of God.

Michael Clement
And so, what you find today is all around the world in different cultures. There's Christianity, some places where it's not found yet. We're trying to get it there. But in Asian culture, in European, in South America, on every continent, their churches sometimes look a little different. I mean, it's related to their culture, but it's not dominated by their culture. And, you know, where does it come from? Comes from the word of God. And so, it's so imperative. And that's why with some groups, when people start fooling around with the word of God gets my hackles up. I don't like that, you know? That's not what the word of God says, or what the word of God means.

Michael Gleb
And that goes to the point that you began with; spiritually discerned.

Michael Clement
Spiritually discerned.

Michael Gleb
How do we know, you know? Is because, if you're a child of God, you have the spirit of God. And then you have the word of God, and the spirit of God's gonna lead you into the truth of the Word of God. And that radar starts to scope a little bit when somebody starts to twist scripture. "Wait a minute, that's not what that," yeah.

Michael Clement
Yeah, and that's why it's important for us to know God's word, individually, know God's word. Many years ago, my wife and I were working in a church and a lot of people in the church were very ignorant of God's word. And at Sunday School, the kids didn't know the Bible. The teachers didn't know the Bible. There just was a real lack of knowledge of the Bible. And one of the older ladies in the church told me that many years ago, the church had had a series of pastors that truly believed the Bible, and they were encouraged to be in their Bibles. But then they got a pastor that came, and on one Sunday he said, "you know, you people are bringing your Bibles back and forth from church and home and you're gonna wear them out." He said, "leave your Bible at home. We've got Bibles in the pew, and I'll tell you what the Bible says." And she saw that as the beginning of the decline of their church spiritually. And it makes a lot of sense. Anyway, she's got a lot of wisdom.

How Do The Different Accounts Of The Resurection Fit Together?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
So, the question, and this is the fourth week that we're dealing with this question. "Hey guys, as we approach Resurrection Sunday, which is just a couple days away now, would you talk about the different accounts of the resurrection and how they fit together?" So we began this series with the gospel of Mark, and kind of an introduction of the whole series. And really, Mark is a good base to start from, cause we believe it's most likely the first gospel that was written. Then we branched out into Matthew and Luke. And so today, fitting John in with the rest is kind of our topic. Jonathan, would you get us started as we think about the gospel of John's resurrection account?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. We open up in John chapter 20, and we would run through verses 1 through 18. And at the beginning it talks about Mary, "the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb early while it was still dark and saw that the stone had been taken away from the tomb." And as I think about that, you know, Jesus could've came out of that tomb without moving the stone, right? Like, He could've easily just been on the other side. And so, you know, thinking about that, why was the stone itself moved? It wasn't for, you know, like, it wasn't for him, right? He didn't have to have it moved for him to exit the tomb. It was for, you know, Mary Magdalene when she gets to the tomb. It was for, you know, the disciples when they get to the tomb. It was for us to see that, you know, I was able to peer into that tomb and see that he was gone, right? We know that Simon Peter, and the one whom Jesus loved, which we would say was John, right? And I always teased people saying, "yeah, Jesus loved me, you know, since my name is John!" And we know that in this story, Simon Peter and John, in a sense, raced to the tomb. And we find out in this gospel that John must have been faster or a track star and made it to the tomb first. And so another thing, I always tease my brother, his name is Peter, and my name is John. So I always tell him, "I'm a lot faster than you, but you're a little braver than me." You know, as we see this story, John made it there first, but he didn't look in first. As Simon Peter got there, he was the one that peered into the tomb. And, you know, I wonder, why was this, you know? We can always think, you know, think into scripture a little bit further, I guess. And, you know, Peter was always the one that spoke first, or I guess in a sense, a little braver. Obviously, during the rooster crowing he had a moment of not being brave, you know? But here, Peter looks into the tomb and he sees, you know, obviously Jesus isn't there, right? Like, the body's not where it was placed. And so, you know, these are some of the things I enjoy as I read through this. Just seeing, you know, Peter was willing to, even though he had that moment back then, you know, "I'm gonna peer in. I'm gonna see for myself what's taken place." And I encourage each of our listeners, you know, see for yourself who Jesus is. See for yourself. Like, get into those scriptures and start reading and digging in and doing those deep dives into the scriptures and seeing for yourself who Christ is. You'll always come back with joy and, you know, it'll be exciting for you. We see that when they go back and tell the other disciples about what they seen, and you know, we see that some of them had some moments of doubt, right? Thomas doubted, "Okay, is it really, you know, our savior? You know, our leader left us and he died, right?" And so we see these men or disciples, even the women that were there, where they were at, you know, how would we be in those places, right? Would we have been like Thomas and doubt what was taking place? I mean, as an early, early believer, I doubted a lot of things. Like, "Gosh, is this, is the Bible true?" Right? "Is this resurrection true?" Like, you know, there's a lot of things that I doubted early on. And as we dig into scriptures and we start learning who Christ is, we can see the truth, and we can see that the Bible is reliable. And I think that's what we see here. You know, Jesus had shown himself, not just to Mary and that's it. He showed himself to multiple people over a certain period of time. And, you know, that's what we would've seen back then. That they needed more than just one eyewitness to have something to be true. You know? And so he showed himself to multiple people to show, "Hey, what I said before and what I'm doing now, there's truth to this."

Ben Cline
Yeah, that's so good. And we, you know, come to the book of John and it's the last of the four in our canon of scripture as far as the order that they're placed in our Bibles. You know, the gospels are there. And we wanna read through each of those accounts, you know, pick up the things that are unique about each of those accounts and see how all of those things fit together. And when you're looking at the book of John, it's so interesting because this is John's record from his perspective of, you know, all these events that took place. And as you're reading through, it seems to be a story that is a lot about Mary Magdalene's experience. And I just thought that that was so interesting. There's some things that are unique in this record. You know, Mary Magdalene goes early in the morning, at the beginning of the day to the tomb. And in the other accounts, you see that there's other women who went there with her while, you know, this is her account. She goes there, she sees that the stone has already been rolled away, and she leaves. She goes and she finds the other disciples that were living nearby. The ones who had actually stuck around, that would be Peter and John. And she tells them the stone has rolled away. And the report that she gives to them is, you know, it would've been startling news to see that the stone had been rolled away. And her fear was that somebody had taken Jesus' body. And that's what she went back and reported to Peter and John. And so you can understand, you know, as they were racing toward the tomb, you can understand the urgency behind that, right? And you can understand why they wanted to get there as quickly as they possibly could. And so she went back with them and, you know, after they went and they both eventually ended up looking inside of the tomb and seeing the linen wrappings that were sitting where Jesus used to be, where his body used to be. She stayed there and she was weeping outside of the tomb. And she ended up looking into the tomb and saw the two angels there. They asked her a question actually that would get, you know, asked of her again in just a minute, uh, but by a different person. They asked her, "why are you here? Who are you looking for?" And she explains to them again, the same thing that she reported to Peter and John. That she was afraid that somebody had come and taken her Lord. She was chosen. Mary Magdalene was chosen, to be, well I guess, I don't know if she's the only one, but she's one of the few who got to see Jesus that early. You know, Jesus came, she turns around, and Jesus came and met her at the tomb. And, you know, he was talking to her as well, and she didn't even recognize him at first. And I just love what Jesus did there, because he knows what's going on in this woman's heart. He knows how distraught she is. And he knows the concerns that she has about Jesus' body. And so he's telling her all of these things and having this discussion with her. And then he says her name, he says, "Mary," and then suddenly she recognizes him and calls him "Rabbi," which is His teacher. And she just thought that he was a gardener, at first, who was tending to the, you know, I guess you could call it landscaping or whatever, around the tombs. But you know, he was standing there in front of her. And, you know, there's just this very uniqu record in John about all these things that Mary Magdalene experienced. And I love what Jesus does here, because he doesn't just let her stay in that state. He doesn't just let her, you know, stand idle. He gives her this first command that she's hearing from him, and that is, "go and tell the others." And I think that that's an important lesson for all of us, that we need to go, we need to take this message out into the world, that Jesus is risen. And that's why I look so forward to Easter each and every year, is to be able to do that.

Gary Schick
Good stuff! And this really concludes this series for us. So as we kind of draw it together, it's probably good to just step back for a second and just realize the four gospels are kind of like the four ends of the compass. You know, they are looking at the life of Jesus from four different perspectives. But that said, the first three that we've looked at, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are what are called the Synoptics. And they basically kind of use the same framework, and just kind of branch out in different directions. We believe Mark is telling us the eyewitness account as Peter remembers it. And there's so much in Mark that just, is very eyewitness. Even though Mark himself probably wasn't the guy who was standing there talking about; for example, the feeding of the 5,000. They sat down on the green grass or, uh, talking about how Jesus felt on certain occasions, just very up close in that way. But just quick snapshots. Peter, just even in this account of running through the tomb, you just know he's an abrupt guy who charges in. And so that's how he would've told the stories. Matthew as a former tax collector and one who's really got a heart for the Jewish community, just very meticulously lays out how Jesus fulfills, fulfills, fulfills. And Luke, who is not an eyewitness at all, he was actually the one Gentile to come back and to research everything and say, "and you know what? These things I've researched so that you may know." And he's talked so much about Jesus, especially as he relates to, they all do, but in a special way, Luke kind of zeroes in on the downtrodden and the way that Jesus lifts people up. But what is so magnificent about John, is he just starts from a different place. In fact, in John 20, he says, "Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples not written it in this book." And John made no attempt to follow the outline previously prepared. He made it his goal to really tell some things that hadn't been told. And where Mark is kind of like, an old fashioned photo album, does anybody remember those? I think today we call it Facebook, where you just see individual snapshots. Luke and John could be, and actually Luke has been by the Jesus film made into a full-length movie. I think actually, at this point, all the gospels maybe have, but John has been described to me as a beautiful, like a Rembrandt painting. Just up close, the detail is just, it's like the, the paint is still wet, and you have these up close moments. And so, where John is telling us the same resurrection account as the others have told, as has been pointed out, he really brings us close. Rather than talking about the women, he talks about one woman at the tomb. Rather than focusing very much on Jesus' appearance to the disciples, he tells the story of one disciple; Thomas. And then, rather than zeroing in on kind of the whole group of them as they go up on the mountains to receive the great commission, he zeroes in on that one restoration and commissioning of Peter. So, you know, all of it's true accounts, all of it happened. But John tells the story in a way, as you pointed out, as you guys both pointed out, that focuses on individual experiences of that. And his purpose, as we see in John 20 is, "but these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God. And that by believing, you may have life in His name." And I think, one of the powerful things about John is, is it tells these individual stories and the book is full of them. You know, there's Nicodemus, there's the woman caught in adultery, there's the man born blind. Really, it tells us extensively their stories, even the coming of the first disciples as they kind of went and found Jesus. "Well, where are you staying?" "Well come and see." You know, these up close personal accounts. But John is ultimately inviting us to have our own personal encounter with Jesus. And friends, I know I speak for the brothers in Christ with me today. That is what we are longing for, for you. You know, Easter's a great time. It's hopefully, we're about to see the full flowering of spring; looks like some warmth in the week ahead here. So that's a beautiful time of year. There's a lot to celebrate in terms of the story of Easter. Whether we're talking about the passion of the Christ, what he endured as he died for our sins, the songs of Resurrection Morning, "Christ The Lord Has Risen Today. The fellowship time, the Breakfast at church, the time around the table at home. But ultimately friends, it's gotta be more than celebrations and chocolate rabbits and great movies. It's got to be your personal encounter with the risen Christ. And once you've experienced that, it just changes it forever. It's not just a day in the calendar, it's not just some time off of work. It's not just some special celebration and some good music or some whatever. It becomes a time of personal worship. Whether that starts for you at sunrise, or a little bit later in the day. Where does your personal encounter with Jesus come? And I just wish that for you today, good Friday, as we think about what he endured on the cross for us.

If God Knows That Some People Will Go To Hell Why Does He Create Them?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley and Brad Kilthau.

Gary Hashley
The question that we're going to talk about today is this: "If God knows that some will reject His offer of salvation, why would He create people that He knows will go to hell?" I would say there's even another question, a question posed by one of my professors at Bible college years and years ago, a question to get us thinking. "If God knows all things, and the Bible implies He does, He knows the past, He knows the present, He knows the future. He knows what is actual, and He knows what is possible. If God knows all that, and God knew that Adam and Eve, when He put them in the garden and He gave them the one rule. Don't eat from the tree in the midst of the garden, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If God knows all things, then God would've known Adam and Eve would disobey. Why did God even make Adam and Eve? And that is one of those questions that I don't know we will ever have an answer for that will satisfy anybody. And one thing we always need to keep in mind, and I think Brad would agree with me on this, is that we are not God's judge and jury. God doesn't answer to us. I think sometimes people make up their mind, "If God isn't the way I want Him to be, then He's wrong and I just don't want to believe in Him." But think about it on the other side, since He is the creator of the heavens and the earth, and He is the creator of us, and He is the giver of truth and the giver of morality. Who are we to look to God and say, "I don't think you're fair. I don't think you're doing this well. John 3:16 says, "For God's so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son, that whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life." We know from scripture that those who don't put their faith in Jesus, not only will be condemned, they are, John 3:17, it talks about, "God didn't send His son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved." Then it says, "He who does not believe is condemned already because he's not believed in the name of the only begotten son of God." And so, you know, God created us, not robots. He created us with the ability to choose. We have intellect to think, we have emotions to feel, we have a volition or the ability to choose. Now, from God's side, scripture makes it very plain that He wants people to be saved. Let me just share some examples: Ezekiel 33:11, "As I live, declares the Lord, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn back, turn back from your evil ways. For why will you die, O house of Israel? Earlier in chapter 18, he says, "I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, declares the Lord. So turn and live." Another place in that same chapter, "have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, declares the Lord God, and not rather that he should turn from his way and live." Proverbs 8, "I love those who love me, and those who seek me diligently will find me." Lamentations 3, "The Lord is good to those who wait for Him, to the soul who seeks Him." Jeremiah 29, "you will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart." Isaiah 45, "turn to me and be saved all the ends of the earth for I am God and there is no other." 1 Timothy 2, "This is good and is pleasing in the sight of God, our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." God wants people to be saved. He provided for us to be saved. Jesus made it possible through his death, burial and resurrection. The Holy Spirit works in people's hearts to draw them to God. We have the scriptures that point us to God. We, as believers, have been told to be his witnesses. And so, if people don't believe and they've never heard, that's our fault. But if people have heard and don't believe, that's their fault. None of it is ever God's fault. I was studying to write my senior thesis as a senior at the Grand Rapid School of the Bible in music in Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was writing my thesis on the sovereignty of God and the free will of man in salvation. I was reading a book by Arthur W. Pink who said that Jesus did not even die for some people. He said, "God created some people just to send them to hell." Now, I can't go with that because the Bible says, "God loved the world and gave His only begotten son." So when I posed that to someone close to me, who is of the persuasion that Arthur Pink has, I said, "well it says, for God so loved the world." And he looked at me and said, "yeah, but world in John 3:16 doesn't mean 'world.' World only means the few He's chosen to save." Well, I can't go there folks, because the Bible so many times talks about the offer being made to all of mankind. In fact, Peter talks about people denying the one who bought them. Jesus bought us with his blood. He paid the price on the cross. So I think God's heart is, He wants everyone to be saved. Salvation is to be offered to all. It is available to all. And those who do not put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, that's their choice. He said, "they're condemned already because they have not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God." So we can play the game of, "God should do what I think is right, and God should do it the way I think He should do it." Or we can sit back and say, "I trust God to always do the right thing, because God is faithful to Himself." Faith comes by hearing the word of God. And the Bible is out there. People pick it up in motel rooms. People hear it on the radio. People hear it from a friend, read it in a gospel tract. They see scripture in the gospel tract. People have come to put their faith in Jesus. So the thought of, "why would God create people He knows will go to hell?" I don't know why, but I do know that they don't have to if they put their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ as Savior. So, my theologian friend across the table here, Brad, why don't you pick up where I've left off. Or start where I haven't even been and throw some input into this question.

Brad Kilthau
Well Gary, you know, when you look at that question, and I know that question comes up a lot, "why would He create people that He knows will go to hell?" I think you can look deeper into that question and really see what the person is really asking. They're trying to put, again, guilt on God or fault on God for people not being able to go to heaven. And I think what we have to keep coming back to, obviously is it is not God's fault. And it is not God's desire, again, that anyone would perish. And one of the ways we know that is, when we look in the Bible, especially in Romans 1. In Romans 2, it speaks about how God offers Himself as light to every single human being. It talks about how creation is without and how conscience is within. And as we know, that the Lord gives us witness of His existence, and that goes to everyone. Now there are people who do not want to accept that there is a God. There are people who do not want to accept that they have to answer to God. And so they might come up with their own theory of how things came to be. And that's how come we have, I believe, the false propaganda of evolution that's going on right now. It's not that people don't know that there's a God, they just don't want to acknowledge that God is there. They don't want to answer to God. But again, we come back to what you were sharing too, Gary. Is that God created us because He wants to have a relationship with us. He wants us to be with Him. He wants all of us to be saved. And so, again, He shares that He's there. Just look at creation. Just look at, even the moral law that's written on the heart of every human being. Where did that come from? Well, it had to come from some source. And when a person turns to that source, or looks for the source of what that came from, you gotta see that there's a designer who made the design and all of the beauty that we live in on this world. And so, God's witnessing that, "I'm here. I want to have that relationship with you." And then when we, as Christians, come along and we read scripture and we read what Jesus said, as you were saying in John 3:16. And then we also read in Acts 4, when the apostles are sharing the same thing. That they're salvation in no one else other than the name under heaven given among men, which must be saved. And that's through Christ Jesus. And again, there's a resistance. And they, um, "well, we don't wanna believe in this Jesus. We don't want to accept Him." Well, there again is the fault of the person who will end up someday in hell. The Holy Spirit is always drawing people to the truth that there is God. And when we acknowledge that there is a God, that there is some light in general, again, of a creator. Then the truth of the matter is, God will always, always bring more light to show that He is there. One of the questions that come up in my Bible school training was, you know, of course we always have these that come along and say, "well, what about the guy that's living out there on a remote island? And he's never heard the gospel. No one's ever shared the Bible with him. And what about him?" Is it his fault that he'll end up someday in hell? Well, that's when you go to what we teach about in the subject of Apologetics. And we come back to a very familiar story that often could be shared. Think about a guy that's lost out in a dark jungle. He's been out there for some time. He's been exposed to the elements, he needs to get back to civilization, otherwise he's going to die. He's out there in the middle of the night. He climbs up on this mound and he starts looking around and he sees off in the distance there's this little speck of light. Now, what should he do? Well, he should walk towards the light. If he rejects the light, he's gonna be in trouble. So if he starts walking towards the light, the light will get brighter and brighter and brighter, and eventually he'll find himself coming back into civilization where he could find the help that he needs. But if he looks out and sees that little speck of light and says, "nah, I don't want anything to do with that," and turns around and walks back into the darkness, well, whose fault is that? It's the man who chooses to turn away from the light that was offered to him. And in the same way, when God offers, he says, "I'm here. Look at what I've created. Look at the law that's written on your heart." When you see that light and you say, "is there a God?" Here's what's gonna happen, God is going to bring more light to you. And it might show up just as you were sharing, Gary, it might show up as a gospel tract. It just shows up out of nowhere. Maybe somebody threw it inside of your kids' trick or treat bucket on Halloween, and it ends up in your hands. Maybe all of a sudden you find yourself with a Gideon Bible in your hand. Maybe you're the guy on that island all by yourself, and all of a sudden a missionary comes rowing up in a little boat. Why do you think he's coming? Because God is sending more light. And I know that we live in a society today that wants to try to promote our God as some evil tyrant that would just love to see people suffer. That's the work of Satan. That is not God. God doesn't want anyone in hell. In fact, he created hell for Satan and the fallen angels. It's not even there for human beings. He doesn't want us there, He wants us in his heaven. But that is up to us if we're going to accept Him or reject Him. And so when we see God, He gives a general revelation to show that He exists to show that we need to actually start turning to Him. But again, we have to come to the truth is that no one is gonna be saved by general revelation. They have to hear the gospel. They have to hear it from the word of God. They have to hear the message just as you were sharing. And John 3:16, that's how my Sunday School teacher led me to Christ when I was eight years old, is through that verse right there. And so we have to hear it again from God, from His word. And so God will get that word to those who are desiring a relationship or to know Him. And you know, when you look in the Bible, you think about the early church and those who went out. How Peter went out to Cornelius, how Philip went out to that Ethiopian. God must have really loved that Ethiopian to send Philip out there into the wilderness and say, "Hey, there's a guy reading from the book of Isaiah. Go out there and talk to this man about me." And when we look around the world today, we can even see some in Muslim countries that where the word of God is being shut out. But we find that God is still revealing Himself to many today in dreams to show that He exists. And as we see those who are starting to turn and say, "Is there a God? Is there a God like this that loves me?" All of a sudden we find that radio waves or internet or some way, God gets the message or the gospel to those people. And so the truth of the matter is, God wants all sinners, all of us who are lost in sin, He wants us to get the message of grace so that we can say yes to Jesus. There's never gonna be a time of when someone's gonna stand at the great white throne of judgment, which is for only those who have rejected Christ and stood into eternity that way. But there's never gonna be someone who can stand before God at the great white throne of judgment and say, "God, I didn't know you were there. I didn't know you loved me. I didn't know that. I had no chance to have an opportunity to come to know you." And that is not true. The Lord will say, "Depart from me, because I never knew you." But it wasn't because of God's fault. It's because man has chosen to reject Him and His light.

What Are Satan's Angels, And Should I Worry About Them?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley and Brad Kilthau.

Gary Hashley
We are looking at another question today, helping clarify things in people's minds. And here's what came, "Christians and others often talk about good and bad, and that there is a spiritual war going on between God's angels and Satan's angels. I get God having angels, but not sure about Satan having angels. Are these what are called demons, and do I have to be worried about them?" So, to start with, we need to be reminded that Lucifer, who we came to know as Satan, the devil, the serpent, the dragon. He's called all of those in scripture. He started out as an angel. We read about this in Isaiah 14 and Ezekiel chapter 28. That's easy to remember: 14x2 = 28. But in Isaiah 14:12, "how are you fallen from heaven, oh day star, son of dawn? How are you cut down to the ground? You who laid the nation's low. And here's the answer you set in your heart, 'I will ascend to heaven above the stars of God. I'll set my throne on high. I will sit on the mount of the assembly in the far reaches of the north. I will ascend above the heights of the clouds. I will make myself like the most high.' But you are brought down to sheel, to the far reaches of the pit." We find that Lucifer was originally an angel himself, because God didn't create Satan as Satan. He didn't create demons as demons, but He did create angels as well as on earth creating humans. But He created angels, an enumerable company of angels, and they were there serving Him. And yet this Lucifer, who it would appear, was maybe the highest ranking angel in God's host of angels. According to Isaiah, he started to become proud. He started to think that, "why should I serve this God? Why can't I be God?" And he declares that he wants to be God, and God cast him from heaven. And he took with him other angels who had followed his thoughts, who had decided they wanted to follow him instead of following God. And they were cast from heaven and Lucifer, we know now as Satan, we know him as the devil. John in Revelation talks of him as the dragon, talks of him as the serpent. And that's where he came from. So he was an angel, and those who fell with him had been angels. In Revelation 12, starting at verse seven says, "now war arose in heaven: Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent who is called," listen to this, "the devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world, he was thrown down to earth and his angels were thrown down with him." So when you hear of demons or Satan's angels, it appears from scripture. We're talking about the same group and there are angels who followed Lucifer and his rebellion. Angels who decided that Lucifer must have, they thought had a chance to dethrone God and then found out you can't dethrone God. A created being cannot dethrone their creator. And they were cast from heaven. Earlier in chapter 12 of Revelation, it talks about the dragon with his tale drug out a third of the stars. And the understanding that I've heard all my years is that third of the stars implies that one third of all of the angels God had created went with Lucifer in his rebellion. We read in the Old Testament in the days of Moses, of a rebellion that started with Korah Dathan and Abiram. And Korah decided Moses was getting too big for his britches, and that Korah ought to be in the same place Moses was in. Many people listened to Korah and decided Korah was right, and they were going to dethrone Moses. God stepped in and said, "no, don't dethrone the person I've put in charge!" And so Moses stayed in charge. And Korah, of course, that says the Earth opened up and swallowed him and his stuff. But yes, there are two types of angels now, but there was only one type of angel at creation. But there are two types of angels now. And so the question then comes about the spiritual warfare that happens between these two entities. In our last time we did this, Brad alluded to the time in Daniel, when Daniel prays and Gabriel is sent to deliver a message as God's angel, taking a message to God's man, God's prophet Daniel. And it says that Satan and his angels got in the way and there was a battle taking place until Michael shows up and leads the charge against Satan. And Gabriel then is able to go on 21 days later, earth days later, and take the message to Daniel. We read about the armor of God. It says, "we don't wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers and the rulers of the darkness of this world." It says, "so put on the armor: the breastplate of righteousness and the helmet of salvation. Take the sword of the spirit." You know, "the shoes of the preparation of the gospel of peace, the belt of truth around our waist." The word of God, the sort of the spirit, the shield of faith, because there are battles going on that we never see. You know, when Elisha was surrounded by the enemy and his servant was all upset Elijah said, you know, prayed, "God open his eyes so he can see." And the hills were filled with fiery chariots and God's army was out there fighting against the armies of Satan that we never see. So yes, there are evil forces who started out as angels, but we know them now as demons led by the chief of the demons, Lucifer, who we also know as Satan, the dragon, the serpent, the wicked one. So Pastor Brad, should we be worried about these demons?

Brad Kilthau
Well, there's a lot of thought with that. And in some cases, well, we need to know where they are. When we look at the Bible, we understand that some of those demons that were cast out, that followed Satan outta heaven, were cast out and came down to this earth. We know that some of them we don't have to worry about because they're permanently bound right now. We read about that in Genesis of where these angels came and had sexual relations with daughters and men, with women, human beings. And of course, there was the offspring, and this was totally against God's will. God saw it as such a heinous, immoral sin that he bound them forever, and they are in the lowest abyss. And they will be there until the Lord decides to dump that into the lake of fire at the end of time, and so they don't get another chance. And so we don't have to worry about those angels, those fallen angels that is. But there are also the fallen angels that we think about in Revelation 9 that come out. We could call them the locust demons that are in the bottom of the Euphrates River as they obviously sinned against God in a very heinous way here on this earth. And they are cast into this abyss, but they will be released during the tribulation period as part of the fifth trumpet judgment to carry out some very hurtful things against those who are on the face of the earth. If we're believers, I'm just saying, we don't have to worry about those angels either because it will come out during the tribulation period. And as we are raptured before the tribulation, we won't be here to be seeing them. But there are still demons that are active, thriving, doing the work of Satan right now all around us. And just as you said, Gary, if we could pull back that veil, we would see that spiritual warfare. We're not fighting against flesh and blood, we're fighting against a spiritual enemy in our life. It's something I think we always have to be reminded of. What can these demons be doing to us right now? I think a lot of people think about the demon possessed people as we see in the gospel accounts of where they were cast out and and so forth. When Jesus cast the demons outta that one man, a host of demons, and they went into the swine and then they went out into the sea of Galilee and drowned there. You know, and I think a lot of people have this misconception that, well, we don't have to think about those demons anymore.

Brad Kilthau
They're not active today like they were then. I truly believe they're more active today than they've ever been because they know their time is getting shorter and shorter before their judgment comes. So how can they hurt us? Well they can cause, as we know in the Bible, certain physical and emotional and mental disorders in people. We can see that in Matthew 12 and Luke 13. They can also cause among people what we would call self mutilation. Some of the things we've looked at in the past, one of the things that's very popular was, those who were cutting themselves. And some of that's still going on today. Sometimes we wonder, where does that come from? Why would a person do that to themselves? Well, I think we've labeled everything as a psychological problem, but we need to know there's also a spiritual problem going on. And sometimes I think we're mislabeling some of that. And it is the work of demons. They're very active today in teaching false doctrine, and I think that's one of their main things. In fact, the Apostle Paul tells us in 1 Timothy 4, he says, "Now, the spirit of God expressly says in the latter times, some will depart from the faith giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons." And when we start looking at what's being taught in some of our church buildings across our country today, and we start to wonder, where could that come from? How could ministers of God, claiming to be that, standing front of his congregation and telling his people that Jesus was not born of a virgin. To stand in front of his people and say, "well, Jesus resurrected from the grave, but it wasn't physical. It was only spiritual." And we gotta think, where could you get such a thought? How could you stand in front of people and share that? Well, the only way you could do that, is if you are being misled by, I think, a demonic presence. That there has to be an influence of a demonic spirit that's misguiding and teaching false doctrine through people as a mouthpiece for them. They can hinder spiritual activity. I know that those of us who've sought to lead people to Christ, it invariably happens. And I know, Gary, you could attest to this too. You know, when you're preaching a message and you're getting down to the heart of the message, you're ready to drive the point home that people need to recognize Christ as Savior and Lord of their life. And you're bringing it right to that point, and all of a sudden hymnals start to drop on the floor, or it seems like somebody pinches a baby about that time. And the whole place goes to confusion and immediately as a servant in the ministry, we recognize what that is. That's a spiritual attack. It's trying to hinder the sharing of the gospel that happens over and over. We gotta also remember that demons can do miracles. They're limited in their ability to do that, but they can do some very deceiving miracles. One of the things that I thought of a while back is what we call the apparitions of Mary. And there's a rise on this right now in the world of where many people are truly believing that they are seeing Mary, the mother of our Lord. As we think about in the Bible, they're seeing Mary appear before them, and then she starts to share some things. She says, "I'm speaking for God to you." Most often, what she is saying to these people is, "you need to pray to me. You need to confess your sin to me. You need to come to me. I'm gonna be the intern between you and God." And we know that's false. We know that's not true. It is only Jesus who is the intercessor between us and the Father. How can that be? Well, demonic beings can actually present themselves in a physical form to look like a human being and be used to share false things. And people will believe this because, again, they've been deceived. And then sometimes, yeah, they can invade and possess certain humans. And that still happens today. And I know we like to label everything as a physical or a mental issue, but we need to look sometimes further. There could also be demonic possession of people today. Some people have asked me in the past, they've said, "So, Pastor Brad, have you ever seen a demon possessed person in your years in ministry?" And I've gotta say, "yes, I have." And when that person looked at me and spoke to me, I immediately recognized that it was a demonic presence. And of course, how do you defend against that? It comes back to what you said again Gary, Ephesians 6, it is through prayer and through the word. Through prayer and through the word. The word is our offensive weapon against a demonic presence in our lives.

Gary Hashley
Well, I hope that helps answer that question about Satan's angels and demons. Are we talking about the same thing? And I believe the answer is, "yes," we are. And there's much to learn and there's much to grow in our faith, because greater is He who is in us than he who is in the world.

What Are The Best Bible Translations? Part 1 - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez, and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
So great to be with you guys and great to be back with our listeners again today. We're gonna do a follow up today to a question that we covered a couple weeks ago. Somebody asked a little bit of a translation question about some names in the Bible, and as part of that conversation we got just kind of talking about a little bit about different translations, which is something people often wonder about. I think probably, I wish personally, I don't know, but you guys, I wish people came to me with more Bible questions. I've never met a pastor who said, "oh, people are constantly barraging me with Bible questions." So...I love doing this program. But one of the questions that I've probably been asked the most is, "well, pastor, what's the right translation? Or the best translation? Or what would be a good translation for me?" And so I think that'd be a good one for us to just kind of talk about today.

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. So, I think that is definitely one of the most questions I would get too is, "what translation should I read or which one should I stay away from?" And so today, I guess I'll kind of go through something that when I, that was probably one of the questions I asked too when I first became a believer too. Is, "pastor, what translations should I read?" And so, you know, back then, great question. You know, he threw out a couple, but I had a friend that actually drew me out a chart I guess, so to speak. And so that's kind of what I've used now. And I don't have all the different English translations on here. I guess at some point I could start adding and making this list a little bit better.

Gary Schick
There's always more!

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. So I kind of have just the ones that he had showed me back then. And so imagine, like, a straight line, and on one side of the line you'd have, like, your literal translations. And so the literal translation is an attempt to translate by keeping as close as possible to the exact words and phrasing of their original language. So they would take the original language and make sure that they stay true to that. And then on the other, the far side of this, you would have the free translation. This would be more of like that paraphrasing translation. And then in the middle you kind of have, what my friend would call, was the dynamic equivalence. And this was an attempt to translate the word, and it would be close, but it was kind of more of like a word for word. And a lot of times that's kind of tough because, in one, you know, language they have a word, but that word means many things. English should be just kind of, you know, like love! You know, like love, we just think 'love' and, you know, in other languages there's many types of love. And so, those can kind of get kind of tough as you start translating through that. And so, you know, if we look at some of these translations you look at, like the King James version, that would be a literal translation of the scriptures. NIV would be more of that dynamic equivalence. And I guess the NIV 1984 , I should say. Cause you go with some of this new NIV and I would start putting that more of kind of like that paraphrase. Cause some of it's really not where it needs to be anymore. So if you're going NIV, I would definitely try to make sure you find a 1984 version of it. If you can.

Gary Schick
You gotta go for a used though, cause they won't sell them in the regular stores anymore.

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. They won't sell that anymore. And so if we were looking at a paraphrase version, this would be, I guess, the most popular one would be the Message Bible. And, you know, that's a good one to read through. But that's not one that I usually use to study through. For me, I usually use either the, New King James, more than likely that's what I'll have in front of me. I'll go back and read through many of them, but I usually study out of more of the New King James. That's kind of the direction I guess I've gone, because that's what I was given when I started, when I became a believer. Everybody kept on handing me, either the King James or the New King James version. Those are the ones that were constantly given to me. So I guess, if we look at the first complete English language version of the Bible, was John Wycliffe's in 1382, I think is what it's what it said, he was kind of accredited for that complete translation of the English Bible. You'd also have, like, William Tindell, that was the 1500's I believe, kind of where he was translating the scriptures. And so, yeah. So for me, I mean, that's kind of the Bible that I've kind of stuck with. And then I've had, like, the Message Bible, I've used that to kind of further study I guess, and not as my main study. So, yeah.

Ben Cline
Yeah, thanks for that. That's a good overview of, you know, the different styles of translation that there are. And, you know, it's funny cause Gary, I don't know what translation that you use, but we may all use different translations. You know, the one that I kind of tend to stick to is the New American Standard Bible. But that's one of the literal translations. And the hard part about some of those is that, you know, especially with that particular translation, is that reading through it is kind of choppy, you know, in English, it's sort of abrupt. And so it is nice to be able to go to some of those other translations. Like the New Living Translation is one that I use just for listening to or for reading, you know, in my own personal devotion time, because you know, it flows in English better. So there's a lot of different choices out there. I guess some of the things that I wanted to talk about, you know, translation is really kind of a funny thing when you're translating from one language to another. I remembered a story. We went on a missions trip to Mexico and we were visiting a church down there, and the pastor asked me if I wanted to preach. Well, I don't speak a lick of Spanish, right? So, I had to have somebody who lived there, who knew English well enough, that he could, you know, translate as I was teaching that morning. But the interesting thing was that we had to sit down and go through the notes that I had written out and all that stuff because there's so many, you know, idioms and, oh, what's the other word? Figures of speech, that we use in English. And every language is like 'that' actually. They have their own idioms and their own figures of speech that they use. But we had to kind of try to take all of those things out and make them, you know, words that he could translate, you know, from English into Spanish as I was teaching. So that's just kind of the way that it goes. And so you have all these ideas that are, you know, from the Hebrew culture and, you know, ideas that come up in the Greek language that don't exactly translate over to English. And so, you know, they do scholarly study to try to figure out how to best get it down on paper in English. But, you know, I just had some thoughts, you know, about the different translations. And these are kind of more, you know, personal thoughts, things that I've learned over the years. And one of those things is to just be really careful when, in your understanding of what a translation is, there are, you know, some false ideas going around. You can't trust certain English translations, because the idea behind, you know, their understanding of how a translation is coming about, especially the newer translations, is that they're translating from one English translation to another, and making an updated version of it or whatever. But, you know, the truth of the matter is, the good English translations that we have, they're all happening from the original languages. From the original manuscripts. And so that's something that is just really important for us to understand, that those ideas that are being translated, the words that are being translated over are not from English to English. They're being done from the Greek and the Hebrew and the Aramaic over to English. And so, just one idea to be aware of. And then the other thing too is, you know, be careful of the idea that there's only one English translation that can be considered the word of God. You know, I know that there's, I might be stepping on some toes by saying that, but there's certain, you know, arenas that you can be in where they say, "this is the only trusted English version of the Bible." So don't go into that, because they're all, you know, a lot of these translations are done very carefully, and they have, a lot of work that goes into them and they really are trying to get that best meaning from the original languages. And then we also have, you know, I don't know if everybody's aware of this, but everybody has access to the resources if you have a word that you're, you know, getting really hung up on, there's resources online to be able to go to and find out the definitions and the different meanings of this word back in the original languages. And so, you know, that's not something that was readily available 20 years ago, but it is now for sure. And so, I guess the last thing that I wanted to talk about was just, you know, as the body of Christ, let's make sure to not let differences in opinion over Bible translations get in the way of us being unified as the body of Christ. You know, we don't want to let that cause divisions at all. So, just some thoughts.

Gary Schick
Yeah, really good thoughts, guys. You know, just in real simple, I think, in terms of answer to the question, which, what is the best translation or the best one for me? It's very simply, listeners, the best translation is the one you're going to read. It's the one you're gonna pick up and read. I'll tell you my own experience as a kid; I was handed, in primary one, I don't know what even that was, you know, somewhere between kindergarten and first grade, I was handed a little King James Bible. I've still got it. And in the cover plate it says, "thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." And oh, how I wish that I had read more out of that first Bible I was handed, unfortunately, as a rambunctious kid in Sunday school. We probably used our Bibles more for knocking each other over the head and really getting some talking to about that. "What? The word of God? What are your kids doing? But when I actually reached a point in my life when I was ready and hungry to read and I opened it, I mean, I made the same mistakes so many people do. The Bible's not just a book that you necessarily want to go cover to cover. It's a bunch of little books and probably best to start in the New Testament. But no, I started in Genesis 1 in the King James version, and as a, I don't know, maybe sixth, seventh grader at that point in my life, I was soon lost. And so I went to the Christian bookstore and there on the shelf were all of these translations. Some of the ones that you guys have already mentioned. The New American Standard was the one, like they were teaching in the seminaries. But again, a little bit harder language. There was the Revised Standard Version, which was a little smoother. I didn't know, but I looked at all of them. And the one I settled on at that point in my life was the Living Bible. And it was at a, was it a perfect translation? It wasn't even a translation, it was a paraphrase. But I'll tell you what listeners, I read it from cover to cover, and as I began to go, if you look through my old copy of the Living Bible, you'll see the opening pages are white. And then you start to see some red lines in there where I start to underline some verses. And then you see, by the time I, and I still did it the hard way. It took me three years; Genesis 1 to the end. Actually, I started in Revelation, because Hal Lindsay was a big deal back then, and I wanted to know how everything was gonna end. And I'll tell you what, if anything will cure you of being just totally, gobsmacked over what is, how are the end times gonna play out? Just read Revelation, and it just blew me away. I was like, "yeah, okay." And now I went back to Genesis 1 and worked my way back there again. But by the time I'm in the New Testament, the pages are, it's just like, "who bled on these?" You know, there's just all different colors. And as I was outlining and highlighting and underlining, it just became such a rich experience for me. And then from there I worked my way into, I guess what you might call, a better word for word translation. I guess we just want to come back to once again, what is the best translation or the best one for me, the Bible you're going to read.

An Explanation of Slavery in the Old Testament - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez, and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
Hey guys, it's great to be together. We've got another interesting question that was passed along to me. Exodus 21:1-6 is the passage that's being asked about, and Jonathan's gonna read it to us. But the question is, "can you talk about slavery and the Bible's seeming endorsement of it? Also, it seems strange that a man would have to choose between his freedom from slavery and keeping his wife and kids. What does it mean that the slave's wife and children belong to the slave's master? Is there a spiritual truth that God is trying to show us here? I'm confused."

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. So Exodus 21:1 starts out, "now these are the judgements which you shall set before them. If you buy a Hebrew servant, he shall serve six years, and in the seventh, he shall go free and pay nothing. If he comes in by himself, he shall go out by himself. If he comes in married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master has given him a wife and she has bore him sons or daughters, the wife and the children shall be her masters, and he shall go out by himself. But if the servant plainly says, 'I love my master, my wife, my children, I will not go out free.' Then his master shall bring him to the judges. He shall also bring him to the door or to the doorpost, and his master shall pierce his ear with an awl and he shall serve him forever." So that's the scripture that they gave us for today. And I think for me, a lot of times when we look at the scriptures, we look at them through our current circumstances, or the eyes that we've seen here with slavery. When we hear "slavery," we think of it as how we've grown up learning about it, I guess, through school. And, you know, how slavery was in the early times of the United States history and stuff kind of like that. And so we think of it, now slavery is evil like, I hope people don't think, as we talk through this, that we're trying to justify something or anything. But, you know, slavery in itself is evil. And it's not something that should be happening. And hopefully it's not happening currently, but we know that it is happening all across the world right now. So we look at this and we see that slavery, I guess, in the Bible we see it throughout the Bible, happening. And slavery was, I guess, permissible in certain situations as long as slaves were regarded as a full member of the community. And we kind of see this in Genesis 17:12, it says, "throughout your generation, every male amongst you shall be circumcised when he is eight days old, including the slave born in your house and the one bought with your money from any foreigner. And so you see that even slaves were having to walk through the same things that the Hebrews were having to walk through. The slaves would also get the opportunity to have the same amount of rest. It says, "work six days and on the seventh day, rest." And so even the slaves were held to that standard. Like, "you're gonna work six days for me as a slave owner, right? But on that seventh day, we're gonna give you rest and you're gonna be able to recuperate, hopefully and be able to go on." They were to be treated like humans, cause that's, you know, even though they're slaves, they're still humans. And I think that's some of the difference that maybe we're seeing in the slavery that we've seen happen in the early US history; is a lot of the slaves weren't seen as human. You know, so we dehumanize things so that way it's easier to do things that maybe we shouldn't be doing to other humans. Not saying that back then in the new or in the Old Testament, that people weren't dehumanized. I think you were still seeing some of these things happening. And so I think you see, like, even here, like it talks about the Hebrew slave. They're gonna work six years for that person, and then in the seventh year they're gonna be free. And within our question it talks about, "what about the women and the children?" And I was reading through a bunch of different forums, I guess, on this yet last night and trying to, "okay, where are we seeing this." I've seen some people talk about, "okay, in this passage it doesn't say forever. And so maybe they're serving their six years, and then they'll be free on their seventh. But it doesn't really support that either." And so you kind of have this back and forth on that. What does that mean? And I guess for the way I read that, if the husband was willing to stay and become a slave forever, more than likely his wife and his children were the master's forever. Cause otherwise, why would you, you know, stay knowing that, "hey, your wife's gonna be out in two years," you know? Like maybe you'd, you know, work close to that, to where your family's a slave at, so that way you could be with them. But I guess I'm not really sure on that. So yeah.

Ben Cline
Yeah, these are, you know, difficult questions to deal with and sometimes to understand even from studying through what scripture has to say. But again, it goes a lot to the historical context of what's going on here. And again, like you said Jonathan, we have, you know, such a tendency to look at things through the context of how we understand things in our modern times. And, you know, in our modern times we understand slavery to be, basically, kidnapping somebody and owning them, which again, is evil. It's not okay. But a lot of times, the slavery or the servanthood that is being talked about in the Old Testament, and especially here in this passage in Exodus 21 this is talking about, you know, slavery within the Hebrew culture. And so this is, you know, somebody who owes somebody else a debt, and basically sells themself into servanthood to a person that's called their master now. And so this is something that we could compare to, you know, like indentured servitude. So they're basically there to pay off a debt. And the thing that I love about this passage of scripture, where God is establishing the law, is that he's taking something that the world has been doing for, you know, so long. You see a lot of examples of slavery in scripture of things that were happening in the world, where slavery was taking place. But what God is doing here is, He's regulating it and He's helping people to see that they can't just, you know, do whatever they want and take advantage of other people. And so He's really taking some time to establish some rules here and actually establish some rights, or some basic rights for the slaves, or the servants. And so, you know, slavery is fundamentally different in some instances, you know, from our modern slavery versus what was happening back in the time when this was written. And the thing that was happening that's so interesting, as you read through this passage a little bit further in Exodus 21, the modern slavery that we understand today is expressively forbidden. It's in verse 16 of Exodus 21 that the kidnapping and selling of people is expressively forbidden. And so modern slavery was expressly breaking that law that was established by God. But the interesting thing as you're looking, you know, at slavery in the Bible, is that oftentimes it was like this economic arrangement. And one big difference is that it was never one race feeling a superiority over another race. And that being the determining factor as to whether or not somebody could be a slave. And so that was, you know, a huge difference between what was happening back then and what's happening, not what's currently happening, but I guess there's probably still a lot of slavery that's taking place in different forms in the world now. But you know, what you were talking about, Jonathan, in the early days of the United States, that's exactly what was happening. You know, people were being taken and people were being sold as possessions, which was not okay. But God was establishing here ways for people to relate to each other in ways that were fair. And so there's that six years, you know? They're only allowed to have somebody serve for six years in order to pay off a debt. You know, a married couple, if they went in, if the husband was sold into slavery to pay off a debt, if he sold himself into slavery and he was already married, then they were treated as a married couple. They were treated as part of the community. They were treated as temporary residents of the community. And then when his debt was paid off after that six years, he got to go free with his wife. But then there's that situation where a man marries a woman after he has sold himself into this servitude and he now has a choice to make at the end of that six years. And, you know, if you have a person who truly loves his wife, he's gonna stick with her, right? And so God is giving them this option as a way to show people, you know, God's love and His mercy and His justice. He's giving them a way to be able to stay together. And so, you know, God really is just establishing order. He's allowing a way for families to stay together. He's showing His mercy and His love in establishing these laws, really. And that's probably just some of the answer.

Gary Schick
Right, and there's so much. But I think you guys have really laid the groundwork well. I mean, first of all, differentiating between, really, what's happening even in a lot of Islamic countries to this day where people are, you know, being taken. And we hear about human trafficking, again, right here in the United States. Quite a lot of it. But again, it's people being taken into slavery, and with no way out. And it's completely under the radar of the law, at least, if it's going on here in this country and in other countries. I guess it is legalized, but still in a very bad way. Whereas in the world of biblical times, you know, first of all, the economics of that world were so much different. Today, if you're poor, there are safety nets. You may or may not choose to take them, but they're there. Back then, if you were poor, and had no means to provide for yourself, you would starve to death. Or if you would fall into debt, there was no, you know, way to get out of that. There were no bankruptcy laws that would set you free from it. And I don't even know that there were debtor prisons, so how do you do this? So yeah, by all means, by one of the primary ways that people, and it would be a temporary thing, was to sell yourself. Many people came to this country that way, people forget, many people sold themselves as indentured servants to come here. You know, Englishmen selling themselves to their fellow Englishmen to work in their estates until they had paid off their debt, and would often go on from there and build up their own estates. So I don't, you know, think people really would have a problem with that. At least the idea of this was a temporary means. And then the other thing is, what did it mean to be a slave in the house? Again, we tend to think of the United States model, where the slaves quarters were, you know, kind of down the field. They were very, very poor quarters. The master lives up on the hill, in the mansion. Take a look at Abraham and Sarah, with her maid servant. Take a look at Isaac, Mairus, Leah and Rachel with their maid servants. They're not out in a separate part of the property, they are part of the household. The servants were part of the household. They have, as you guys pointed out, the same rights. And they had responsibilities, but they were, in a sense, part of the family without the rights of full heirs of the family. If we'd have read further into the scripture that you read to us, Jonathan, we would've seen that sometimes a woman from a poor circumstance, her parents may sell, in a sense, sell her to someone as sort of a secondary wife. But if she's not pleasing to him or, you know, maybe she was forgotten as a bride to his son. If that doesn't work out, then she is to be set free, free and clear. I mean, as you pointed out, unlike in the United States, where people were treated as possessions, people remain people in scriptures. And let's remember where this is being written in Exodus, the Hebrews themselves have just come out of slavery. It was, as you both pointed out, just sort of part of the world's system of that time. And so God is moving them towards seeing the humanity in every human. The bride that's provided for by the master is still part of his house. That was the problem. The guy who comes in from outside, and now he's going to basically take away from that household. But he has the option to become a part of that household for life. And in terms of the spiritual application, you know, isn't it in a an interesting thing in the New Testament, we do see even more of the seeds of moving away from slavery. For example, where Paul writes to Philemon about Onesimus, who was a runaway slave, who's now become a Christian and now is a brother in Christ. "He not only asks that you forgive him," in other words, not give him the punishment. Which could have been either a severe beating or death. "But rather receive him back as a brother." And in fact, Paul indicates, and I know you're gonna do even more, indicating basically, "Philemon, it's time to set an Onesimus free." Paul couldn't quite come out and directly say that because of the law of the Roman Empire at that time. But he could sure point Philemon in that direction, which he clearly does. And so this freedom, and it's interesting what the New Testament says to slaves and masters. He says, "slaves, you're free in Christ. You are not serving your earthly master. You're serving Jesus. So regardless of how you're treated by your earthly master do what you do as unto God." And we translate that without even thinking in our context to people working in the workplace, "regardless of your workplace, your boss, those around you, You do what you do as unto the Lord." On the other hand, Paul says to those who are free, the masters, "and you are yourselves enslaved to a heavenly master, and so you treat these others under your authority, under your workspace with the dignity that that is there due." And isn't it interesting then when, for example, James and Jude and, you know, these guys, they're writing the New Testament letters, they identify themselves as a slave of Christ. You know, a servant of Christ, bond slave of Christ, someone who is wholly belongs to the Lord, has become fully His man and fully His representative in the world. And so, you know, and those are some of the positives of that kind of relationship in that time period. They were part of the house, they were obligated to the house. They were to be fully provided for by the house. And they were full representatives of the house when they were sent out on an errand, on a mission with a message. And that is, we are sons of the living God and daughters of the living God through faith in Christ. But we are also his servants, his emissaries, his ambassadors. So is scripture endorsing it? No, it's not endorsing any of the bad, but it's moving the reality of what was going on in the world toward God's ideal for mankind. And also giving us some pictures of how we relate to one another and how we need to be fully God's people. And represent Him well and serve Him well in all things.

Why Is James Translated That Way Instead of Being Jacob As It Is In The OT?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
I don't know guys, I think the questions that Russ is, is giving us are getting harder, do you think? So maybe instead of Ask the Pastor, we should call it Stump the Chump.

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. I've been stumped a few times.

Gary Schick
But definitely, it sends us digging into the word and that's always a good thing. So here's the question he sent us this week, "Hello guys. Someone told me this last week that the name James in scripture is actually translated as Jacob in the Greek." Which of course the New Testament was written in Greek. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew and Aramaic, mostly Hebrew. Then they asked me, "why does it show up as James in our Bible and not Jacob? Feel free to tackle this if you would like and maybe discuss further the translation of the scripture from the original languages. Thanks, Russ." So, as the questions get harder, I hand it off to Jonathan to get us started.

Jonathan Hernandez
Well, as much as I wish I was a Greek scholar, I'm unfortunately not, and so, I'm not gonna try to say some of these names in Greek cause I'm not gonna be very good at it. So from what I was able to gather, I guess there's kind of a couple trains of thought when we look at, why is James not called Jacob in the New Testament? One interesting one that I came across, was that as King James was having the Bible translated, he would rather have the name James in there instead of Jacob. Cause obviously, his name was James. I don't know how much truth is to that one, but I felt that it was pretty interesting as I was digging in. I keep seeing that over and over again, but there's actually nothing that says, "here's the truth behind that or anything." So I just thought that was kind of interesting. As I was digging through some stuff, and people even had YouTube videos about that train of thought, and so I thought those were kind of interesting as I was as digging through So, as we looked, I guess look at the name James, it actually comes out of the name Jacob. And so from what I understand, I guess, and this timeframe, there would've been a lot of people with the name Jacob, cause that's their, you know, kind of an ancestry name. Just like some of you guys, you know? Maybe you have somebody that was part of your family and then everybody's name was derived from that same thing. Like, my dad's name is Peter, and so his dad's name is Peter. My brother's name is Peter, and my brother's son's name is Peter. And so you kind of have this generational name that's going through, and I think this is kind of that same place. Where we see this name Jacob that kind of just was handed down through the generations. And so, as they have this name keep going through, and then as you have these new cultures coming into the land, you kind of have this name kind of start being changed into James over time. And so that's kind of how I was seeing that. Just kind of move through the different time frames and, you know, the Latin culture I guess. Or the different Greek culture coming in and kind of making the name move from, I don't know how to say it, I guess Lavos? I guess that's how they pronouce Lakovos? And that was the, you know, the name kind of just being translated as James rather than Jacob, which, how do you say it was? Lakovos? And so, yeah. See, my Greek's not the best. Sorry. But yeah, so that's kind of how I was understanding this. Just, from that time it just kind of formed into James and so yeah.

Ben Cline
Yeah, it's really interesting just the way that words work over the course of time. You know, one of the things that we see happen every year is that our English Dictionary adopts new language. And a lot of times, those words are developed from words that already exist. But, you know, it's interesting just thinking about the transformation of Jacob into James over the course of time. And one of the things, I think that Jonathan and I were using some of the same resources, so this is good. But, you know, one of the things that they talk about is, that there was so much Greek influence on the language and on the culture during the time of Jesus, that some of these things started to happen. And they talk about how this is a good example of a word getting Greek sized or hellenized, and that's just meaning that it's being influenced by the Greek culture. And so the Greek spelling and the Greek structure ended up, you know, sort of taking over and beginning to transform this name. And I got to thinking about what this looks like in our families today, kinda like you were talking about Jonathan. How those names are passed down. But this is sort of looking at it from a little bit different perspective. You know, on my side of the family, we're Clines, and we spell it, you know, C l i n e. But I would imagine that our ancestors did not have that, you know, more English spelling of a German name. I'm sure it was a K or something like that. You know, and so that has transformed. My wife's family is all from Scandinavian descent. And when they lived in, and I'm not sure if it's the Norwegian or the Swedish side of the family, but when they lived over there, it was Johansen. And when they came over here, it sort of transformed into Johnson. And so there's that, you know, that change that happens because of the influence of the culture. But one of the things that, you know, as you study the Bible, you run into this word etymology. And it's just a bigger word, I guess, that means the study of the course of words over time. You know, how a word changes, how a language changes over time. And one of the things I was reading about, is that before the Latin Vulgate was produced, which the Latin Vulgate would've been the Latin translation of the Bible.

Gary Schick
Which the Roman Church follows to this day,

Ben Cline
The Catholic, yeah. So there, before that time, there was the Greek Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Bible.

Gary Schick
Right. For the Old Testament.

Ben Cline
For the Old Testament. Yeah.

Gary Schick
The New Testament has always been in Greek.

Ben Cline
Yeah. And so the etymology of this is that, the Greek Septuagint was translated into Latin. And so in that version, from what this says, the influence began to change that name Lokovos into a form that looks more like James and is translated into James, from what I understand could be. So that's another possible way to look at it. You know, as there were, and I think that there was some French, you know, involvement in that as well. Where the Latin was changed into the French and there's just a whole lot of history to that.

Gary Schick
A lot of history in Latin and French.

Ben Cline
But, you know, so all of that to say, this is the etymology of that word, that it changes over time. And so we do still see the name Jacob in the New Testament. But it is, you know, almost always referring to the Old Testament characters and not the New Testament characters. And so there's just a lot to it. There really is.

Gary Schick
And just picking up on that, as I looked at those two words in Greek, there's actually in the New Testament, there's both names. There's Yakov, which is just directly translated from Hebrew into Greek as Jacob. And then there's the Greek name, which is the Hebrew equivalent Yakuba, which is always translated James. So there's your difference right there. So it is actually two different Greek words for the same name. One is the Greek name, one is the Hebrew name put into Greek letters. And so yeah, Yakov=Jacob. And then there's something else that goes on. And that is, how does it get from a y sound into the English with a J? And that is because English has a certain amount of heavy influence, as you mentioned, by French, but also by German. And I think it's in German, that for some reason, what we have as the letter J is pronounced as an I or a Y. And so you mentioned in your own family's history, Johansen. Well, Johann is John, and it has a J. And so in the New Testament, Yohannes is John and comes into Johan in German or Scandinavian or whatever it is. And then in English, we come to that letter J and we don't pronounce it with an I or a Y, we say "Ja." And so, you know, for example, we hear about in, you know, Spanish, the name Jesus. Jesus comes from the Greek "Yesus," but when you send it through into English, it ends up with a J. And so we say, "Ja" where in older times they would've said, "Ya" And so these are all ways that language kinda changes over time. But it is the same essential name. And similarly, you have in Hebrew the name Hanah, we say Hannah. And then you meet the New Testament prophetess who celebrates Jesus' birth, Anna. And in English we call her Ana. And both names are the same name, and they all all mean grace. So, Hannah, Anna, Ana. And in Hebrew you have a lot of H sounds and there's a couple of Hebrew letters that have an H sound. There's really not an H letter in Greek. There's kind of a little hyphen to say there's an H sound here, but yeah. So there's a lot of reasons why, especially, names get kind of twisted up as they go from one language to another. And so now I don't know why, and I noticed you guys really didn't find it either, why the M sound comes in there. But just to check what you said, Jonathan, cause it sounded a little suspicious to me too. Is King James' influence on the King James Bible influencing the name? And I'm gonna say, "no," and here's something you readers you can do, or listeners you can do this too. While you were talking, I just looked up the Bible Gateway, which has a whole bunch of translations and I looked for the Wycliffe translation, which predates the King James by a lot, you know, over a hundred years. And it's translated there as James.

Ben Cline
Oh, interesting.

Gary Schick
I don't know why people kind of go off in these in the internet about King James. Friends, it's a witch hunt. It's what do they call it? A conspiracy theory, it's nonsense. A conspiracy. It is 100% nonsense, cause you can go back a hundred years before him and find, "No," it's already being translated as James. And so Yokuba, you're gonna find consistently throughout the New Testament, James, it refers to all those contemporary to Jesus.

Ben Cline
And I think that M sound that's in the end of James, that is from the French influence.

Gary Schick
Probably. Yeah.

Ben Cline
And I think that's where that comes from.

Gary Schick
How did Jacob stay Jacob through all those centuries? We'll never know. And we are not experts in language, but we're thankful for it. And we're thankful for those who've done the hard work for us. I still to try to hang on a little bit to my Greek from seminary days, and I don't know if that's so much, because it was such a painful experience for me. Or a little bit, you know, somebody who influenced me a lot, I'm rereading his works right now is C.S. Lewis. He's a language guy. And so I'm a wannabe language guy. I still keep trying, you know, I've been trying for 30 years and I'm still trying. But I know a lot of guys that just say, "thank the Lord I got through that class and put it on the shelf." But it is important that people do the work, or that some people have, because as we talked about last week, we were talking about orthodoxy. There have been mistranslations through the years that have led to much more serious things than, how do you pronounce a name, for example. As we've talked about, did we talk about this after the show or during the show once how the divine name was actually mistranslated into the King James as Jehovah? Where actually two names are going on there, the Hebrew name Yahweh, and as in order to not say that name, the Jews would say Adonai Lord. And so they put the vowels for Adonai into the word Yahweh. And in the King James it got translated Jehovah. Well that's not a big deal, cause God knows who we're talking about no matter what we call. But then it becomes a little more serious in the Latin Vulgate when St. Jerome, who was a pretty good translator and he did, he had both as you pointed out. He had the septuagint in front of him, but he also was very proficient in Hebrew. But somehow he translates the words for repentance as dependence. And so that creates a whole new train of thought as opposed to merely turning from my sin and trusting in Jesus. Now I've gotta do something about it. And so that leads we Protestants to say in a wrong direction that we were grateful for our Greek studies. To go back to the original and say, "no, it doesn't say dependence, it says repentance." But then even worse, you have somebody who stumbles over John 1 and mistranslates it. "In the beginning was the word and the word was with God." And it's mistranslated by the Jehovah's Witnesses as, "in the beginning was the word, and the word was a God." Which, if whoever did that really knew their Greek, they would know that that would not be a possible translation there, but a mistranlation. And so, and now you've got it taking us, not into a wrong teaching within the Christian Church, but taking us now completely out of Christianity. Because now, at least by Jehovah's witnesses, they don't understand Jesus even to be divine. They just see Him as a very good man. Sorry friends, there's a lot of good men I know, and not one of them can save me. It takes a perfect---the sinless son of God who is God in the flesh. And so, aren't we thankful as English speakers, that is our primary language for those who have carefully done the work to say, what does this text say? So hopefully this conversation has been helpful to our listeners, but you can do some of this work yourselves, listeners, in the sense of: open up Bible gateway and don't just compare the modern translations, but also look at the ancient translations or what's the other one that I look at all the time? Not Bible gateway, but, oh, the You Bible. If you look in the You Bible, you can find a lot of English translations. You can find other languages, and you can find some of the older ones. The one I would be cautious about is the Geneva Bible. Over and over again, I have looked for the Geneva Bible online, but what I'll find is what calls itself the Geneva, but it actually is just the King James. And I don't know why that is, but I'm pretty sure I was looking at that Wycliffe translation. That it really was Wycliffe's translation, which actually predates the Geneva translation into English, which is a whole other conversation, isn't it? So maybe we should end there. Other than what's the edifying part in this? Just to be really grateful that, #1 the original language has been preserved for us. #2, there have been people who love Jesus, love the Lord very much, who have been very careful in the translation to make sure that our modern translations really do get it right. And where there's discrepancies and questions, they'll often put it in the footnotes. And then #3, sometimes we're gonna scratch our heads and say, "why is Jacob the Hebrew name? Jacob become James?" And I think we solved it. In the New Testament, they went with the Greek name, and then through French it becomes from Yokubo to James.

Why Do Bad Things Happen If God Loves Us? - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley, Tim Hebbert and Brad Kilthau.

Gary Hashley
Hello and welcome to this edition of Ask the Pastor. A question was sent into KCMI and forwarded to me by Russ Garrett, and it says, "Hello, I googled the simple and often asked question, 'If God loves me like a father and has good things for my life, in accordance to what Christians often purport to convey to non-Christians, then why do bad things happen to me when I had no role in them? Further, and more problematic He doesn't act on my behalf or others when He could. Let me personalize this: Friends went to another city to start a church plant. After they and others prayed for months and believed this was God's leading, within three months of the plant, his wife was murdered leaving him as a single parent. So where was God, without the ward and tepid explanations Christians give? How do you begin to reconcile this? I have children, and I don't have any power like God, and even I would've acted to protect my kids. Thank you." Well, you know, this is a very common question, and this is a question that probably neither Brad nor I will be able to answer to the total complete satisfaction of the questioner. Because living in a sinful world, we are surrounded by bad things happening to people, and not just the evil people of the world, but even the good people of the world. And there are those who would say, "I don't wanna hear the worn and tepid explanations," and that's a legitimate thought. but yet maybe those ward and tepid explanations are truly biblically based and faith based understandings. One thing I notice in scripture is that I don't find anywhere that God promises me, or promises you as a follower of Jesus, that life is gonna be easy, and that He is never going to allow anything bad to happen in your life. In fact, in Isaiah 30:19, 20, we find both sides of this. Verse 19, for a people shall dwell in Zion, in Jerusalem; you shall weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry. As soon as He hears it, He answers you. Now, that sounds fantastic. It sounds like, you know, God's gonna step in and everything's going to be good. The next verse, verse 20, "and though the Lord give you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide himself anymore, but your eyes shall see your Teacher." So, one sentence right after another sentence, the first almost leading you to believe that God is gonna make sure that everything goes well, "you'll weep no more. As soon as you cry, I'll hear, I'll answer." And then the very next sentence says, "the Lord might give the bread of adversity and the water of affliction." Now, there are those who would say that if bad things happen to good people, if God is there and He's loving and He's wise and He doesn't step in, then it must mean that God really isn't there. In fact, one author says, "you know, there are some assumptions, a fact, and then a conclusion that we can approach in two different ways. Assumption #1: an all powerful God would be able to end suffering. Assumption #2: an all loving God would desire to end suffering. Fact: suffering exists. Conclusion: an all powerful, all loving God, therefore, does not exist." And I have a dear friend who I went to Bible school with. I flew airplanes with and ministered alongside of, who had two teenage sons killed in an automobile accident. And now he claims he was a fool to ever believe in God, because if God didn't stop the bad thing from happening, then he's not going to serve God. But on the other side of the page, he says, "assumption 1: an all powerful God does exist. Assumption 2: an all loving God does exist. The fact that suffering exists then leads to the conclusion: God must have loving reasons which he is able to achieve for permitting suffering." I'll tell you, when I come across times in my life where life is hard and suffering is a reality, I like to remind myself of what God said through Isaiah 55:9, "for as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." And I just remind myself that God doesn't necessarily think the way I think. Because basically the question is saying, "well, if I as a parent would step in and would make sure my children don't endure suffering, then if God is a loving father, then He should do what I think I would do if it were me." And yet, the fact of the matter is, God thinks differently than we do. He never told us that what seems normal to us is normal to Him. He didn't tell us that what seems reasonable to us will be reasonable to Him. And so we face these struggles. I think of Hebrews 11, before I turn this over to Brad. You know, in Hebrews 11, the faith chapter about these faithful people, you know, and early on we read about Adam and Abel and Enoch and Noah and Abraham and Sarah, and all these through Joseph and Moses. And then it talks about, you know, "by faith, great things happened." He says, "what can I say? Time would fail me to tell of Gideon and Barak, Sampson, Jephthah, David, Samuel and the prophets who through faith conquered kingdoms, enforced justice, obtained promises, stop the mouths of lions, quench the power of fire, escape the edge of the sword, were made strong out of weakness, became mighty in war, put foreign armies to flight. Women even receive back their dead by resurrection," and some say, "yes, I like that." But then it says, "some were tortured, refusing to accept release so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered, mocking and flogging, even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two, they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated." So when I look at that, I realize that there are times where God does step in and wonderful things happen. And there's times He allows hard times in people's lives. Now, I can't say anything I've said is the absolute answer that's going to solve this in everybody's mind. But I'll tell you, as I've lived life for 65 years myself, as I've gone through difficult times, I find that what the Bible teaches about God's mind and God's love and my need to trust Him, it may not be in some people's minds the best answer. But in my mind, it's the better answer than any other answer out there. So yeah, do tough things happen in people's lives? You're listening to a guy whose mom died of breast cancer when I was 29 years old. You're listening to a guy whose nephew died at five days old, because only half of his heart was developed in the womb. But yet, I have found that trusting God and His wisdom and His love and his sovereignty, and trusting that He has a plan, I I don't find that as worn and tepid. I find that as encouraging. Pastor Brad, tell me what's going through your head right now.

Brad Kilthau
Well, I know one thing, Gary. When you're talking about Isaiah 55, and we use that a lot, and we have to because again, God's ways are above our ways, and we have to keep that in mind. But as I was looking at this question too, and I don't wanna be disrespectful in any way to the listener who sent this in. And I don't want to come across that I don't have compassion for them and where they are and what they're thinking. But my first thoughts is this, we don't get saved to be kept safe from harm and disasters here on this earth. We get saved to ensure that we will not have to pay for our sin/debt in hell forever and ever. We have to think about the other side. We have to think about heaven, you know, and we have to keep in mind that God doesn't owe us anything here on Earth. It doesn't matter if we go to church every week, it doesn't matter if we give our life savings to all the charities to feed people. It doesn't even matter if we plant churches. God still doesn't owe us anything, okay? And so when I looked over this question, "if God loves me like a father and has good things for my life, then why do bad things happen to me when I have no role in them?" And as I looked at that question, it appears to me that our listener has figured out God to be made up of some type of a merit system. That if I do, then God does, and we have to understand again, that's not our God. Ephesians 2:8-9 makes that very clear, especially when it comes to our salvation, "for by grace through faith we're saved." It's not of us. It's not of our works. It all a gift from God, and we think about this gift. It's a gift that we don't deserve. And then the second half of the question, "why do bad things happen to me when I had no role in them?" I think that brings out that there's a misconception of who we really are as human beings. Because when we think about it, you know, if we're born on this planet, as a human being, we're a descendant of Adam, and therefore we have that sin nature that Adam passed on. And secondly, we have all sinned and sinned and sinned and sinned repeatedly against God. So to say that I had no role in this, well, we have to remember that we're all sinners. I love what it says in Ecclesiastes 7:20. It says, "there's not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins." Romans 3:23, of course, "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God." 1 John 1:8, "for if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. And the truth is not in us." All right, so here's a thought. We all are contributing to the situation that we live in, and the bad things are happening on this earth because we're all sinners. Bad and horrible things are gonna happen to all of us. And the reason those bad and horrible things happen, is because we have this sin issue, and sin has brought about these horrible, horrible things. And when we think about us saying, "I've never caused any of this. I didn't cause this with this person." Well, what have we caused? We've caused sin. We sinned ourselves, and there is judgment and there's consequences for that. So to say we don't have any role in the bad things that happen here on Earth is basically saying, "well, I'm pretty good. I mean I'm perfect, I'm holy." You know, sin brings death. Sin brings illness, sin brings hardship, sin brings loneliness. And we've all contributed to the world's sin problem. And when I think about this horrible thing that happened to this woman, the blood of this woman is not on God's hands. Her blood's really on our hands because we're the ones who've sinned against a holy God. And so, even though we're all sinners, even though we all contribute to the horrible situation of this world through our sins and the hardships and everything that comes upon people, we gotta see the other side of this. God in His great love died for us. While we were still these horrible sinners, Jesus, who was perfect by the way, He paid our sin debt in full. He shed His blood on the cross, and therefore we're free from what we do deserve. And that freedom comes by faith in Christ. We always go to John 3:16, "For God so loved the world, that He sent his only begotten son. That whoever believes in Him will not perish, but have everlasting life." I mean, think about that, Gary. When you think about it, Jesus came and gave us a gift that we don't deserve. He gave us a gift, a freedom from our sin problem. And the truth of the matter is, He's taken care of that eternity situation already. And then we also know that in the end, when He returns, there is not going to be any sin at all. It's gonna be eradicated completely. But until then, we don't have to live in despair. We don't have to, even when there's evil things happening to us, we realize that as believers, the moment we die, we go into the presence of the Lord. And when I heard about this woman who's involved in God's work in planting churches, most likely she's a child of God and a believer. And so most likely, as we know from the Bible, at the moment she died she went into the presence of the Lord. She gained, gained, and gained. She went to heaven forever to be with Christ in the Father's house. She's not cheated out of anything. She's got the best of the best. And yes, compassion and love needs to go out for the husband, but I think he's a believer also planting churches for the Lord. Yes, he's hurting. Yes, he's mourning, but not as those who don't have hope. This is a short time. Soon he will be united in the presence of the Heavenly Father forever and ever. We've gotta keep in mind that God acted already to protect his kids. If you're looking for something right now to protect, He already did that 2,000 years ago. And that protection cannot be taken away from us. It is eternal security that we have in Christ. And so I think we have to keep the right perspective here. The perspective is that Jesus paid it all. The Father has already protected us, and He offers that free gift for us to take by faith at any moment.

Gary Hashley
I think the difference comes because doubts and questions come from feelings. Faith is a choice. I choose faith. So Father, those who are suffering right now and wondering where you are, remind them you are right there with them in their suffering just as you were right there with your own son when He suffered for us on the cross.

Keeping Our Focus During The Holidays - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastor Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
Hey, listeners, as I kind of prayed, this is what I wanted to address just briefly with you this morning as you're about your day, something to help keep our focus for the holidays. It is a mad dash till Christmas starting today, Black Friday, and it is so easy to forget the pause that we just took yesterday to give thanks. And to lose sight of what we are about to celebrate, Jesus, whose birth Christmas is at least supposed to be about it. Sometimes we kind of hear the not so funny joke about that the Christ child kinda lost in the wrapping paper of the day. And I know some of you are just starting your Christmas shopping. Some may already be done before Black Friday even arrived, others probably are gonna be making a mad dash on Christmas Eve. But whatever your Christmas season looks like, I hope that you can just pause and keep in touch with the highlights of what the season is about. You know, Thanksgiving was yesterday, and in a way, even talking about it is like eating turkey for the next couple of days. Not quite the same, is it? But yet giving thanks. What a beautiful way to enter the Christmas season. In fact, what a beautiful attitude to carry with us all through the year. And as we enter into the season of love and joy and peace and hope, let's maintain that attitude of gratitude that I hope was a part of your Thanksgiving celebration yesterday. Today, I just want to read to you one of the great Thanksgiving psalms, and then just think about it for a moment or two. Psalm 136, and you can even join me. There's a refrain that's repeated every verse or two, and I invite you to, as I'm kind of reading it, and you're going to learn what the key word is. I'll just give you a hint, "His love endures forever." And I want to invite you listening, friends, as I'm reading that to join me. And in saying it, I think there is something powerful about hearing the word of God, which is one of the wonderful things about being able to send it forth over the airways. But there's also something powerful about speaking the word and speaking it together. So join me on the refrain as I go through this powerful Psalm, Psalm 136. "Give thanks to the Lord for he is good." And here's that refrain, "His love endures forever to him who alone does great wonders. His love endures forever, who by his understanding made the heavens. His love endures forever, who spread out the earth upon the waters." Join me now, "His love endures forever. He who made the great lights; His love endures forever. The son to govern the day; His love endures forever. The moon and stars to govern the night; His love endures forever. To Him who struck down the firstborn of Egypt; His love endures forever, and brought Israel out from among them; His love endures forever. With a mighty hand and an outstretched arm; His love endures forever. To Him who divided the Red Sea as thunder; His love endures forever. And brought Israel through the midst of it; His love endures forever. But swept Pharaoh and his army into the Red Sea; His love endures forever. To Him who led His people through the desert; His love endures forever. Who struck down great kings; His love endures forever. And killed mighty kings; His love endures forever. Sihon, king of the Amorites; His love endures forever. And Og, king of Bashan, His love endures forever. Engrave their land as an inheritance; His love endures forever. And inheritance to His servant Israel; His love endures forever. To the one who remembered us in our low estate; His love endures forever. And freed us from our enemies; His love endures forever. And who gives food to every creature; His love endures forever. Give thanks to the God of heaven. His love endures forever."

Over and over, this beautiful psalm tells us something about God and then repeats. And I hope you were repeating it with me, that refrain, "His love endures forever." You know, whatever's going on, here are four words for you to just repeat today. "His love endures forever." It's a powerful psalm. The psalmist looks back, first at the creation, and as he considers different aspects of God's creating, he's just reminding those who are joining with him in song and praise that this God who created, His love endures. And then he zeroed in on what was the keynote of blessing for Israel. That powerful moment when they really birthed His nation, when God led them out of Egypt. Triumph over peril, brought them through the Red Sea and into the Promised Land. Granting them the land where kings had once ruled, and now giving them, who were a slave people, and nothing and no one in the world, a place in this world. Friends, that was what Israel looked back to. What is it we're looking back to today? In this country, we're looking back yesterday to the pilgrims and how You brought them through the sea and how You brought them through a difficult winter. Allowed them to be befriended by the natives and taught to hunt and fish and plant corn and to celebrate God's faithfulness. And now, as we are just on the pivot point of entering into the Christmas season, we remember when Jesus came, walked among us, prepared the way for the Lord. Isaiah wrote, "prepare the way for the Lord. Make straight the path for Him, a highway for our God." And Jesus came and he dwelled among us, and he gave his life at the cross. And he rose again and he opened paradise. And he is Mighty God, King of King's, Everlasting Father, Counselor, Prince of Peace. All of this and more, we have so much to be thankful for. The God who Israel knew as the God whose love endures forever. The God who our pilgrim's fathers, followed to this great land of plenty and discovered His love endures forever. The love in whom Christ has come and dwelt among us; His love endures forever. He is coming again. Friends, why not take, just even each verse of this psalm as you enter into the King. Into the season before us, is a starting point for your prayer and your praise and entering His presence with thanksgiving in your heart, developing an attitude of and for your mind and a joyfulness in your spirit. If you do, I believe you're going to answer further into the joy of this season. Then perhaps ever this season that is just beginning. I'm wishing you thanksgiving. I'm wishing you joy. I'm wishing you peace. I'm wishing you the fullness of the hope that is ours in Christ, and the steadfastness of His love in your hearts. Now get out there and enjoy the gift of this day and remember his love endures forever.

Is Worshiping God As important as Some Make It? - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley and Brad Kilthau.

Brad Kilthau (00:31):

The question that we wanted to address today, is a question that goes this way about worship. It says, "is worship of God as big a deal as some Christians seek to make it? Is it that important to God, or are there other things that He is much more concerned about?" Well, it's a good question, but when we think about God and the need for worship, I think you gotta look at what Jesus said in Matthew 22:37. Basically, a man walked up to Him one day and said, "what's the most important thing in the Bible?" What's the most important thing? And remember what Jesus said, He said to the man, "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. And this is the greatest and the first commandment." I think, obviously when we look at that, we find what Jesus was saying. Is that the worship of God is the absolute purpose of our life, is that we are to worship God. That's our purpose for being here. Now, when it comes to worship and the way it's expressed in different ways, through different believers, different churches throughout the valley, how do we have a God-honoring worship? And maybe this is maybe what the listener was thinking about with the question. But I think, when I was looking at this question a little bit, I thought, "well, there has to be a passion." There has to be a passion for the Lord. I know, when we love our jobs, we get up in the morning. If you really love your job, you can't wait to get up and go to work, and have something, you know, happen with the your hands or whatever God's given you, giftedness, to do. You just, it drives you. It drives you to do the best that you can. A lot of people have a passion for sports, and you look at the crazy things that they'll do for that. But when it comes to worship, we've gotta have the same thing. We have to have a passion for the Lord before worship will ever be heartfelt. Before it'll ever be, I believe, God honoring. And so a question that we have to, I think, ask ourselves when it comes to worship is, "do I really have a deep burning passion for God Himself?" And if that passion is there, you're gonna see that the worship is there. If the passion isn't there, you're probably gonna see a bunch of actions, routines, ritualistic type things, worship that's not really honoring to the Lord. And one of the passages of scripture, Gary, that I was thinking about when we look at this question, is found back in Malachi 2, especially in verses one through nine. And it talks about the corrupt priests of Israel, and how these priests were, as they should be, called to lead the people to worship God. But they weren't doing a very good job of that. What was happening was, when people were bringing in sacrifices to be offered up on the altar, they'd bring their old sick cow. They'd bring their old animal that had a lame leg or something like that, and they would bring it in and the priest would just go, "okay." And they'd offer up that sacrifice before God like it was nothing. And so they were letting the people get away with not worshiping the Lord properly. And then God comes down on the priests, as He should, and God gets after these priests because they're the ones who are to lead worship. And one of the unpopular parts of that passage of scripture is, the Lord said, "I will spread refuse on your face and on your feasts." And you think about that, it says dung. That's animal dung is what He's talking about there. And so, what was God saying? That He's gonna smear that across their faces and on their feasts? Well, what God is really saying to them is, "because of your lack of leading the people in worship, I'm taking you outta your position. You're gonna be like filthy refuse that's gonna be taken outside of the city and burned and done away with because you are of no value to me." And I always gotta wonder, what happened with those priests, you know? And how that all went down. But obviously, you can see that the priests had lost their passion to worship God. They had lost their love for God, which led to a lack of worship. And it's just going through the routine, you know, and I guess, what I'm saying is we can do that today as Christians too in the church. We can lose our passion for God. We can just go through the routine pretty soon, and it's like a regular routine of going to church on Sunday and whatnot. And we think that we're worshiping God by sitting there singing some songs and, you know, clapping hands and participating with other believers. But it's not from our heart, it's just another routine. And before God, you gotta wonder if that isn't sickening to Him as He looks at that, because He's looking at the heart. He's looking for people who really wanna worship Him because they're in love with Him. And you know, so you think about, how can we change that? How can we get that back, that fire that we need to worship the Lord? Well, I think one of the things, as we learn here in Malachi, is we need to get ourselves in a place of where we're under the teaching of the word of God that will bring about a love for the Lord. If you're not under the teaching, you're not in love with the Lord, because you're getting disconnected, you're not reading this love letter. I think about Mary and Martha when Jesus walked into the village, and of course, Martha invites Jesus over and she's getting all the house ready, maybe a big meal ready, all of those things. And she's getting frustrated cause she looks over and Mary just continually sits at the feet of Jesus and doesn't move. And so finally she comes over and she's very frustrated. Jesus can read her heart. He can probably read her face. And I love what the Lord Jesus says to her. He says, "Martha, you are worried and troubled about many things, but the one thing that's needed. Mary has chosen that good part." And that really speaks to my heart, because what the Lord is saying is, until you place yourself under me, under my teaching, you're not gonna see true love and true worship." You're gonna be running around being busy, trying to get the right things to look good for Jesus. But he's looking at us to get ourselves into place of where we'll really see who He is and the greatness of Him so that we can worship Him properly. And so, as I was thinking through that, also, I have to bring this up, Gary, before I turn it over to you. As I think about worship in the church, we have to understand the importance of our peers when it comes to worship. Because again, when you come back here to Malachi, because the priests didn't have a passion and weren't doing their job correctly, the people were walking away from their worship of the Lord at the same way. And, you know, as men especially, I wanted to say this, as men we're called to be the spiritual leaders of our home. Spiritual leaders, even for our wife, and we're to be the spiritual leaders in the church, and we should be the ones leading worship. We've got that same calling as that spiritual headship, that spiritual leadership that God has put us into. And I just wonder sometimes that, you know, if you walk through the church, how many men are really singing from their heart in worship? Most of the time it's usually, I don't know, the women when it should be the men. But men for some odd reason, they think that they can stand there like, you know, Mr. Macho, and "I'm not gonna sing this. I'm just gonna stand here and mumble the words or not even open my mouth at all. And it makes me look tough and it makes me look manly." But I got to think that's not manly before God. God's looking for a man that'll lead his family, lead his wife, and lead the church in worships. Let's always keep in mind our peers when it comes to worship also.

Gary Hashley (08:03):

I've been asked over the years, "well, what does it mean to worship?" Our English word, worship, comes from an old English word, worth-ship. It's expressing to God the worth that He has to us, the worth He deserves to have in our minds and in our hearts. I've described it this way: worship is letting God know that I know who He is and what He's like. How amazing He is, how much I love Him, how much I rely upon Him, how much I adore Him. It is an expression. We do find in scripture that God wants exclusive worship. And why would I say that? We find one spot in the Old Testament in particular that says, "the people would go before Sabbath during the week, and they would worship on the high places. They would worship the idols and the gods of the peoples around them. And then they'd show up on the Sabbath to worship God." And God was not happy with that. It wasn't, you know, "I'm glad you've come worship me today. The rest of the week is yours." It was, you know, "I want to be exclusively worshiped by you." So, one of the questions we have to ask is, you know, "is God the one that is the most important in our lives? And are we expressing that to Him now?" We express it in a variety of ways. We can express it in song and some today, you know, anytime we're singing in church, they call it worship. Sometimes it's just simply singing because we aren't really expressing from our heart to God, our love and our adoration and our wonder and our awe. We can worship in song, but every time we sing doesn't mean we're worshiping. We can worship in prayer. As we come to Him in prayer, we're letting Him know we're relying upon Him. He's of utmost important in our lives. It's worship to study the word. We kind of differentiate, you know, worship time from sermon time. But actually coming before God during the sermon time and really, truly, all of us focusing on the scriptures and letting God know that we know how important He is and how much He is the most important in our lives. But we can also do it through serving Him and through evangelism. I mean, Brad talked about the great commandment, "love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength." But he said the second is like it, and that is "love your neighbor as yourself. And I guess the thought that comes to my mind, Brad, is there are things we can do to worship, but simply doing those things doesn't mean we're worshiping. For instance, back in Isaiah 58, the Israelites were, you know, wondering, "how come we fast?" We go without food for a period of time, and it was designed to be a time of worship, but they were doing it and they'd lost the sense of it. In fact, God says, "is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of wickedness, to undo the straps of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover him, and not to hide yourself from your own flesh? Then shall your light break forth like the dawn, and you're healing shall spring up speedily; your righteousness shall go before you; the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call on the Lord and the Lord will answer; and the Lord will say, 'Here I am." He was saying, you know, "You can go without food, but that doesn't mean you're worshiping in a time of fasting." In fact, He said, "I'd rather have you love your neighbor as yourself. I'd rather have you, you know, try and loose the bonds of wickedness in people's lives and help people find freedom in Christ to help break the yolks that bind people and to share your bread with the hungry and help the homeless poor and help the naked poor have something to wear." He's basically saying, you know, "I want you to worship me, but it's not just singing, it's not just praying, it's not just fasting. You can do those things and not worship, but you can serve me in those things. And I will see that as worship." I had a gentleman come to me years ago and he said, "You know pastor, I know I'm not here a lot in church." He said, "but you know, I like to hunt and I like to fish." He says, "I can worship in the woods." And I smiled and said, "do you?" He said, "do I what?" I said, "do you worship in the woods?" You know, we can, that doesn't mean we do. And we can make excuses for it, but what God wants is our hearts to come before Him in wonder, in awe, in adoration. That can be through singing an old hymn, that can be singing a Sunday School chorus, that can be singing a brand new song we call worship songs. And I know we've had worship wars in America, in our churches. What is the right approach to a church service that we could rightly call worship? And I'm not sure God is as worried about the form, or the melody, or the rhythms or the harmonies, or just even the activity. He's more worried about our hearts expressing to Him that He is God, that we love Him, that we adore Him, that we submit to Him. That we take His word seriously and want to know it, because as we know His word we'll know Him better. So yeah, worship is very, very important. It's important to God or we wouldn't be told so much about it in the scriptures. But just remember, it's not just what we do or what we say. It's the thought and the attitude and the heart behind it, because God does want us to worship. Jesus said, "we should worship Him in spirit and in truth." I hope that helps!

The Themes of Advent - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez, and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
Good to be back with you listeners, and perhaps some of you are doing a little traveling over the last week, and I hope that you made it safely home as we are recording this morning. It is a cold one out there, and maybe it will be on Friday when this airs. But anyway, we kind of have something that we're gonna, I think, hold until January. We're just, really getting in the Christmas Spirit and thought we would take a turn onto some of the, from a Christian perspective, the themes of the season. And take a little bit of a look at, what are called the themes of advent, I guess you might say. So, we come from three different backgrounds, and I know our listeners come from a lot of Christian backgrounds and some of you out there have grown up with something called Advent. And I would guess, just by our conversation right beforehand that all three of us, none of us actually probably grew up with it. I did not....we did not grow up with it. I have served in churches that didn't know what Advent was. I have served in churches where this is a big part of what we do---and I have found---and currently I'm serving in a church where it's not a big part of what we do, but it is something we kind of follow through the month of December. "Bring the kids up for a few minutes as we light some candles and talk about their significance." Of course, this is not found anywhere in scripture, but the themes that we talk about are found in scripture. And so, the very first one, and I guess there's different ways to approach Advent too, but the first one, I think universally, is the prophecy candle that talks about our hope as Christians. And Jonathan, could you get us rolling on it?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah, definitely. So, like Pastor Gary was saying, I didn't grow up with, you know, going through the Advent season. And I serve in a church that we don't really have it. I've never had it, I've never done it, I guess, since I've served there. And even as going to the church there, we didn't serve, or we didn't go through this process. But it's exciting to dive in and kind of learn and see what this looks like. And so the first candle is a prophecy candle of hope. And so in ancient times God gave His people, Israel, hope by speaking to them through the prophets. And, you know, we see this all throughout the Old Testament, and how the prophets spoke and gave the word to look at for forward. He revealed what was to come and told of the great blessings that they would receive when Jesus, the Messiah, would dwell amongst them. And the people look forward to the coming of their Messiah, and the hope that was spoken into this. We find that same hope when we read through the words of the prophet. And hopefully as you guys read through those, you can feel that hope building up within you. We find that, like I said, we find that same hope, Christ has come and our hope is in Him. "We have this as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul," this is Hebrews 6:19, "a hope that is eternal." And so during this week, we get that opportunity to reflect on the hope of Christ. We see what the Old Testament had spoken of the coming Messiah, and then we get to see the actual coming of the Messiah. You know, as we celebrate Christmas here, you could look at the prophecy of Isaiah 7:14. "Therefore, the Lord Himself shall give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall call his name Emmanuel." And then we see the fulfillment of that in Matthew 1:23, "Behold, a virgin shall be with child and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel," which being translated is, "God with us." And so that's kind of, you know, like I said, I have to really dig in to see what the Advent season is. And so that's kind of where my study is, I guess, so far has gotten me.

Ben Cline
Yeah, I also grew up in a church that didn't really, we didn't really know what Advent was. I think I'm sure that my pastor probably knew what it was, but we never really celebrated it, you know, in any way, shape or form. And so we weren't taught about it. But, you know, in recent years, the church that I serve at currently, we have some years, gone through the Advent season. Some years, not gone through it. But I wanted to kind of, like you were saying Jonathan, kind of dig into that this year and, you know, take some time to think about what it symbolizes and what it reminds us of. And, you know, thinking of the topic of hope, if you do a word study for hope in scripture, oh wow, it's gonna be a long word study, right? And it's a very large topic in the scriptures, and so it's an exciting thing for us to remember. And I guess the question that I always start off with when I'm talking to somebody about hope is, you know, there's a different understanding, I think, of that word hope in the world versus, you know, from what the Bible teaches about it. And so, you know what I guess the question is: what is biblical hope? You know, it is not the same kind of thing that we talk about when we say, "I hope that something happens," or "I hope that I get this thing," or whatever. And even going into the Christmas season, that's maybe something that we hear a lot as well. What do you hope that you get for Christmas? It's a wish, right? Yeah, it's something that, you know, we really just wish for. And it's not based on anything that we know for certain. And I guess that's the difference between worldly hope and biblical hope, is that the hope that we have is based on things that are certain. And the hope that we have is because of what certainly happened. And it's interesting, you were talking about Hebrews 11 as we were kind of talking before we started recording this morning. And the first verse in that says, "Now, faith is being sure of what we hope for, and certain of what we do not see." You know, and so you can go through and you can do a, a study of that word, hope, and find all sorts of things in scripture about what biblical hope actually is. And the first thing that I would say, is that biblical hope is deeply tied to faith. You know, our hope in being certain of what we do not see is deeply tied to the faith that we have in God, and deeply tied to the faith that we have in the promises that He's made to us in scripture. And so, you know, if you look at the Greek, if you look at those, the definition of the word, hope, it has behind it this idea of certain expectation. Which, you know, if you're hoping for a pony for Christmas, it's not the same kind of certain expectation. But if you have placed your faith in Jesus Christ as your savior, you have that certain expectation that you will spend eternity with Him forever. And that you are now adopted as one of His children, that you are a co-heir, you know, of the Father with Jesus Christ. And so, you know, there's all these things that we can place that certain expectation into, and that's just the word that we call, hope. So those are some of the things that I was thinking about. Just getting started off with that theme of hope for Advent.

Gary Schick
Yup, and good things to think about. You know, as I think about these things, these are Christmas traditions. And I don't know about your families, I grew up in a family where it was pretty bare bones. Christmas morning, opening gifts...most of the time. I think, yeah, most years we would read the Christmas story together. Now, my current family, it seems like every year we're adding on some new Christmas tradition, you know? It's starting off with Christmas Eve: we all open one present, and it's a big surprise! It's always Christmas pajamas and a big surprise, we put them on and there'll be a game. And we go around in our Christmas pajamas, driving around looking at Christmas lights. So, if you see some people in pajamas on Christmas Eve, it's probably the Schick family and their dogs are with them in the vehicle. And that is just one of what has become many. But, you can kind of understand when the date of Christmas was somewhat set. And of course, there is a little difference. Most of the western Church, essentially, celebrates Christmas, December 25th. The Orthodox East celebrates, I think a little bit later. We'll probably hit that in January. What's the difference there? But in any case, think about the time of year we're heading into. Think about what this time of year would be without Christmas. The days are dark, long, cold. And so what do people start to do? They start to light fire to keep them warm. And so here is a time in the church when things are gloomy, dark and cold, where people would light a candle and begin to think about the biblical expectation that we have in Christ. And as we approach the day that we celebrate His birth, we don't know exactly. I think there's some ideas when He may have been born, but the 25th is just kind of what we've settled on. It's a great way, I think, to kind of get our minds a little bit back in what it might have been like for the people of the Old Testament past. You know, Peter talks about the prophets of old, longed to look into the things that we now celebrate, you know, who Christ is. So, I'll get up on Sunday and read for example, "for as we light this candle about hope and prophecy," to read just a few verses like you did. About, you know, from Isaiah 7, "the Virgin will be with child," or this Sunday, it wasn't actually part of that, but just part of my message, cause I actually am going through Hebrews 11. Where in Isaiah 9, it talks about, "For unto us a child is born, to us a son is given, and the government will be on his shoulders and he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace." What must it have been like for Isaiah to write that and then to just wonder, "who is this? Who is this gonna be?" You know? And of course, we know it's Jesus, but to just be looking for, and you know what? In a sense, we are with those saints, those Old Testament people in the sense that they were looking forward to Christ. We're looking back on his first coming, but we are also waiting with eager expectation and confident hope. I love the way you talked about that Ben, looking forward to His return. You know, the world is still a dark place, and yet we have this light burning within us: Jesus! This hope, and we have this assurance that He is coming again. He is going to set the world right. And for those who put their hope in Him, there is all of the eternal joy to come. What a great thing to focus our minds on in the hurry and the busyness. In the dark and the cold and the slippery and the wet! But yet, as Christians, let's be out there with hope, and we're gonna talk about some other great things: peace and joy and all the things that we associate with Jesus and His coming. But today, it's on hope. Hey, thanks listeners for being part of this with us. And again, where where are you at today? Maybe you're not feeling hopeful. Maybe there's some pretty heavy burdens on your shoulders. Maybe there's some recent grief in your life, or even past grief that's still pretty heavy in your heart. I just encourage you to open up the word go back to the promises that look forward to Jesus and just be reminded of all that is ours in Him. What a great hope wishing you that today.

Why in the Old Testament, is LORD in all Capitals? - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Gary Hashley and Brad Kilthau.

Gary Hashley
Well, good morning and welcome to another installment of Ask the Pastor. I affectionately think of it as stump the chump, but that's just my mind and the way my mind tends to work. This question was turned in at KCMI that was forwarded on to us, and the question reads this way. "I've noticed in the Old Testament, when it talks about the Lord God, LORD is all in capital letters. In the New Testament, it's used with lower case letters: Lord. What is the significance of these?" Well, that is a very good question, because how do we know God other than as He has revealed Himself? And one of the ways He revealed himself is in this thing we call the Bible. But in the Bible, another aspect of God revealing Himself is through His names. There's not just one designation. There's not just one name for God, and so we need to then spend a little time and do a little study to learn about God based upon His names. There are three primary names for God that we find in the Bible. There is Elohim, there's Adonai, and there is Jehovah. Elohim, Adonai and Jehovah. Elohim we meet real early in the Bible. "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth," capital G, lowercase O, lowercase D. Let me read to you from Lehman Strauss's book. "The first person," he says, "L signifying unlimited strength, energy, might and power. Allah, signifying to swear, declare or make a covenant. These two roots, when brought together in the name Elohim, mean infinite strength and absolute faithfulness. Thus, we are introduced to the God of the Bible as the one with whom nothing is impossible." And who always keeps His word. Elohim is the strong faithful one. So when you come across the word God, capital G, little o, little d, it is the English rendering of Elohim talking about God's power and God's faithfulness. No wonder in Genesis 1:1, "in the beginning God created," the power of God, "created the heavens and the earth." So Elohim is one of those you run into. Then you find Jehovah, which appears with the all capital letters. Whether it's the word Lord in all capital letters, or the word God in all capital letters. And it's the translation in English of Jehovah, the name Jehovah translated God. All capital letters about 300 times, and Lord, all capital letters about 6,000 times. It's mentioned in scripture more than any other name of God. It's derived from the Hebrew word "havah," meaning to be or being. When Moses said to the burning bush, "who do I tell the Hebrew people you are?" He said, "tell them, 'I am who I am has sent you," the one who is to be. The idea is of course, that of existence, self existence. Thus Jehovah is the eternal existent one, self existent one without beginning, without end. The same yesterday and today and forever. God is now what he always has been and what he will remain forever. So when you do see it in all capital letters, LORD or GOD, it's Jehovah. But then there's a third term, Adonai, which you see as the word Lord with a capital L and then a lower case o r d. And of course, that name has to do with authority. It has to do with reigning over, and others being under the one who makes the rules. The one who puts the rules into place, and the one who would punish for the breaking of the rules. And so those three primary names are really important for us to learn from, because they tell us things about God. So yes, capital G, little o little d from Elohim. Capital G, capital O, capital D are all capitals with the word Lord, Jehovah. And then Lord with a capital L and a little o r d, Adonai. Now, those names are often compounded, Almighty God: Elshaddai. Most high God: El Elyon; Everlasting God: El Olam. Then with Jehovah, there's Jehovah Gyra that talks about being the provider. Jehovah Rapha, a healer; Jehovah Nissi, our banner. Jehovah Shalom, gives us peace; Jehovah Tsidkenu, got our righteousness. Jehovah Shama, the God who is present. So yeah, it might be simpler in some ways if there was just one name for God, but God reveals Himself as the self existent one, as the strong one, as the faithful one, as the giver of peace, as the one who provides for our needs. And all those are part of what we find in the Bible with the names of God. Brad, looks like you're ready to jump in.

Brad Kilthau
Well, you know, Gary, you're saying that and it's right on. Of course, when we look at the names of God, it is to help us to understand more about who God is and the character of God. And kind of when you go through history and see the Jewish people and how they pen out scripture, how they read scripture in public squares and so forth. And then as you come down to the New Testament time, and we get, here in our Bibles---but when you go back to to ancient history, some of the things that I found that was very interesting is: we realized that for thousands of years, the Jewish people, they had a great expression of how to worship the Lord. And it's found in Deuteronomy 6:4-5 it's called the Shema, and it goes this way here, "O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one." And of course, these are all capital L O R D, "the Lord is one." "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your strength." And Lord, as we see in that worship of the Jewish people to God, is the personal name of Israel's God. It's the personal God. Now, as we learn, of course you come back to Moses and the burning bush in Exodus 3. And of course that's when God appeared to Moses and said, "Moses, I want you to go out and lead my people out of slavery, out of Egypt." And of course, there's Moses, you can just see him shaking in his sandals like, first of all, he's got to face Pharaoh. The second thing is, he's got to go back to his people who've already rejected him, and why would they ever follow him? And it's like, Moses turns to God and says, "well, what if the people asked me the name of God and who sent me?" And so God responded, and when you're studying the original language, God tells him, "tell them 'Ea sent me." Ea is the best way I could pronounce it. And when you study that, it means "I will be, I will be." And so you can just see Moses like, "how am I gonna use that? I Will Be sent me? It's not gonna work for me." And you know, God can obviously read our minds, as Moses is standing there, "I will be," should be only something that God would say to the people. So in the next sentence God tells Moses, basically the word, Yahweh, the God of our ancestors has sent me. "That's the way you will address the people. The God of your ancestors is the one who has sent me to come and to free you." Now, when you get to that word Yahweh into ancient Hebrew, again, it is actually a form of a verb. That means He will be, just as you were saying, Gary, He's always been, He's self existent. God is just simply there. He doesn't depend on anyone else for His existence. He never was created, He's always been, He will be. God has always. And so when we see this word, Yahweh, that's when we come to that appearing in the scripture, some 6,500 times in the Old Testament alone. Now, through the centuries, as we know the Jewish people, they wanted to honor the divine name of God. And so often they didn't wanna say His name, when it came to his name. As they were reading the scripture out loud, they thought it would be a great way to honor God by not even saying His name, because they were not worthy to say His name. And so when they read the Hebrew Bible aloud and they would come to the part of where they would need to say His name, they stopped even saying the word yahweh. And instead they said, Adonai, Adonai for the Lord, Adonai. And this practice continued throughout the centuries. And later on, when people started to translate the Bible, especially as we know coming into the English language, they somewhat had the same practice. Instead of spelling out the divine name, just translated L O R D all in capital letters. And more of that is when you think about the ancient scribes, you know, they wanted to prevent anyone from accidentally saying God's name out loud. And so they came up with a, I don't know, kind of a visual reminder to make sure nobody said it wrong. And when they would say, you know, again saying Adonai was a way that they could say the name of God in public and still show respect to God. But one of the ways they moved on with this, to make sure that no one said the name of God and used another name that would still honor God, but not be speaking a name of God, is they took the four capital letters out of Yahweh. They took the Y, the H, the W and the last H of the Divine name. And of course we see Y H W H, and then they inserted the vowels of the name Adonai. And so they took the vowels, a o and a, and they came up with a word, which is for a name for God, which is pronounced Yahuah. And so the Israelites and the Jewish people aren't gonna say Yahuah. So it was just a visual reminder, never to say even Yahweh, always go to Adonai and say it as Adonai. And then of course, when Christian scribes and so forth, translating scripture, a lot of them didn't know this history when they were even translating some of this. And so, some of them even started using the word Yahuah, which was an artificial word. Instead of saying Adonai or as coming back and saying Yahweh. And so they were saying, Yahuah. And until basically later on through this time of figuring it out, finally they came up with the true way of, they thought, of addressing God in a way that would be honoring and still not be saying His absolute name. They said Jehovah, and today, many Christians still use the word Jehovah. The title Jehovah describes the name of the Lord. Now, the main thing is this, the word L O R D in all capitals, it indicates that there is a divine name of the God of Israel. And we have to be careful sometimes that we don't confuse that. Because when we come into the New Testament, of course there's the word Aden, which is simply as you were alluding to, Gary, means Lord, L o r d, with the lowercase letters following. And of course, that name could be used to describe a king, you know, or to describe a guy that had servants or a guy that was just a shepherd over the sheep. He was a Lord of that. And so often the authors would use that: the Lord of all the Earth, the Lord of hosts, the Lord of Lords, and so forth. But I think behind all of this, this is what we gotta get out of. This is Jehovah, Lord, Adonai, Yahweh, all of these, it represents the original name of the God of Israel. And I guess the way we need to address the God of Israel, if you really wanna be serious about this and to say it properly, and you're worried about saying it wrong, it's just the one who was the one who is, and the one whoever will be. And to probably reverence the Lord with his name.

Gary Hashley
And I think we need to be very careful, because we've become pretty flippant with the name of God. Israel was very careful, even how they said it and how they wrote it. I agree with that. And we take it so casually and we use it as just an expression of excitement or an expression of fear or whatever. And we need to be really careful how we use the name of God.

Brad Kilthau
You know, sometimes that can even happen in our prayers, right? We can Lord, lord, lord, Lord, and not even realizing we're throwing that precious name of the Almighty God out there like that. Again, do we really mean to say His name? Do we really mean to say His name in a reverent way? You're right, Gary. We have to be very careful that each time we address Him and try to speak His name, that we have this high lifted up reverence for who we're speaking of.

Gary Hashley
I had a young man at Frontier School of the Bible when I taught there, who loved to start his prayer, "help me God." And something in me just cringed. I'm not saying it was horrible, but it just seemed a little casual when you're addressing the sovereign God of all things.

Who Were The Puritans? - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Johnathan Hernandez and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
Okay, here's the question. "The Puritans play a prominent role in our observance of Thanksgiving. Can you tell us more about these people and their faith?" And Jonathan, would you get us started?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah, so I had to do quite a bit of research, cause I didn't know a lot, I guess. So I guess the question talks about Puritans so we can, I guess we'll hit on that. They were a group of people that were, I guess part of the church in England. And a good majority, you'd have two different groups, you had the Separatists, I think that's how you say it. And then the ones that didn't wanna separate from the church. Those kind of the two groups of that Puritan thought process I guess. And they were really wanting to, I guess they were a movement that was trying to separate the Anglian type of church culture that they were wanting to move into, and separate from more of that Catholic church mindset. And so they wanted to make sure that their influence was purely scripturally motivated. And then they also wanted to eliminate from their beliefs anything that was rituals or practices that weren't really directly found in scripture. So they didn't wanna just do something because it was what we've always done. They wanted to make sure it was, "this is what scripture shows and so then we'll go with that," their beliefs. And from what I found on the internet, some of their beliefs was that there's a judgmental God. God rewards good and punishes evil, predestination, the elect, the original sin, God's grace and providence. And so that was some of the beliefs that they would, I guess, walk in. And so, if we're talking about Thanksgiving as a holiday, we would talk more about the Pilgrims, and the other guys, we'll get more into that as we move forward. But the Puritans, I guess if we separate them from the Pilgrims, they came over to America more in that 1630, somewhere around that time, to Boston. And they were also ordered from the king to establish a colony there. And so they came over with the goods, with the backing of England in that sense, to come and establish a colony there that would really be England on this side of the states. Well obviously, it wasn't the states back then, but (laugh). So that's kind of where they came over from, that they really wanted to separate and have religious freedom. A lot of them, and this is where we see the pilgrims coming over, is cause they were coming over because they wanted to have that religious freedom. And some of the Puritans really, I guess some of them later on were still part of the Church of England. "We haven't separated from them, and so we're coming over to establish that here." And as you guys will talk about the Pilgrims, they were coming over to run away from that culture. And so that's where we see it. My family, I guess if we're talking about Thanksgiving, we celebrate it and more of the thought of us getting together as a family and thanking the Lord. And we see that, I guess some of that within the pilgrims. They were thanking God for that first harvest and they were celebrating with the people that had survived through that dreadful first year. And then also you would see the Native Americans that came apart and celebrated with them during that first harvest. Cause they were the ones that helped teach them how to grow the crops, how to fish. How to do those type of things, and how to live in this environment opposed to where they were from. So kind of, I guess some of the history that I had found within that.

Ben Cline
I always think back when I get questions like this, that my worst subject in school was history. And so I have to do a lot of looking, but I kind of wanted to focus a little bit on the Pilgrims and their faith. Because our celebration of Thanksgiving does really revolve more around the Pilgrims than it does the Puritans. And there's a difference there. But it was interesting reading about the pilgrims, because they truly were separatists from the Church of England. They left England in 1608 and they interestingly went to Holland to seek religious freedom there; to be able to worship according to their conscience. And they were only there for, I think, 12 years or something before they decided to leave there. Because the economy and the culture there was not really allowing them to accomplish what they wanted to accomplish. And so they set off for the new world, and ended up landing in Massachusetts in 1620. And that's all of the history that I really wrote down. But I was just focusing on the beliefs of the Pilgrims being separatists from the Church of England. Number one: they rejected the institutional Church of England as Separatists. And so the first thing that I was thinking of, that I was reading about, is that they believed that the worship of God must originate in the inner man. And so I was just thinking of, what are some of the scriptures that were maybe running through their minds as they were formulating that sense of worship. John 4:24, "God is spirit, and His worshipers must worship in spirit and truth." So they were probably seeking the truth of worshiping God. Luke 4:8, "Jesus says, 'worship the Lord your God and serve Him only." And I think that's probably something that they were seeking; was to be worshiping God only and not the institution that they felt like man had created. Psalm 66:4, it says, "all the earth bows down to you. They sing praise to you, they sing praises to your name." Romans 12:1, this is a familiar verse to us, "present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. This is your spiritual service of worship." And so they had this desire to be worshiping God according to the way that they understood God was asking them to worship Him. And then the second part of what I was reading about, what the pilgrims believed is that they didn't see church as a building. They didn't really see church as this physical institution, but they saw it more as we see it now. We talk about this a lot in church, that church is not this building that you come to, but it is the body of Christ. And that really goes on and is talked about more in Romans 12, starting in verse three. He talks about how the body of Christ, we all have gifts that, He's made us all gifted in different ways. But the reason why, is because He wants us to work together as the body of Christ, as the church. And so I think those were maybe just some things that they could have studied as they were formulating that belief system that they came over to the new world with.

Gary Schick
Yeah, in many ways they were kind of the seed from which modern evangelicalism has grown. In many ways, in terms of independent churches, in terms of Back to the Bible, in terms of a personal faith versus an institutional faith. And I think you both drew the line really well. I think it gets confusing in people's minds; people say Puritan and mean Pilgrims. And yeah, actually the difference between the Puritans and the Separatists is right there in the names. And what they were seeing happening in England is something that we are seeing. I mean, it's been going on for ages. There is a tendency, however the church begins, for it to slowly institutionalize and to sort of start to drift away from scripture. And so shortly after the reformation, England was kind of going back and forth in its relationship to Catholicism, and the Church of England was kind of the result. And there were some really great things about it. It had reformed to the scripture in some ways, but not completely in others. And there was an institutional aspect which maybe wasn't so great, but there were some good things happening. And so the Puritans were a group within who, their goal was to purify, Puritans to purify the church from within. So the Puritans are the ones who hung in there and they said, "we are the Church of England, we are not leaving the Church of England. We are going to be God's light within to bring this institution around to a more biblical base." The separatists, just by definition, they separated out. They didn't go to church at the local Episcopal church, which was the Church of England. They had their gatherings in the countryside, and houses and farmhouses, and whatever; barns. And really, the famous guy from them is John Bunyan, who wrote The Pilgrim's Progress. Sadly, I'll bet most of our listeners have never read The Pilgrim's Progress. But there was a time when pretty much, in every Christian home in America you had three books. You had the Bible, you had Fox's Book of Martyrs, and you had John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. And Pilgrim's Progress, he wrote it while he was in jail and starts as if he's, "While I was in jail I had this dream," or something to that effect. And it is an allegory, where it's very symbolic, this guy's journey from the city of Destruction, which is the city of this world to the heavenly kingdom. And how he came, first, as he's coming out, he's hearing the words of the prophets and he's fleeing freeing for his life, and he flees the city of destruction. He finally comes to the foot of the cross, where literally the burden drops off his back and he receives the gift. So they had a very evangelical understanding of the gift by salvation, by faith through Christ and Christ alone. Great book. If you've never read it, read it. But as you pointed out, these separatists as you pointed out Ben, these separatists first go to Holland. And one of the things that I remember about them is that they're actually doing pretty well there, but their kids, just like our kids, are starting to blend in with the culture and speak the language of the culture. And for them, that literally meant speaking another language. Speaking Dutch as opposed to English, and just taking on the Dutch culture, and maybe in some other ways starting to drift away from their Biblical roots. And so they're like, "no, this isn't good," and so they go back to England and they eventually board the Mayflower. And after a horrific voyage, they land in New England, north of where they wanted. They wanted to go further south where it was a little warmer. They get there. Have you ever watched the show Alone? Basically you're watching 10 people out starve one another, trying to win 50 or 500 grand, and whoever is basically the last one who can take it out there. And every now and then somebody will bring down an elk or something. They'll bring down some massive animal, and they'll have some food to survive on. But, this is the pilgrims, they get---and the thing about Alone that is so appropriate to this, is they put these people, these 10 people in some remote location late enough in the year that they really don't have time to build, gather, and prepare for winter. And so it really is, it's a show of just scratching by, and that was the pilgrims. They were the first episode of Alone. They get to New England when it's well past time to plant or even really harvest. Winter's coming, they have to pull together some bare bone shelters, people are sick, they're sick from the voyage. I think, as we've pointed out, I think over half of them died that winter. The handful that were left are taking care of the sick and it's ugly. These people are sick, their---well, I probably can't say it on the radio. It's coming out from everywhere, let's just put it that way, and they are really sick. And so the people that are left are having to change the clothing and change the bedding and it's gross. And they only would've survived, I think based on the kindness of the natives. And I think in our minds, the way we've kind of gone to school, and that we've dreamed up this image of the first Thanksgiving, it's probably a little different than the way it really was. I think well, what did you say, Jonathan? You thought they probably ate eel, because that's what the natives had helped them learn to fish. I mean, whether there was any Turkey, there was probably venison. One of the things I remember reading is that they did play games. So we talk about, "oh, they've secularized Thanksgiving with all this football." Well, they probably didn't play football, but as you point out, they may have played lacrosse, the native game. There was some friendship there as time unfolds, they probably didn't continue to treat those natives at all the way they should have. But they were treated well by the natives, and probably only survived because of them. Teaching them to plant, teaching them to fish, teaching them to so many things. And so I think there's some good that we can come together about, and say, "you know what, thank you Lord that there were some people who welcomed them to this land." Would that it had stayed that way, I don't think the Pilgrims, who were looking for some religious toleration didn't turn around and end up being all that tolerant as they set up shop in New England. But history happened and we are still a work in progress. I think that's what America is, it is a work in progress. But there's some pictures there that I think, this is what we need to strive for. And as I was thinking about this, as we were even talking right before we dug in, I thought about those words in Revelation 7 where John talks about what's coming. He says, "and after this, I looked and behold a great multitude that no one could number from every nation, from every tribe and people and language standing before the throne and before the land clothed in white with palm branches in their hands and crying out in a loud voice, 'salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne and to the lamb." So as Christians, we have some distant memories of what that might have been. We really don't know a great deal, but we also know where we're going. And I think Thanksgiving can be a day to strive toward. A good day for all of us, who in one way or another, found ourselves in this wonderful land of plenty. And making America what it should have been and should be. Just one nation of people from every background, for people of every background where the gospel can be freely offered to people of every background. And boy, that is my prayer, is that we'll come together and just really honor Jesus in our own homes. Enjoy the day. It's only a day, they had it, I think, for several days. Was it three to five or something? Three days. So can you just imagine, stop. We kind of do that at the end of the year. Between Christmas and new years, everything slows way down. That's what they did. They just slowed down to give thanks for the harvest and to give thanks to the Lord.

California Misconceptions - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Michael Gleb and Matthew Gleb, and Pastor Mike introduced us to his brother Matthew, who preaches in North Carolina.

Michael Gleb
Hello and welcome to Ask the Pastor. My name is Michael Gleb and I'm the pastor of Torrington Baptist Tabernacle and I'm joined today by a special co-host. This is my brother Matthew Gleb, and Matthew is from North Carolina. Matthew, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, like you said, my name is Matt. I'm the youth pastor in Greenville, North Carolina at People's Baptist Church and I've been there now for 10 years and the Lord's really blessed in our ministry there. Excited to be a part of a staff, about six of us on staff, and we run about 450 people on Sunday morning. And I have a youth group, about 40 to 50 kids, and I just really love serving the Lord.

Michael Gleb
Amen. I think it's a unique experience that's obviously different from being a pastor, is being on staff at a church and serving under a pastor. And sometimes the pastoral staff can be underappreciated sometimes. But also, it can be a tremendous blessing and you have an opportunity to work with people that even a pastor doesn't get the opportunity to work at. But anyway again, you said that you had been on staff for 10 years at People's Baptist there in Greenville, North Carolina. Talk to us about some of the duties that you have had over your tenure there.

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, I started right out of college and we have a Christian school there. And so Pastor Butler, who's actually also my father-in-law, hired me on to teach at the school. So I taught there full-time for a couple years, and knowing that I did not wanna teach forever he, and he knew that as well. And we started to transition out of that position and I started a college ministry at East Carolina University. We called it a Turning Point College Ministry. And I had a great time doing that for several years, for four years actually, and saw a freshman class come in and work with them until they graduated and got to see several students saved. And I got to participate in a couple of their weddings and actually marry off a couple of them as well. So that was really cool to see. And then during that time our youth pastor at the time, left our church to help his father-in-law in Pennsylvania. So I started pulling double duty with being a college pastor and youth pastor, and we were able to do that for about a semester and I just could not keep up with preaching three times a week. Still teaching a little bit in the school and just all the other response was that, "come on a church staff." And so we handed off the college manager to someone else, and I was able to be a full-time youth pastor from then on out and still work a little bit in our Christian school as well. But a lot to do, a lot of different facets of our ministry. And so it's great to be a part of a little---have my hand in a little bit of each one.

Michael Gleb
Yeah. I know a little bit about your history and I know that you've coached basketball, is that right?

Matthew Gleb
I've coached all the sports, not qualified for some, but basketball, baseball, soccer.

Michael Gleb
Oh, soccer. Wow, that's an interesting one. I was an assistant coach for soccer in Fairfax, Virginia for a while, but never was the head coach. And I mean, you've done just about anything that you can do in a church ministry. You've done it, you sing in the choir.

Matthew Gleb
I was singing in the choir and with some scheduling conflicts, I sing whenever I know the song. Now, I'm not able to go to our practices, because of some scheduling conflicts in our ministry. But yeah, love singing. I never sang ever in my whole life until I went to our church: learned how to sing a little bit and learned how to read some music. But mainly I sing with our frontline music and on our church staff we have a singing all of our staff we can sing pretty well. So that's fun. But yeah, singing has become a new part of the resume.

Michael Gleb
Amen. That's good. Yeah, I know that you almost have to be sort of a renaissance man when you come in on staff somewhere. For instance, I had my education in history, history education, secondary education. But when I started teaching, it was teaching. I taught computer classes, I taught PEs, I taught health, I taught all kinds of things that I had zero experience or almost zero knowledge in by the way. So I'm sure some of those parents wouldn't like to hear that. But anyway, that's kind of how it is.

Matthew Gleb
And we really cannot forget about the most important facet of any ministry is being able to stack chairs and move tables. I can move all sorts of tables. Plastic, metal, wooden, you ask and I've done it.

Michael Gleb
Yeah, I told the congregation, I said, "pre-pastoring is 80% reminding people of the gospel and 20% setting up chairs. So yeah, I understand that. That's so true. Now, you don't forget, there is a better half to the Gleb family. And there are also should I say an offspring? Talk to us a little bit about your wife and family.

Matthew Gleb
I've been married now for nine years, her name is Casey and we met in college. We went to West Coast Baptist College, and that's where we met and started dating. We dated for about a year and a half and then I proposed to her after I graduated and she still had a year left. And so I started working at the church one year before she got there, and we enjoyed our time together alone. And then we started to want to have a child, and this may relate to some people, but it took us four and a half years before we were able to have our son. So that's pretty tough. And all of you out there that may be struggling to have a child, or it just doesn't come as quickly as it does others. It was definitely a burden for us for a while, but we were able to have a son, his name is Chandler Michael Gleb. He's the best, and I love him so much. And now we are currently wanting to have another child. And so if any listeners out there have a good prayer life, please pray for me and my wife to be able to have another kid.

Michael Gleb
As your brother, I got a little excited there. I thought there was an announcement coming to the greater part of eastern Wyoming and western Nebraska coming up there, but that's good.

Matthew Gleb
-----You would not be the first to know.

Michael Gleb
We're glad to hear that. Chandler is a special boy. I love him to death and we're excited that Chandler's in your life. He was born in 2020, and just kind of a little bit of a family history here. Our dad, Matt and my's dad passed away in late 2020 to Covid, but Chandler was born in March I believe, right? And then yeah, Chandler was born in March and so he was able to meet dad, and dad was able to hold him and that was a blessing. Now, I had you come out here and preach for me every year. We've had you here every year except for last year because we had a covid scare in our church and then there was literally Southwest Airlines canceling flights because of pilots on strike and all this stuff. So you preached to us online while we set out for a couple of weeks going to online services but you have a connection to the west. How long did you live here?

Matthew Gleb
As you told me, cause I did not know this We moved here in 93, so I was three years old. I'm a 1990 baby, and that's really fun to say these days. To say, "I was born in the 1900s," for all these young people around. But we moved here in 93, and then moved out back east in 2003. So, I was here for 10 years and then while I was in college, my parents moved back. So most of my Christmas's while I was in college were in Cheyenne.

Michael Gleb
Yeah. So, I know this is probably putting you on the spot. It's not the formative years of your life. For instance, I moved here when I was 15, so that shows you the age gap here between us. But I moved here at 15, so it was formative years for me. But can you tell us anything maybe that you like about the west or something you remember about the west, or something that you appreciate about the area?

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, I love the wide openness. You get out east and there's trees everywhere, so you can't see very far and you kind of feel enclosed. But out here it's just kind of wide open. So I do love that. I miss the western culture of the cowboys. And I miss the mountains, and being able to actually see the mountains in North Carolina. If you get into the mountains, you can't see them anymore because there's just trees everywhere. So, I love that. Love the weather. I loved winters here for a while as a kid, cause we had to play in the snow. Obviously, I didn't have to drive through it, so I know my mom hated that. And my mom and dad were on the precipice of divorce several times as dad would be forcing our car down the highway.

Michael Gleb
Know no murder!

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, he'd be forcing us down the highway. We're going to church and we only had to drive an hour to church one way. So we've seen our fair share of accidents. But yeah, I love the west, and love coming out here to visit. Love coming right here to preach to a lot of good people here. And yeah, I like the culture.

Michael Gleb
Now, you came to know Christ here in the west. Am I mistaken about that?

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, I was saved in 2001 when we were going to Cavalry Baptist Temple in Fort Collins, Colorado. And I got saved one night when my little sister was scared, that she came into our room and she was scared and I was like, "Jessica, there's nothing to be afraid of. No one's gonna get us in our house." She goes, "No, I'm not afraid of that. I'm afraid of dying and going to hell." And I've heard the gospel message my whole life. I could quote the verses, but I feel like it was truly then that the Lord convicted my heart and I realized, "Oh wow, I don't believe that I would be going to heaven if I died." And it just kind of hit me all at once. And we could not wait to talk to our parents; they were actually, I think, at the grocery store. And so when they got back, my dad took me into our computer room, and my mom took my little sister. And he led me to the Lord, and we knew the verses, talk together, and that's the night that I trusted Christ as my savior.

Michael Gleb
Yeah, it's one thing to know what the Bible says, concerning salvation. It's one thing to know all the verses, it's even another thing to believe there is a God. But to have a personal relationship with Jesus is the most important thing to accept Him personally. And so that's a great story. It just reminds us of how many people grow up in church and never truly accept Christ as their Savior.

Matthew Gleb
We actually just recently had a woman at our church, she grew up in a certain denomination, and you could say that she loved God. That she appreciated the Bible and she enjoyed bringing her family to church. But they visited our church and her oldest daughter got saved at camp, and her husband had already been saved when he was in college. But she came to a point where she realized, "I can be as sincere as I want to be about religion and about God," but she came to know that, "I never trusted Him as my savior." And sincerity will not give you everlasting life.

Michael Gleb
Right.

Matthew Gleb
Being a good person and even really pushing everything you have into your religion, really means nothing. It's all about a relationship with Jesus. And I'm so glad that, Ms. Bear is her name, she actually was saved this Summer. Yeah, that's a blessing.

Michael Gleb
Let me put you on the spot as we end up here. Churches out here are not incredibly large. There's probably a few of them. I've been to some churches, even worked on staff of some churches; churches back east that were bigger in size that oftentimes have a staff of pastors: if you will, assistant pastors, youth pastors and things of that nature. Matt, from personal experience, and I really don't mean to try to put you on the spot here, but can you give us, if you happen to be in a church with an assistant pastor, here's what I've seen before. A church member may get angry and they don't direct it towards the pastor, because of the office. And so what they do is, they almost place their anger, it's misplaced anger, onto a staff member. They feel like they can mistreat a staff member. They feel like they can mistreat a youth pastor, or such and such. So I may ask you a question, what would you recommend of being 10 years on a church staff, what would you recommend for those maybe listening that do have a larger church that have the staff? How do you treat a staff member? Is it that way out there?

Matthew Gleb
On the senior pastor?

Michael Gleb
No, no, no. If you're, I mean, as experienced, how would you treat, if you're just a regular layman, how do you treat the staff person and their family?

Matthew Gleb
Yeah. I think it's easy to overlook the staff member, because the pastor is there in front of us every Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, depending on your schedule. And so he gets a lot of the due recognition and appreciation for his office, and everything that he puts into the church. And this is no bash on our church. I believe our church does a great job, but I've seen it growing up in church my whole life. Where the people who don't have the title as senior pastor, that they may be forgotten. We have a pastor appreciation month, and a lot of times we recognize the pastor, but then there's a whole other pastoral staff that is doing a lot of work as well. And picking up a lot of the work so that the pastor could just study and preach and not have to do all the ins and outs, weekly things that we do. So I believe my dad probably did the best I've ever seen out of anyone. Helping to recognize and appreciate a whole church staff. And he would give honor to the pastor, but he would quickly follow that up knowing that the other families that are involved get their appreciation as well. And he wanted to take care of them. And the church staff gets a lot of the pressure, but sometimes the compensation is not as much. And so it's almost like the balance is totally different. So it's a good thing for maybe even your church to reevaluate how you take care of your staff, how you recognize them. We're not doing this to pat them back. We're not doing this for "atta-boys." But man, they don't hurt.

Michael Gleb
Sometimes it's needed.

Matthew Gleb
Yeah, they really do help keep people on fire. It's good to know that what you said spoke to someone's heart. It's good to know that, you know, you were a blessing to somebody. So be willing to share that. Be willing to be a blessing to those families in any way, shape or form.

Michael Gleb
Well, Matt, thank you for joining us. I love you and I'm so thankful you're my brother first of all, but that you came on and helped some people.

Jesus Says Not To Be Sorrowful Over Those Who've Died; So Why Did He Weep?

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Jonathan Hernandez, and Gary Schick.

Gary Schick
So, we have a new question today. Each week we have a new question. This one came from, all of our questions, it came from Russ. He kind of funnels them to us. But this was a question that he received in response to an article. Well here, I'll just read what he wrote and the question. So he said, "Hello guys. The individual in this question is referring to one of Amanda's blogs. I thought you might have some thoughts to share." Thanks, Russ. And so here's the question, "an article of yours explained that Jesus cried because of the," and this is in quote, so this is quoted from the article. "Jesus cried because of the pain and suffering death was causing, even though death was not the end. In that moment, Jesus wept; God does not like to see his people struggle." So that's what the blog said. Now, the individual writing in, asks this question, "Why would Jesus cry when Jesus knew death is nothing to be sorrowful or sad about? I see it as my father or mother going to the grocery store, then I cry. Why would I cry when I know my father later comes home from his outing, or my mother when she goes to the grocery store? I cry and cry? When I know she's coming home later. Hopefully you understand where I got confused." All right, Jonathan?

Jonathan Hernandez
Yeah. So I would guess the scripture reference would've been John 11:35, when it says, "Jesus," it's kind of my guess of where this all comes out of. And so, if we look around that scripture, you know, the whole context of that scripture, why did Jesus weep? Well, he was crying, or shedding tears because his good friend Lazarus has passed away. Right? And so they run to him and they say, "Well, why weren't you here? If you were here, he would still be alive." And they have some, I don't know, some Jews with them that were also crying. And so Jesus felt the emotion of the entire group, you know, think about that. Like, when we go to a funeral, or we hear the news of someone passing and we see the grief of people. I don't know about you guys, but I kind of start to tear up, you know? It's emotional even if I didn't know the person. But feeling the grief that these people are expressing, Jesus was fully God, right? And He was also fully human. So He would have these same emotions that we express, you know? If we can cry, Jesus also being fully human, would've also felt those emotions and know, "Hey, I see these people dealing with heavy grief and they're mourning the loss of someone." Jesus would feel that. And so I love that we have, you know, that Jesus can feel those same things that we do, you know? And know that when we go and we say, "Hey God, like, these are what I'm experiencing today." It's not like He goes, "Oh, well I don't understand that." You know, "I don't know what you guys are going through, I don't know those things." No, He relates to us. And so, just trying to lay some of that down. Like, he felt the same things that we feel, so He knows when we're suffering. Well, He's feeling that too. So God, you know, Jesus was feeling that deep sympathy of loss, sorrow, grief. So He felt all those things and He's seen, you know, "Hey, my good friend Lazarus is dead now." Being fully God, He knew ultimately that Lazarus was gonna be raced from the dead here in just a short time. He knew that, you know, Lazarus goes to spend eternity with Him later on. And so He wasn't weeping, or he wasn't crying because He felt, "Oh, I can't raise Lazarus from the dead." Or, "oh, Lazarus is dead forever, and I won't ever see him again." I think He was more weeping because he felt the grief and the pain of what everybody around Him was experiencing. And He was---I can't think of the---He was relating to them in that form. And so, that's kind of what I think, where I was feeling within this question when the question was like, "when the mom goes to the store, you know, the child weeps or doesn't weep because they know mom's coming back? Well, Jesus wasn't crying because He didn't know where Lazarus was going. You know, He was crying because he felt the grief and the pain and the sorrow that was around Him within everybody else. And then my wife brought up an interesting thing, too, last night when we were kind of discussing this. You know, she was like, "you know, Jesus ultimately knew that the result of sin is death." And so, He knew that, you know, He's gonna be seeing people ultimately die in their sins. And so maybe He was, you know, already seeing the future in an aspect of that, you know? There's all these people around here that are grieving for the death of Lazarus, even though internally, they're already dying because of their sin. So I thought that was kind of an interesting thing. And so we kind of went off on a thing last night going through that. So that's kind of where I guess I'm at in this.

Ben Cline
Yeah. That's great. I think that, you know, looking at this particular question, it's probably talking specifically about that instance in John chapter 11. And, you know, I was reading something and their perspective was, you know, "Jesus wasn't crying over the death of Lazarus because he knew, right? He knew that Lazarus was gonna be raised again. He knew that ultimately, Lazarus would be spending eternity with Him forever. And so, He wasn't necessarily crying or weeping because of Lazarus's death, but because of those who are around Him. Because He feels compassion for us. And, you know, I was also reading that the word that is used there when it's talking about Jesus crying, it indicates that these were tears of compassion for his friends. And so, you know, He's looking out, like you were saying Jonathan, and seeing Mary and Martha and all the Jews who are there, who are weeping over Lazarus, and you get choked up, right? You understand and you feel compassion for the people that are around you. There's another instance where the Bible and in the gospels, it talks about Jesus weeping. And that was in Luke chapter 19, where He's looking at the city of Jerusalem and understanding what their future is gonna be. And it says that as He was approaching the city, He wept over the city. And again, this is a weeping of compassion. And, you know, him feeling and understanding what the city is gonna be going through, but His weeping is more complex than just when we weep a lot of times. Because Jesus was looking at the city and He was understanding about the city that they had heard the message about him and they had rejected Him. And so, He knew what was coming for them, eternally speaking. But, you know, I was reading about this one as well, and they were also talking about how He knew within the matter of, you know, like 40 years that Jerusalem was going to be destroyed. And He was looking on the city and understanding that that was coming as well. He was weeping over the direction that the people had chosen to take; over that direction of rejecting Him as the savior. You know, so when we talk about Jesus weeping, He's weeping with compassion for His people. He's weeping with compassion and sympathy and empathy, over the things that we are feeling. I read a quote, it says, "Jesus' tears give us a glimpse of how the Father feels over the grief of His children. You know, Jesus being fully God and being fully man, He felt the things that we feel as human beings. And, you know, you ask the question, "Have you ever wept over something?" And I think that all of us could say, "Yes, we have wept over something." And, you know, maybe that's a yearly occurrence or a weekly occurrence, I don't know. But, you know, this is the same type of thing that Jesus felt, because he's fully human. But the feelings that He had were with the perspective of God, which is what makes it so complex, right? And so we can understand that, you know, when Jesus was weeping, it's cause He's feeling the same kinds of feelings that we feel, but knowing all the things that God knows. And so that's kind of where I land on that one.

Gary Schick
Excellent. And I was just kinda digging into the Greek while you were talking, you were mentioning it and, you know, Jesus wept and you know, that's essentially what the word means. I think it's always important to look at everything in context. It's the shortest verse in the Bible, just in case you wanted a little trivia there. What's the shortest verse of the Bible? It is John 11:35, "Jesus wept." And the reason I know that is, I had a roommate in college and, you know, talk about how you can misuse scripture. In a way it was kind of cool when we would sit down---I went to a Christian college. We'd sit down to have a meal, and so somebody would often pray. And so his way of praying for a meal was he would quote a scripture, which I thought, you know, that could be kind of cool. So we sat down for, I don't know, breakfast, lunch, or something. And my roommate goes, "Jesus wept. Amen." What? And I mean, consistently this was his meal type prayer. "Jesus wept. Let's dig it, guys." I think that's kind of missing the point. And I think it's kind of easy to miss the point here. One thing I think is helpful, is not just to read the words and say, "Hey, Jesus knew better. He knew we were gonna rise. He knew Lazarus was gonna rise. What's going on here?" Well, let's look at it in context. Start back at verse 32, "Now when Mary," and this is Mary who sat at Jesus' feet listening so intently, so there's a close relationship here. A close relationship of respect, of faith, of all kinds of good friendship going on. "When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet saying to him, 'Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.' When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled. And he said, 'Where have you laid him?' They said to him, 'Lord, come and see." Now we read these two words. "Jesus wept. So the Jews said, See how He loved him!' But some of them said, 'Could not He who opened the eyes of the blind man also have kept this man from dying.' Then Jesus, deeply moved again, came to the tomb. It was a cave and a stone lay against it. Jesus said, 'Take away the stone." Well, we could go on from there, but it's interesting to me that both the one who wrote our question and the contemporaries around Jesus who observed his weeping, this raises questions in a sense of confusion for them. Like their question is, "Well, couldn't He who had opened the eyes of the blind, done something about this? You know, isn't this an unnecessary tragedy?" And our listener is kind of asking the question, "Well, aren't these unnecessary tears, if Jesus really does know?" And I think they're both going around. The very thing that I think you both have just really addressed so well, no need to say more, and that is that Jesus, "Yes, He's fully God." Yes, He's got this death thing under control but He, over and over again in scripture, we read something about Jesus that we human beings often don't have for each other. He has compassion. When He was about to feed the 5,000 and everybody's getting hungry and they've been with him for a long time, and the disciples are very uncompassionately sending them away so they can get something to eat. "Or where are we gonna get enough money to feed these people?" What does it say? It says, Jesus was moved with compassion. And actually, if you're reading the Old King James version, it talks about bowels of mercy or something. It's kind of a odd, but literally the Greek word (says Greek word) talks about a feeling down in the gut. Yes, He's God, but that doesn't make Him less in touch with our so-called feeble feelings as poor mortals. Actually, because He's God, because He made us, because He loves us; truly loves us, fully loves us. He actually enters deeper into emotion than we do. And just because there was a resurrection about to be, doesn't mean that Jesus was unable to enter into the real, felt, visceral, deep sorrow and loss that was absolutely real to everybody around Him. And it's His loss too. This is why He came. He came to overcome death, but He also recognizes---and I think you guys are pointing in this direction a little bit. He knows what overcoming death is gonna cost Him. He knows what He's about to go through. And the cross is all---all kinds of feeling is coming out of Jesus. All kinds of emotion coming out of Jesus, yet without sin. Which is the amazing thing, because you and I would've salted in our emotions with a few more things to say, wouldn't we? You know, we would've cursed the crowd in no uncertain terms. Not Jesus, not Jesus. He fully, more fully than we ever can recognize, the depth, the permanence, the gulf of death. And yet He does go on and bridge it. And we see, not only that He wept, but before He wept and after He wept, we see Him deeply moved by emotion. This is what sin has brought, it has brought this horrific gulf, this horrific separation. That ultimately would not even be just the separation, as if that wasn't bad enough between people who love each other, but a complete disconnect with the God who made us. Until He bridged the gap, so that we could enter into life, so that we could have a permanent resurrection down the road. And let's not forget that too. Lazarus' resurrection was merely, although miraculously, a restoration into this life, but a life continuing of decay and sorrow and feebleness down the road. We know that Lazarus, I mean, we don't know how long he lived. We're thinking he probably got to live to a good old age, but he died again. Only the resurrection of Jesus brings us to a new kind of resurrection. What Hebrews 11 calls a stronger resurrection. And indeed it is when truly, tears get wiped away, because death at that point will no longer have hold on us. But, you know, praise God! You know, the god of the ancient Greeks, Stoics perhaps has the god of no feeling, because there's no point in feelings. But the God of the Bible is a God---I mean, from the pages of the Old Testament on, He has His plan. He's working it out, but He feels when His people go astray. He feels what a cheated-on husband feels. We read about that in Hosea. He feels it, you know? I'll just say one more little thing. So years ago, I learned to play the harmonica, and I learned from a guy who, and this is something I grieve about, he doesn't know the Lord. But I got to actually experience some one on one lessons with him. And as he was teaching me to feel kind of a bluesy version of Amazing Grace, he said, "Feel it, Gary. Feel it." And if you know anything about the harmonica, it's an emotional instrument. It's all about music, it's all about emotion. And so, yeah, you can just play the notes very monotone or you can play it mm-hmm. And the kind of music, the kind of harmonica sound that gets ahold of people is when you're feeling it. And so I've taken that, not only into music, but recently I was actually at a family funeral. My aunt's lived to a good old age, she's been gone for several months. It could have been a completely emotionless time for me and everybody. But as I reflected on her life, as I reflected on the people in front of me, as I reflected on the need of some in the crowd for a salvation that they have not grasped yet, there was nothing fake about some tears that came to my eyes. You know, and that's just something that I've learned is, you can go through life kind of distancing yourself and disconnected from, or you can do what Jesus did when He came among us. You can feel it, you can connect, you can be there more than physically, but emotionally present. And that is where our God wonderfully meets us. Jonathan, you know what I was just thinking about too, just like the sorrow was real. The joy of the victory is real too. And it's, can you imagine the emotion when we all get to heaven? Wow! Victory day! And the resurrection is permanent. Those tears are washed away.

The Names Of God Continued - Ask the Pastor

You can listen to Ask The Pastor every weekday at 9:00am MST on 97.1FM Hope Radio KCMI! You can also listen and subscribe to Ask The Pastor in your favorite podcast feed. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music and most other podcast services.

This edition of Ask the Pastor features Pastors Ben Cline, Jonathan Hernandez.

Ben Cline
Well, I'm gonna get our conversation started this morning. You know, again, like you said Jonathan, that this is kind of a continuing conversation for us. That we started talking about some of the names of God last week, and it just is such a huge topic. It's such a huge thing for us. You know, not just as pastors, right? But as followers, followers of Jesus Christ. And, you know, you and I were talking this morning about how there really is kind of this long, long, long list of the different names of God. And the question is, "why is it important for us to study the names of God? Why is it important for us to know them?" Well, you know, for you listeners out there, if you're wondering what the answer to that question is, well we get to look at the names of God and we get to study the names of God, so that we know more about who He is. You know, we were at a KCMI event last night, and Bryan Clark was the speaker, and he was talking about how God is the creator of all things. And He seems like such a big God, but you know, the name change that happens in Genesis 2 is the first time that that name Yahweh is mentioned. And that name of God means that He's a relational God. And so, He wants us to know more about who He is. And I think that that's why we need to be studying the names of God in scripture. So I ran across a couple of names, you know, of God and things that I wanted to talk about this morning. The first one is Yahweh. And we might say Yahweh or Jehovah, and they're kind of interchangeable; in the English version of what we say and what we study about. But Yahweh Rapha is one that I ran across. And the word Rapha---and again, it's not important for us to necessarily know those original Hebrew names. But, you know, it is important for us to know what they mean, because that's how it really applies to us, knowing who God is. But Yahweh Rapha, it means "the Lord who heals." And this comes from a passage in Exodus 15, and God is talking about the importance of the Israelites obeying Him. To do what is right in His eyes, in God's eyes, to give ear to his commandments and to keep all his statutes. And then he says, "if you do this, I will put none of the diseases on you that I put on the Egyptians." And, you know, of course those are the people that the Israelites were fleeing from. And then he says at the end of that verse, "For I am Yahweh Rapha, the Lord your healer." And so, that word, Yahweh Rapha means "the Lord who heals." And, I think the way that we can understand that through scripture is that God is healer. And I think the first thing that we think of when we hear that God is the healer, that he's our physical healer---and yes, it is true that God is our healer. And in fact, God is called the great physician. He's the one who, you know, knit us from our mother's wombs, and He knows us down to the very number of hairs on our head. And, you know, we understand God that way. In his will, if we're dealing with some sort of a physical ailment, or something like that, can God heal us? Well, the answer is yes, He can if He chooses to right? And so we can think of Him that way. But we also think of this in terms of spiritual healing. God is our spirit spiritual healer. And there's a passage in Isaiah 53, and it's in verse five. I just wanna read it through real quick, cause this is where it was first mentioned. But it says, "but he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace. And with his wounds, we are healed." And then that's brought up again in 1 Peter 2:24. Peter's talking there and he says about Jesus Christ, "He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree. That we might die to sin and live to righteousness." And then he brings up what Isaiah said. He says, "by his wounds, you have been healed." So, the fact that this is prophesied about in the Old Testament, about the Messiah going through all of this physical suffering, well, why did he do that? It ultimately led to His death. But he did that to pay the penalty for our transgressions, to pay the penalty for our sentence. And that is the only way by, you know, accepting that truth, accepting that as a free gift. That's the only way that we can be spiritually healed, and be given eternal life. So those are a couple of ways that we can understand God as the healer. As Yahweh Rapha. And there's another one that I wanted to talk about this morning too, and that's Yahweh---and I'm gonna completely butcher the pronounciation of this---but I think it's pronounced Mekadesh. You only do what you can do, right? But Mekadesh means sanctification, so it's "the Lord who sanctifies or makes holy." And one of the things that we need to understand about God, and maybe there's some of you who don't understand that word sanctification. Well, it just means to be set apart from something. And when we're speaking about God sanctifying us, it means that He is setting us apart from the world's system that we live in. And so Yahweh Mekadesh means, "the Lord who sanctifies." One of the things that we find through scripture is that, you know, God really makes it clear that He makes us holy, not through our works, He makes us holy. "Not even through the law that He gave, but that it's only through Jesus Christ," in Romans 3, the entire chapter is about this. But He establishes the fact that in and of ourselves, there's no righteousness in us. There's no way to be sanctified in and of ourselves. And then in verse 21, picking up there, it says, "But now apart from the law, the righteousness of God has been revealed as attested by the law and the prophets. And this righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe." And then it goes into a verse that I think a lot of us have memorized. It says, "there is no distinction. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." And then verse 24, it says, "And are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." So, you know, that's what that name reminds me of. Yahweh Mekadesh, "the Lord who sanctifies," the Lord who makes us holy. And we're not made holy because we do things that are righteous, because we do things that are really good in the sight of God. We're made holy through that sacrifice of Jesus Christ. And only by faith in Him.

Jonathan Hernandez
Those are some great names. And I liked how, as you were starting just talking about, you know, as we know these names, it helps build that relationship with God even more. Because when I know someone I know, you know, their character, I know all of these things. So, you know, as we start building a relationship and Pastor Gary too---that's usually the third guy with us, but he's gone today and we're praying that he has an amazing time. And, you know, so as we grow closer to each other, we start learning characteristics. And as we grow closer to God, these are opportunities for us to learn, you know, these names of him and these characters and characteristics that he, you know, that he carries. So today, one of the ones that I have is Jehovah Nissi, and we kind of covered a little bit of this last week, just kind of what it means. But I guess there's so much to these that we could just really spin probably a whole show on just each one. And so, Jehovah Nissi is "the Lord is my Banner." And we see this out of Exodus 17:15, and Moses built an altar and named it, "The Lord is my Banner." And so we're introduced to this, obviously it's this Hebrew name, Jehovah Nissi. And it's the story of the Israelites and Moses, where their just kind of wandering around in the wilderness. And Moses, he's the first one to call upon the Lord in this manner of Jehovah Nissi. Like I said, this is Exodus 17 and, you know, as we give these scripture references, hopefully the readers jot these down real quick. And you know, are able to go and, like, really look into, you know, each of these names. But here are the Israelites, they're facing the Amalekites in battle and they're overwhelmed by this force in a sense. You know, this army is, man these guys are warriors. You know, these guys are fighters and they're experienced, and this army, you know, has the best commanders, has the best, you know, they have everything. And they feel like they're gonna lose. I mean, that's probably kind of how their feeling, you know, we're just kind of reading it, I guess, into scripture a little bit there. But, you know, they're feeling that overwhelming presence a little bit. And they're just, you know, the Israelites, they're just farmers. They're, you know, they're herdsmen. They were just slaves not too long ago. You know, they're just escaping in a sense. You know, they're traveling with women and children, and they have all their herd, and they have all their possessions. The battle was really for survival, you know, for a future, for hope. And here they battle. But the great thing is, they weren't just traveling with just the children, with just, you know, the herds and the wives and their possessions. They had something else that they were traveling with. And, you know, they were traveling with a pillar of fire, you know, a cloud of smoke. The very presence of God was traveling with them. And, you know, this is something that Moses realizes, and he's able to see this and, you know, not only is he traveling with all these things that he physically, in a sense, sees, but, you know, he's traveling with this presence of God. And the great thing is, even for today, you know, sometimes we go up against these battles in our lives and it's tough and it's hard. And, you know, there's times where we're like, "I'm gonna lose this battle." It's tough, right? And I think one of the things that we need to realize, just as Moses did, "I'm not traveling alone. You know, I'm not traveling just with my wife and kids and my possessions, and I have three animals. I'm not just traveling with them, you know? I'm traveling with the presence of God, cause He's here with us." And so, you know, Moses says here, "Jehovah Nissi, the Lord is my banner." And I think we can say that same thing as we go against different things or have certain---I don't know what some of our listeners may be battling. A season of whatever it is, depression or something. And they can say, you know, "Jehovah Nissi, "the Lord is my banner." As I go through this battle, I'm not alone. I have God with me." And if we think of a banner, you know, like when I first heard this word, we did a series a couple years ago on the names of God at church. And this is one of the ones I went and I'm like, you know, kind of studying. And I was like, man, it's so crazy cause, like, you know, I was never in the military, so I don't have some of the understanding of some of these things. And, you know, as I was studying this, it was talking about some of these, you know, people going into battle and they're carrying this or carrying that. And, you know, so we think of, when I raise a banner, you know, I think of a flag or something along those lines. You know, like if we're at church camp, we all have like these banners that were, you know: I'm Team Blue, I'm Team Red, you know, I'm Team Green. Or whatever your team name is, and so you're carrying around this banner all weekend, but it's describing who you are. You know, and so we're carrying this banner that's saying, "Hey, we're believers in Jesus Christ. And not only are we believers, but we carry the presence of the Holy Spirit with us wherever we're going." And so, you know, I just wanna encourage you guys, as you are going through these battles, know who you are with, you know, who is walking with you through these battles? Who are you---you know, in a sense you have this banner that you're carrying and you're saying, "I am a follower of Christ, He is Jehovah Nissi. He is Jehovah Rapha, He is my healer." You know? He is these things as we, you know, can go into these battles. The other name that I wanted to talk about today was Jehovah Shalom. And this is translated, "the Lord is Peace." We see this in the story of Gideon, you know, when the angel of the Lord appeared to him, Judges 6, there we go. Sometimes my mind goes into other places, but Jehovah Shalom, it's translated "the Lord is peace." It's one of the Old Testament names of God, obviously if it's speaking of Gideon. And so, in those days, the children of Israel were living in a state of fear, because of everything that's going on. The Midianites, they once defeated this army, and they're kind of coming back up and they're kind of terrorizing Israel with an overwhelming mob-like force. And their going around, and Gideon wasn't immune to anxiety. He wasn't immune to waves of uncertainty, and, you know, I think that's us too. We're not immune to some of these things like anxiety or uncertainty of things. You know Gideon, he had this uncertainty that was sweeping the nation. Matthew Henry writes a little bit here, then he says, "Gideon was distressed. He was thrashing his wheat, not in the proper place, but by a wine press in some private unsuspected corner for fear of this army. Fearful of the attack and the worry about the safety of their families. The Israelites, like Gideon took to hiding in dens in the mountains and in the caves and in the strong holds in Judges 6:2." So this is, you know, Matthew Henry wrote some good commentary. And so he's talking about, here's Gideon, he's distressed, you know, he's fearful. He has a little bit of anxiety, possibly some of these things like, "I don't know what's gonna happen, and I'm a little fearful of this force that's coming against us. And so instead of doing what I usually do here, I'm gonna kind of hide in the back a little bit. I still have work that I need to get done, but we're gonna do it in a kind of hidden place." It was a season of personal national unrest. Then the angel of the Lord appears to Gideon, and he's commissioning him to lead Israel and deliver them from this torment, you know, these tormentors. And Matthew Henry continues, he says, "The day of the greatest distress, and it is God's time to appear for people's relief." What is your greatest distress right now? Like, maybe some of you listeners are like, "I don't have anything. You know, I'm good." And man I'm like, that's amazing, that's great. We need some tips. But when we're in that place, you know, this is a time that God's gonna appear and give us relief. You know, we're just like Jehovah Nissi, we're not fighting alone. We're carrying, you know, the presence of God. And, you know, this was certainly true of Gideon's calling. You know, if you guys go back and read through all of these, you know, through Judges 6, and just start seeing some of this stuff, you know, it's amazing what happens. The Lord, He reminds this new warrior, you know, Gideon, soon to be judge. You know, He's reminding him, you know, and telling him who he is, and that the Lord is with him. The Lord is here. You know, the Lord's gonna be through him, through this entire process. But one of the biggest things that the Lord gives them in that is peace, you know? And I think as we go through the battles and the different things that we're walking through, one of the things that we need is peace. I mean, that's what I always pray. Like, if I'm facing something, I'm like, "God, give me peace in the situation." Cause I know my anxiety can overtake me at times. And that's something I've struggled with my whole life, is anxiety. And, you know, the great thing is that we have an amazing God that when we're struggling with these things, we can say, "You know what God, I need your peace today. You know, I need you to help me as I walk through these things." And so, you know, what are you guys dealing with this morning? What battle, in this sense, are you facing? One of the biggest things that God can give you in this time is peace. To help you process everything that's going on. You know, maybe it's a decision within. You know, maybe you have a new work decision, you know, you have a job and you know someone else is offering you something. Like, you just need peace in those situations. It could be, you know, you're battling cancer right now and, you know, yes, God can heal you, but He's also gonna give you peace during this time. You know, instead of having to deal with the anxiety of everything that's going on, you know, also ask God, "you are Jehovah Shalom. You are the one that is peace. You know shalom, peace. And so God, give me peace as I battle through these things." And so, you know, for me, that's something that I usually pray, "God, I need peace in this situation." So, you know, that's an easy, or I guess not easy, but that's an opportunity for you guys. You know, let's pray, you know, some of these scriptures out, you know? How can you open these names of God and use them in your prayer life? You know, use them in your devotions or whatever, you know. Me and my wife went through a book, I was trying to remember the name of it and I can't find it. And so, if I find it I'll let you guys know what the name of it is. But it was just the names of God, and it was a devotional that told you the name and it told you scriptures and you read through it, and then you basically just journaled through. And me and my wife spent a couple months just walking through. You know, it didn't obviously have all the names of God, but it had a lot of them. And so I encourage you guys to just kind of, like, read through those and, you know, see what God is speaking to you as you guys read through these names of God. So, just to close out, I was reading through an article, and at the very end of this article this lady asked a question. And this is a question that, you know, comes from when Jesus was talking to his disciples, and Jesus asked his disciples, "Who do you say that I am?" And they all answered, you know, in different things, "Well, these people say this, these people say that." And finally, you know, instead of Jesus just allowing them to continue to go through this, "Well, these people say this." He stopped them, and he says, "But what about you? What do you, or who do you say that I am?" And I encourage you readers to, or you listeners today, to stop and quit saying, "this is who everybody says you are God." But get to the point. You could say, "you know what God, this is who you are. This is what I see in Scripture. This is who I know you to be, because of our relationship that I have with you. And so I would encourage each of you guys to get to that point where you can say, you know, "This is who you are." And I could be confident about that because I've been through the, you know, I'm in the scriptures. I'm in a, you know, that devotional life with you. I have that intimate relationship.