11: FISH: Scripture (Part 5)

[00:07] Stephanie: Welcome to Deeper Walk’s On the Trail podcast. You are on the trail with father-daughter duo, Marcus and Stephanie Warner. I’m Stephanie and I’ll be talking with my father, Dr. Marcus Warner, as we discuss topics that help you stay on the trail to a deeper walk with God. Alright, it’s episode eleven in the fifth part of our FISH series. We’re looking now at scripture.

Greetings, Father.

[00:30] Marcus: Greetings, Daughter. Good to be with you again.

[00:34] Stephanie: Always. How are you today?

[00:36] Marcus: Doing well. It’s been a really hot, sticky day here. We’re up in Michigan as we do this. And yeah, it’s been kind of brutally humid and hot, but nice to be in an air conditioned house.

[00:48] Stephanie: Gorgeous clouds.

[00:50] Marcus: Gorgeous clouds.

[00:50] Stephanie: We saw that one cloud that it hadn’t quite formed into a thunderhead yet. It looked like a triangle, it was crazy.

[00:59] Marcus: No, it is like you to find the epic in the ordinary. It was an epic cloud, that is for sure. We do like thunderstorms, don’t we?

[01:09] Stephanie: And when I was a young child I did not. And then you guys taught me to not only not fear thunderstorms, but to love them. And now it’s one of the things that whenever there’s a storm and people start going, “Oh no, it’s rainy”, and then they’ll look at Stephanie and “Go, oh well, you like it.”

[01:28] Marcus: You like it. Exactly. Yes.

[01:30] Stephanie: I’m like yes, I do. Thanks.

[01:32] Marcus: So we have a beautiful cloudy day.

[01:36] Stephanie: Way to spark my joy. All right, so today we’re talking about scripture. And in the last episode we were talking about living in the spirit.

[01:47] Marcus: Yes.

[01:48] Stephanie: And your acrostic S.L.O.W. – Seek, Listen, Obey and Watch. As we move into talking about scripture, I wonder if you could talk more about where you see SLOW applied in the Bible.

[02:00] Marcus: So one of the first things that jumped out at me is the book of Joshua. And Joshua had a lot of battles to fight. So I look at Joshua as a really good paradigm for the victorious christian life. And the victorious christian life is the idea that we will have battles to fight. But if it’s a battle God wants us to fight and God is in it, there is always a path to victory. And so the question is, what is that path to victory?

And God lays it out for Joshua at the beginning and he said, “Be strong and courageous and obey.” So obedience was the key to victory for him. Well, how did he know what to obey? And he realized that for every battle that Joshua fought he had to stop, seek God, listen to what God wanted, and then obey that. And then he got to watch what happened. He also got to watch what happened when he didn’t stop and he didn’t seek God. Because if I don’t stop and I don’t seek God, then I can’t listen.

And that happened to Joshua with the Gibeonites who came and they pretended to be from a distant country. And he did not stop and seek the Lord on what to do. And that was the one time he got into big trouble because he didn’t stop and seek the Lord. So he wasn’t able to listen and obey, and we watched what happened. Now even that was redeemed though because the battle where the sun stood still is where they went to defend the Gibeonites. Joshua definitely sought the Lord on what his strategy should be for that battle.

And so even in spiritual warfare situations with people I’ve often told them, let’s stop and ask God for his strategy for this battle that we’re in. And so that’s where that came from. We see that illustrated there nicely I think in Joshua. His whole campaign was based on stop, seek the Lord, listen to what he has to say and obey. And then watch what happens and go forward. It also reminds me of Jesus’s words where he says, “Watch and pray so that you don’t fall into temptation.” Because I think it sort of completes the cycle that as I’m living a life of watching and praying, I’m more likely to recognize that it’s time for me to stop and seek the Lord.

I can give you one more while I’m on this because it’s like the Torah. The Torah is anchored in the creation story. And so we see God creating stars and the sun and moon. The moon to rule the night and the sun to rule the day. And then the stars remind us of seasons. Well, that word “seasons” is the same word that the Torah used for its festival season, right? It’s time for tabernacles, it’s time for Passover, you know whatever the festival was.

And so one of the things that we see in the Torah was that the Tabernacle and then temple worship, was anchored in a morning sacrifice and an evening sacrifice. Which is related I think to sunrise and sunset. And I can’t get over the idea that sunrises and sunsets are beautiful because they are calls to worship, they’re reminders. Stop and seek me, let’s spend some time together. And then every week there was a sabbath and on Sabbath they did a double sacrifice. And then once a month there was a new moon and every new moon, there was a double sacrifice.

And then there were week-long festivals where you weren’t supposed to work. In fact I totaled it up one time, that if you took off every day that the Torah tells you to take off, 70 days a year were vacation days. Right. That’s pretty good. And literally we talk about a 10% tithe of money, but there was a 20% tithe of time. And so we see that resting was actually an act of worship to God. To take the time off and to trust that he would take care of you, even if you didn’t work yourself to death.

And I think how much better our lives would be if we actually took the time to rest that the Bible puts in there. To stop what we’re doing and seek the Lord on this regular basis. So there’s sort of this calendar reminder. Stop and seek me, listen to what I have to say, and then obey. Then watch what happens and see if you don’t see more peace in your life.

[06:05] Stephanie: That’s beautiful. So beautiful. Oh man, I love your perspective on the Old Testament. And yes, thank you for your contagious love of the Old Testament. I’m in Biblical Studies masters right now, and I’m gonna be doing an exegesis of Joshua next semester. I’m just very excited.

[06:26] Marcus: Yeah, you’ve got some great profs down there too, so it should be a good time. I’m looking forward to gleaning from what you’re learning.

[06:32] Stephanie: So I love it. Someday I would love to have a series of just digging one episode at a time, into your Biblical theology overview.

[06:42] Marcus: That would be cool.

[06:42] Stephanie: But right now, we’re going to fire hose.

[06:45] Marcus: We are fire hosing it today.

[06:46] Stephanie: So your biblical theology overview around here is known as WWW.PLAxN.COM. Do you think you can give a brief overview?

[06:57] Marcus: Well, first of all WWW.PLAxN.COM, it’s the word plan with an “X” in it and PLAxN.COM is an active website. You can actually go there but I don’t know what it takes you to. I haven’t been there in a while. The idea here is there are nine building blocks of Biblical theology that every Christian really ought to know and understand. So when I was in seminary we used to have this discussion of, is there a central theme to the Bible? And some people are like, “Well, it’s Jesus.” And some would say, “Well, it’s the kingdom of God.” Or it’s “the promise” that was given. And there were all kinds of ideas. Or it’s God’s eternal purpose in creation. A lot of people have had ideas about what’s the centerpiece.

I used to argue that if there’s a centerpiece, it’s the idea of worship. And that is God created us to walk with him. So, if you define worship as walking with God. That is his purpose in creation was to have a family that would be relationally connected with one another, and relationally connected to him. That’s what worship is. We express our worship to God through our connection with him and through loving our neighbor. That is how we walk with God.

Walking with God is about trusting him and obeying him. Growing more intimate with him in this process of trusting him, knowing him, and obeying him. As we know, trust and obey God, is just this cycle that continues to get us deeper and deeper. So coming out of that in our discussions at seminary, was this idea that there is something called “Creation Theology.”  And that is lessons that are anchored in the fact that God is Creator. Lessons anchored in the fact that this is how God designed the world. And this is sort of foundational to understanding the worldview of scripture.

And so the “WWW” of these building blocks are all related to what we might call creation theology. And they are lessons that apply to all humanity and all places. And the first one is worship and worship as walking with God. The idea that God’s purpose for creation was to create a people who would have a relationship with him and walk with him. And so God created paradise.

And we get glimpses of this now and then because we have these moments in our lives where like, “Life just can’t get any better than this.” And it’s a glimpse of that paradise God created us for. But as we all know we don’t live in paradise right? “Paradise has been lost,” as someone famously said.

We live in a fallen world that is at war, so the second “W” is warfare. And that you cannot understand this reality unless you understand that we live in a world at war. And this takes us directly to the problem of suffering and evil in the world. Jesus said when he was here, he called the devil “the prince of this world,” right? That the world is under the influence of the evil one. So the evil one is free to roam the world and there is evil that is free to happen.

And I heard a pastor years ago say, “God allows evil, but he uses evil, and he overcomes it.” So he clearly allows evil cause it’s happening a lot and he uses evil. We see this in Joseph who was “evilly” sent into slavery and was “evilly” sent to prison, and was “evilly” left there too long. But God used the evil that happened to him to put him in just the right position to create a redemption story. And then he overcame it by “raising Joseph from the dead” so to speak, and giving him this place of glory. We see this in Job, we see it in Jesus, we see it in Esther, and we see this in stories all through the scripture.

So there’s the idea that God created the world for worship and created paradise, but that we live in warfare. We can’t understand life until we understand that we are born into a world of war.  And so to help us in this fallen world at war we get to the third “W”, and that’s wisdom. And it’s this idea that there is a universal wisdom that we all are called to. God said, “Life is too complicated for you to figure it all out, so let me make this simple for you. Trust me.”

So that’s why we get to like Proverbs three, five, and six. “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make your path straight.” And that word acknowledge is Yada, right? It’s the Hebrew word that can be translated to “be intimate with.” Thus it says, Adam, Yada’d Eve and she got pregnant. Right? So you have this intimacy idea that God says, “In all your ways be intimate with me, and I’ll make your past straight.”

So that brings us right back to the S.L.O.W., seek, listen, obey, and watch. So the “WWW” of this is anchored in this idea of creation theology lessons. They come from the nature of the world, our worldview, and how we look at what’s going on in the world. God wants us to know that there is a wisdom that will guide us into a path that ends in his blessing, even though we live in a world that’s fallen. So we want to get on that path that leads to what is good. God says, “Well trust me, obey me, and that path will end in blessing. So those are the first three.

[12:08] Stephanie: This next part, the PLAxN, I remember you teaching my fifth grade Sunday school class. We would use our hands and you would walk us all through it. So this is simple enough for fifth graders.

[12:21] Marcus: Yeah. “Are you smarter than a fifth grader?” So if you want you can take your right hand and turn it towards your face, staring with your Pinky. And you count down starting at 2,000, 15,00, 1,500, 500 and zero.  So you got 500 year intervals between each finger. Now there is no zero BC or zero AD, one BC goes to 180 but I use zero just to keep it simple. So we got 2,000, 15,000, 1,500, 500 and Jesus at the zero marker there. So I’ll just ask you because you know this stuff, right? So which famous Bible character was alive in the year 2,000?

[13:01] Stephanie: Abraham.

[13:02] Marcus: Very good. And which famous character was alive in 1,500?

[13:05] Stephanie: Moses.

[13:06] Marcus: And in 1,000?

[13:07] Stephanie: David.

[13:08] Marcus: There you go you see she’s known this since fifth grade. So my pointer finger is not a person, it’s the exile. And then the thumb of course is Jesus. That’s your standard Sunday school answer. So we have Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus. Now what those four characters all have in common, is that God had a covenant associated with each one of them.

So if you think about covenants in today’s world, a covenant is like a wedding or marriage covenant. And so we think of rings as the symbol of those. So what we like to do is put a “ring” on each one of those covenant fingers, Abraham, Moses, and David. We call it the Abrahamic covenant, the Mosaic covenant, the Davidic Covenant, and then Jesus brings the New covenant. So the first one going back to 2,000 BC and Abraham. The Abrahamic covenant is regularly called “The promise.” And so that is the “P” of PLAxN, promise. The mosaic covenant is called the “law”, so that’s the “L” of PLAxN.

And then the covenant with David was the promise of an anointed one who was coming. So the Greek for anointed one is Christ or Christos. The Hebrew is Mashiach from which we get Messiah. So you have Christ the Messiah, The Anointed one who’s coming and that he’s promised to come through the line of David. So we have PLA, promise, law, and anointed one. And then we have exile and the new covenants. So if you just take the four covenants it spells P.L.A.N. – Promise, Law, Anointed one, and New covenant.

[14:38] Stephanie: Look at that.

[14:39] Marcus: Look at that. Who knew? I think God set that up, Joe.

[14:44] Stephanie: God likes to make you smile.

[14:45] Marcus: Yeah, just to make me smile. So God’s plan for the world was to bring his son to be the promised seed through whom all nations on earth would be blessed. So the promise is sometimes called “the gospel preached ahead of time” in the Old Testament. And I find it interesting that this promise in one of the settings in which it was given, was called “The binding of Isaac”. Abraham binds Isaac and puts him on the altar. They just kind of role play the whole thing that Jesus the promised seed is going to do, that will bring salvation to the world, and thus bring blessing to all nations on earth. And today in every nation on earth there are Christians. So we’ve seen the fulfillment of this promise already.

[15:30] Stephanie: Do you want to touch on the “exile’s” role within the plan?

[15:34] Marcus: Yeah. The exile is the one non-person. When I was studying in seminary and was really diving into the theology of the exile, there were two passages that stood out. Both referred to the exile as divorce. I’m like, that got my attention. It says, “God gave faithless Israel her certificate of divorce and sent her away.” I’m like wait, “God’s divorced, is that what this is?” And so it brings up this question, “Well when did he get married?” That takes us back to the law and the law of Moses.

Sometimes look at it this way that the promise is a little bit like an engagement. It’s when they were betrothed and then the law is when they actually got married. So there’s this marriage covenant at Mount Sinai where Moses is presiding. He says, “Do you Yahweh, take Israel to be your people?” And then Israel is like, “Do you take Yahweh to be your God, forsaking all others?” And they say “Yes” and they enter into a blood covenant.

So there is blood that is sprinkled on the altar to represent Yahweh coming into the covenant and there is blood sprinkled on the people. You know it probably didn’t get all of them, but the idea is that they are both brought into this covenant. The prophets referred to it as a marriage, that they had gotten married. But I like to say that Israel essentially committed adultery on their honeymoon. You know right there at Mount Sinai Israel was worshiping the golden calf. Later in the desert they were worshiping the Baal of Peor.

And the imagery of idolatry and adultery were just linked all through Israel’s history. We actually see an interesting picture of this in the life of Solomon.  And that is that Solomon like Israel, God spoke to Solomon just as God had spoken to Israel. And Solomon built a temple and at the centerpiece of this temple was the Holy of Holies, where the ark was that has the law inside.

And the first commandment of the law is “No other gods beside me.” So just shortly after Solomon builds the temple saying, “I’m going to worship Yahweh. This is his temple on the earth, no other gods besides him.” What does he do? His foreign wives convince him to permit the worship of their gods and soon he’s building shrines to them.

And so Solomon just like Israel had done is breaking the covenant. He is committing spiritual adultery and the penalty for that is exile. And we see a glimpse of this because God took ten of the tribes away from Solmon and gave them to somebody else. And that’s a foreshadowing or picture of Israel’s exile. And then we see this just building and building. And you realize that God had every right to send them into exile much sooner than he did, but it was his patience and his mercy.

So finally he sends them into exile. Both Ezekiel and Jeremiah who are the prophets when the Babylonian exile occurs, leads them to foretell a new covenant that is going to come. It will in a sense replace the law, and the new covenant will surpass that one. And then Hebrews in the New Testament does a really good job of unpacking how that all works.

So the exile is important because it sets the stage for why a new covenant was necessary. And then the new covenant I like to say, is not only the thing that replaces the law, but it fulfills the promise to Abraham, and it fulfills the promise to David. So it brings all of these covenants together in one, and it’s the fulfillment of all of them. So the exile kind of ties all these covenants together in a pretty unique way.

[19:16] Stephanie: Yeah, I guess so. I don’t think I’ve ever actually thought about the foreshadowing of Solomon before, that’s really cool. I learn something new from you all the time, I love it.

[19:28] Marcus: You know in one of our books, The Deeper Walk Guide to the Bible, we have a segment on the Exile and that chapter kind of camps out on Solomon. I call it,”The slippery slope to exile.” It’s got its own acrostic to it and everything, shocking. But yeah, it was one of those things that jumped out at me when I was studying the Old Testament intensely, back in the kind of early days of ministry.

[19:46] Stephanie: So do you want to do any more on the new covenant, or do you want to talk about “Dot Com?”

[19:57] Marcus: Yeah, let’s go into Dot Com and make sure we get there. Because the new covenant is the covenant of grace as opposed to law. Right. And then when we get to Dot Com, and “COM” is a little bit different because “COM” stands for “coming of Messiah.” We talked about creation theology and WWW.  I call the PLAN you know, salvation theology, which most people are very familiar with, and then Dot Com represents kingdom theology.

And it’s this idea that the kingdom has come in Christ and thus we are living in the last days. But until this present evil age ends we’re still waiting. So we’re in this already not yet period. That the kingdom is already here spiritually but it is not yet here physically. And so when Christ does return that will be the coming of Messiah. That’s when this present evil age ends and his throne is established in Jerusalem and he literally reigns over the earth. And so all of our prophetic views of the kingdom are kind of anchored in that part of the acrostic.

[21:10] Stephanie: One of my favorite aspects of your teaching is how you’ve helped me understand a Biblical worldview. Having an accurate understanding of what the world is, how it works, who God is, and how we relate to him. To say this is important is an understatement. So I really appreciate that. And I know we’ll look more at worldview more in depth in a later series. But for now I’d love for you to talk about the Bible’s role in developing and understanding worldview.

[21:43] Marcus: Certainly. Yeah. I sometimes say that at the heart of discipleship is the idea of worldview. That culture starts with belonging and that these are my people, and then my people share a common perspective on life. And so most of us our worldview is our assumptions about life that we never even think about. But when we explore them, worldview encompasses a lot of things including “how do things happen, what causes things to happen?” Like, is there an overarching narrative that fits it all together?

And so worldviews are often expressed through the narratives of a culture or the mythology of a culture. So in that sense of the role that myth plays in some cultures, we look to the Bible as true mythology, if you will. It’s saying this is the actual narrative that we need to have. And so one of the reasons that studying the Bible is so important is that as we internalize scripture, it begins to shape our worldview.

And one of the ways that it does that is that the more that I embrace scripture, the more I fill my mind with scripture, the easier it is for me to see life as an extension of the Bible. It gives me the categories by which I evaluate what I’m looking at. If I don’t saturate my mind with scripture, and if I don’t have the worldview that comes from Bible study, then I will get my narrative on what’s happening from someplace else. And that creates double mindedness and double mindedness robs us of peace, and creates all these other problems in our lives. So yeah, hard to overstate how important that is.

[23:20] Stephanie: Yeah, that’s perfect. As we are wrapping up this very, very rich content episode, can you just leave us with some strategies for interacting with your Bible? Or memorizing it so that you can start achieving this saturation?

[23:37] Marcus: Yeah. Most people I talk to say, “Oh, I am terrible at memorizing. You’re so lucky.” They’ll tell me, “That Bible memory is so easy for you.” And there’s some truth to that. Right? God gave me a mind that remembers things. But there is something called Bible quizzing. When I was young it taught me to spend usually 10 hours a week or more taking walks with my Bible, like for an hour a day or sometimes two or three. And I got in the habit of repeating a phrase at a time to myself, and as soon as I had that phrase down and I could say it perfectly three times, then I would add a phrase. And then I say that one perfectly three times and then I would put the two of them together, right.

And what I found was that generally in about 15 minutes I could actually memorize three verses. And most people are like, “Really?” And I’m like well, try it. So the goal is to take 15 minutes on any two verse or three verse segments of scripture. See if at the end of that 15 minutes in just through this repetition process you can actually recite that. Now what you’ll probably find is the next day you’ll forget it, and that’s why you have to do it again.

And that’s why you do this every day. What I found when I was really doing this as a major part of life, I found that it was not really that hard to memorize a chapter in a month. And so once you get to that point where you’re actually memorizing whole chapters, it really begins to reshape your brain. It begins to reshape the way that you think and the way that you’re looking at life. So I say this because most people are intimidated and they don’t even try.

The other thing I found really helpful was having a partner. A retired gentleman asked me one time if there was anything he could do to be supportive. And I said, “Well why don’t you be my Bible memory partner?” And so we got together once a week for an hour and just reviewed all of these things, and it kind of helped keep me anchored and moving forward. So I encourage Bible memory, encourage Bible study, and honestly Bible reading.

And I think one of the problems we have is that too many of us have gotten used to five minutes of Bible here, five minutes of Bible there. And I think even if we just took Sundays for example, and said, “I’m going to take an hour this Sunday and just read my bible for an hour.”  That would be huge for a lot of us. I just want to encourage people to start where you’re at and to start picking away at this. You can actually learn a lot more than you think just by building a habit into your life.

[26:23] Stephanie: I would also just encourage that if you can read a whole book at a time. If you can set aside a Sunday and just read a whole book, I have found that to be very enriching. And you get the whole context of what the book is trying to do just reading it straight through.

And so on the flip side of it, if you’re not doing the memory work or if you’re just wanting to saturate your mind with it, instead of saying, “Okay, I got my chapter for the day, or I got my reading.”  You could sit down and just read a whole book and you can start with a smaller book. But I have found that to be very good and helpful. Thank you dad, any final thoughts? We need to wrap up here.

[27:04] Marcus: Yeah, we covered a lot of territory. Obviously the whole Bible in one podcast. But hopefully people get the idea that you can’t have a deeper walk without scriptural knowledge. And I think in the chapter of my book I end with this story. A missionary was smuggling some Bibles into a closed country, and after he made the exchange, he said, ”So, do you want us to come teach?” And the person looked back and kind of with this stunned look on his face held up the Bible and says. “Bible will teach.”

And I think that’s part of this. We all need to keep growing in our ability to feed ourselves from God’s word.

[27:44] Stephanie: Amen and thank you. And thank you listeners, for joining us on the trail today. If you want to keep going deeper with us on your walk with God, please subscribe to the Deeper Walk podcast and share with your friends. You can find more at our website, deeperwalk.com.

Thanks again. We’ll see you back next week.