Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it would have been a lot of fun. And so, yeah, we had a really good birthday. We are... We don't have all the songs we set up on it. That's why. It's mostly just, it doesn't matter that much. It don't matter? No. You could record it. I can record it. We have all the... Thank you. Open me up on YouTube, so I can get to do the editing. It doesn't have to be right this minute. Someone just told me to talk to you when you were there, so that way I got my part and you got the next. All right, how are you doing? Thank you. I didn't know how to do it. Yeah, Tina's good. You know, I want to sit on your arm. Yeah. Yeah. Good morning, Amber. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. If you unhook the other one, it'll have a bit more slack. Oh, is there another one? No, no, just, if you take it, if you unhook this guy too. Should I bring it around the other way? Maybe, if you're gonna be plugging in there, why not? That's a good idea. I think I just did what we did yesterday night. Thank you, sir. Oh yeah, that's way better. And I won't be tripping around everywhere. Trampoline underfoot. I know a guy who can fix it. You? Oh. Oh no, I don't want to do that. Yes, and he is actually the one who was in the last video. So I am going to get to know him because my dad is not so sure about this. But one of the things that people ask me in the back of the office, Why is this not opening? Where's open? Excellence. Good morning. Right now, I know I'm Christmas cold to you. I know that's the one. That's it. We're just getting started. So, excellent. I think I'm right. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I'm this one. I know I I need to have, like, some kind of arm that sticks out here that's a coffee holder. Actually, a robotic one that actually, like, it actually, like, sips it to my mouth. And if it could, like, have something like, you are awesome, have a drink of coffee, like in a robotic voice, that would be even better. That's pushing it. Be like, I can't make robots lie. All right. Well, let's start with a word of prayer. We'll be looking. We're just going to pick up where we were last week. There was good conversation, and I actually prefer that. Sticking on the same topic for a couple weeks is great if there's a lot of beneficial conversation. And there's a lot of differing perspectives on the Ten Commandments. And so these are things that I think are worth thinking through. and studying together, not just quickly rushing through. So if we can get through this morning, awesome. But if there's a lot of conversation, and remember, we will be focusing a little more on the Sabbath in a couple weeks. So if we want to jump back into that, that's fine, but also know We'll focus on that a little bit later because that seems to be the one that people are most eager to know about to see what it says for us as new covenant Christians. But let me open up in a word of prayer and then I'll read Exodus 20 and then we'll resume our study. Father, we want to thank you for this beautiful morning. I'm so thankful Lord that you have granted us this building to gather in Father, I pray that even this would be used for your glory, that we'd be good stewards of this building, that in it Christ would be proclaimed and your word would be taught. We pray, Lord, that conversions would take place. And Lord, that we would grow in our holiness, we would be sanctified as we gather together and celebrate together that our Lord Jesus, our Redeemer, has been raised from the dead and He now rules. He is seated at the right hand of the Father with rulers and angels and authorities having been subjected to Him. And so Father, I just pray now, as the triumphant Holy Spirit has been poured out and given to the church to make disciples, I pray that by the power of the Spirit, Lord, that would take place in our own lives and with our children and our neighbors and coworkers. And so teach us, Lord, from your Word. Help us to understand the role of your moral law, the role of the Ten Commandments in the Christian life. Would you guard us, Lord, from easy believism? Would you guard us from the error of antinomianism? Father, would you help us to say what the reformers, that we're saved by faith alone, but not by a faith that is alone. And thank you for giving us, Lord, something that is clear, a way to express our faith and our love for you. So, Lord, we pray for the obedience of faith in our own lives, and among the nations, we ask in Jesus' name. Amen. Exodus 20. And God spoke all these words, saying, I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or serve them. For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not hold him guiltless who takes his name in vain. Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male servant, or your female servant, or your livestock, or the sojourner who is within your gates. For in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, the sea and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. You shall not covet your neighbor's house. You shall not covet your neighbor's wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor's. Now when all the people saw the thunder and the flashes of lightning and the sound of the trumpet and the mountains smoking, the people were afraid and trembled. And they stood far off and said to Moses, You speak to us and we will listen, but do not let God speak to us lest we die. Moses said to the people, Do not fear, for God has come to test you, that the fear of Him may be before you, that you may not sin, The people stood far off while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was. So we will pick up where we left off and I want to keep emphasizing and making it abundantly clear that the Ten Commandments are not a punishment that God afflicts His people with, but a gift He blesses them with. And as we're going to see that we need to remind ourselves that God is not giving these ten words, the Ten Commandments, to be a ladder by which His people climb that they might come to Him or earn salvation. The Bible nowhere teaches that. It's only when people who don't understand God's character or His grace or His mercy or His willingness to save wretched sinners, it's only when they don't understand how good He is that they take His good law and they turn it into a means by which they somehow climb up to Mount Zion. The Bible nowhere even infers that. Okay, that these are gifts that God gives to His children to protect them, to guide them. They're guardrails, right? Kevin DeYoung in his book on the Ten Commandments says nobody ever curses guardrails when they're driving up the switchbacks or driving down switchbacks in a very perilous, mountainous highway. No, we're thankful. They keep us on track. And so I want to keep reiterating, right, when we hear commands, So often, we just assume that they're given from some authority who wants to just stick his thumb over us and wants to lord over his reign. That's not God. And we saw last week, and we'll probably keep reminding ourselves, Exodus 20 always follows Exodus 19. Never read them Exodus 20 and then Exodus 19. God delivers His people out of slavery. Why? So they can be slaves to Him? Yes. but he's a good master. Actually in Exodus 21 God gives one of the most beautiful pictures between master and slave and it has to do with an awl or a big nail if you will and a hammer and a door and a master and a slave. Does anyone know what I'm referring to? Right, and so here's the situation. Yes, slavery did exist in Egypt, right? And God is actually going to use this picture of something that has been imposed into the world through sinful men, slavery. Don't let people say, oh, the Bible's always about slavery. That's just one of the most useless arguments in all the world, but it seems to be something they always go back to. And so here God is taking a structure that has been imposed into a fallen world by wicked men, and he's actually going to redeem it. And so Moses says, right, what does it look like to love your God and to love your neighbor? He says that when there is a relationship between a master and a slave, and at the end of seven years when the slave has served his term, If he wants to stay with his master because he says to himself, I am far better off to be with this loving, gracious master than to be on my own, I will come to him and I will say, I will freely be yours because I love you and you have a beneficent, benevolent reign. I'm going to show my submission to you and that you are better to me as a master than I am on my own as my own master. Take this all, drive it through my ear to the door." Now, yeah, I don't get all the cultural background to that, but it's an amazing picture of what we are to be with God, right? Paul in Romans 1, you know how he identifies himself? Paul, a slave or a servant, doulos. Bond-servant, that's my favorite. Right, yeah, he's the apostle, but even before that, he's the slave. And so, read Exodus 19, read Exodus 21. These are beautiful pictures of God's rule and reign over his people. Let me quote the de Young quotation to you again. He says, the way to find moral instruction is not by listening to your gut, but by listening to God. This destroys post-modernism and most religious people. Most religious people come to their conclusions or they live out their life by what they feel. I received actually an email from a Mormon person this week who is just saying how unfair a lot of the things that Christians believe seem to her. But she's not going to the scriptures. I feel a good God would never do that. Well, you could say that. A good God would never give laws to his people. He would just let them live as they saw fit. Well, you know what? That kind of did happen in the book of Exodus. When they forgot God, you can read it in Exodus 32. And the people broke out into a massive orgy. And it was derisive, not only to God's holy name, but even their enemies heard of it and were mocking. So God's laws are good. You who are parents, you love your kids. We teach our kids, don't run into busy streets. Sometimes they forget that. It happened on Friday and Sammy almost died. But we told her, these laws are for your good, honey. When we told you not to run into a street, it's not because we want to restrict you. It's because you almost got run over by a car. Right? Like I screamed out. I hope Chris didn't hear. I screamed out like crazy. Or don't touch that. Red is a nice intriguing color, but it's not good on a stove. Don't touch that. Don't take candy from strangers. Like you're not giving this because you want to lord it over them. You want to protect them. Hey, they're your children. That's the context of Exodus 19 following. God loved these people and he brought them out of the tyranny of Egypt. And he says this is what it looks like to live in relationship to a good, law-giving God. Okay, so if you want tyranny, listen to that inner voice. You want tyranny, follow your heart. You want freedom, run to God and read his word. Okay? There's no more slavishness in this world than people who cast off the Lord. Right? Psalm 2. They rage against the Lord and against His Messiah saying what? Let us burst their bonds and cast away their cords. In the ESV it's alliterated. Burst bonds, cast cords. Right? They're raging against Him. And they're the most enslaved people in the world. You want to see an enslaved nation? Canada and the United States are becoming increasingly slaved to all kinds of tyranny. Why? Because they would not have the Lord God rule over them. You want to see slavery? Read the book of Judges. They would not have the Lord or His commands rule over them. And so the Lord says, I will give you a taste of what you want. Okay? So, don't listen to your inner gut. The heart is what? Deceitful. It is incurable. It is wicked above all things, Jeremiah 17 says. Don't follow your heart. Lead your heart with God's Word. Your heart will always lead you astray. The Word of God will always lead you to freedom and to life and to liberty. The way to find moral instruction is not by listening to your gut, but by listening to God. Well, how do you listen to God? He speaks. And He speaks clearly to us in His Word. If we want to know right from wrong, if we want to know how to live the good life, if we want to know how to live in a way that blesses our friends and our neighbors, we'd be wise to do things God's way, not like Frank Sinatra. Does anyone know that song? I did it my way. He's got a great voice. And that man is probably suffering in eternal torment. Because that was his life's motto. I read a biography or I flipped through it quickly. I was bored at the library. That man was wicked beyond belief. Don't let old blue eyes make you think that he was a good moral man because he lived 50 to 100 years ago. He was a philandering, filthy... Anyways, he did it his way. And he died in slavery. The Ten Commandments have fallen on hard times. Right, if you were to ask most Christians, I won't embarrass us this morning, but if I were to say, what are the Ten Commandments? You don't even have to get them in the right order. My guess is that most of us would not be able to list six or more. That's a guess. And I'm not trying to guilt us, I'm just saying they've fallen on hard times. In most Reformed churches, they've taken down icons and pictures and stuff like that, but in a lot of Reformed churches, they will have Some things on the walls. Anyone know? Is it true? Do you have the Ten Commandments in the churches on the walls? Or somewhere in the sanctuary? They read them out every Lord's Day. Presbyterians, you listen to R.C. Sproul, I know they would have them there. And again, oh you religious people. Okay, you can take that. But my kids could say that about the good laws that I have of our house. Oh, eat your vegetables. Oh, don't like intoxicate yourself with sugar. No, like, I love you. You can put that creepy voice to anything and make it sound good. You can put scare quotes on the Ten Commandments. But the scriptures never portray them that way. And so I really think we as Christians need to recover these. I really do. Not in a legalistic, salvation-earning way, but in a way that actually shows and embodies what it means to love God and to love our neighbor. I have a quote here. from Jeremiah, and I'm gonna read it, because they began to get the Ten Commandments wrong. God's laws, his ordinances. And do understand, you can sort of do like the Google Maps zoom out. So Jesus does summarize them with two. He crystallizes them, distills them, right? Love God, love neighbor. I would say that's the two tablets. And then God sort of distills all those other seven and 113 into 10, right? Because there's more than 10. But if you really want to get the gist of what it means to live in covenant with God, it would be these 10. And then Exodus 21 begins to get into specifics. Like, you see your neighbor's donkey? and it's hurt, go and help it. If you see it in a pit, go and do something, right? Like don't collect more interest, don't collect, don't do that. But it's basically, this is don't covet, or don't harm, or don't murder, or don't commit adultery, right? There's tons of laws that get specific on the 10. Okay, so take all the laws, and then you can summarize them in 10, and then for those of us who have trouble with 10, Jesus summarizes them in two. Okay, but knowing the 10 is quite helpful. The more specific we can be, the better. Oh yeah, I just need to love God. Well, what good is it if I'm like, I just need to love my wife? Well, what does that look like? Well, here's, get her flowers, help her out. I had to remember yesterday, compliment, like honestly, I just forgot, like, oh honey, you're doing a great job. I forgot that. Oh no, a good husband just loves his wife. Yeah, but what does it look like? Like, help us out. And that's what the Ten Commandments are for. God redeemed them, and this is how they show now, if their hearts have been regenerated. Right? To say, oh yeah, I just love my wife. Well, if I really do love my wife, I'll want tangible ways to express that. And if we really do love God, and really do love our neighbor, there will be tangible ways of expressing. Well, Israel forgot that. They began to play fast and loose with God's law. And this is antinomianism in the Old Testament. What does antinomianism mean? The law doesn't matter. It's not important. We're against the law. Let us sin that grace might abound. God gave us the sacrificial system. Listen to God's rebuke to a church, oops, to an Israel that's saying grace, grace, grace, grace, but they've misdefined or redefined grace. It's like in a show I won't watch anymore, it's called The Princess Bride. You know, and there's this scene, the guy keeps saying, inconceivable! And then, you know, the guy says, I do not think you know what that word means. And I would say that with a lot of Christian churches. They use the grace card a lot, and I don't think they know what grace means. Thus says Yahweh of Hosts, the God of Israel, add your burnt offerings to your sacrifices and eat the flesh. For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, so now he's referring now to Exodus 20 that we just read. For in the day that I brought them out of the land of Egypt, I did not speak to your fathers or command them concerning burnt offerings and sacrifices, but this commandment I gave them. Obey my voice, and I will be your God, and you shall be my people. And walk in all the way that I command you, that it may be well with you. Do we want it to be well with us? Husband, do you want it to be well with your wife? You do well. to live in a wise covenant with her. Kids, do you want it to be well with you in the land and to live long and to have harmony in your house? These commands are good, right? This is what we think. When I read this, I'm like, oh, yep, here it is. God's saying you need to be good and then I'll accept you. No, he's speaking to his covenant people. Do you want it to go well? And I'm not saying that this doesn't mean you'll ever get sick or you won't ever have persecution. Do you want to have a right relationship with God? then do what he says because you love him. And if you have a hard time doing what he says, the question you should be asking yourself is, do I love him? Is his law written on my heart? Are his commands burdensome to me? If I do it always gritting my teeth and complaining and mumbling and murmuring like the Israelites did in the wilderness, that should be a red siren. Maybe I'm just religious, but I don't love God. Because as Nathan taught many weeks ago from John 14 and 15, Jesus says, if you love me, you'll keep my commands. Keep interrupting myself. But they did not obey or incline their ear, but walked in their own wisdom or counsel. I think the Hebrew words etza could be wrong, but that's also in Psalm 2, right? The nations, they take counsel together. It goes against Psalm 1. Where do we take counsel? Not in the wicked, but in the word of God, right? Blessed is the man who neither walks, stands, or sits in the counsel of the wicked, or the mocker, the scoffer, okay? So they began to take their counsel elsewhere. but walked in their own counsels and the stubbornness of their own evil hearts." Jeremiah, like Deuteronomy, is all about the heart. They went backward and not forward. From the day that your fathers came out of the land of Egypt to this day, I have persistently sent all my servants the prophets to them. Can I just give you a little bit of a... Most people, when they think of prophets, they're like, oh, tell me the future. That's not Old Testament prophets. They're covenantal enforcers. They always went back to Moses, right? When Elijah goes before Ahab, he's not like... I get it, there's the odd little story, but by and large, the prophets go and they don't say, here, let me give you some awesome vision of the future. No, they're actually, you need to go back to the old ancient ways, Jeremiah 6.16, and you need to repent. You need to walk humbly with your God. Most people think of prophets like, oh, awesome, tell me the future. No, actually, prophets primarily reminded of the past, because the people had began to swerve and deviate from God's straight and narrow way. I persistently sent all my prophets to them day after day, yet they did not listen to me or incline their ear but stiffen their neck. They did worse. than their fathers. Simply put, they forgot the ancient paths, where the good way is. I would say that the Christian church probably would fit into this. It's unbelievable how far the church has strayed from this notion of seeing obedience as a good thing. Most Christians and most churches, the Ten Commandments, they probably don't know what to think about them. Not only have they forgotten them, but they're I don't know, that sounds just legalist, isn't it? Didn't like Paul teach about grace? I would think a lot of churches would think that. If you ask the Ten Commandments, I guarantee that most of them would start formulating in their mind, this is probably a Pharisee or a legalist who's talking to me. I just think that the church has forgotten that. The old ancient ways. And we've used religious language and we've perverted grace. What do you guys think about that? It's kind of quiet here. Maybe I'm stepping on. I think as I really agree that neglecting the law of God, it really does show us in a sense the power of God. Can you say that again nice and loud? That furnace is really loud. That's golden. The majority of it and the emphasis picking up from chapter 12. Okay, so what Nathan has said is that the law shows us the how of love. Okay? And yet, the love precedes the law. Precisely. And it enables one, if you've got your eye on the lawgiver, and you've got your heart on the lawgiver. Perfect. And you're going to conform yourself to those principles. And yeah, I really think When we get off to put the law first, in a sense, that matter of stone, then it really does become a ministry of condemnation to us. But when we apply the law as a way of loving God, then it is actually truly the life that it was intended to be. Yeah, the law doesn't produce love. It expresses it. And so as you're talking, I'm like, who can I pick on? And so I decided to pick on John. So two people are driving down south towards Raymond. One is extraordinarily happy and joyful, and the other is grumpy. John is joyful, he's driving to go see his wife, and he can't wait to express his love to her. Perhaps I'm going or something. It's because I have to go and do something. And what's the difference? They're both driving to go see Justine. But John loves her and he has his eye on her. And that journey there is not arduous. I always think of Nathan when he was dating Hannah. I don't think it was a chore for him to drive half an hour to go see her. And even for us as husbands, sometimes it can be like that. If we forget how much we love our wives, it's like, oh, dishes. I guarantee you weren't thinking that when you were engaged to her. Where is that picture? Huh? Where is that picture? Yeah, text it to me and we'll throw it up on the screen here. No one knows what we're talking about. Neither do you need to. All right, so I was doing the dishes one day when Nathan came. And I was just saying how, you know, how much I love my wife. And so we staged it, and I was like, I did like a, oh, like I was, I even had hair back then, it was glorious. And so it just looked like I was toiling for my wife, and Nathan even did it in like sepia or whatever the black and white is. And it was this picture. But in a very real sense, if there's love, right, there could be a guy doing dishes, quote unquote, for his wife who's grumbling and murmuring, and there can be a guy who's doing dishes for his wife because he just loves her. Okay, so I do think, Nathan, you've touched on it. And we dealt with that a couple Sundays ago as well, both with Nathan's study and then the one after it, out of Matthew 22, right? When we summarize the law as love of God and love of neighbor. But do understand that love is not absent of loss. Just get the order right. Make sure that the law isn't driving the love, that the love is pulling the law. Kind of touching on what you said, that commandments have fallen on hard times. I completely agree with you. I remember asking a pastor very frankly once, what's the hardest book in the New Testament to preach? And he said, oh, a lot about James. He said, for New Covenants, evangelical Christian churches, the book of James is a very hard book to preach at because it almost pulls you back to that concept. And again, you get the order reversed. You're thinking, okay, well, I need to follow and be the book of James to be a Christian. Absolutely, you're putting, like you said, that heart before you, of course. But again, the Bible's kind of divided into how do I come to God? And the book of James is saying, once I'm here, what do I do? Thank you for that. So yeah, it's very, very difficult. Oh, that's what I was smiling about. He called it a right straw-y epistle. And yet James has the audacity to describe the law as the perfect law of? Righteousness, but also liberty. And so that's it too, right? We have to just make sure we're reading James rightly and not pitting him against Paul, which is what a lot of people love to do. But read rightly within the canon, as Blake says, James is a great book, right? It's basically proverbial wisdom for new covenant believers who have been justified by faith, right? And then he goes on to say, but this is nothing new, citing Abraham and even Rahab and others, right? Prove it, right? So James is actually not the scary book it should be, but you are right. I bet you most churches have a hard time. Should we preach through James or will we be seen as legalists? But James should always be read in tandem with a book like Galatians. And they do not contradict or oppose each other, they complement each other. And you need to know the situation into which James is writing versus the situation into which Paul is writing to the Galatians. But I would say, like Israel of old, the New Covenant community, the church, we've forgotten where the good way is. I don't know if anyone took me up on my, what's the word, not offer, on my encouragement to memorize them, or at least to know them. But I want to encourage you, even this week, if you forgot, that's okay. But go back and just read Exodus 20 a whole bunch of times, and just be able to summarize them. That's why this catechism is actually quite helpful. Just list some. Here's 10, right? And here's the scriptural reference. See, this is why I always plug my computer, and it always turns off for some reason. Like, I don't know what it wants from me. Like, I'm touching the ID and I can't enter my password. Oh, there we are. Very good. Thankfully though, judgment for Israel was not Yahweh's final word to her. For I will restore health to you and your wounds I will heal, declares the Lord. Why? I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you. So maybe we have strayed from the ancient ways. But the ancient ways always lead us back to the Lord. Right? They always lead us back home. Okay? And so here's the Lord pleading with His people, return. Like even in the book of Hosea, return. Return to Me. Okay? And so Jeremiah goes on to use language reminiscent of the Exodus, where Yahweh will rescue His people out of bondage. Not from Egypt this time. but from Babylon, and he will bring them safely into the promised land again, where he would again make a covenant with the people to be their God. And I'm not trying to get highfalutin on you, but the new covenant is almost like a reenactment of the old. Okay, and so what God did is he rescued his people out of their bondage to slavery, but he did not rescue them and bring them into the promised land and leave them without a covenant. He brings them in and then he says, this is how you are to relate with me in the land. The kingdom according to Vaughan Roberts and Grahame Goldsworthy is God's people in God's land, under God's rule, experiencing God's blessing. That's great. So God makes them his people, he brings them into his land, but then he gives them his law or covenant that they might experience His blessing. And so what I want to say is that if God in the old covenant rescued them from slavery and then gave them covenantal commands, we should see the same in the new. He rescues us not out of the slavery of Egypt or Babylon, out of the slavery of this world. As you read the New Testament, Babylon and Egypt are symbols of this world system. And so we've been saved out of that slavery, out of that bondage to the world, and the Promised Land is not Palestine, but it's actually the inheritance of a new heavens and a new earth that is broken in in the person of Christ. But God has also given us law, and he writes it on our hearts, right? The book of Hebrews quotes Jeremiah 31. God says, I am going to write my law on their heart. And the question I'm asking you, and you should be asking is, what is the law he writes on our hearts? Some people would say the Ten Commandments. I agree with that now. I would say that that's God's moral law that transcends time, and everybody has it. But to write it on their heart doesn't mean they know it, it means they love it. Remember the heart. The heart is the place of affections. When I became a Christian, it's not like, oh, now I know there's a God, or oh, now I know adultery's wrong. I always knew that. But now it's actually at a heart level, a convictional level. It's a part of my fabric, and to actually do those things now is to sin against God. And that's what I think Paul is saying, whether it's in Romans 2 or in Galatians. When God writes His law on our hearts, He reveals it at a heart level. We now want to obey God from the heart. Israel had the law. The problem is that their heart was wrong. And so that's what Jeremiah 31 is saying. The law was good. like Romans 7, the problem is your heart. And so a time is coming, and I'm going to give you a new heart. And I'm going to write my law on your heart, which is what I think Paul says in 2 Corinthians 3. Yes? So I have a Presbyterian friend, and he thinks that you break the Second Amendment if there's any depiction of Christ. And I would say if you try to depict the Father physically, that makes sense. I'm not completely sold on the Christ one because he's a man. I mean, I would not. I grew up in Catholic school, so I would never deify it the way they do. Especially the way of Jesus. But what are your thoughts on that? Depicting Jesus like in movies? Yeah. We can look a little bit more at that next week, but quickly I would say, one, you need to have a biblical theology of what's going on here, because, and I'm going to say this reverently, that God, in Genesis 1 and 2, made idols, representations of himself. Okay, the Hebrew word selam and, oh, I forgot the other one, right? In his likeness and in his image, those Hebrew words are used in the Old Testament to idols. So there's a wrong imaging and a right imaging. And so in a very real sense, God did make an image of himself. But that's the only one. that is not idolatrous. And so Jesus, so here's our biblical theology, he made man, Adam. Well, Christ is the true Adam, he's the true man. And so God himself, so I don't know what he looks like, but we have to be careful of saying, well, we can't imagine that Jesus was a man. Well, God brought the eternal son into the world. God was imaged as a human, just like in, oh, careful, that was almost, but God made an image in chapter one, And then the true, the truest essence of that is seen in the person of Christ. And so, I'm careful. I know there's, this is a Romans 14 issue, some people would say, never, I can't watch a movie, I can't read a Bible, right? A lot of kids' Bibles have pictures of Jesus. I respect that, I don't think they're off on that. However, some people would say, yeah, well, Jesus was a man, right? He wasn't an apparition, he wasn't a ghost. You know, I would just say to those people, you know, if you're having that, just make sure he's not like the white Jesus with blue eyes and blonde hair, because he probably looked, like Isaiah says, like someone you would never esteem to be a Messiah. Right? Like a stump you would trip over, you'd go, oh, what is this? Right? Like just a common Jewish-looking male. It's funny, actually. It's kind of like a movement. Oh yeah, you imagine Jesus walking on water. You imagine in your mind, hopefully, a guy. Colossians 1, Hebrews 1. He's that exact imprint. We can look at that word after. It's character in the Greek. The snake that's lifted up. The heel of the finger. Look to it. Look upon it. also take that too far with the iconography. Right. Anything that is perhaps good, righteous, and honest, Satan is going to take it upon itself and convert it. So we have to be careful. We don't go to two unwise extremes and say, well, we can't have any because the Bible still has them. But we also have to be careful that we're We can look a little more at that next week, Matt, and we can even look at both perspectives. Is it already? It's 10.20. Okay, well I will speed up a little bit more. I was trying to get at Jeremiah 31. Maybe just go to the website, read the notes, and you'll see where I'm getting at. Is that just as there's a law that God gives his people in the Old Covenant, understand that there's a law he gives his people in the New Covenant. Okay, and there'll be disagreements. Okay, but understand we're not lawless. And as Nathan drove us to Romans 13, understand that this is a good, this is the perfect law of love. And it says, love summarizes, actually brings under the headship. You know when you're making your lists and you put something at the very top of the column? That's the Greek word, anikaphaleiao. You summarize it, you put it at the very top, right? Groceries and then everything under it. Chores, everything under it. And this is what I think Paul is saying is, love and then all the laws underneath of it. Okay? But law, it doesn't just say love and then it's blank. It says love and then has all the laws under it that sums it up, brings it under its head. Sorry, Nathan. Okay. So yeah, think through that, read through the notes, maybe there'll be a little more discussion. But understand that if we have a hard time, wanting to keep the law, let alone keeping it, it may actually be like the engine light on an engine. It's like something could be wrong. And God keeps saying, if you have a hard time doing and loving me, or loving me and keeping my law, it's probably because your heart is off. And do a little bit of a spiritual checkup. Let's pray. Father, we want to thank you for your word. And Lord, we pray that you would help us to say with the psalmist, oh, how I love your law, that your law is an expression of your goodness and your kindness and your rule and your reign. And help us, Lord, to guard ourselves against even that idolatrous habit, Lord, to foist upon you images of ourself even, or images of what a ruler is to us. Help us to run to your scriptures and to see that that you are kind and compassionate and forgiving and just and holy and gracious, and all these are in perfect harmony. And help us, Lord, ultimately to see what your reign looks like in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ. So Father, just help us to think through this as a church, and Lord, help us to seek to keep your commands because we love you. May we be blessed and a blessing to this world we ask in Jesus' name, amen.