I think the counter's going, looks like, yep, hello. Facebook, and if you're watching this later on YouTube, hello, YouTube. Welcome to our weekly Saturday evening gathering from six to seven here at the Household of Faith in Christ. We're gonna have a discussion on 3 John, the very end of 3 John today, so if you wanna grab your Bibles and get ready to read along here in a moment, I would encourage you to do that. You can follow us on Facebook, obviously. We have a YouTube channel. You search for The Household of Faith in Christ on YouTube, you'll find it that way. And I thought we'd have it ready for launch at this point. It's not quite ready, but pretty soon we're gonna have a website where we're gonna archive all of our messages and have blogs and other sorts of things that hopefully would be edifying to you. So once that's ready, hopefully within the next few weeks, at least a beta test version of it be ready to put out there and you can find us there as well. Anyway, without further ado, I'm gonna have Angela open us in prayer, and then I'll have a sermon called Shackin' Up. And we'll have a discussion following that, and you're encouraged to participate in the discussion in the comments section, and we'll incorporate those as best as we can during our time together. Our Father and our God, we thank you, Father, for another week of blessings, Blessings of protection and provision, blessings of safety. We thank you for gathering us together this day, Father. We thank you for the privilege of worshiping you, of learning more of you. We thank you for the privilege to seek your face, Heavenly Father, and to be in relationship with you in a deeper and more meaningful way. We just pray, Father, that you would accomplish that through the teaching this evening. Lord, that we would know you better than we knew you before. And we ask that you bring to this teaching, Lord, people who will be touched by it, people who need a touch of you, who need to know you. And keep away, Father, anything that would be harmful, any person that would intend to bring harm, any spirit that would intend to bring damage. We just pray that away. And I just ask this to be a blessed time together. For our blessing and to your glory, in the matchless name of our Lord Jesus Christ, amen. Amen, thank you. If you're joining us a little bit late and you want to grab your Bible, the message is going to be referencing 3 John. So if you want to grab that, open up your Bible there. Not chapter 3 of the Gospel of John, but the 3rd Epistle of John. Now, last couple of times that we walked through God's Word together, we were traveling along with the Apostle John as he wrote a letter to Gaius, a disciple of Christ, who was faithful to walking in the truth. This letter that we read is now known as Third John, or the Third Epistle of John, or sometimes Three John, particularly in Europe, it's often referred that way. It is the shortest of the Bible's 66 books, contains just over 200 words, and six of these words are the word truth. At another time, the word true comes up. John is committed to the truth, and he wants to make sure that all Christ's followers are also committed to the truth, knowing the truth, believing the truth, proclaiming the truth. living the truth. Now, who is Gaius? We can't be sure. The name Gaius does appear in the New Testament a number of times, but it's probably several different men named Gaius who are identified in the scriptures. It was a very common name in the Roman Empire, kind of like in today's America, the names James, Robert, Michael, very common. But we do know that this particular Gaius He was beloved by John. We know this because the letter uses the word beloved four times. And these uses of beloved actually shape the letter for us. They provide for us the section breaks as we read, which is one reason why I prefer the translations that keep the Greek there and translate it into English, take the Greek word and translate it as beloved. as opposed to dear friend or something like that, which makes it a little bit less clear where the section breaks are in the letter. But anyway, in covering the first 12 verses of the letter, the last couple of weeks, we saw a familiar theme from John. Truth, it's what's for dinner. Truth, the other white meat. What's, or where's the truth? Remember that, where's the beef? Where's the truth? Just truth it. You deserve the truth today. Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief the truth is. Snap, crackle, truth. I'd walk a mile for the truth. Finger lickin' truth. Give me 22 minutes, I'll give you the truth. Traffic and truth together on the eights. This is John's thing. The truth. Have you noticed on social media how each individual kind of seems to have their go-to thing? You know, one person, it's cute and cuddly posts over and over. A different person, it's, you know, political, polarizing political posts over and over. Another person, it's, you know, cynical and snarky posts over and over. Well, the Apostle John had social media way back when, he would have posted about the truth over and over. It is his thing. For example, in 2 John, which we studied just, I don't know, a month or so ago, he warns against helping false teachers who are enemies of the truth. And then in this letter in 3 John, he commends those who help teachers of the truth. And so now, we're gonna read the final few verses of 3rd John, and then we're gonna talk about the truth as it's impacting us right now, in the here and now in 2021. So, hopefully you've already grabbed your Bibles and have 3rd John open. So let's look at verses 13 through 15. And if you're confused by me saying that there are 15 verses in the book, You might be confused if you're reading the NIV or the King James or something like that. Some of our Bibles say that there are 14 verses. Some say that there are 15 verses. But this is merely a numbering question. All of the words are the same. There's just a different way of handling the verse of occasion. It's one of those really very rare oddities. But it has absolutely no bearing on the content or the meaning of the letter, okay? Don't be led astray here. Keep in mind, when John wrote the letter, there were no verse numbers. The verse numbers are not inspired text. These numbers were added more than 1,000 years later to make it easier for us to reference and study the Bible. So even though what I'm gonna be reading to you are the words from the NIV, which does not have the number 15 printed on the page, I'm saying that there are 15 verses pretty much only because it's what my Greek text shows me and it's what the NASB and the ESV and a lot of other translations have as well, the English translations. But again, I can't emphasize enough, no worries. The words, essentially all the same. So beginning with verse 13. I have much to write you, but I do not want to do so with pen and ink. 14, I hope to see you soon, and we will talk face to face. 15, peace to you. The friends here send their greetings. Greet the friends there by name. This is a short passage, but it is still the inspired word of God, breathed out by God, therefore inerrant, infallible, the perfect, rule and guide for faith and life practice, those of years to hear, let them hear. And let us pray. Father, we ask your blessing upon this message. We ask that we would share John's concern for the truth, your concern that we be committed to the truth, that we recognize it, that we defend it, that we advocate for it, and we live our lives by it. Help us to more deeply understand and apply your truths to our life and our situation through what you have preserved for us in your word that we study here and discuss here this evening. We ask that you clear from our mind distractions and concerns, that we stay focused on you, your word, your truth. Help us to feel the presence of your Holy Spirit, Father. I had a profound sense of us having the Holy Spirit among us there for a moment. I'm not sure exactly what that is. The Holy Spirit's always among us, but I particularly had a profound feeling of it tonight. So, praise God. So, you mostly like me, right? Some of you would even say that you love me. Some of you. I hope, right? I hope you love me or at least like me because I am going to need your goodwill this evening and in the weeks that will follow. I'm not looking for a fight. I'm not. But I think a fight has found me. And it has found you too, whether you know it or not. there is a fight in the church going on. And it's not the regular traditional fights, historical fights along typical denominational lines. This is a civil war kind of a fight. This is evangelical versus evangelical, Baptist versus Baptist, professing conservative Christian versus professing conservative Christian. And the stakes are rather high. And I'd like you to think about where you stand. To think about where the Apostle John would stand if he were standing in the spot where I find myself standing here tonight. What am I talking about? Over the last year to 18 months, it could be any one of a number of issues, right? big splits and divisions in the body of Christ about how to grapple with certain things, but this fight actually precedes that and actually provides a bit of a foundation for some of the problems that allow these other problems to seep in unchecked so horribly in the last year plus. What am I talking about? I'm talking about the shack. I know. It's just a movie. Before that, it was just a book. And before that, it was just a collection of imaginative thoughts from the mind of William Paul Young. But the shack has become much more. than this, and not because it raked in tens of millions of dollars in the box office and has done well as a DVD, not because the book was at the top of the bestseller list, selling more than 22 million copies, although that is a lot of books. The Shack has sold more copies than The Godfather, Jaws, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, More copies than the Grapes of Wrath, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Old Man and the Sea, The Exorcist, Catch-22, The Cat in the Hat, The Joy of Sex, to name just a few. Now the shack, it has achieved historic Success, but not as much success as who moved my cheese, right? So be thankful for that. Now, despite all the commercial success, perhaps you don't know the story. So in a nutshell, here it is. A little girl is abducted. She's taken to a shack in the woods and killed. And her father, Mackenzie, or Mack for short, he's devastated. Can you imagine? Can you imagine something worse than your innocent child being tortured and murdered? There's a certain Christ-likeness in that, isn't there? The father sending his innocent child to be tortured and murdered. Well, Mac, as you might imagine, he has some questions for God. But he doesn't really go to God with these questions because He's always struggled to find a closeness with his heavenly father due to abuse that he suffered as a kid at the hands of his earthly father. And then an invitation arrives in the mail for Mac to meet Papa in the woods at the shack. the place of his deepest hurts and depressing pain. It's a pretty good setup, right? It's emotionally tugging. It is easy to connect with personally. It wrestles with questions we all grapple with at least sometimes. What will Mac find? Who will he meet? What will we learn when he goes to see Papa at the shack? Compelling questions. Through the use of a simple plot with simple characters, the author reveals his answer to really compelling and challenging questions like, why is there evil in the world? Where is God when there's tragedy? What's the meaning and the purpose of life? Are you ready for Mr. Young's answers? Are you sure? Because we're now entering the battlefield of the Civil War. Now let me start with some of the volleys that are lobbed by supporters of the book. And if you hated the book, Please bear with me because I agree with what these supporters say. The story of the shack honestly exposes the gaping raw wounds that so many of us have festering behind our facades. Now I haven't had a daughter brutally murdered, praise God. I have a son who faces significant challenges every day, and absent another miracle in his life, he always will. And you, you have your version of this story. Like Mac, I'm the survivor of abuse as a child, and you might have your version of this story. Like Mac, The person next to you, across from you, watching this across the internet with you right now, they have struggled during their life to feel closeness with God. And you probably have your own version of this story, too. This is the brilliance of the shack. Paul Young is telling your story, my story, all of our stories. so we can relate. And we read with interest, open to the possibility of a new emotional connection with God. And this is good, it's really good. The dilapidated building in the shack, the shack itself, is a metaphor for our lives. There's a metaphor in the shack for our hearts that are filled with aching, hurt, and yet filled with so much Wondrous beauty, a standing contradiction almost. I mean, this is good stuff, really good. It's very relatable, very real. I mean, the story itself is imaginative and fantastical, but the emotional chord struck, very real. In a way, we might say that Paul Young has met people where they are. This is good. It's something that we all could and should do better than we do, meet people where they are. It's good stuff, really good. This is part of what bothers the critics. And it concerns me too. There's an old saying, when the heart and the head will follow. In the shack, Paul Young wins the heart. He offers salve for bleeding blisters. Every turn of the page brings a warm hug to a hurting reader somewhere. The shack is a shoulder to cry on, a bending ear that listens, a quiet friend who's there for you. And this has me on high alert, because I have the Apostle John on the other shoulder, in the other ear, and he's saying to me, as he does at the end of 3 John, peace, to you, and it's a peace that comes from true understanding. John teases us sometimes as readers, doesn't he? Sometimes he'll say that there's just so much more that he wants to say and write, but there isn't time or space. Or he wants to tell us what he has to say in person, face to face. So I'm wondering if John, if he came here right now, offered his greetings, each of us by name, what would he say? Given that Christians are arguing with Christians about this darned book and movie, What would John say about the shack? Given John's always present focus on the truth, I think I know a few things that he would point out to us. To those who tempted to say right now, hey, what's the big deal? It's only a book, it's just a movie. John would probably point out that all Authors, they have a point of view and even an agenda when they write. And the shack, it's no different. In the acknowledgements, in the back of the shack, the author says the book shows the ways in which God works. Elsewhere we read in the back of the book, back pages of the book, that it offers A magnificent glimpse into the nature of God. It offers one of the most poignant views of God and how he relates to humanity. These are theological claims. Paul Young is intending to teach about God. Who God is. what God's like, why God does what God does. It's not just a story, not ambivalent. It has a purpose. If you read it, read it seriously. If you watch the movie, watch it seriously. If I were to write a book, make a movie, and put it out there and tell you that this is a book, this is a movie about your wife, your husband, your mother, your father, your child, or anyone at all who's important to you, close to you. Well, you would read that book seriously, wouldn't you? You'd watch that movie seriously, right? Make sure they got everything correct. They didn't misrepresent the person that you care so much about, who means so much to you. They didn't lie about them, spread falsehoods about their character, what they're all about, their very nature. You take it seriously, right? Well, this is the case with the shack. And the shack is not about your spouse. It's about your creator. It's not about your parent. It's about your savior. It's not about your child. It's about your beloved king. So we're examining exactly what Paul Young says about God and seeing how it measures up to what God himself says about himself in scripture. And there's so much ground to cover, it's gonna take more than one week. So we're going to have a discussion this evening. We're going to begin our discussion this evening about it. We're going to have a string of messages actually walking through some of this and have a string of discussions therefore that follow up. So before I pause for us to begin our discussion here, let me I've done this a couple of times, I'm gonna do it now. I've mentioned this a few times. What you see here on the internet is about an hour of our time together, but we get together before six o'clock, and we hang out together after seven o'clock, and we fellowship with each other, we try to figure out how we can pray better for one another. On select Sundays, we enjoy the Lord's Supper together, and we sing songs, praise and worship songs to our Lord, Savior, and King. before and after what you see here on Facebook and YouTube. If you would like to round out some of what you do on Saturday evening with us and sing some songs of preparation to our time together or afterwards, here are some suggestions, or even throughout the week, or just generally in life, these are some good songs. But these songs go along well with the themes of what we're talking about this week and in the handful of weeks to come. In Christ Alone, Before the Throne of God Above, O church, arise. There is a fountain. O God, thou art transcendent. There's five. I'll give you five more. Now, I know I'm saying them kind of quick, but we are recording this and it'll be available later, so you just gotta jump ahead about half hour-ish, maybe a little bit less than a half hour into the video. Find this part and you can keep hitting pause and writing down the names of the songs if you want. O great God, servants of the gospel, how deep the Father's love for us. I greet thee, my sure Redeemer, Art, and a personal favorite of mine, behold our God. Anyway, let me close with a word of prayer and then we'll start a discussion. Father, we ask that you would forgive your people for being so quick to stray from the truth, so weak at recognizing what the truth even is. unfortunately. We thank you that we can count on you to reveal your truth, that you've done so in the person and work of Jesus Christ and in your written word. We ask that you would bless our time here this evening as we enter now into a time of discussion to see what those who purport to put forward biblical teachings, how faithful they are to your truth, and how well equipped we are in recognizing truth and lies. We ask that this time would truly be a time of edification and encouragement for your people, those here in this room and those who are joining us remotely via the internet. We thank you, Lord. We ask that your spirit would guide us, that you would fill our mouths with wisdom. It's in Christ's name we pray. Amen. over here they start by asking I don't know you've read the shack did you see the movie No, but I've read the book. Have you? Neither. Are you familiar with it at all? Yeah. Well, one of the beauties about how we're going to handle this is you're not going to have to have read the book or seen the movie. It might be helpful if you've seen it or read it recently, but to be honest, the way I'm going to handle things, you're not going to have to have done that. And to be clear, I'm not one who says, you know, put a hex on the book, never read it. But I'm also not encouraging you to read it or watch the movie. There's no real need to, unless after our discussion, you wanna read the book or watch the movie to recognize for yourself some of the things we're gonna talk about and maybe learn how to better understand when somebody is pushing a worldview that may or may not be biblical. But a lot of people, they would say it's a sin even to read the book. I can't find a biblical argument that says that it's a sin to read any particular worldview put forward in the pages of a book, but we do need to have discernment and understanding, and sometimes we can't understand what we're up against, and we can't understand how to recognize certain errors if we aren't ever exposed to them. So, anyway. Well, so you've read the book, you said? It's been a while. Yeah. I did read it, yeah. Well, I'm curious, and I'm gonna ask you, well, either one of you, this is for both of you, because I kind of think I know what your answer's gonna be, but I don't know what yours is gonna be. When you first read it, first impressions? My first impression is that it's entertaining and irreverent. It's both. It's both entertaining and it's entertaining as well as irreverent towards God. A lot of things that are irreverent can be a little entertaining at times, huh? That on many of the woods that he went to see by the shack, was that supposed to be like Yeah, yeah, so and we'll get into the specifics of who all the different characters are probably next week We'll dive into that. But yeah, but the Papa character is supposed to be a you know, God the Father character in the book and in the movie for that matter, so Oh Probably Washington. Yeah, just to get up to speed with what it's all about. We have the book. Yeah, we have the book. You can read it. It's not high literature. It's a quick read. It's pretty close to Poptripe. I mean, it's nothing really special. But yeah, Poptripe sells a lot of books, apparently. Like I said, it's a simple story, simple plot line, simple characters. This is not classical literature by any stretch. Anyway, your first impression? It's been a while. My first impression was, I don't see what the big deal is. I was like, to be honest, it didn't even, I think this is God's blessing for me when something is not Biblically sound I don't remember a lot of it and people were like, oh, what about this? What about that? I was like really I don't even remember that I think it's actually a blessing God's protection on me because I'll read scripture and I'll remember stuff and I'll you know Be able to quote a scripture or whatever and it sinks in and it just becomes part of me What when it and I really do think it's God's grace on me. I honestly do I that's the only explanation I have and Well, I've got a few notes of things that I pulled from different parts of the storyline in the book and the characters and some of the quotes from the book and stuff to kind of give us some fodder for discussion. So, and if you've got a copy of The Shack and you want to check out what I'm saying and proof text me and see if I'm, you know, properly quoting and properly representing, I'm gonna give you page numbers. So on page 113 of The Shack, The light bulb goes off for Mac, and he finally understands that, quote, everything was about him, about the human race, end quote. Now, previous to his recent fall from favor, Max Locato, was sometimes unfairly dismissed as being a not very deep theologian. But even the title of one of Max's books does better than Young does on this point, in my opinion. The book title I'm thinking about from Max Locato is It's Not About Me. Why do I say that and what do you guys think? Would you agree? I agree. I think it's not about me. I think that Can you maybe repeat the quote? Well, the quote was, Mac realizes, the light bulb goes off in his head and he realizes everything was about him, Mac, and about the human race. Everything's about him and the human race. Without context, I would say that that sounds kind of eh. Like, I don't know. And that's a very good point. I mean, obviously that's just one line, and so there's no context. That line is representative of a thread and a theme that runs throughout the pages of the shack. So it was pulled as a representative sample. So is it kind of in a way saying that, it is a theological statement, is it not? Absolutely. So would it be saying that, how do I put it? that it's about our personal relationship with Christ? Because, I mean, I would agree with that. It is about that. So, what is about him? Well, with the book title I stole from Max Locato, when Max Locato writes a book and says, it's not about me, what is he arguing for? It's not about me, it's about what? It's like a basic Sunday school question, I guess. It's about God. It's about God, it's about Christ. And that's something that the shack swings and misses on repeatedly So Now, in the messages that I'm gonna share in the coming weeks, I'm not gonna spend time on this particular character, because you can't cover it all. I promise you, there are so many examples of heresy, and strangeness, and cultural appropriation that's not Christian. There's so many weird things going on in the shack. You could do 52 messages on it, probably. But, for the purpose of our discussion, There's a person, a representation of wisdom as a person who is Hispanic. They're trying to be very PC, by the way. All the characters are different ethnic groups throughout the shack. And this Hispanic representation of wisdom, she says on page 155, so many believe that it is love that grows, but it is the knowing that grows, and that love simply expands to contain it. Love is just the skin of knowing. It's been a while since I've read the book, but I know that the way the Bible sums up love for God is to obey him. I mean, God doesn't even put love for him in terms of emotion. He puts love for him in terms of obedience. So you can't really love him if you don't understand what he requires. So if you understand in truth what he requires and you're obedient to him, then our love for him is growing as we mature in that obedience. But probably what he's saying in that quote is you just get a bunch of knowledge and the more knowledge you get, the more loving you are. Which is ridiculous. The Bible says that fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge. Exactly. Love is not in that statement anywhere. And the Apostle John would have particularly had his antenna go up on a quote like this because of something that was in the early formative stages of Gnosticism. The early formative stages of Gnosticism. Special insights, special knowledge, that's what's going to improve you, that's what's gonna save you. I don't think there's a creature that has more knowledge actually than the devil. And I mean, depending on your view of how old the earth is, let me put it this way. Even if you believe in a young earth, that means the devil's been around for a few thousand years. He's got a lot of knowledge, in other words. Way more than any person. So how can you square that quote with the number one enemy of God who has more knowledge, really, than any human being? So Gnosticism and that whole idea is a problem. It's heretical, as you've pointed out. And it totally ignores one of the more I don't know, profound, influential, conceptually anyway, verses of the Bible in 1 Corinthians chapter 13, verse eight, which talks about things passing away, including knowledge will pass away, and what's remaining then is love. But here we have a quote that says, love is just the skin of knowing. So if knowledge passes away, Does love then pass away too or is it just some sort of shriveled up skin that's left remaining? It makes it seem like love is dependent on knowledge. Didn't even come into my mind. You know what, I'm actually closer to you. I really don't remember a lot of what, because I was so offended. I think whoever wrote that needs to go back to their Bible. I don't know that they ever were in the Bible. Full disclosure, I've actually spoken to him. I had him as a guest on my radio show on the faith debate program and we discussed and I challenged him and he didn't, in my opinion, give very satisfactory answers. He used a lot of weasel words, it seemed to me, but anyway. The shack claims that parents are too broken to love their children well. That's on page 154. Now what do you think about that? It's not true at all. I think we're able to love regardless of how broken and sinful we are. And I think that Bible says we're, I mean, Bible commands us to love, no matter how broken we are, no matter how broken everyone else is. Because we're all broken. And I like how you added, you said how broken and sinful we are, because the sinful part, that sin idea is something that's absent from the shack. Stays away from that, doesn't want to bring up that three-letter word. So there's no gospel in there. No, no. Very heretical. People, if he has said people can't love perfectly, I'd be okay with that. We can't do anything perfectly, but we can do a lot of things well. So, I mean, a parent that knows the Lord, follows the love well, can love well. They just can't love perfectly. Yeah, we're able to love well or otherwise at all. We're created as an image, and he has sustained certain aspects of our image-bearing through his common grace. Otherwise, there'd be utter destruction. We would've all killed each other by now. There'd be no human race left. If God wasn't sustaining us by his common grace so that the kingdom could advance and the truth could be proclaimed, we would have given in to our sinful instincts So long ago, there would be no planet left, probably. Now Mac says that he feels shame. That's a good thing, right? On page 158, his shame is for having been judging. So he's asked, by what criteria do you base your judgments? Okay, that's a good question, right? Good question. Despite supposedly being a seminary-trained Christian, the character Mac is introduced to us as a believer who is seminary-trained. So not your average run-of-the-mill Christian, a seminary-trained Christian, and he doesn't seem to know the answer. Because the answer, by what criteria do you base your judgment, the Christian answer, of course, is? The Bible. Yes, by the word of God. That is the answer. You don't have to go to seminary to know the answer to that question. But, instead he stammers that he has no answer. He's then told that this is because, he's told, so he says, I don't have an answer to that question. And the reason he doesn't have an answer to that question, he's told, is because there is no criteria for judging. Here's a quote, judging requires that you think yourself superior over the one you judge. That's not what that means. That is not what that means. What does it say up here? That just means that you see a path of destruction and then you want to Highlight that for the person so they avoid it so that they can repent it has nothing to do with you I mean the idea of You lose a dear loved one to some horrific thing, this evil that happened. How is it going to resolve? What's going to happen? You can enter into the pain of the bad character. I can only try to imagine what that would feel like. The empathy kicks in and so you're traveling along with him on his supposed path toward healing and you're hoping it's going to resolve well. I just read it as a story. I didn't read it as any sort of study guide. But people who don't know the Bible will read it theologically. Sure. And the first question that I would ask the Mac character in response to that ridiculous answer that supposedly probably Jesus gave him in the book is then, why are you judging the person that murdered your daughter? You know, what right do you have to judge that person? And that's actually a theme that comes up in the book. And there's problems with how that theme comes up. We'll get into that. I think it might be next week's message I'm going to get in specifically how that's mishandled in the text of the shack compared to the text of the scriptures. Always remember that The Word of God is infallible. The Word of Man is 100% a different story. But that's what I meant when I said the book, it bothers me because it's so irreverent. It has the Holy Spirit giving these kinds of answers, or Jesus, it has the Trinity, giving these kinds of answers. And I also just have a problem with how they even physically embody the Trinity. That can maybe be for another discussion. But in addition to how they presented the Trinity, which I think was irreverent how they did it, they put answers in the mouth of God that it just, you just go, it just floors you. Well, you're right in the sense that if you don't know the word of God, you would believe that that's actually what God would say. Yeah! Because it's presented as that. I guess because, praise God I'm in the word, I was just like, it was just a goofy story to me. That's, um, in the, uh, Papa, you were talking about, if that is supposed to be God, the Father, And that's a second commandment violation. So there's another thing. And actually that's going to be something, I don't say it in those words, but I talk about it in next week's message. I've got next week's message basically done. The book is riddled with theological error. But there's all those insidious stuff and what can happen is it can become too through some sort of like an osmosis, we can begin to condition you to have just the slightest variation in your biblical understanding of what God teaches, who God is, and so then somebody else in another place will start to stack on that, like it can create small little fracture points if we're not. So the enemy is always looking for a premise. And expanding upon, even if you're, you know, like Dina's like, you know, I didn't really When I talk about the Civil War, I'm not kidding, what really drew my attention was a lot of supposedly evangelical, traditional, conservative theologically, churches, were using the shack as a Bible study. And they weren't doing it like we are, where we're trying to be critical thinkers and compare it to scripture. They were, what can we learn about God from the shack? and that's all it was, and my hair was on fire. And I was mentioning my concerns to other people who I had great respect for up until then, and they thought I was out to lunch. I'm like, oh my gosh. And that's when I realized we've got a problem. And then you can understand we're not basing things in the truth of God's word. All of a sudden, intersectionality and critical race theory and cultural Marxism and all of that sort of stuff can infect the church This was part of the problem that we now find ourselves in. That's why I'm focusing on it even though the movie was a few years ago and the book came out before that. We talked about judging a second ago. Well, in spite of saying that you shouldn't judge, Ironically, and there's a lot of this in the book, a lot of inconsistency, a lot of ironic inconsistencies in the book, God invites man to judge him. That's on page 160. So we shouldn't judge others, we shouldn't be judging, but we should judge God. They should read the Book of Job. Do you have anything you'd like to add to that? Wow, that might put you in your place. It's self-refuting and defeating, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, there really is nothing to say there. But there are examples, like in the book of Exodus, for example, the way that most readers would approach it, it's when the Israelites kind of turn on Moses, is how most of us read it. And they're like saying, Moses, would you bring us out here to die? We need water, we need food, what's the matter with you? We're better off in Egypt. Remember that part of the story? And then, they're gonna stone Moses. You remember that? If we properly read that and we understand what's really being said there, they're going after Moses as the mouthpiece and representative of God. They're judging God. And in doing so, they're sinning. So when the shack says that God invites man to judge him, obviously they haven't read Exodus or a whole bunch of other parts of the Bible. So. No, I mean, God invites us to have heart to hearts with him. God invites us to bear our emotion and our, and our everything out to be raw with him, but in a reverent, fearful way. Because he already knows what's on our hearts. And I think, you know, I'm reminded now of one of your favorite books, maybe your favorite book. Job. Well, yeah. And because I love that book so much because there is that realness of it. But when Job crosses the line, God puts him in his place out of love for him, like, hey, hey, hey. All right, I let you burn your mouth, but let's put this into perspective. Let me ask you some questions now. And Job's like, oh, whoa, wait a minute. I spoke and I shouldn't have. Whoa, who, yeah, you're right, who am I? But, excuse me, God does that out of love for us. Yeah, God basically says, you're gonna judge me? Alright, I guess you created the universe, right? So who did the Leviathan? Who did all of that? So I guess my point in saying that to what you're saying, yeah, Job is my favorite book because I think that demonstrates how amazing God is how he wants a true, authentic relationship with us to the point where he says, okay, get real with me, but let me give you this example in the book of Job so that we know our proper placing with one another. Let's just not forget. Get real with me, don't get rude. Exactly. Let's not forget who we are, that I am the creator, you are the creation. Yeah, I mean, the Bible's clear. The lump of clay is in no position to pass judgment on the hands of the potter. Right, the potter. screaming out at you, and was saying, no, you're wrong. How? I wrote this. Yeah. That's an interesting thing. All right, we've got time for a couple more probably. The Shack says that God would have to be worse than a human parent to send anyone to hell. Oh, yeah. One of those, I see. That's on page 162. So, well, let's see. I mentioned earlier that my initial reaction to this book was it was entertaining and yet irreverent. I saw that it would be entertaining, yet it was very irreverent. This is another, I think, point, another example of irreverence. Because I think when people say that God won't send people to hell, I think what they don't understand Actually, in a very real way, people send themselves to hell. It's a choice that they make, not something that's forced on them by God. But what I'm getting at is, I think what people don't understand about the holiness of God is that God is more holy than we can really conceptualize. And so for him, and I think I made this point before, for him to condescend himself, to take on a human body, to allow himself in a human body to be sullied by sin because that's the only way to pay for our sin. And then for any human being to look at that and say, I don't care. I don't care that you did that. I don't, you know, and sort of give God the finger. Okay, so you did that, so what? And kind of give him the finger for doing that. Say, I don't care. It is such, it is, I think it's an eternal offense. Really, it is so over the top blasphemous. to do that to a God that is more holy than we can really conceptualize. I don't, well, there's a couple of things. First of all, the spirit and the soul, the book of Ecclesiastes says whatever God does is forever. So the spirit man in us is a forever creation because whatever God does is forever. I believe that about the spirit man. Anyway, That spirit man that sins against God, I don't think you ever get done paying for that. You know, if you... Well, that's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. It's blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. If you've hardened yourself, you have so offended and blasphemed and hardened your own heart... Oops, sorry. So hardened your own heart against truth and offended and blasphemed God, that I think what happens is you have to pay for, because hell is justice and heaven is grace. Well, the people in hell are paying, they're paying wages. I mean, the wages of sin is death. They're being paid what they are owed. People in hell are being paid what they are owed. And so... Well, they also, God isn't forcing them to, to do something against their will. They don't want to be with them. Exactly. That's the other part of it too. They don't want it anyway. So God's going to give them justice and justice is you have to pay for what you've done and you have offended me and disrespected me in a manner that you can't ever get finished paying for that. You know, I see it in that aspect, that facet of that truth as well. I mean, I think they've hardened people, they've hardened their hearts so badly that they can't ever repent. That's one aspect of it. But I think the other aspect of it is, you know, you have done such a grave Act of blasphemy that you never can ever fully pay for that, you know So you have to your punishment has to go on and on and on and on because that's justice for you And so if you don't understand if you don't know I'm not saying I fully understand God's holiness But what I am saying is I have I think I have a glimpse of it And I think that that's part of the reverence that this person is missing about this book. He doesn't really understand. how holy and majestic God is. Otherwise, he wouldn't even let that, that statement in of itself is very blasphemous. He would not let that come out of his mouth. He's treating him as if he's just a man. Right, he's treating him as if he's just, you know, he's just, you know, Bob or somebody, you know. As an equal. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, he's treating him like, oh, that's just chip, you know, I mean. No, he's God, he's majestic, and he really doesn't get it. He wouldn't be removing his sandals. He wouldn't. He'd be like, that's just God. Hey God, have a seat and here's a beer. He doesn't get it. Reinforcing this idea that he has against God's judgment is, Max says that he understands the sacrificial love of the son, but he says, quote, but God's another story. Okay, well, so that's not very biblical at all. That sounds very Mormon to me. How so? I think I know what you're saying. That there are three beings and one essence. That the sun is not God is what you're saying. Which is contradictory by the way, because if you don't know, essence actually means being. Yeah, so this idea, you know, we hear this all the time about, you know, I like the New Testament God, not the Old Testament God, because a New Testament God, or the representation of what God is all about in Jesus, whether he's God or not, is this lovey-dovey, kind and friendly, you know, fuzzy, non-threatening authority figure, or whatever. And then you've got the old, angry, long-bearded, you know, railing against everybody in the Old Testament. as a complete misrepresentation of both the Old and New Testament characterizations of God. So, anyway. Well, I think maybe we'll draw to a close, at least here, online, and then we're going to continue singing some songs here, and we'll invite you to sing some songs at home. You wanna close us, or? Sure. Heavenly Father, thank you so much for this time together. Thank you for this discussion. We know that you are the truth, that your word is the truth. We thank you for it. We ask that you would cause us to be steeped in your truth, that you would illuminate the truth when we read your word. We pray that you would section off time in each in our lives so that we might take the time to be in your word and to pray to you and to allow the Holy Spirit to illuminate, to have it truly seep into our being. That it would be the very essence of us, to use Langdon's words, that we would become more like you. Thank you for everything that you've done. Thank you for your sacrifice. Thank you for your holiness. We ask that you would fill us with your truth. You are the way, the truth, and the life. It's in your name, Jesus, that we pray, amen. Amen. Oh, I didn't even ask. Anybody have anything they wanted to share? No, okay, good. Not good, but I mean, good that we didn't ignore them if they were there. If you had, I would have engaged you, you know, typing online or we would have dealt with it next week. So speaking of next week, I hope to see you about 167 hours from now. Next Saturday, six o'clock, we'll be back on Facebook. Till then, God bless.