The central theme of this podcast episode revolves around the peculiarities and complexities inherent within biblical narratives, particularly as exemplified in the story of Jonah. I am Ross Stackhouse, the founding pastor of Heaven Earth Church, and I express our desire to create a welcoming environment for those who may feel marginalized within traditional church settings. Our mission is to honor the diverse stories of individuals, recognizing that within every human narrative lies a reflection of God's overarching story. As we delve into the idiosyncrasies of the Bible, we will explore how these seemingly strange elements can illuminate profound truths about divine compassion and moral guidance. We invite you to join us as we embark on this enlightening exploration of faith, scripture, and the human experience.

The HeavenEarth Church Podcast Exists to Amplify The Conversation Happening at HeavenEarth Church.

This conversation centers around the vision to be a church that make a lasting impact in our community by building relationships with all kinds of folks, helping people know and live like Jesus together.

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Podchaser

Heaven Earth Church, under the stewardship of founding pastor Ross Stackhouse, has cultivated an ethos of inclusivity, welcoming those who often find themselves on the peripheries of traditional church communities. The church's mission is not merely to provide a space for worship, but to engage deeply with the narratives that shape the lives of its congregants.

This episode delves into the stories of individuals who have come to find solace and purpose within the community, many of whom identify as misfits or seekers of faith. By honoring their diverse experiences, the church illustrates that within each human story lies a reflection of the divine narrative. This conversation invites listeners to reflect on their own journeys, emphasizing that the church is a sanctuary for all, regardless of their past or present circumstances. It is a place where faith can be rediscovered, and where the complexities of life are met with understanding and compassion. The podcast discusses the profound and often perplexing themes found in the Bible, particularly through the lens of the story of Jonah. Pastor Ross Stackhouse tackles the inherent 'weirdness' of biblical narratives, suggesting that rather than shying away from these complexities, believers should embrace them as opportunities for deeper understanding. The episode encourages listeners to approach scripture with humility and curiosity, recognizing that the Bible is a rich tapestry of stories that reflect the diverse experiences of humanity in relation to the divine. The discussion highlights that God is not limited to the narratives we expect, and that the so-called 'weirdness' can lead to surprising revelations about love, grace, and the nature of faith. Through this exploration, the podcast aims to help listeners find a renewed sense of holiness in scripture, encouraging them to see the Bible as a living document that continues to speak to contemporary issues and personal struggles. In the exploration of biblical narratives, this episode of the Heaven Earth Church podcast invites listeners to grapple with the complexities and peculiarities of scripture, specifically focusing on the story of Jonah. Pastor Ross Stackhouse emphasizes the importance of context in understanding these ancient texts, urging congregants to look beyond superficial interpretations and engage with the deeper meanings embedded within.

The episode reveals how the story of Jonah serves as a metaphor for God's expansive love and mercy towards all people, challenging listeners to reconsider their preconceptions about who is deserving of grace. By dissecting the interactions between Jonah and the sailors, the podcast illustrates how those typically marginalized can often display profound faith and understanding, while those expected to embody righteousness may falter. This nuanced discussion aims to inspire a more inclusive and compassionate reading of the Bible, encouraging followers to embody the love of God in their own lives and communities.

Takeaways:

1. The core mission of Heaven Earth Church is to embrace individuals who feel out of place within traditional church settings.
2. Through this podcast, we delve into the narratives of those who identify as misfits rediscovering their faith journey.
3. We emphasize the importance of understanding the Bible's complexity, including its supernatural and miraculous elements.
4. As we navigate the scriptures, we aim to discern God's heart and intentions behind the text, especially in the face of its inherent weirdness.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. heavenearthchurch.org
2. youtube.com/heavenearthchurch

Welcome to Heaven Earth Church.

My name is Ross Stackhouse.

I'm the founding pastor of Heaven Earth Church.

From the beginning, our heart was to be a church for people who don't fit neatly into church.

Our heart is to meet people where they are, to learn their stories, to honor their stories.

Because in every human story is God's story.

In this podcast, you'll hear more about the people who now call Heaven Earth Church home.

Their stories, in many cases of misfits who are discovering or rediscovering faith.

If you want to know more about us, you can go to heavenorthchurch.org Otherwise, we invite you now into the story.

Hello, good people.

Brad Miller here, the producer of the Heaven Earth Church podcast.

One of the main benefits of being a part of the Heaven Earth Church community is our Sunday morning conversations taught by founding pastor Ross Stackhouse.

You can watch and participate in the Sunday morning conversation this Sunday morning, 9:30am Eastern time at YouTube.com heavenerthchurch.

The audio version of the Sunday morning conversation is available here on the podcast, which you can find at Apple Podcasts, Spotify and on the website, which is heavenearthchurch.org now here is Heaven Earth Church Pastor Ross Stackhouse with the message the Weirdness of the Bible from the series Finding the Bible to be Holy Again.

Lord, will you light the path before us, Ignite a fire within us, the holy fire of your spirit, in the name of Jesus.

Amen.

Okay, so we're going to start with a little bit of a fun game to get your mind going.

This is.

Is this in the Bible really or not?

Okay.

Your favorite game.

I know that you love this game.

Okay, I got to get to the, I got the slides a little bit out of order, so.

Okay, here we go.

First off this one, let us know in the comments.

In the Bible, not in the Bible.

I'll explain to you why I'm doing this in a minute.

So on that day, the Lord will take a great sword, harsh and mighty, and will punish Leviathan, the fleeing serpent, Leviathan, the writhing serpent, and will kill the dragon that is in the sea.

Come on, people, let me know.

In the Bible, not in the Bible.

I, I, I should see some yeses and nos.

Okay, we got a vote for not in the Bible from Christie.

We got a yes and a.

Keep them coming, guys.

We got three yeses and a no.

Don't.

Don't let groupthink influence you.

Don't let it influence you.

If you think it's not, say it's not.

Stay strong.

Christy.

In the Bible.

Sounds like Revelation to me.

Angela says, I can see that.

Yes, this one is in the Bible.

500 points to all the people who said yes.

You can redeem your points at a date to be named later.

It is in the Bible in Isaiah.

Isaiah 27:1.

All right, next one.

You ready?

Here we go.

In those days, the sky was emerald and the sea was crimson.

The earth was ruled by demons and ghouls.

No human or animal could survive if not for the provision of the Lord in the Bible.

Not in the Bible.

Let's see.

No cheating, by the way, either.

We've got a no.

Hmm.

Keep them coming.

Yes or no?

Yes.

Love that song by Josh Garrels.

Not in.

We've got a Not in.

We've got no's.

Not in the Bible.

Ooh, Nick.

See, we're going to highlight Nick.

Nick is.

Nick is actually choosing middle ground.

So.

Nick, this is cheating.

No, I'm kidding.

I appreciate this.

He's saying it sounds like Book of Enoch stuff.

Enoch is in something called the Apocrypha.

So it's in some Christian canons of the Bible.

For example, Catholic Bible, not Protestant.

Not, not, not.

It is not in the Bible.

I just made this up.

I'll bet you if I would have left ghouls out, some of you would have been like, I think it's in there.

All right, next.

Then the Lord opened the donkey's mouth and it said to Balaam, what have I done to you that you've beaten me these three times?

Don't let your friends sway you one way or the other.

Is this in the Bible or not?

In the Bible or not?

We've got a yes.

We've got a couple of yeses.

Yes in the Bible.

Not in.

From Joey Ott.

Yes in the Bible.

In the Bible.

Keep them coming.

What do you think?

Is it in there?

We got another.

Yes, Of course it's in the Bible.

It's in numbers, chapter 22.

Talking animals.

It's a thing in the Bible, especially in the first five books.

You got a talking serpent in the beginning of Genesis.

You got a talking donkey here.

I swear this will make sense in a minute.

Well, I guess I shouldn't say that.

I believe it will make sense in a minute.

Lastly, meanwhile, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow.

Jonah.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

All right, I'm going to give this one away.

I think you all know this one is in.

And this is where we're going today.

This is where I want to spend most of our time is in that story today because we've been in a series called Finding the Bible to Be Holy Again.

Benny, my cat is meowing because he's excited.

You see?

He's so excited.

Can you hear him?

Do you want to see Benny?

Benny's joining us for worship today.

Say hello to the people.

His full name is Benedictus.

Say hello to the people.

Benny.

Hi.

Okay.

Star of the show.

You guys don't want to hear anything else from me.

You just want to see Benny.

We're talking particularly today, about what do we do about the weirdness of the Bible.

And if you're like, ross, the Bible is weird.

I don't think so.

I'm just telling you, you dig into it enough, you're gonna come across some weirdness, like talking animals.

There are many things that, when I think of weirdness that come to mind.

For example, genealogies.

There's so much genealogy in the Bible.

This person begat this person and begat this person.

Huh?

Speaking of genealogies, there's accounts where people.

It says they live to be 900 and some years old.

Methuselah got real old.

What the violence, especially in the Old Testament, that's attributed to God.

What do we do about that?

There's so much stuff that we could talk about when we're talking about, like encountering God through the Bible or trying to find those scriptures to be holy.

And how do we do that when it's weird?

But today I want to focus on these stories, like the one in Jonah.

And I think as we go through this, it will help you to find God's heart through the scriptures, especially when you encounter that strangeness, like the supernatural, like the miraculous.

Jesus does a lot of miracles did, you know?

And maybe sometimes you read that and you're like, gosh, deep down you don't know what to do with it.

So like I said, again, I think what we talk about today will help you to experience or find the Bible to be holy again.

And I want to say something really quick, as an aside, actually, it's really important.

We're not in this series, but finding the Bible to be holy again, just so we can find the Bible to be holy again.

We want to find the Bible to be holy again.

We wanted to rediscover its power and its beauty so that we find God's heart through it.

And we're shaped by God's heart.

We need it and our world needs it.

The events of yesterday, I think.

I think reveal that.

I hope this doesn't take it off track.

But it's important to say this.

We may all have different feelings about the state of immigration in our country politically.

We may have a different mindset and approach.

You may be there like, you may be out there thinking, the Democrats have really screwed up immigration.

They got us into this mess.

Or you might be thinking, man, it's the Republicans who are just being.

They're just terrible, awful, evil.

Right now, I'm not so concerned about siding with one or the other, but I hope we can agree that what is happening in our country with ICE and what is happening with citizens of our country, but also people who aren't citizens, who are being treated without due process, people are being treated violently and obviously people who have been killed.

It's evil.

And we want to find the Bible to be holy again.

We want to find God's heart through it.

So God teaches us the difference between good and evil.

Because one of the traps that we get into as human beings is that we wake up sometimes and we assume we know.

But right now, in these times and at all times, we need God's help, God's spirit to teach us what is good and what is evil.

And so that we do what God tells Jonah to do.

When you look at how Jonah begins.

So we'll get there in just a minute.

Look right here.

Whoops.

Look right here.

It says, the Lord's word came to Jonah, Amittai's son.

Get up and go to Nineveh, the great city, and cry out against it.

For their evil has come to my attention.

One of the things that we do as God's people is God will send us to cry out against the evil that is running rampant in the world.

And I know this, guys.

What I saw in a video about what.

What's been happening in Minneapolis and stories there, but really what's been happening all around.

What I've been doing to have.

I've been a part of prayer vigils and protests outside of Miami Correctional Facility near Kokomo, because I'm.

We're not hearing about just.

We're hearing firsthand accounts about how people are being treated in this atmosphere.

And so we need to seek.

To seek the scriptures to discover God's heart, to find the scriptures to be holy again so that we can be strengthened in our awareness about what is good and what is evil.

And we can also be encouraged, made brave to cry out against the evil that we see in the world.

So, okay, that was a bit of an aside, but it's really important because every time we come together, guys, right, we bring our personal stuff and we bring the events into the world.

And I don't want to act like those are compartmentalized because they're not.

Alright, really quick, here's what I want to show you.

Ironically, today there's an awesome image from the Bible Project on the story of Jonah.

Bible Project is an amazing resource if you want to want help to find the Bible to be holy.

Again, I can't recommend a resource any more than the Bible Project.

So here's what we're going to find today.

Ironically, in this story about a guy named Jonah who gets swallowed by a fish, that's really not the most important thing that happens.

It really isn't.

It feels like it.

Perhaps maybe because of how we've heard about it, but really, if we dig into, if we chew on the scriptures slowly, we'll find that a lot of the heart of this message of Jonah is about how God does not play fair favorites.

God is paying attention to all people and cares for all the nations.

God is graceful to each person for the sake of the whole world.

And God is addressing the evil that is destroying the world and God's people.

And finally, God is asking us to love people like God does.

When I think about, like what I gather from Jonah, that's it.

So I want to talk to you about that.

We're going to get to that, but also about the Bible itself.

I want to tell you that we can have a very high view of Scripture without having the view that has become normal in recent history in our neck of the woods.

We're going to talk more about that.

You can let the Bible be authoritative in your life as Emily beared witness to last week.

You can believe that God's breath is in each writing, as I talked about in week one of the series, and give up and let go of questions like is the Bible infallible?

Is it inerrant?

Is it all literal?

We can release obsession over that which has become an obsession in our recent time in our neck of the woods.

We can have a very high view of Scripture without having the view that has become normal in recent history in our neck of the woods.

So I want to show you how to do that today.

That's what we talked about recently.

So first, let's do this one thing that we always want to keep in mind before we jump into Jonah.

Okay, for a minute we said the three rules of real estate are location, location, location.

The three rules of engaging scripture context, context, context.

So the old approach that I'm saying, hey, I invite you to let go of it.

Maybe you inherited this in faith and also part of the Bible, that certainty is the goal.

And the question to ask is, what is the exact right thing to think this passage means?

It's like, there's one right thing to think that this passage means, and we got to go get to that.

I want to invite you instead to this new approach of approaching it with humility, curiosity, and a desire for discovering God's heart.

With your primary question being, what is God trying to say to us through the Bible after we've wrestled with it, we've asked our questions, we've asked God.

God, you're saying this in the Bible.

Is that really your heart?

An example of, like, why context matters so much is Revelation.

For the record, it's not Revelations.

It's the Revelation of John or the Apocalypse of John.

That book, to me, is the most misunderstood book in the Bible, and it's largely because of context.

You don't have to know all the context of the Bible.

What was happening in the time before it was written was what's happening in the Bible.

You don't have to know all that.

But I do think it's important to assume that there's a lot you don't know yet.

Revelation is one of those books that, like, it's ultimately a letter.

It belongs in the genre of letters.

And it was an encoded letter that a guy by the name of John sent to some churches.

In a time when it was really hard to follow Jesus, it was illegal to do so, and he sort of wrote some of it in code so the message would get through and maybe it wouldn't bring people to peril, including himself.

For example, the number 666, what does that number mean?

It's in Revelation.

If you wondered, where does that number, that preoccupation, that obsession with 666, where does it come from?

The book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible.

666.

It means Satan, right?

Yeah.

We all agree on that, right?

Means Satan, No?

Nope.

It is well established that one of the things that happens in the Bible is a fancy word I'm going to teach you called numerology.

It happens all over the Bible where numbers correspond to letters.

And it is well established from biblical scholars that 666 equals in numerology.

Nero the Emperor.

Nero.

The evil person that the writer has in mind in this story is Nero the Emperor.

Nero was being awful to Christians.

He set fires in Rome because he wasn't getting his way.

This is what we.

That's what scholars.

Scholars tell us.

And he blamed the fires on Christians who then suffered a lot of persecution.

When is the writer of John or of Revelation writing shortly after those events?

666 is Nero.

I'm just telling you that context really matters.

You don't have to know it all, but, hey, approach it with humility, curiosity, and a desire to know more, to discover more.

All right, we're not talking about Revelation today, Ross.

We're talking about Jonah.

Let's go through it real quick.

You with me?

Okay, here are the questions that the prophets context for Jonah.

Jonah is one of the prophets, and it's in a section of the Old Testament.

Prophets are writing in a time where everything has gone wrong for God's people.

They're writing specifically when Israel got destroyed, the north and the south got destroyed by two really powerful empires who had a tendency towards evil, especially the Assyrians.

Jonah is writing, or Jonah is one of the prophets.

Who's asking questions like this in the midst of this destruction?

So everything has gone wrong.

The prophets are asking, how are we favored by God?

And this was allowed to happen.

How can God still be the almighty God?

We've come to believe God is.

And this evil is allowed to prevail.

Is there a chance that we're just as evil as all the people we've been calling evil?

The prophets will wonder that.

And what does God have in store for us now?

And also what does God have in store for our enemies?

This is the backdrop of Jonah.

I'm going to walk you through it.

We're going to lean into the weirdness together.

And I want to show you how you can work through weirdness in the Bible and find it to be holy, helpful.

All right, we already went through this.

Let's walk through this together.

Okay.

This is Jonah, chapter one.

I'm going to walk through it quickly with you.

Benny's in.

Benny's excited.

The Lord's word came to Jonah, Amittai's son.

Get up and go to Nineveh, that great city, and cry out against it for their evil has come to my attention.

What's Nineveh?

Nineveh is the capital city of the Assyrian empire.

Remember what I just told you about context.

The Assyrians utterly destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel in 722 BC did evil things to God's people.

So Jonah got up to flee.

Basically, Jonah, God said, go there, Jonah.

Jonah said, I'm going to flee as quickly as possible in the opposite direction.

I'M out of here.

One of the things, like, if we're listening again, this is how I want to teach you right now, a better way I think of engaging the scriptures.

Instead of saying, like, what exactly does this mean?

And pursue certainty, approach it with like, humility, curiosity and a desire to discover God's heart.

So, like, chew on it like good food.

Don't woof it down like fast food.

Chew on it.

Be still with it if you have to.

If you're a person who struggles with attention, listen to it as you walk.

But listen to it, like, attentively.

If we do that already in this first thing, we can gather a couple things.

God is paying attention to evil.

We may think like God is far off not paying attention.

God is paying attention to evil.

God has his eyes on it.

He has his eyes not just on God's people, but on God's enemies.

Or, excuse me, on the enemies of God's people.

Already we can hear that.

And a question that this is going to raise from the start is you're going to see in this.

The Bible Project points this out.

The people in this story that you would expect to do this, maybe the righteous thing, they don't.

The people you would expect to do this thing over here, the unrighteous thing, they do the opposite.

So sometimes we can't fit people into these nice, like, righteous, wicked categories, right?

Although we want to because it makes us feel safer.

Us and them makes us feel safer.

It's not true, but it makes us feel better.

The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea so that there was a great storm on the sea.

Let's stop there.

Sometimes when we read the Bible, sometimes people have walked away and saying, oh, okay, well, that means that God causes natural disasters.

Well, hold on.

Is that what it says?

No, it says, in this story, in this instance, God hurled a great wind upon the sea.

We can't walk away.

That's also the part of humility.

We can't walk away with a conclusion and be really confident about it.

That's being arrogant.

We got to slow down and think about our assumptions and conclusions.

It breaks out this great storm.

The sailors important characters here, they each cry out to their own God.

They're being superstition.

It's like, bill, can you pray to your God?

Bob, you pray to yours.

Jim, you pray to yours, and we'll have our bases covered.

We'll be all right.

But what's Jonah doing?

Is Jonah praying?

No, he's sleeping.

Isn't there another story later in the Bible of a Great storm on a boat and somebody sleeping.

Mmm.

That's the other thing that we keep talking about, like, having a big picture view of the Bible.

You may not be able to hold it all together, but in Jesus story, there's a moment where there's a storm and Jesus is in a boat with his disciples, and he's asleep.

And so again, the Bible is, like, giving us some moments where it's saying, like, hey, will Jesus be like Jonah, or will he be more like something else?

Hint, something else.

Jesus will tell us to love our enemies, whereas Jonah wants to flee from enemies.

Jesus will go closer to his enemies.

The Bible can do that for us if we lean into it.

The ship's officer is like, how are you sleeping, dude?

They do this thing, weirdness in the Bible.

They, like, basically throw dice to figure out who's to blame for this storm.

There's some weirdness.

We'll move past something for now the lot falls on Jonah, and they go to him and they say, hey, tell us, since you're the cause of this evil happening to us, what do you do?

And where are you from?

This is kind of funny.

PT Talked about this.

There's a bit of humor here.

It's like, wait a minute.

These sailors didn't think to interview Jonah before they brought him under the boat.

Now they want to know, like, where are you from?

Who's your daddy?

And he says to them, like, I'm a Hebrew.

I worship the Lord, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land.

It's kind of like, that's interesting, because a little bit ago, it doesn't seem like your actions line up with that.

Let's keep going.

They were terrified, these sailors.

Like, what have you done, you moron?

What are we supposed to do?

He said, pick me up and toss me into the sea.

I know it's my fault that this great storm has come to you.

Now watch this.

Watch what these sailors do.

They couldn't manage it because the sea continued to rage against them.

So they called on the Lord, saying, please, Lord.

Now their attention, all of their tension, they were Jim, Bob, Bill, praying, each to their own God.

Now all of their focus is to the one God.

Lord, don't let us perish on account of this man's life, and don't blame us for innocent blood.

Look at that statement of faith that they make.

The people you expect to do maybe the wicked thing or the wrong thing.

In this story, they turn.

That's a huge theme in this story.

It's like, God is Calling you to this, will you turn and go toward it?

We can hear that if we chew on the Scripture, if we lean in and walk slowly with it, the guy who's the godly guy, he turns in the wrong direction.

The folks who are like the pagans, they turn in the right direction.

Anybody, Jesus demonstrates this.

Anybody can turn toward the Lord's heart and be enlightened, inspired, empowered, will Jonah.

Jonah gets tossed into the sea.

These men worship the Lord with profound reverence.

Again, the question, who's going to worship the Lord with profound reverence?

All the prophets ask that, and Jonah's story is one of them.

Like, who's going to actually profoundly worship the Lord?

And a lot of the prophets will say, when we mean worship the Lord, we don't mean just going to the synagogue or the temple and making sacrifices to the Lord.

How you treat your neighbor is an act of worship.

And we've been failing the mark on that.

This story is in line with that.

Lastly, finally, meanwhile, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

Chapter one.

Do you notice what I haven't talked about so far?

What I haven't said, Especially with this last part right here?

Meanwhile, the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah.

Jonah was in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights.

What's missing?

I haven't even said anything yet about do we take this literally or not?

Not said one word about it.

Here's why I say that, guys, sometimes we got questions passed down to us that we were told are the most important questions we could ask of the Bible.

Again, is it inerrant?

Some of you've never heard that word.

I'm honestly happy for you.

Is it infallible?

Is it all literal or not literal?

And I've been telling you, I don't see Jesus worried about those questions.

I don't see Jesus or his followers wrestling with those.

So maybe we don't have to either.

We just traveled through Jonah, chapter one.

And we uncovered a lot of God's breath in it by chewing on it slowly, being humble, curious, and seeking God's heart through it, without even deciding whether it's literal or not that this guy got swallowed by a fish.

Now, listen, I'm not saying that it never matters whether the Bible's literal or not.

Do you hear me?

I am telling you that sometimes if we're so obsessed with that, we may never get to God's heart because we're so focused on questions that are keeping us from God's heart.

There are genres in the Bible, parts of the Bible that I believe that authors meant to tell us.

Like, this literally happened.

Primary example, Jesus, resurrection.

The four gospels of Jesus life are more in the genre of kind of history, like a biography.

These first disciples and followers of Jesus wanted to tell us, we literally saw this guy crucified, and we experienced him fully alive after he was dead.

We're not saying that figuratively.

We're telling you this guy is literally the conqueror of death.

This is a library of scriptures.

There are different genres in it.

The way that you read Genesis is not the way you read Jonah, is not the way you read the Gospels, and it's not the way you read Revelation.

You might say, ross, well, then how can I do it?

I'm just a normal person.

I don't have all that know how.

That's okay.

Start with the assumption there's more that I don't know yet.

And when you encounter weirdness like this, it's okay.

I'm going to close with some thoughts on that in a minute.

In this case, bibleproject says that this genre is satire.

And so, like, what they mean by that is.

I want to quote it to you directly here, if I can find it.

Of course I can't find it.

So anyways, we'll have to let that go.

The point is that genre matters.

But here, for as it relates to Jonah, let me just say this to you.

If you take it literally, which I could get, I could give room for, like, I believe that there's a God who's behind the big bang.

I believe that.

I believe in our God who is behind life as we know it.

The miracle of the holy, like, of, like, creating the universe like our God started it.

I believe that.

So is it possible that a guy could get swallowed by a fish and survive there?

Yeah, if you believe this story to be literal, great.

Don't condemn people who don't.

I also, I could see it very figuratively, metaphorically, because it's in the genre of satire.

Maybe the people who wrote this and conceived of it originally didn't even.

Like, they didn't even mean for it to be literal.

They were just trying to communicate this point that prophets did, which is, hey, we're not just the only favored ones.

God's paying attention to the enemies, too.

And God's calling us to love our enemies like he does.

If you take it figuratively, that works.

Don't condemn people who don't.

There are sections in the Bible that were Written with more literal intent.

I'm not sure this is one of them.

But ultimately we can find God's breath in it, we can find God's heart.

And when we get to some weirdness, you know what we can do?

We can simply turn a prayer to God and say, God, help me know what to think about this weird part.

If we come to a violent part in the scriptures attributed to God, we can say, God, is this really your heart?

Is this really who you are?

I'm going to get to the end here, the four points that I have, and then I'm going to turn it back to Emily and Adam as it relates to weirdness in the Bible.

First of all, expect weirdness.

There are talking donkeys, talking serpents, genealogies, people living to be 900 miracles.

There is weirdness all over the place in the Bible.

First of all, we should expect it.

This is a library of scriptures with many different genres, capturing events that span centuries.

I've said this before, there's going to be a time in the future when people are going to go, wait a minute, people carried little computers around all the time.

How weird is that?

Expect weirdness, but also notice it and go deeper with it.

Like I just said, if you come across a part that's violent and it's attributed to God, you don't have to go, well, God must be violent.

No, you can say, God, is that really your heart?

You can discuss it with friends.

Secondly, as I just said, approach the Bible as a library, an ocean of writings with God's breath in in them.

There are parts of the ocean, beautiful snorkeling.

You can be just on the surface and see beauty.

There are parts of the Bible that are deep, dark, cold, scary.

You need help.

Thirdly, pursue the big picture knowing that you will never see it fully in this life.

I gave an example in week one of this series about the story of Noah.

Something written at the beginning of the Bible and something in Peter that connects to the story of Noah that's at the end of the Bible.

Try to see more of the big picture.

If you were to look at this picture, don't just read the Bible and look at, just appreciate the details.

Yes, this actually is just one square of an entire ceiling of the Sistine Chapel that Michelangelo painted.

Sometimes as Christians in our neck of the woods, we got hyper focused on a detail and took it out of the big picture.

We want to see the big picture and see God's heart in it.

Finally, keep Jesus, the word of God in the center.

John 1 says that Jesus is the word of God made flesh.

So for us Christians, the Word of God is ultimately Jesus.

He's like the library of scriptures in a living, breathing human person.

For us at Heaven Earth Church, this is in our beliefs narrative.

The center of Christianity is a person and his name is Jesus Christ.

So any conclusion that we draw about the Bible, it better make sense with his life.

If we conclude that God is violent and has bloodlust, we better look at Jesus who is not willing to spill blood except his own.

So expect weirdness.

Approach it as a library.

Pursue the big picture.

Keep Jesus at the center.

I'm done.

Benny, we good?

Oh, he's asleep.

I put him to sleep.

Daggone it.

Thank you for participating in the conversation happening at Heaven Earth Church.

Your next opportunity to do so live is this Sunday morning, 9:38am Eastern Time, either at the main campus at 309 East Main in Whiteland, Indiana or online at YouTube Live.

That's@YouTube.com heavenerthchurch the audio podcast is always available at Apple Podcast and on Spotify.

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Instructions on how to do just that and links are in the show notes.

You can always find out more by going to the church website heavenearthchurch.org we.

Want to thank you for spending time with us today.

My name is Ross Stackhouse, the pastor to Heaven Earth Church, and you may think out there that your story is over, but in fact your faith story may just be beginning.

If you want more information about our church or you're interested in a next step, you can go to heavenearthchurch.org Otherwise, we look forward to being with you next time at the Heaven Earth Church Podcast.