Exodus 3:6 | Reading the OT in the NT

I am personally thrilled over the moon that some of you came back.
You don’t even know how excited I am that some of you came back.
Alright, I didn’t lose sleep over it,
but there was a wonder.
Okay, so we spent our time,
last time together in Genesis and that will provide a little
bit of a form for what we’re going to do.
Before we jump into today,
which I have out here on the board,
if you want to find Exodus
3, you can do that.
Just want to give you a heads up about next week.
If you were in first service,
Amy Keeper made an announcement there about next week’s Intergenerational Sunday School.
That’s a thing that the Christian Education Committee has sponsored this year.
They decided that as an experiment,
we’re all tired of winter and they said the kids
are tired of winter and it’d be fun to do something that would be different.
Only next week,
the Christian Education Committee is taking over the fellowship hall and there’s
a one Sunday school event for all ages at the church.
This class is on pause next week for that and then we will begin again week after.
In case you’re wondering,
accommodations are being made for those folks who would not like
to participate.
They’ll be here in this room instead of doing fellowship stuff in the fellowship hall.
That will be available to folks,
but our hope is that the church will participate in that
as it’s an event planned for everyone.
That’s the news update on that.
That said, today we’re in Exodus chapter 3,
so if you are there in your Bible,
we will
jump in.
That said, I’m not there, so let me get with you.
Is someone brave enough here to read?
We would read verses 4 through 6.
Would someone be willing to read that?
On Exodus 3?
Yes.
I got it.
3, 4, 3, 6.
Ammonias V, is that okay?
Yeah, that’s great.
When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see,
God called him out of the bush,
Moses Moses.
And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said,
“Do not come near,
take your sandals off your feet for the place of which
you are standing as holy ground.”
And he said, “I am the God of your father,
the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob.”
And Moses hid his face,
for he was afraid to look at God.
Wonderful, thank you.
So,
I’m sure that you saw quickly here our context where within the burning bush narrative
here in Exodus, which if you were with us for the Exodus study that Clint and I did,
this is one of the pivotal moments in the book of Exodus.
It would certainly be on par with the crossing of the Red Sea,
especially as it relates to
the amount of attention that it gets in post-Israel and then ultimately Christian thought.
This is one of the pinnacle moments in the book of Exodus,
and so it’s somewhat natural
that we would turn here to see how this moment is later interpreted by Christians.
A few things that we need to know going into this text as it lives in Exodus,
not as it’s interpreted elsewhere, is this language of “Here I am.”
Did you see that?
Here I am.
That is language that’s picked up from Genesis.
In fact,
Abram, who later becomes Abraham,
is notorious for every time God addresses him,
Abraham responds,
“Here I am.”
And in Exodus,
that theme is picked up once again.
This idea of “Here I am” continues on in the story.
What’s fascinating here is that the human presents themselves to God,
“Here I am.
Here the human is.”
But God, in this transformative address,
says not “Here I am,” but God announces himself
to be “the I am.”
So the human is addressing God as the “Here I am.
Here the human is.
I’m here, God.” And God says,
“I am all.” God encompasses everything.
So within Exodus itself,
this “I am” statement of God,
this naming of God,
is a substantial moment.
But here today,
we’re looking particularly at this section here where God says verse 6,
“I am the God of your father,
the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac,
and the God
of Jacob.” And at this, Moses hides his face because he’s afraid to look at God.
So the address here is to the history,
the lineage,
the fathers of the fathers.
These are the people who God is naming in this section.
And that, for Moses, connects him to that lineage.
It connects the book of Exodus to Genesis the King before.
It’s a fundamentally tone-setting text in Exodus because it tells us, the reader,
what’s happening here is that God is choosing the Israelites in the same way that he chose the forefathers in Genesis.
That’s just a small section of what’s happening in Exodus itself.
But of course,
we’re not particularly going to dig into Exodus,
but that’s sort of the
context that we’re at so far.
So any questions about Exodus before we jump into the New Testament here?
Anything you want to flush out here before we move on?
Now let’s go.
Let’s turn to Mark chapter 12 verse 26.
This is a little difficult for me this week,
to be honest with you.
This text is actually shared,
or this story is actually shared across all three of the
synoptic gospels.
So that means that this is in Matthew,
Mark, and Luke.
Same story,
but told in the different voices of each of those writers.
So it’s a little bit tricky to choose which of the ones we were going to look at today.
You see that I’m planning on cheating and letting Luke speak a little bit here as well.
But this is also in Matthew,
so I want you to be aware that Matthew tells this story
as well.
But we’re looking here at Mark chapter 12,
and we’re going to look at this entire section.
I kind of lied to you.
We’re going to go all the way back to verse 18,
and I’m happy to read this one.
So then the Sadducees,
and Mark is very helpful here.
He gives us a description why the Sadducees matters.
So then the Sadducees,
who say there’s no resurrection,
that’s what you need to know,
came to Jesus for the question.
“Teacher,” they said,
“Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies and leaves a wife
but no children, the man must marry the widow,
raise up offspring for his brother.
Now there were seven brothers.
The first one married and died without leaving any children.
The second one married the widow,
but he also died leaving no child.
It was the same with the third.
In fact,
none of the seven left any children.
Last of all, the woman died too.
At the resurrection,
whose wife will she be since the seven were married to her?”
A reading question.
Mark began this section very, very intentionally.
The Sadducees, who believe what about resurrection?
That it does not exist.
So now they just led with a question to Jesus at the resurrection.
This is not a good faith question,
right?
This is clearly a mocking question coming to Jesus that shared across all the synoptic gospels.
Jesus replies,
“Are you not in error because you do not know the scriptures or the power of God?”
That is a WWE scriptural slam down right there.
He’s telling the Sadducees,
and you need to know there are two classes in Israelite religion.
There’s the Sadducees and there’s the Pharisees,
and you know that Jesus argues with both of them, right?
But Jesus’ most contentious debates,
you could argue, are with the Pharisees, especially
in Matthew.
But here’s the thing,
the Sadducees are the upper crust.
They’re the elite.
They’re the landed, more historically connected tribe,
not tribe, but their affiliation in Israel.
So when you hear Sadducees,
you need to be thinking temple.
You need to be thinking a pretty aristocratic in their structure.
And when you think Pharisee,
you need to think more local congregation,
more moral-centered,
more ethically-minded faith.
And so here, the Sadducees are coming to Jesus, and essentially,
they’re asking Jesus an Old
Testament question because the Sadducees major,
well, I’m getting ahead of myself,
but the Sadducees’ major critique of resurrection is it’s not in the Pentateuch.
And you know, the Pentateuch is the first five books of the Old Testament.
So here, Exodus is in the Pentateuch.
They’re turning back to the oldest scriptures,
and they’re asking Jesus,
“How is this thing
possible when resurrection doesn’t even exist in those texts?”
So Jesus says, straight off the bat, verse 24,
“Are you not in error because you do not
know the scriptures or the power of God,” which the Sadducees believe they’re making a scriptural argument.
Jesus says 25, “When the dead rise,
they will neither marry nor be given in marriage,
nor will they be like the angels in heaven.”
Now about the dead rising,
“Have you not read in the book of Moses,
in the account of the burning bush,
how God said to him,
‘I am the God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac,
and the God of Jacob.
He is not the God of the dead,
but of the living.
You are badly mistaken.'”
Okay,
so a couple things happening here.
Once again, we have a debate happening about how to read the Old Testament.
The Sadducees who deny the resurrection are looking back at those first five books,
saying resurrection does not exist there.
So what case could you make for it?
What you need to know historically is that the people of Israel did not have theologically
the idea of a bodily resurrection until about 200 years before Jesus.
That idea really becomes something that comes up in the literature.
The idea before that,
that strikes many Christians as odd,
the idea before that was that resurrection
was not connected to your individual body’s resurrection,
but the idea was that your family
lineage would be your continuing life in the world beyond.
So think Abram,
right? When God makes his covenantal promise with him,
he does not promise him that he will live forever.
He promises him that his generations will go on like the sand on the shore,
right?
Like the stars in the heaven.
The idea is that your life will never cease because from you,
an entire generation of
generations of generations will continue on.
Are you with me?
So it’s in the inter-testamental period,
that period of time between the Old Testament and
the New Testament, that kind of stuff you have at the late end of the prophets,
the stuff that none of us really know what to do with,
all the way up to Jesus and Matthew,
Mark, Luke and John.
That section,
the people have been deported,
their slaves,
their families have been split,
their livelihoods and land has been taken from them.
And in that context,
the people and the prophets begin to have this understanding of that this
is not the end,
that God is able to make this wrong right,
not just in our future generations,
but in actual time,
God is going to resurrect people.
And it is the group of people who innovated,
and by that I don’t mean made up,
I mean who amplified that voice were the Pharisees.
The Pharisees were the ones who were the chief proponents of the idea of bodily resurrection.
And I want to make sure that we also understand here,
this is not what many Christians today
believe about the idea of your spirit being resurrected.
This was the idea that you die and your spirit separated from your body and you go somewhere
else or your spirit waits for your body.
The concept of resurrection here in early Judaism is you die and you’re dead until God remakes you.
God raises you up and you the person that you are.
So what Jesus is doing here to a reader who’s connected in this time frame is actually
both rebuking the Sadducees for not believing in resurrection and also critiquing the Pharisees
for not having a full understanding of resurrection,
which I think is a fascinating
pattern that Jesus is picking fights with both sides,
which I think that Jesus is very consistent in doing.
Any questions about that before we press on because we still have to talk about
what Mark is doing with Exodus.
Okay, so let’s talk about that.
So Jesus’s reading of Exodus hinges on the tense,
the tense.
So either God was or God is.
And let’s be clear,
the historical reading that the Sadducees are turning to is that when God
is talking to Moses,
who he’s talking about is Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob.
It’s about those people.
The point is,
Moses, you will be in their lineage.
That’s the reading that the Sadducees have made of what God told Moses.
That is not what Jesus is reading.
You see that?
Jesus’s entire argument to refute them hinges on the tense of is God is or is God was.
Because if God was the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
then they are dead.
If God is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
then they’re alive.
That is a complete new revelation of the text in Exodus.
And when Jesus brings that,
like I said, he is debating this resurrection thing.
He’s both refuting the Sadducees.
He’s critiquing the Pharisees.
But what I find so fascinating about this is the one little B word,
that one little connecting
verb is the thing that Jesus hones in on and transforms the entire meaning of what Exodus
is saying.
Because fundamentally,
what he’s saying is that the life of these men,
which ended with their
bodies, is not the end of their life with God.
And so this idea,
even then the Pharisees would have said,
no, they’re dead.
They’re dead,
dead, right?
They’re just waiting for God to make them again.
Here, Jesus is making the claim that they are still alive,
which you see in the New
Testament text, by the way, that it should shock us more than it does.
What do you think is happening at the transfiguration other than this exact point?
Right?
That Moses shows up.
You have here represented these folks who are not dead.
So the gospel writers are making this point,
and they’re doing so on purpose,
that these individuals are alive.
And this is, of course, flowing from ultimately their later recognition.
Every gospel writer tells us that the disciples either disbelieved or misunderstood what Jesus
taught about resurrection until the end,
until they saw what Jesus meant.
And now we see as they write these accounts,
they see that Jesus left these little footholds
the whole way, and it was just something that they missed along the path.
Does that make sense?
Okay,
so I’ll give us a chance for discussion here,
because I think this is fascinating.
But I do,
like I said, I’m cheating a little bit today,
so forgive me.
I do want to look at Luke with you,
because Luke’s telling you this story offers another
detail that I think is really particularly interesting.
So this is verse 27.
We’re going to skip in this a little bit.
Some of the Sadducees who say there’s no resurrection came to Jesus for the question.
This is pretty much verbatim what we had in Mark.
The question goes all the way through 33.
We’re going to start at 34.
Jesus replied, “The people of this age marry and are given in marriage,
but those who are
considered worthy of taking part in the age to come and in the resurrection from the dead
will neither marry nor be given in marriage,
and they can no longer die,
for they are like
the angels.” They are God’s children,
since they are children of the resurrection.
“But in the account of the burning bush,
even Moses showed that the dead rise,
for he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob.
He is not the God of the dead, but the living,
for to him all are alive.”
Some of the teachers of the law responded,
“Well said, teacher, and no one dared to ask him any more questions.”
Note,
Luke is clear at the front side.
The people asking this question are Sadducees.
Notice who gives Jesus affirmation at the end,
teachers of the law,
not the Sadducees.
So we want to be clear,
Luke is not saying these Sadducees saw the light and they said,
“Jesus, we’re all on board.
Welcome us into the kingdom.”
He’s saying that there were some there who saw the point that Jesus was making.
But here,
I think this is such a beautiful telling that Luke gives us.
“He is not the God of the dead,
but of the living,
for to him all are alive.”
And I think it just gives us another perspective of what Mark was retelling us of Jesus’ teaching,
that ultimately,
Exodus here,
which by all accounts unto Exodus,
is not at all
about resurrection.
This is not a resurrection text.
This is about lineage.
This is about God’s revelation of who God is.
But here, Jesus sees in this text the absolute foundation of an Old Testament reading of resurrection.
I want to be very clear.
This is a very pressing statement,
so I’m going to slow down.
We can talk through this together.
When I went to seminary,
one of the things that seminary likes to do is to beat out of you the
popular notions of faith,
because professors, that’s kind of the way that they work.
And one of the things that they like to do is they like to teach that you should never read an
Old Testament book as if it was a New Testament book.
The idea is you should respect the book.
You should respect who wrote it and why they wrote it.
You should respect when the people received it.
You should try to kind of get back to what the original people understood when they got the book,
if that makes sense.
Their point is, you shouldn’t be reading Jesus into every Old Testament text because that’s not
the book that was written originally.
Problem is,
Jesus doesn’t do that.
That’d be all well and good.
So that’s not how Jesus reads the Bible.
When Jesus reads the Bible,
he sees resurrection in a text where the author historically had no
idea about even the conversation about resurrection.
Didn’t even cross their mind when this book was written.
And yet Jesus sees that revelation on the pages.
Are you with me?
So now it’s not to say that that’s like, you know,
go child,
be blessed and read everything
in the Old Testament that you could possibly think,
right?
That’s not also a good way to read the Bible.
But it’s to say that Jesus himself models that the Old Testament text inspired by God
have more in them than what they were originally understood to mean.
That there’s more there.
And if you have the eyes of faith through Jesus Christ,
his death, his resurrection, and ascension, in this case, we’re talking resurrection.
You can find that in the text.
I give you another example of that.
Read Genesis chapter one.
In the beginning,
the earth was formless and void and over it hovered the spirit,
the breath of God,
the Ruach of God.
What does that mean?
Biblical scholars have no idea what that means.
But you know what Christians have said?
Yeah, it does.
The spirit of God.
It says the spirit.
It says the breath.
These in the Septuagint,
which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament,
those words are one and the same.
So the Christians read that and said,
“Yeah, spirit of God.” Genesis chapter one, verse one.
I wouldn’t have passed my test in seminary had I said that.
But the early Christians did.
I think we need to be aware of that.
So Jesus reading,
Exodus chapter three, talking about resurrection,
looking at that Mark and Luke.
We’re going to pause.
Questions, thoughts, feedback,
conversation. I think that I’m going to let you breathe.
I think I don’t know that the woman probably was going to be
resurrected after she murdered all of her husband.
No proof, Tony.
Rochelle and I are watching Monk right now.
So that comment is hilarious in the dark moment.
Monk’s a homicide detective.
If you’ve not seen the show, it’s very funny.
We watched the original Monk.
Aren’t they redoing Monk now?
Are you still doing the one where it was?
Tony and Rochelle who?
I thought they were remaking that with somebody else.
Oh, I wouldn’t watch that.
I’m a purist.
No,
any comments, thoughts?
No?
My God.
This is maybe off track,
but we’re talking about resurrection.
Weren’t there two people that went straight to heaven without dying?
So how would that be viewed?
Yeah.
Well, I’m thinking Elijah.
Who are you thinking?
There’s another one.
I can’t think of the name.
Well, they never have taken to kind of the voice of this grave.
Nobody knows where he’s going.
That’s not what it is.
Right.
But that’s a stretch.
Well, yeah, I once remember reading something about that though.
I read so little John that yeah.
So we’ll make something clear there.
Obviously, that’s actually inscribed in the New Testament.
The idea of Jesus hanging on the cross of the crowds cheering at him.
That, you know, if you’re Elijah,
pull yourself down from the cross.
But once again,
you’re talking intertestamental profit period there.
And so what I think is interesting about that text is it has the idea of eternity,
but it doesn’t include the idea of death.
Because if a person died,
they’re dead.
And the Old Testament word for hell is shield,
which means the underplace.
Literally the dirt.
When someone is buried,
they go to shield.
In our Christian conception of hell,
we have more of a circus image of hell.
And I don’t mean that insulting to circus.
I’m sorry.
But you know, like the kind of movement and the gaudiness,
that thing that happened with the seven layers of hell,
the idea of flames versus freezing versus like we.
It’s very cinematic.
Our idea of hell.
My point is that the ancient Hebrews,
the idea of hell was death.
Emptiness,
darkness,
dirt,
buried.
The earth closed upon you.
Right. Which I suppose if you’re claustrophobic,
that is the definition of hell.
I mean,
that that’s their conception of it.
So the ultimate when someone is killed, when someone’s murdered.
You think of the we did this in Exodus,
but this comes in Leviticus too.
The strong censure against murder is not just because of its ethical implication.
It’s not just because God is creator.
And when you kill,
you take the life of a created.
It’s also because when you kill,
you take away one’s ability to live on.
If that person doesn’t have more children.
You’re stopping the line.
It’s rejecting someone from having the opportunity for permanence,
for their idea of eternity.
So that’s built in.
So when you have someone like Elijah, who’s certainly,
if you look at the plurality of the Old Testament,
an exception, not the rule.
I’ve got to think that there’s an interplay happening there,
but you also have to remember.
It’s at the same time,
at the same time that the people are having these honestly new
revelations about what resurrection might mean.
It’s at that same period that they’re beginning to have conversations about messiah.
They’ve always had David,
son of David, right?
They’ve always had this idea that Jerusalem is going to be the center of the capital.
But at this moment,
this idea that messiah save your lord is maybe going to be the center
of the capital, is maybe going to be more than just a person who’s the next David.
Maybe there’s going to be something more to that,
is beginning to be in the public kind of consciousness.
So this unending live stream,
is that why historically there’s so many genealogies in the Bible?
Yes, which is why Jesus being the son of David matters.
If you go to talk to a kid today,
“Hey, do you know that your great granddad’s granddad,
granddad was this person?”
They look at you and say,
“No, I don’t know that and I don’t care.
I don’t care because what does that have to do with me?”
By the way, we have the same conversations about sort of generational sin.
What do we do about the fact that some of our family members participated in world wars,
or participated in slavery,
or part– you’re right.
If you go back far enough,
every one of us has a family member
done something despicable and heinous, just statistically.
To us, that’s not troublesome.
That’s not troubling because I didn’t do it,
but that’s a western individualist conception of the world.
Remember, I mean, we have in the Bible over and over again,
God says in Psalms,
“The sins of one or generation will be passed to tens of generations,” which we think,
gee whiz, right?
But in that conception,
if you commit a sin against a person’s family
and steal from them eternity,
it is only fair that your eternity pay.
Yeah, so yes.
All right, well, we got just a little bit of time
and then we’ll end with questions and conversation.
So,
unfortunately, this next section is not one passage
and I’m going to have to skip over looking at every one of them.
But I’m sure most everyone here has heard of the “I am” statements in John.
Yeah, okay.
So, I’m not going to spend a lot of time unpacking those,
though we have statements like Jesus says in John,
and this is the only gospel to say this,
where Jesus says these in this sort of clarified way.
Jesus says in John,
“I’m the bread of life.
I’m the lie of the world.
I’m the door of the sheep.
I’m the good shepherd.
I’m the resurrection and the life.”
You know that we’re going to come back to that.
“I am the way,
the truth, and the life, and I am the true vine.”
So, Jesus’s statements in John are
not, I want to be clear,
they’re not a direct connection.
I don’t think you’re going to make a scholarly direct connection
that Jesus is quoting Exodus chapter 3
and that he’s making a super nuanced critique
of what this text was saying,
that that would be reading ourselves into this text.
So, I won’t be clear.
That’s not what I’m suggesting.
What I am suggesting is there’s no way that Jesus,
a Jew,
a avid reader of the Old Testament, who’s
debating with the priests in the temple in Jerusalem,
which I don’t even know what the analog for Christians would be.
Would that be arguing with the Pope in Rome?
I mean, press betweens don’t have a Pope.
Otherwise, I mean, argue with whoever that person is,
Jesus is playing NFL in the Bible,
with the Bible.
The idea he’s not well-versed in Exodus chapter 3.
He’s not making arguments about it with the Sadducees.
And then when he says “I am,”
he doesn’t have an indirect awareness of what he’s saying here.
I think that would be foolishness.
Realistically,
the thing that gets Jesus killed,
and let’s be clear about this,
Rome didn’t want to kill Jesus.
Jesus did nothing to Rome except incite the Jewish leaders.
He did nothing but make the peace troubled.
And so Rome,
who was consistent,
their blunt instrument to fix rabble-rousers,
was to kill them.
So, Rome did what Rome was going to do.
The thing that got Jesus killed was that he made the claim that “I am.”
Now,
he doesn’t say that formulation in the other gospels,
but everything he teaches is that.
Everything Jesus says is tantamount to claiming for himself the “I am of God.”
And that is what gets Jesus killed.
If he was just a good Jewish boy who read the Bible,
who said we should be peaceful,
and he had some interesting rhetorical sparring with the Sadducees and the Pharisees,
that wouldn’t have got him killed.
That’s every day.
That’s what they do.
What got Jesus killed is what happened in Luke.
You remember when he goes back to his home church,
right?
First sermon, he comes back and says,
“This day,
this prophecy has been fulfilled in your midst.”
What do they do?
They try to do what it took Rome to get done in the end.
They try to throw him off a cliff because they heard this.
They heard it rightly.
That’s what Jesus was saying.
“I am.”
“I am God.” Not, “I’m like God.” Not that I learned from God.
Not that I think highly of God.
“I am God.”
And that, friends,
is heresy to a Jew,
right?
Because what is the core foundation of Judaism?
That I am God,
and there only is one.
There’s only one.
So who do you think you are?
You didn’t create everything.
You have a mother,
right?
I mean, if that person showed up to First Presbyterian Church,
we would all,
you know, one of the great psychiatric illnesses that exists continuing today is identifying as a God.
This is a thing that the human mind tends to do.
If that person comes to church,
we all try to treat them nicely,
but we kind of say,
“Why don’t you go sit down and maybe not talk so much,” right?
I mean,
we try to be polite.
To be clear,
Jesus is claiming a revolutionary thing.
And I think the reason that I want to turn to the “I am” statements here as it relates to this text is
because ultimately, to the point of Jesus’s death,
he’s a heretic.
At the moment of his resurrection,
he is Lord.
Everything hinges on that.
Remember what Paul says.
If Jesus Christ was not crucified and resurrected,
then we above all people are to be pity.
Because if he was just a guy who died,
that he’s a heretic,
who claimed a thing that his religion said was abominable,
and he was rightly executed.
If, on the other hand,
Jesus meant what he said,
“I am,” and he meant that he was the God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob,
then he is the Lord.
He’s the creator.
He is the Savior of all things.
And in him is the hope of all people.
That sounds very New Testament.
But you see,
the disciples heard this teaching,
and who knows what they were thinking?
I would love someday to get to sit with Peter and to,
you know, that’d be kind of a big wig,
like to get to sit with Peter and say,
“What did you hear and understand?
What did you think Jesus was talking about?
And how did that change?”
That’s what I want to invite us to consider in this class
as we wrap up here.
And it’s one of those formulas that,
unfortunately, I hope it doesn’t get too old.
But one of the beautiful things about turning to the Old Testament is to ask,
“What did the earliest readers miss
that Jesus shows us is true?”
Because that is practice
to do that same work in your own life.
What have you missed in your life that Jesus shows to be different?
You realize that’s what conversion
is.
It’s the idea that what came before,
what you knew to be true previously,
was true, but incomplete.
And I think a lot of Christians would do well
to begin thinking about our faith as incomplete.
What you know is true.
That if you know Jesus Christ, you know truth.
But news flash,
none of us see the whole truth.
He’s bigger than us.
He’s bigger than our individual mind.
He’s bigger than our time and our place in history.
He’s bigger than the biggest you can stretch your mind.
And that’s a gift,
by the way, because if you could understand it all,
that would make you Jesus.
And then we would be nice to you and put you in the corner.
Right?
So I want to be clear.
What Jesus is doing is remarkable.
He’s reading the Old Testament,
and he’s seeing it rewritten in light of who he is in God.
And I think that is incredible.
That’ll be the end of my piece.
Questions, thoughts, comments,
feedback.
I think right after that, Luke,
verse 2027,
isn’t that,
I don’t think I’m wrong,
when Jesus says something to the effect
that how can I be in the lineage of David
when he refers to me as Lord?
Yeah.
Like how can I be his son?
Right.
Twice.
I can read my Bible, I promise.
I can’t read it right now.
It’s somewhere.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Who signs the Messiah?
So that would be an interesting conversation,
because one of the commentators I read
was talking about how Luke has grouped these stories
in a particularly interesting arc
that actually tells the core of the gospel,
which we don’t have time to talk about.
But it’s really,
this whole chapter would be interesting for you to read,
because Jesus in some ways in Luke,
this story is included as part of this meta argument,
which is interesting.
Well,
I have two things.
One,
thank you for being here.
Two,
please come back in two weeks.
That’s all I have.