#279 Wes Huff - This Might Be the Most Important Biblical Discovery of the 20th Century

Wes Huff is a Canadian Christian apologist, theologian, and public speaker specializing in the reliability of ancient biblical manuscripts and the defense of the Christian worldview. Born in Multan, Pakistan, to missionary parents, he spent his early childhood in the Middle East before returning to Canada, growing up in a diverse environment exposed to various worldviews. At age 11, Huff was diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis, a rare neurological condition that paralyzed him from the waist down for about a month, followed by a full recovery that doctors described as medically inexplicable. An aspiring athlete and former student participant in track and field, he is married to Melissa and father to four children. Huff holds a Bachelor of Arts in sociology from York University, a Master of Theological Studies from Tyndale University, and is currently pursuing a PhD in New Testament studies at the University of Toronto’s Wycliffe College, with a primary focus on the history of ancient biblical manuscripts, textual transmission, and the development of the biblical canon. As Vice President for Apologetics Canada, Huff speaks regularly at churches, universities, conferences, and interfaith events across North America, addressing topics such as the historical reliability of the New Testament, the formation of the biblical canon, and responses to skeptical objections. Huff also runs an active YouTube channel under his own name, producing debates, lectures, and short videos on apologetics and biblical history, which has grown rapidly to approach hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: If you’re serious about selling to the Department of War, go to https://SBIRAdvisors.com and mention Shawn Ryan for your first month free. Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @shop.mando and get 20% off + free shipping with promo code SRS at shopmando.com! #mandopod Go to https://calderalab.com/SRS. Use code SRS for 20% off your first order. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out at https://roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off sitewide. Wes Huff Links: YT - https://www.youtube.com/@WesHuff IG - https://www.instagram.com/wesley_huff WEB - https://www.wesleyhuff.com APC - https://apologeticscanada.com In March Wes will be giving a Can I Trust The Bible tour at The Museum of the Bible, go to https://www.museumofthebible.org and use code SHAWN25 for a special discount. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 0:16Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped doing it? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not admitted without parent.

• 0:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wes Huff, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here. It's a pleasure to have you. Man, at breakfast this morning, we realized it's been almost one year exactly since we've made contact. Mm-hmm. We've been trying to get you, so, long time coming. Yeah, yeah. I'm glad it came to fruition. Me too, me too. But, um, so I want to give, I want to start you off with an introduction here. Just, Wes Huff, born in Multan, Pakistan. You spent part of your childhood in the Middle East, surrounded by Islam and other worldviews. And overcame a rare condition as a kid that left you temporarily paralyzed without medical explanation. I call that a miracle. Now, you're the Vice President of Apologetics Canada,

• 1:19Shawn Ryan?

  where you equip people with answers to tough questions about scripture, history, and faith. A Canadian Christian apologist, reformed Baptist theologian, and one of the sharpest voices defending historical reliability of the Bible and our Christian faith. You approach skeptics with clarity, grace, and rock-solid evidence, making the case that the Bible isn't just a book of faith. It's the most scrutinized and preserved text in human history. A father to four, husband to Melissa, and most importantly, you're a Christian. Thanks for being here. So, uh, everybody that comes on the show gets a gift? Okay. So we got you a couple. Okay. First one.

• 2:05Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance League Gummy Bears.

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Awesome.

• 2:07Shawn Ryan?

  Made in the USA. It's just candy. They're legal in all 50 states and legal in Canada, I'm pretty sure. So, uh, it's just candy.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 2:16Shawn Ryan?

  And then,

• 2:19Shawn Ryan?

  I got some buddies over at Sig. One of them happens to be the VP of Marketing. His name's Jason.

• 2:24Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:25Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, I told him you were coming on. He got all excited.

• 2:28Speaker 04

  Oh, man.

• 2:28Shawn Ryan?

  So we thought you might like this. We're not sure how you're gonna get that back to Canada, but we'll help you figure it out.

• 2:33Speaker 04

  Oh, my goodness, Sean. Okay. Explain to me what I'm looking at.

• 2:37Shawn Ryan?

  All right. You're looking at a Sig Sauer P365 Legion.

• 2:42Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:43Shawn Ryan?

  So that is a carry. That's a everyday carry gun.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 2:48Shawn Ryan?

  It takes 17 rounds in the magazine, plus one in the pipe for 18. That's their new optics line. They put those little slits in the, in the front to help with recoil management. I'm not sure what's legal and what's illegal in Canada, so we're gonna figure that out and we're gonna get you.

• 3:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, we might need to get creative, but.

• 3:06Shawn Ryan?

  As close to that as we can.

• 3:07Speaker 04

  Man, that's awesome. That's awesome. Thank you so much.

• 3:10Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, you're welcome. Hey, shooter?

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Uh, I have shot, yeah.

• 3:14Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 3:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that's amazing. I really appreciate that.

• 3:18Shawn Ryan?

  My pleasure.

• 3:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. I got a couple of things for you.

• 3:21Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 3:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we're gonna, we're gonna be trading. So, um, the first one I want to give you is, so my friends, uh, over at Dawson Blades, uh, which is a forge that I hooked up with, uh, not that long ago. We collaborated on making a series of historically accurate with a modern twist blades named after early Christians who were influential individuals in the faith. So this is a recreation of a Roman Pugio dagger that, uh, we're calling the Irenaeus. And so he was, uh, he was an early church father, very prominent individual who wrote a series of writings called Against Heresies. Wrote against guys like the Gnostics and why they, they were off base. And so this is the second

• 4:06Speaker 04

  in our series. We have one out called the Augustine. This just launched this month. Um, and that is a size accurate, historical, modern, kind of twist on what a Roman centurion would have carried in the first century.

• 4:22Shawn Ryan?

  This is awesome.

• 4:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, thank you. Yeah.

• 4:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I also have for you.

• 4:30Shawn Ryan?

  Beautiful.

• 4:31Speaker 04

  A page from a 1576 Geneva Bible.

• 4:36Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:37Speaker 04

  So, that's.

• 4:38Shawn Ryan?

  What year? 1576?

• 4:40Speaker 04

  So, the first Bible that was brought over to the United States by the pilgrim was the Geneva Bible. Most people think it's the King James Bible. So, King James Bibles were brought over, but the Geneva Bible was actually the Bible of the Puritans. Um, because they considered the King James a state-developed Bible.

• 5:00Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 5:01Speaker 04

  And so, when they came over, they brought Geneva Bibles. And so, that's one of the first. They started printing, I believe, in 1560. And then that's the 1576 one, which was their kind of second round.

• 5:14Shawn Ryan?

  Man, this is, thank you.

• 5:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course.

• 5:17Shawn Ryan?

  Getting framed and putting in here, put in the studio. This is, wow. "This leaf is guaranteed to be an original from a 1576 Geneva Bible printed in London by Christopher Barker." The first year Geneva Bibles were printed in England was 1576. That's amazing.

• 5:38Speaker 04

  There you go. Thank you.

• 5:45Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Wes. So, we're gonna do a little bit of a life story, talk a lot about, um, a lot of the research you've done. And, uh, but first, I woke up in a weird mood today and, uh, had a, had a, had an interesting conversation with my wife, uh, this morning. And so,

• 6:05Shawn Ryan?

  last, last week was a rough week of interviews. We had a interview about all of the Epstein stuff going on in, you know, politics right now, and that's always a dark, dark place to be. And then, the, another interview that we had last week was, uh, Elizabeth Phillips, whose brother was, um, molested at, at a, at Camp Canuck, one of the biggest Christian camps in the world. And after she dug in, allegedly, there's been thousands of kids abused. And I woke, I just, whenever I do these, um, uncover some, this kind of stuff that's going on with kids, Epstein,

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  that camp, I mean, we've done a lot of them. It's just, it, it, um... It really throws me into a thing, you know, that, um, why is this happening? And it be, it just, man, it just, it like reopens all the questions that I used to have before I really came to Christ about three years ago. And, you know, and, and I don't even know how to organize all my thoughts. I thought I had them all organized before we started this, but I don't, but it, it, it, basically where the conversation ended is what, what is, what, you know, if, what is the point of living like a Christian?

• 7:27Shawn Ryan?

  If, you know, the, the, the common thing that I find in Christianity is really all you have to do is believe to go to heaven. And so, you know,

• 7:40Shawn Ryan?

  I grew up Catholic, joined the SEAL teams, pretty much lost my faith for about fourteen, fifteen, maybe twenty years. And then, uh, came back about three years ago, had a, a very profound experience in Sedona. But, you know, and so through my journey, you know, I've been talking to people like you and Lee Strobel and John Burke and, and, and priests and, um, Father Rehill that lives down in Columbus, just, just forty-five minutes away and, and, and I'm, I'm learning from all of you guys a tremendous amount, but, you know, I'll bring up John Burke, for example. John has researched, I think, a, around fifteen hundred near-death experiences

• 8:22Shawn Ryan?

  all throughout the world, different religions, different countries, different ethnicities, different everything. And what he does is he finds all the commonalities of these near-death experiences and relates them all to Christ.

• 8:38Shawn Ryan?

  Now,

• 8:40Shawn Ryan?

  in his studies, sometimes he talks about people go to hell and they'll have a hellish near-death experience where they, where they, where they die on the operating table or, or wherever, and then they wind up in hell. And Jesus is there basically saying, you know,

• 9:00Shawn Ryan?

  Do you accept me as Lord and Savior? Yes, boom, out of hell and to heaven. You know, and, and, and I was a lot more upset this morning, so it would have flowed a lot better. But kind of the point being is it's, it's hard to live as a Christian. It's hard to do the right thing. It's hard to admit you're wrong. It's hard to say, I'm sorry. It's hard to not lie, cheat, steal, screw people over to get what you want. It would probably be a lot easier to get what you want, get to your goals in life if you didn't live as a Christian. And so, you know, kind of my point here is, is

• 9:43Shawn Ryan?

  if you can go through life a shitbag, not being a Christian, lie, cheat, steal, kill, adultery, break every one of the 10 commandments all the time, and then you die and you are in hell, but you still have that one last chance that says, hey, do you accept me as Lord and Savior? Yes. Then what, what is the point of playing it out every day? And as a Christian?

• 10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's probably two components to that question. One is a very, you know, I think honest assessment of what's typically called the problem of evil.

• 10:29Speaker 04

  And I think that totally makes sense. And I think if you don't feel those things, you're probably not living your life in the real world. In that we see that this world is beautiful, yet it's profoundly broken. And that's, that's the testimony of scripture ultimately, is that God created the world to be good, but something took place. We know deep down that the world is not meant to be like this. People aren't meant to die prematurely. Children aren't meant to be abused. People aren't meant to get cancer. And we know that there's something wrong. And there's, there's this.

• 11:13Speaker 04

  This, you know, gut feeling that we get, and ultimately, I think it's Jesus who puts that gut feeling there. I think the fact that we understand that evil is something speaks to the fact that there is an objective evil, to be outbalanced by an objective good. Because in one sense, there's this understanding that if you subjectivize evil, then we can say we don't like those things, that they, they really, you know, shouldn't happen. But to say that, that we need to stop them, that these are objectively evil, is actually admitting that there's some sort of moral law. And a moral law needs a moral law giver. And

• 11:57Speaker 04

  so ultimately, I talked to a lot of people who almost assume that taking God out of the picture solves the problem. I think it actually makes it more complicated. It makes it more complicated because now you've removed the objective standard by which to actually say something is truly objectively evil. And there's, there's something that's unique about the Christian worldview in the question of pain and suffering and evil, in that the God of the Bible describes himself. There's this really great instance in Exodus, where Moses, he's up on Mount Sinai, and he says, you know, I, I want to see you, God. But God

• 12:41Speaker 04

  says, you know, I'm, I'm too great. I'm going to put you in the cleft of a rock. I'm going to pass by, and you're just going to kind of see a snippet of me. But God describes himself as a God who is, as this Exodus 34 6, he's compassionate, he's gracious, he's merciful, and he's over-abounding in steadfast love and kindness. And there are different iterations of that particular description of who God is throughout the Bible, throughout the Psalms, throughout the prophets. In fact, if you read the book of Jonah, it's actually Jonah's beef with God. He doesn't want to go to Nineveh and preach repentance. And at the very end, he says, I didn't want to come here because I hate the Ninevites. And I knew that you are a God who is compassionate, that you're over-abounding in steadfast love

• 13:23Speaker 04

  and kindness, and that you're true to your word. And if they repented, you would forgive them. I didn't want that to happen. Right? His beef is that actually God is too good. But I think what's interesting about all of the common denominators within that sort of description of who God is, despite the differences, is that it all includes some version of what we would translate as the English word compassion. And compassion in English comes from two Latin words, calm meaning with and passion meaning suffering. And I think one of the things that's unique about the Christian worldview is that the God of the Bible actually steps off his throne in eternity and into humanity and experiences

• 14:04Speaker 04

  brokenness, he experiences abandonment, he experiences pain and suffering, and ultimately he experiences being murdered. And in that way, the God of the Bible is not distanced or aloof to the pain and suffering that we actually experience, because he can actually relate to it. That as the second person of the Trinity entering into humanity, he understands what depravity actually is, because he can relate to the pain, suffering, abandonment, hurt, turmoil that we experience in this world. I think that actually changes the dynamic when we understand the different worldview

• 14:48Speaker 04

  perspectives and how they describe God. Yes, God is transcendent. Yes, God is holy. Yes, God is above anything we could fully comprehend, but God actually experienced what we experience in that brokenness in the world. And that he conquered that. I think the second part of your question. Why do you say he conquered that? Because it's still here. Yeah, it's a very good point. So it's what theologians sometimes refer to as a now but not yet reality, in that when Jesus rose from the dead, what he did ultimately is he said that death has no hold anymore.

• 15:34Speaker 04

  You know, the wages of sin is death, Paul says. But the gift of God is eternal life through Christ Jesus. And so, the punishment that was given to our first parents, Adam and Eve, when they ate of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. And God said, "If you eat from this, you're going to die." Was that, they did die. They didn't die right then and there. But there was a spiritual brokenness. Let me put it this way. So when you read Genesis, Chapter 1, you see all these iterations. You know, God makes the sea, and the fish, and the land, and the animals, and the trees, and the plants. And if you separate the fish from the water, right?

• 16:17Speaker 04

  It dies. God speaks to the water, and it teems with life. But if you separate the fish from the water, it's gonna die. God speaks to the land, and it brings forth vegetation and greenery. But if you remove the plant from the soil, it's gonna die. Who does God speak to when He creates humans? He speaks to Himself. What happens when we remove ourselves from our Creator? We die. There's a relational component to it, that I think is very profound. No matter how you want to read the literalism, or the figurative aspects of Genesis, Chapter 1 and 2. I think the point there being is that we were created for a relationship with God, and that's been affected, that's been broken.

• 17:00Speaker 04

  That's why we have covenants that God makes with His people. Those are promises. They're relational in their ultimate articulation and their practicality. And so, when Jesus comes, and He dies a death that we deserve because of the cosmic rebellion, the evil that we commit, the sin, then is in the grave, but then rises from the dead. What that is symbolic of is that the grave, death, has no hold on those who are found in Jesus Christ anymore. So though we still live in this beautiful yet broken world,

• 17:42Speaker 04

  all things will be made new, and that's the promise. And that... And this kind of leads into the other part of your question. You know, why, why do we bother living our lives if it's just full of pain and suffering? I think when Jesus teaches his disciples to pray, he says, "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven." You know, this, this life matters and it can be profoundly beautiful. And just as, you know, we bring children into the world and there's a lot of potential for hurt and pain and suffering, but we still see that as a good thing. We still see the beauty and the amazingness of new life.

• 18:24Speaker 04

  When I saw my children come into this world, there's, it was incredible. It's a miracle, right? How, how did this come to be? And yet we understand that there's, there's so much opportunity for hurt and pain and suffering and getting messed up there. And yet, the potential for goodness and beauty and to be poured into in that little child, to grow up as a virtuous individual of character, as a good citizen and a person who can understand what is truly meaningful in this life, that's worth doing. Absolutely.

• 19:08Speaker 04

  And I think that's part of, you know, the surrendering of making, it's not just about dying and going, going to heaven. If it was, you know, the gospel authors could have just solved the whole problem by just having Jesus's passion narrative. But a lot of the gospels is about his life. It's about just the daily struggle and the beauty and the amazingness of friends. You know, it's interesting in scripture, in John's gospel, he records this event of Jesus's friend Lazarus dying. And Lazarus goes to the tomb and Lazarus's sisters, Mary and Martha, basically think that Jesus is procrastinated and he's got there too late. Like, if you were only here, our brother would still be alive.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  And it's interesting because Jesus fully knows what he's gonna do. He's gonna speak into that tomb and tell Lazarus to get out. And yet, John records it and says that Jesus stood there and he wept. He wept because his friend had died. And that feeling of that raw emotion, that's not wrong. Jesus knew he was going to raise him from the dead. But he's also weeping, I think, because Jesus understands more than anybody else what the true significance of the brokenness of this world can be in the physical death. But that we look forward to something amazing in the resurrection of life eternal.

• 20:35Speaker 04

  But that doesn't mean that this life is a throwaway by any means.

• 20:42Shawn Ryan?

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• 22:58Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I have another interesting conversation with Wyatt, who we met earlier. And we were just chatting upstairs right before I came down and talking about the same kind of thing. And I can't remember how he worded it, but he had asked, "I have a whole nother life where I was addicted to cocaine and partying and doing pretty much anything, living the non-Christian life." Right. It was a lot of fun. It was maybe the most fun I've ever had. I'm just being honest. I wasn't riddled with anxiety. I didn't have to worry about shit because I had no responsibilities. I didn't have a son. I didn't have a daughter. I didn't have a wife. But...

• 23:43Shawn Ryan?

  So there were no worries. There were no anxieties. There was, I don't know, I have to get this stuff done. I mean, yes, I had a job, but it was, it was... Do you understand what I'm saying? Yeah. And so, back then, I didn't, I wouldn't say I was an atheist. It's not that I didn't believe in God. I just didn't give a shit. And I was a sideline person. And with no fear of death. I actually went, went, I lived in Colombia. I went down there...

• 24:13Shawn Ryan?

  With full intention of dying down there.

• 24:15Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:16Shawn Ryan?

  Been OD on drugs and when life gets boring, I'm checking out.

• 24:21Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:21Shawn Ryan?

  Well, that didn't happen.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Right.

• 24:23Shawn Ryan?

  Let's fast forward. You know, and in, in now, I've, I've come to Christ. I believe in Christ. I'm a Christian. I'm scared to death of death.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:36Shawn Ryan?

  I'm scared to leave my kid behind, my kids, my wife, because I know how fucked up this world is.

• 24:42Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:42Shawn Ryan?

  I'm have more, I have a team I'm responsible for, have a business I'm responsible for. I have anxieties, I have worries, I have, um, does it, it seems like you would be not worried about death after

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 24:58Shawn Ryan?

  you believe in Christ, after you come to Christ.

• 25:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, well, I think

• 25:04Shawn Ryan?

  Seems like life would be, I don't know if easier, but less anxious, less worries, less, I mean, but it's actually, I'm just being honest.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, it's for me. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, I think when we're young, we're, we're kind of naive in thinking that the, the indulgences are just what matters. And as we mature, we realize that there's so much more than just pleasure. And, uh, you know, pouring our lives into temporality. And, and I totally get what you're saying in terms of there being no outward effect on, you don't have a family, you don't have friends necessarily. I bet though, if you had died, it would have affected somebody.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  And there's a ripple effect that we often don't realize to how our lives actually impact others. I mean, this is a lie that a lot of people who commit suicide often just assume they're better off gone. Right? Everyone's going to be better off without them. And the, just the, the ripple effect outwards of how much pain that causes. I also think You know, C.S. Lewis, the famous theologian and writer, he wrote a book called Surprise by Joy. In that, when he writes, he said, you know, "If I was looking for happiness, a good cigar and a bottle of Scotch could have sufficed. That that would have got me there."

• 26:33Speaker 04

  And in his own autobiography, he talks about the fact that he was actually surprised at the fulfillment that was brought and the realization and the maturity that came with it of how much his life affected the people around him and how much more meaningful it could be realizing what his purpose and identity actually was in Christ. That he actually was surprised by joy and that he thought his life was basically going to be over. He couldn't do all the fun things. He couldn't jump into those vices and indulgences.

• 27:10Speaker 04

  But that he failed to realize that the temporal, that ecstasies, those were ultimately fleeting. That they wouldn't fulfill him in the way that he was actually looking for. There, what I was referring to earlier, when, you know, G.K. Chesterton says that the man who's walking into the brothel is searching for God. He's looking to worship something. And I think maybe the anxiety and the stress of what you're feeling, because I feel that too. In that, one of my biggest fears is dying and leaving my family. And then not being able to see my children grow up.

• 27:53Speaker 04

  And not being able, and then thinking, you know, "I don't want my children to grow up without a father." And that weighs on me. Not because I'm necessarily afraid of death, because I truly believe that I will be united with my Lord and Savior. But it's a grieving of the reality of what could be left behind. But I think that's a realization of a maturity that as we grow older, we realize the responsibilities that come with the...

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Things that we do and the people that we're connected to. And that though we might feel like the drugs and the sex and the the physical things and that those are going to give us meaning and purpose when we're younger. It's largely because we we have a mentality that fails to realize our mortality more broadly. That that this world has a lot more to offer than fleeting pleasures. And that, you know, when you pour into your kids, when you're building the train sets with your son, like the joy that that can bring and just seeing a child light up and and

• 29:08Speaker 04

  and seeing your child being born and the love that you share with your wife. That's that's something that I think goes beyond.

• 29:19Speaker 04

  A high, right? Which is a very, in one sense, a very selfish thing, right? I'm experiencing this. But when we get to do something like raise children as virtuous citizens, when we instill character in them, that that's a legacy that goes beyond the simple, you know, I'm feeling this right now and that feels great. Mm hmm. But the thing that lasts are the things that are truly going to give meaning and purpose in the world around us and is ultimately going to change the world. We have that potential. So maybe we should be looking for fulfillment instead of happiness.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  I think I think sometimes I wonder, you know, we tease out the differences between joy and happiness and in some ways those are synonymous. I don't think that, uh, um, but yeah, fulfillment, fulfillment goes beyond simple happiness in the same way that love is far more than an emotional feeling, right? There are days that I wake up and I don't necessarily feel like I'm loving my wife like I did on our wedding day or on our honeymoon or whatever. And. That love transcends that because love is actually about sacrifice to a certain degree. And that's what we see. I mean, if God's character is love, John, the apostle in his epistle says,

• 30:45Speaker 04

  "God is love," and love is the greatest ethic. So if the greatest God is gonna encompass himself, his identity, and the greatest ethic, well, the greatest example of that ethic is actually self-sacrifice, which is what we see in the person of Jesus Christ. You know, "No greater love has this than a man lays his life down for his friend," it says in Scripture. And so whether we're talking about happiness, or whether we're talking about love, or whether... I think we need to calibrate these within a framework that actually puts them into an understanding that goes beyond a simple feeling. Because if love is a simple feeling, if happiness is a simple feeling,

• 31:29Speaker 04

  if meaning and purpose and identity are simple feelings, well, then those are gonna change with my mood. It's gonna change with my diet, right? And so these concepts go beyond maybe the simplicity that we often describe them as. Because I love my wife even when I'm not necessarily feeling as in love with her as I could possibly be. And I can actually live that out in a self-sacrificial way that will truly be loving to her, even if I'm not feeling the warm fuzzies all the time.

• 32:07Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense, makes sense.

• 32:14Shawn Ryan?

  I'm trying to think how to ask this. I mean, what do you think happens when we die? When you think of heaven, what does your imagination, what does your faith tell you? Where is it? What do we see? Where are we going?

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Well, Paul says it is appointed people wants to die and then the judgment. So I think, you know, what's gonna happen is we're going to be...

• 32:39Speaker 04

  Judged, where we're going to stand before our Creator. And there's going to be an instance of we are either theologians sometimes describe it as being found in the first Adam or the second Adam. So Jesus is described as the second Adam in Scripture. And the idea is you're either going to be found in your sin. And you're going to take the brunt of that. Or you're going to be found in the covering of Christ. And He's taken the brunt of that. So what we do in this life, it's not that, you know, we just we punch our ticket. We say, you know, Jesus, I believe in you.

• 33:21Speaker 04

  And then whatever we do after that doesn't matter. You know, what we do actually does matter. We're not saved by our works, but we're saved for works. And those works can actually be an example and an outworking.

• 33:35Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean by that? We're not saved by our works, we're saved for our works.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so yeah. So in in the book of Ephesians, Paul writes, and he says that in chapter two, he says, "And you were dead in your transgressions and sins in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler and the power of the air and the Spirit, is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of our flesh and the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even even as the rest. But God being rich in mercy, because of His great love, which has,

• 34:24Speaker 04

  which He loves us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, made us alive together with Christ. By grace you have been saved and raised up with Him and seated. He has seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ." And he says that you are saved.

• 34:44Speaker 04

  So for by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not of yourselves, it is not the gift of God, not of works so that no one may boast. For we are His workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them. So in other words, there's nothing you can do, or I can do, that is going to placate God. We're not going to be able to earn our salvation, because compared to the standard of the holiness of God, it's always gonna fall short. We're broken, whether we realize it or not. And we're often, I sometimes say, worried about the evil out there,

• 35:28Speaker 04

  when there's a lot of evil in here. And so what God has done on our behalf is through Christ Jesus, He has saved us, like Paul says, that we are saved by faith in grace, and it's not works. So in one sense, you know, the law is like a mirror. So when we see God's law and His holiness displayed in His character that calls us to righteousness, that calls us to do good things, that's like a mirror showing us how dirty we are. But we make a mistake when we think that we need to grab the mirror and wash ourselves with it. That's not gonna clean us. We need something external, we need a jump in the shower.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  That's what's truly gonna clean us. The law has a purpose, and a good purpose, and that's to show us that we're dirty. But it's through faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone, that we're saved. That's something that He has done. We're saved by works, just not ours. Christ, who has done them perfectly. And the works that we do, when I say we're not saved by our works, but we're saved for our works, what I mean by that is that the works are actually the evidence to show that God has truly done something in our life. And now, we see that movement in our heart. So I talked to, I was talking to someone recently,

• 36:56Speaker 04

  who was saying, you know, I have a friend who, he claims to be a Christian, but he's really not living a life that I would say is overly, overly...

• 37:09Speaker 04

  A good example of what a Christian should be living. He said, like Wes, do you think he's a, do you think he's a believer? Do you think he has a genuine faith in God? And what I said to him was, you know, ultimately, that's between him and God. But I think it's perfectly reasonable to look at that person and say, listen, your salvation is between you and God, but I have no reason to believe that. I have no reason to believe that you're saved. And I think that should worry you. I think it should worry you that when I look at the world and I look at you, I really don't see that much of a difference. And that either means that you're, you're not living the life that God has called you to,

• 37:53Speaker 04

  or you're in real danger that you don't actually understand who Jesus is and what he's done for you on your behalf. And so I think the mistake we can make is thinking that God is like the gods of the Old Testament, that the nations surrounding Israel were trying to offer up sacrifices to the agricultural gods. So that, you know, if I sacrifice my son on the altar of, of Baal, maybe he'll grow good crops for me. And, and God says, I hate that. I hate that because that's an, it's, it's, it's making the thing a means to an end. I don't want you to sacrifice to get. I want you to love.

• 38:36Speaker 04

  I want you to love me and I want this to be an act of devotion. Which is why eventually God, through the prophets, starts to condemn the sacrifices, which he commands the Israelites to do, not because the sacrifices are bad, but because he says, you know, you've just made this, you've made it a meaningless act. You've made it something that just becomes rote. It's, it's just a ritual. God says, I don't want ritual. I'm not interested in that. All those other gods, they can get the rituals, right? It's fake. It's meaningless. It's purposeless. But I love you and I want you to do this because I want you to understand the relationship that I'm, I've called you to be in. And so those works,

• 39:21Speaker 04

  those works are an outpouring of the love. But if I were to ask you, Sean, what's the opposite of love? What would you say? Hate. Hate? That's a common answer and I think that's a good answer. But if you think about it, to hate something is actually to, to invest emotional energy in it.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Apathy, apathy is actually the opposite of love. Because apathy just doesn't care. When we see people who abandon children, who, you know, evil is being done around them and they're just indifferent. That, that stirs us, as it should. And it's because apathy is the opposite of love. And what God is calling us to is, you know, the way that we live out that love is by showing that that is actually, not because it saves us, because it can't.

• 40:20Speaker 04

  There's nothing that we can do that God, you know, God doesn't need us to love Him. In one sense, God doesn't need us to do anything. But it's kind of amazing that He, He wants us to. God is no better off or worse off if I don't love Him, if I don't worship Him. God exists perfectly in a set of living, loving relationships and did eternally. And yet, out of an outpouring of His love, He decides to create. He doesn't need to do that. He existed in a set of living, loving relationships in the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And yet, He creates, and even He creates knowing that His creation is going to rebel, that's going to cause pain,

• 41:03Speaker 04

  and that He Himself in the second person as the Son is going to enter into that pain. And yet, it's to His glory. In the, the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, it says that before the foundations of the world were lain, the lamb was slain. And so the cross wasn't a contingency plan. It wasn't an oops, I better fix things. It was all for the glory of God because He loves us and He wants right relationship with us.

• 41:32Shawn Ryan?

  So you're saying it's not the works, it's grace and faith. So the way I understand what you're saying is if you have faith, then you wouldn't do the latter anyways, you wouldn't act like that anyways. Am I correct?

• 41:47Speaker 04

  In the wrong things?

• 41:48Shawn Ryan?

  Okay, we're talking about, it's not for your deeds or your works, correct? That's, it's for your grace and faith.

• 41:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:57Shawn Ryan?

  To get you to heaven. Is that, that's what you said, correct?

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 42:00Shawn Ryan?

  So if you had faith and grace.

• 42:05Shawn Ryan?

  Then maybe you wouldn't have done the works, but you wouldn't have lied, cheated, steal, murdered, done any of that shit. Does that make sense?

• 42:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think-

• 42:16Shawn Ryan?

  So, but by having faith alone, you would not partake in breaking the Ten Commandments?

• 42:23Speaker 04

  Or at least there's an understanding that this is not what I should be doing. Right? There's a changing of mind in the mindset of when I think of my life before really understanding what Jesus had done on my behalf, I could easily explain away bad things, right? Because the significance of them was different. Martin Luther, the German reformer, he talks about the difference between, you know, falling in a hole and making a bed in a hole.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Or if you fall, you trip in the hole, and then you get out of the hole. But that's a mistake, and you understand that's a mistake. You don't then set up camp in the hole. Or a bird flying over your head and a bird making a nest in your hair. Like, when we truly understand the significance of the weight of the wrongdoing that we participate in, it grieves us, and we want to change. And maturity is realizing that we shouldn't be doing these things, though we do them because we're still on this side of eternity, we're still in a broken world. But we have an understanding, and we have that conviction of the Holy Spirit, that we shouldn't do them. And we don't want to do them.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  When I sin, when I sin against my wife, when I sin against my family, my friends, anybody, I feel convicted of that because I know I shouldn't be doing that. But and that's not to say that, um, you know, if you aren't a Christian, that you don't feel guilt or conviction, or I think we all do by nature of the fact that we're created in God's image. There's an aspect of that that's still it's crying out to us in our identity. We know we're not meant to be doing these things. But in the book of James, there's this, this really great passage where James,

• 44:27Speaker 04

  he talks about the fact that if you break one commandment of the law, uh, you've, you've broken all the law.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  And what he says there, uh, is,

• 44:44Speaker 04

  he says, "What use is it, my brothers, if someone says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to him, 'Go in peace, be warmed and be filled, and yet you do not give him what is necessary for their body, what is the use? Even so, faith, if it has no works, is dead by itself.'" Now, you could read that and think, well, he's saying it's, it's faith and works, right? Cause he says, you know, "Show me your, your faith and I'll show you my works." But what he's getting there is not that it's both faith and works. It's that the works are going to be an outpouring of the faith that you have. He says, um,

• 45:29Speaker 04

  now, uh, let me see if I can find it.

• 45:34Speaker 04

  That if you, if you, now, if you commit, if you break one aspect of the law, you are held accountable for all of it. And it's kind of like this, Sean, if you're hanging off the edge of a cliff and you're hanging on to, uh, like a chain.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  If one of those links in the chain is cut, you're gonna fall as if none of those links are holding you up. Right? And that's kind of what James is getting at there. If you, if you break one of the commandments, you've broken all of them. It's not that if you lie, you're now held accountable for murder. But it's that I'm hanging on to that chain. And if one of those links is severed, I'm gonna plummet to my death. Because there's no small sin, because there's no small God. That doesn't mean all sin is created equal. We know that murder is worse than sin. And we even see when Jesus is handed over to Pilate just before his crucifixion, he says, "The one who's given,

• 46:39Speaker 04

  given me over to you has committed the greater sin." The law has more severe penalties for some sins and less severe penalties for others in the Old Testament. It's not that this is all, you know, flattened out. There are gradations of sin, and we even understand that in our own civil law. But it's cosmic treason against a holy God. And so in that sense, it's always going to be significant because of who it's against.

• 47:10Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I read this, um, have you heard of the Jesus Calling? I read this every morning. I read it more than my Bible because I actually understand that. And I know it's funny, but it's true. But, you know, this morning I was reading it. And I was a couple of days behind, so I've caught up. But, you know, it was talking about, a common thing in there is, it's always talking about, "Hand over your problems to me. Hand them over to me. All this shit you're worried about, hand it over to me, I'll take care of it." And I was, I just, I don't understand what that means. I mean, I've got all kinds of fucking problems. I pray for them all the time. Years, some of these problems. And I'm not saying I have more problems or less problems than anybody else.

• 47:54Shawn Ryan?

  They're just problems, you know, and I pray about them. A lot of them don't get answered.

• 48:02Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and then I think about it. I'm like, what, what does that mean? Like, it's Monday morning. I'm anxious. I'm a business owner. I got, I'm a family guy. I got, I got all kinds of problems and anxieties and and so what is, when it says, don't worry about your problems, hand them over to me. I'll take care of them like, I've been praying for years for you to take care of some of these problems and they're all, not all of them, but a lot of them are still here. So, what does that mean? Like, I can't just go, hey, I got all this shit coming up and there are problems and things that I'm stressed about, but I'm just not gonna fucking do any of it because you said you're gonna handle it.

• 48:45Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:45Shawn Ryan?

  That's not gonna work out well for me.

• 48:47Speaker 04

  Right.

• 48:47Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and, and so I don't even know what that means. Just hand over your problems. Here you go.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  I think.

• 48:54Shawn Ryan?

  There they are.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. I think one way that, that it could be looked at, and maybe this is a diff, like a unique way of framing it. But I think part of that calling that God says, you know, come to me because my yoke is easy and my burden is light, is an invitation to be transparent with God in those things. Psalm 23, pretty famous Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd. Yahweh is my shepherd. I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul. He guides me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. One chapter over, Psalm 22, starts very different.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from me, from this, my salvation and the words of my groaning? Oh, my God, I call by day, but you do not answer, and by night, and I have no rest. You know what I find really interesting about the God of the Bible is the God of the Bible, who calls us to come to Him, sees both the person who says, Yahweh is my shepherd, I shall not want, and the person who says, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? As equally valid forms of worship. In that one-third of the book of Psalms is what is sometimes referred to as the lament or the complaint songs. And that God wants us to come to Him. He wants us to be transparent with Him.

• 50:23Speaker 04

  He wants us to be like David, who says, "I don't get it. I'm struggling. I'm lost. I don't feel you. I feel like you're far away. I feel like I'm forsaken." And that aspect, I think, of God calling us to cast our burdens on Him. Part of that is an acknowledgement of God realizing that this world is hard, that our burdens aren't meaningless. You know, some eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism and Shintoism, you read some of these writings, and the way that they talk about struggle and pain and suffering is sometimes very dismissive.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  And that it's like, "Well, just stop desiring things. Just stop." You know, you're too, you're attached to this world because you have this desire, so cast off all desires. You know, easier said than done, right? You know, ironically, they desire to do that, to cast off all the desires. But the, I think what we see within the dishonesty of the text of the Bible is that you see that God, that God who's compassionate, that God who understands, that God who says, "You can come to me, and you can be honest with me about what's going on." You don't have to sugarcoat your problems. You don't have to pretend that you're holier than you really are.

• 51:51Speaker 04

  You don't have to pretend that things are going well, or that things are easy, or... Because, listen, I, I get it. You know, I walked the dusty streets of first-century Galilee, and my, my, my, my feet ached, and I, my friends abandoned me, my family members died, and I was betrayed, and I was murdered. And I think part of God calling us to come to Him is less of a cure-all. You know, all of a sudden, all your problems are gonna be fixed. It's not realistic. We know, we know that's not gonna happen. There's a future tense of the fact that God says, you know...

• 52:36Speaker 04

  Well, I'm gonna make all things new. But he also says, "This world is gonna be hard. And this world is gonna be full of pain and struggle. But I've overcome the world. And so, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me," Jesus says. And as part of that, I think, the calling is less of, "Jesus is just a fixer, who's gonna solve all our problems." Jesus isn't a genie. But the relational component is that God wants us to come to Him. He wants us to be honest. He wants us to be transparent. Because He can understand those things.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  And the reassurance in that is that it's not a God that just creates and sets the dials in motion and then steps back and says, "Well, I hope everything works out. You know, let's see how all these little people can figure themselves out, and I hope it works out." Now, God desires are good. But that good doesn't necessarily mean that everything is gonna work perfectly in this world. Look at the apostles. Look at Jesus Himself. You know, all of the apostles, after coming to the realization that their Rabbi rose from the dead, and that the claims that He made about Himself were true, saw that proclamation

• 54:03Speaker 04

  and the new life that was a possibility for others as something worth suffering and dying for. And although we can't be sure of all the martyrdom stories, that they're rock solid about all the apostles, we know that they had minimum suffered pain and persecution for that. And they desired that. Not that they were going out to get hurt, but they understood that, you know, the God who loves us is worth knowing personally. Because the God who loves us cares about us. When we are in those seasons of, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" And in the seasons of, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want."

• 54:46Shawn Ryan?

  All right, all right. Where do you think we were before we were born?

• 54:50Speaker 04

  I, I don't think we existed before we were born.

• 54:53Shawn Ryan?

  You think that it's just, you don't think, I mean, when you hear the term old soul, does that mean anything to you?

• 54:58Speaker 04

  No, I think it's a turn of phrase. You know, it is interesting that, I've thought about this with every kid that's been born of, of mine, you know, it's so crazy that a new life just pops into existence and that that is something like the, I can see the personality of the baby and I can see how my wife's personality and my personality are articulated in my sons and my daughters and how amazing that is. And that that fact is a little bit incomprehensible, but I don't believe in the preexistence of souls. I don't think that that's something that, that scripture articulates in, in a way this concrete. But I think there's

• 55:42Speaker 04

  a divine mystery to the act of life. How does non-life produce life? I, I, we don't, we don't really have an answer to that question in terms of a scientific pursuit. Um, and even the fact that, you know, this how many pounds of gray matter in my brain is able to ponder those questions is pretty crazy in and of itself.

• 56:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  If we really think about it, why, why can I trust this? If this is a product of time plus matter plus chance, what, what is really grounding my ability to trust my reasoning faculties? Well, I think it's because I am endowed with the image of my Creator, which gives meaning and purpose to that. But man, there's something crazy about, you know, seeing a new life coming to existence and watching that person grow up and

• 56:34Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  Man, it truly is miraculous.

• 56:37Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but, uh, there's no doubt. Wes, let's take a quick break.

• 56:48Shawn Ryan?

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• 58:52Shawn Ryan?

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• 59:34Shawn Ryan?

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• 59:48Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Wes, we're back from the break. So all that wasn't on the outline before this, but so now I want to get into your story. Born in Pakistan?

• 59:57Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 59:57Shawn Ryan?

  What were you doing over there? What were your parents doing over there?

• 1:00:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. Usually when I cross the border and people look at my passport, they ask, military or missionary? Because why else would a guy that looks like me be born in Pakistan?

• 1:00:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Speaker 04

  And it is, it's missionary. So my parents were missionaries in the, um, uh, early 90s, uh, in, in Pakistan. So I was born there, but we weren't there for very long because the Gulf War broke out.

• 1:00:26Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:00:26Speaker 04

  And Pakistan sided with Saddam Hussein. So it wasn't safe to be in, in Pakistan anymore. And so we eventually came back to Canada and then we, my parents went back to the missions field where my, my dad worked in Amman, Jordan, where for a short time he was the chaplain at the British Embassy. So, uh, very short stint of my childhood. I actually went back after I graduated high school and I went back to Jordan. But it was, it was very different because when I was there as a child, we were in Amman and we, it was very rural and, uh, or very urban. And then when I went back, it was very rural. We were, I was working with Bedouin with a tuberculosis clinic.

• 1:01:06Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:06Speaker 04

  And so it's a very different experience. Even the language, the Arabic that the, the Bedouin spoke, the locals said like, don't worry, we can't understand them either. So. It was a but it was it was it was great. And I think I think formed a lot of my desires and interests in even something like inquiring to Islam, having understood what a majority Muslim perspective was, and some of the things that might like not totally compute if you were just learning about something like a worldview like Islam from a book.

• 1:01:46Shawn Ryan?

  Did you how how far into Islam did you get?

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Um, well, I researched it pretty heavily like I I read I read the Quran cover to cover a few times and connected with some people who were doing academic work on the Quran. There was a period when I was in university where there were other Muslim students who during Ramadan, they would read the Quran from beginning to end, and I would do it with them, almost as a way to establish relationships, but also to talk through some of these things. And then I would also share some of what I was reading in the Bible as well. But in my four year undergraduate degree, I probably read the Quran five or six times.

• 1:02:26Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  And in English, mind you, never in Arabic, which my Muslim friends would say you haven't read the Quran, because it only exists in Arabic, right? An English translation, they wouldn't consider properly being a Quran. But I read I read quite a bit of the adjacent stuff, the Hadith and the Sunnah, and then the Surah al-Allah, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, Ibn al-Shawn. So I was I was genuinely interested in it because of the interplay historically with Christianity and Islam. And also just trying to figure out, you know, okay, well, what are the claims of this worldview? Could they actually be

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  legitimate compared to something that I was raised to believe? And ultimately, I found them very wanting.

• 1:03:17Shawn Ryan?

  Really? What it would would I mean, what would you say? What are some of the main teachings in the Quran?

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  Well, I think Islam has an issue in that there are historical articulations of

• 1:03:33Speaker 04

  What's going on in the biblical stories that are just false? So the main one would be in, uh, uh, in the Quran, uh, Surah 147. It denies the crucifixion. So it, it says that, uh, it has the Jews speaking and say, we crucified Jesus, the son of Mary, which is kind of an odd thing if the Jews believed he was the Messiah, that they were crucifying him. And then it says that, uh, that he, he, he was not crucified, nor was he killed, but it was made to appear to them. And so there's a face value denial of the crucifixion. Now they're all Say that he was real. Yes. So Muslims believe in Jesus.

• 1:04:15Speaker 04

  In fact, Jesus is mentioned 25 times in the Quran, uh, far more than even Muhammad is mentioned in the Quran. And the, the, if you think of the traditional Islamic narrative of Muhammad being a seventh century caravanner, I think it makes sense for some of the stories that you find of, whether that's Abraham or Noah, or Jesus, John the Baptist, Mary, who are in the Quran. Cause I think what's probably going on is that you have an individual, if we're accepting the traditional narrative, that there was a historical Muhammad, that he's a caravanner, that he's, he's traveling in and around the Arabian Peninsula, up into areas like Syria and Jordan.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  He's being exposed to Christians and Jews. And I mean, the traditional narrative is that he was illiterate. So he's not reading these stories. He's hearing them orally. But because there's really no exposure to what we call the Old and the New Testaments. And even then it's, it's up for debate whether they existed in Arabic as Arabic existed in like seventh century Hijazi script at that point in time anyways. But he would have been hearing these stories with no kind of discerning ability to differentiate between fables and campfire stories about these characters and what were the actual historically reliable, non-apocryphal documents. So.

• 1:05:43Speaker 04

  The earliest source material for Jesus are the 27 books that we call the New Testament, primarily the biographies of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. But there are other stories that are apocryphal in nature that talk about, say, Jesus, what Jesus was like as a child. So there's one called the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas. And the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas has a story about child Jesus. Now, this is coming a long time after Jesus. Everyone who knew Jesus was dead by the time these stories were developing. But the biblical gospels are very sparse on what Jesus was like as a child. The Gospel of Luke has a very brief story of Jesus when he's 12, going to the temple

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  with his family and teaching in the temple, and Mary and Joseph forget him in Jerusalem and then have to go back. But so there's a body of literature that pops up that's basically talking about, well, what was Jesus like as a child? And so infancy narratives become kind of this very popular, if we want to call them fanfiction, it's not really like a proper historical designation, but kind of like that. And one of these is the Arab Infancy Gospel of Thomas, which has a story about Jesus making clay birds by a riverbank. And then some of the Jews get mad at him because it happens to be the Sabbath, and he's working on the Sabbath. And so the story goes that he breathes on the birds, they turn into real birds, and

• 1:07:09Speaker 04

  the evidence flies away. This story ends up in the Quran. And we know that this is an apocryphal story. We know that it has no historical designation of actually being tied to the first-century itinerant Jewish rabbi, Jesus Nazareth. But it is something that would have been available, potentially in oral form, in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century. And so you have these things that get smuggled into the text of the Quran, but they're jumbled. And they have, so there's their characters that are in some places that shouldn't be in

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  others. Heyman, who is from the book of Esther, ends up in the Exodus story as the right-hand man to Pharaoh. Well, there are hundreds of years between the Persian story of Esther and the Egyptian story of Moses and Pharaoh. So there's confusion and conflation that's going on. And I was, at least when I was reading the Quran early on, aware of the biblical narratives. And so when I'm reading the Quran, and I'm reading some of the Quran's versions of these stories, it's not hard to pick up on where they're just not right. Gotcha. And ultimately, Sir four, verse 157, that denies the crucifixion. That's a pretty serious one.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  What does it say? What does it say? I mean, it denies the crucifixion. Yeah, it says that he was neither killed nor was he crucified, but it was made to appear to them. And it says that even those who proclaim it are in doubt about it. So part of the problem is that there's a little bit of ambiguity in the wording of the Arabic. So some Islamic exegetes and interpreters have interpreted this as he wasn't, he wasn't killed, but he was put on the cross and crucified. Others take that, but it was made to appear to them, and take that as what's sometimes called the substitution theory, where someone

• 1:09:14Speaker 04

  else was made to look like Jesus and put in his place. And that's a minority view, but it is a view that some scholars like Shabir Ali has articulated in the past, the Ahmadiyya sect of Islam, that this is the perspective they hold. And they actually believe that, well, they believe, actually, so I back up, that was a mistake. They don't believe that. They believe that Jesus was on the cross, but he survived, which is called the Suhun theory, that in... In the crucifixion, when it says that he did not die nor was he crucified, it's that he wasn't crucified all the way because he didn't die. But that actually he recovered afterwards and they have a story about him going to India and living to over 100 years and having a family and that kind of thing.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  But there is some ambiguity in the historical commentaries, the tafsir, on this particular passage to where there's debate even amongst Muslims as is this a full outright denial of the crucifixion? That's what the kind of mainstream Sunni Orthodox perspective would be. But some believe that maybe Judas was dressed up like Jesus and he was put on the cross in Jesus's place, or that Jesus recovered, or that it never happened. It was all an illusion to begin with. But no matter which way you swing it, it's still a denial of one of the most established facts of all of history.

• 1:10:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Even like the most skeptical of biblical scholars, if they can say, we can basically know nothing about the details of Jesus's life, we can say that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, because we have so many intersecting sources, Christian and non-Christian alike.

• 1:10:54Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, that's, I mean, so are they bringing up, is the only point of bringing up Christianity, the crucifixion, Jesus, Moses, everybody, you know, that plays a role in the, is it to discredit Christianity in the Quran?

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Um, I, I mean, I think the answer to that would be yes and no. There's a clear line of succession within the Quran. Um, and I think part of this is the confusion on the author of the Quran's part, that they thought they knew what the Torah and the Gospel were. So the Tarat and the Injil, the Torah and the Gospel are referred to multiple times within the Quran itself. And you have a kind of a, you have succession language, that the Torah was given to Moses and it was full of guidance and light. And the Gospel was given to Jesus and it was full of guidance and light. And then the final revelation is the Quran. But there's almost a tacit implication that they're all saying basically the same thing,

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  and that God's message is unified across all of them. The problem with that is that we know what the Torah and the Gospel looked like in the 7th century in Muhammad's day, and it doesn't look any different than what we have now. But I don't think that the, I don't see any evidence that the author of the Quran. Knew what the Torah or the Gospel were. So you have 900 approximately either direct quotations or allusions of the Old Testament in the New Testament. In the Quran, you only have one in quotation of either the Old or the New Testament, the Lex Talionis, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  So in terms of the synchronicity of the Quran to these previous books, it's lacking, to say the least. It's not an organic cultural document like the New Testament is. The New Testament was predominantly written by Jews for Jews and is saturated in Hebrewic and Jewish and Old Testament understandings. If you don't understand something about what's going on in the New Testament, going back and reading the Old Testament might actually help you because there's just so much symbolism and calling back to and the Gospel authors,

• 1:13:12Speaker 04

  Jesus is parallel with Moses and David and, you know, there are all these things. But the author of the Quran, I think, is aware of some of these Jewish, Christian and Zoroastrian fables, is assuming that those are what's going on and so he's baking those into the text, maybe with the implication to kind of woo the Christians and the Jews to come over to his side. But you see, um, so I think it's, uh, there's, there's one passage in the Quran that says, uh, it has this kind of succession narrative, right? It talks about the Gospel or the Torah being full of guidance and light and being given to Moses

• 1:13:54Speaker 04

  and then the Gospel being full of guidance and light given to Jesus. And then it says, "Let the people of the Gospel judge by what they have therein." Talking to Christians, right? Those are the people of the Gospel, the Al Al and Jil. But if they do not judge by what they have therein, they are the defiantly disobedient. Now, in the grammatical context, what they have therein for the people of the gospel is the gospel. So when I'm talking to my Muslim friends, sometimes I open to this passage and I say like, "Hey, I don't want to be one of the defiantly disobedient. I want to stand before God and not have that on my shoulders."

• 1:14:34Speaker 04

  However, in order to be obedient to this passage, and I judge using the gospel, which it's telling me to do, and I judge the Quran by the gospel, I find the Quran doesn't understand the gospel, has no earthly understanding of what I believe, and actually denies central points of it, the divinity of Christ, the crucifixion. And so if the Quran is true, and it's telling me to do this, then I have to conclude that the Quran is false. Because it's telling me to do something that's an impossibility. I cannot judge the Quran by the gospel and find that the Quran actually understands what the gospel is saying.

• 1:15:15Speaker 04

  And so this kind of, my Muslim friends often have large articulations, what you have in the gospel isn't what they had in the gospel. I think that's highly problematic. I don't see any reason why in the 7th century, a gospel would be any different than it is to what it is now. Especially when, in my own study, in manuscript studies, I can find copies of the gospel in Syriac, from Syria, in the 6th and 7th centuries. It reads exactly like what my gospel reads today. So it's not that there's no evidence for that.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  Or if that is the case, and the Quran says that nobody can change God's words, and the gospel is God's word, who changed it? Who was able to kind of thwart the God of Islam's ability to preserve his word in that endeavor? He's either, he was either unable to do it, or he didn't...

• 1:16:19Speaker 04

  Do that. And when he says, no one can change my words in the Quran, it's not true. And so ultimately, I think Muslims have a problem. They're painted into these corners. They have these passages about the Torah and the Gospel, and yet the Quran doesn't seem to understand what those are, or just flat out contradict it. The Quran denies the crucifixion when we know that the crucifixion happened. And so they're kind of painted themselves into these corner, corners in defending these particular

• 1:16:48Speaker 04

  positions. And I just, I don't, I don't think that they can stand up to scrutiny.

• 1:16:54Shawn Ryan?

  That is, uh, I mean, I'm not, I've never studied it. I've never read it. And I find it very interesting how much of the Bible is in there. That's.

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, Jesus is a central figure. He's even referred to as the Messiah, although it's ambiguous in Islamic, like, understanding what that means. Um, he's, he's said to be sinless. He's said to be virgin born. He's said to be the one who's going to come back at the end of time. So there are all of these things, like Jesus is a prominent character. Like I said before, I mentioned 25 times, far more than Muhammad is mentioned. In fact, the only woman named in the entire Quran is Mary, the mother of Jesus. And so the, these figures have prominence within the Islamic holy book, but ultimately they have no full historical understanding of who they are.

• 1:17:44Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Very interesting.

• 1:17:48Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I want to talk about this miracle, about you walking. I didn't, you, we, we kind of talked about a little bit in the hot question. Can we go into that a little bit?

• 1:17:57Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah, let's do it. Yeah. So I was, um, just before my 12th birthday, I was diagnosed with a condition called acute transverse myelitis. And so I had the flu and my body's immune system in sort of a freak accident response attacked the nerve endings at the base of my spinal cord, the myelin sheath, instead of attacking the flu. And so what that caused is inflammation on the base of my spinal cord, which severed the communication between my legs and my brain. And so the diagnosis, um, I, I literally woke up from a nap and couldn't feel my legs. And so.

• 1:18:33Shawn Ryan?

  How? You remember this?

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, very vividly. Yeah, yeah. Um.

• 1:18:39Speaker 04

  The diagnosis was that I would most likely be a paraplegic for the rest of my life. So recovery wasn't impossible, but it was, you know, you're going to dig in for the long haul kind of deal, especially because transverse myelitis as a condition, how it's been described to me by medical professionals, is that the recovery rate has a correlation to the quickness of the actual paralysis. So because mine was instant, the conclusion was that the recovery was going to be long and it was going to be hard. And the short story is that one month

• 1:19:22Speaker 04

  from the day that I woke up and couldn't feel my legs, on February 8th, I woke up, got out of my bed and walked over to my wheelchair.

• 1:19:35Speaker 04

  How did you know to get up? So it was kind of instinctual. It's a, yeah, how did I know to get up? So for one month, you were paralyzed? For one month, I was completely paralyzed, no feeling from the waist down. Yeah. And I don't know how long it was that I sat in my wheelchair until I realized that I, what I'd done, but I knew something was different. And I, it could have been five minutes, it could have been 45 minutes. I couldn't actually tell you how long it was. But eventually I looked down and I wiggled my toe. And that kind of broke me out of the spell. And I ran upstairs and got my parents. You, you ran upstairs? Yeah.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Holy shit. Which was preceded by my mom telling me to run up and down the stairs and weeping.

• 1:20:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. You were in bed and you're just like, I'm going to get up and walk over to my wheelchair. I mean, did you?

• 1:20:37Shawn Ryan?

  Did, I mean, did you prepare yourself? Was there anything, or you just did it?

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  I just did it.

• 1:20:41Shawn Ryan?

  Realizing, like, whatever.

• 1:20:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, what I typically do is I would like, kind of, fall out of bed and crawl over. Um, because the wheelchair wasn't far from my bed, obviously, it needed to be in close proximity. But, uh, at that, at that point, that's basically what I had done. I pulled myself up to my wheelchair. But, um, and it was the doctors that first used the word miracle. I think my parents are very hesitant to use that word. But the medical professionals, um, they were the ones who said, we really don't have an explanation. Because the, the inflammation was gone. There was no evidence of it.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  What happened when you sat in the wheelchair?

• 1:21:22Speaker 04

  Well, I just kind of was, tried to figure out what hap- like, because you know something is different. But you don't know what it is. It's kind of like.

• 1:21:33Shawn Ryan?

  What do you mean you don't know what it is? You just got out of bed and walked to the wheelchair?

• 1:21:37Speaker 04

  Because it's so passive that you don't, it, it's like the, the reality of the situation. It, it, it precedes like the, what is actually taking place. So, so I couldn't figure out exactly what had happened. But I knew something different had happened. And then it was the process of looking down and wiggling my toe that made me realize, like, I can, I can move.

• 1:22:15Shawn Ryan?

  And you, you then run upstairs?

• 1:22:18Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, I got my parents.

• 1:22:22Shawn Ryan?

  What did your dad say?

• 1:22:25Speaker 04

  Uh, you know what? I can't remember what my dad, that's probably a good question to ask him. I remember my mom because she's very emotional. But I mean, it was pretty surreal. I think a lot of us were in shock. I was, I think, after the whole paralysis incident, I was in shock for a long time because I remember feeling oddly normal. I mean, there are obvious times, there were, there were definitely times during that 30 days where I cried myself to sleep. But it also was just kind of strangely, you're kind of strangely numb because it's such a drastic change to be told, you know, you're a healthy child, you're 11 year old, playing sports, going to school, hanging out with your friends. Okay, now you're,

• 1:23:10Speaker 04

  you're disabled. You're not gonna, things are gonna look very different. You gotta put a ramp on your house. You know, you can't get up and down the stairs with like, regularity kind of thing. So it was a big change. And, and I think my parents and my family in general, they were largely, they were, they were kind of, you know, accepted of the fact, okay, this is our reality now. We're gonna do everything we can for this to go well. We're gonna, we're gonna do, we're gonna put the ramp on the house. We're going, we moved my bedroom to the living room. Because I

• 1:23:51Speaker 04

  was upstairs, I couldn't get down, up and down the stairs very easily. And so we were kind of this temporary room downstairs. And, but there was an acceptance that this was probably my reality. And I was doing physiotherapy, but it was kind of a joke. You know, what do you do for a paraplegic? You know, yeah, so, so we, and me, I was ready to be a paraplegic for the rest of my life. And I think my, my parents prayed at the time was always that God would be glorified in this situation. Not necessarily that I would be healed, not that they were against something

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  miraculous happening. But I think they, their perspective was, you know, we, we, God is in control, and we can trust Him even when things aren't going the way we planned, or even the way we understand.

• 1:24:48Shawn Ryan?

  Gee, man. Wow. And nothing, I mean, nothing.

• 1:24:56Shawn Ryan?

  Nothing miraculous, nothing crazy before you went to bed the night before?

• 1:25:00Speaker 04

  No.

• 1:25:02Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. Wow.

• 1:25:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think that did mark a very powerful, what I would describe as a supernatural experience in my life, when the medical professionals said, this is your lot, you're gonna be a paraplegic to now, I guess you're walking again. So that's, it's, in some ways, it's disorienting. In other ways, I did have a framework for the transcendent, for things that are out of the ordinary happening. But it was, it was actually connecting those, those, the dots between my heart and my head later on, that really made that more tangible. In the intellectual questions that I was wrestling with

• 1:25:44Speaker 04

  later in my teens, to going back and thinking, you know, I can ascribe this kind of crazy thing that happened to me as a child to something tangible. It's not just a random fluke, it's not just, you know, strange things happen, no explanation. I, I, I can assign it to an actual individual in this case, right? God, who operates in time and space and history and does things out of the ordinary.

• 1:26:15Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that is amazing. Wow. What, I mean, do you remember, uh, meeting the doctor?

• 1:26:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:26:23Shawn Ryan?

  What, I mean, you, did you walk into his office?

• 1:26:27Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, we did a scheduled appointment, I believe it was scheduled, uh, like, like regularly scheduled appointment. Shortly after, uh, I could walk and I, yeah, I walked in, I was wearing these really big rain boots. I don't know why I was wearing them. I don't think it was raining. Um, and they got me to run up and down the hall and I remember, because the rain boots were like a little bit too big and they were like, not, just awkward, but running up and down the hallway for the doctor.

• 1:26:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's amazing. What did I mean, what did he, what did he say?

• 1:26:59Speaker 04

  This is a miracle. We have no medical explanation. I believe, but I have to double check. I have my mom's journal entries from that time. She photocopied them all for me. Um, but they definitely, the doctor was the first one to drop the word miracle. And I could, I, I think I'm remembering this correctly. The doc, one of the doctors, because there were a number of specialists that were assigned to my particular case. Said, what did you do? And my mom said, we prayed. And I can't remember if the story is that they went off and printed a list of the other kids in the intensive care unit. Said, can you pray for these? Or just said, like, you should pray for the other kids in here. So it was something like that. In her journal entry, because they were like, something happened.

• 1:27:43Shawn Ryan?

  That is wild. That just, I mean, did you, were you at full faith back then at 11?

• 1:27:51Speaker 04

  As much as an 11 year old can be.

• 1:27:53Shawn Ryan?

  That's kind of what I'm getting at.

• 1:27:54Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, I think I made, like, I made a conscious decision that I believe was genuine when I was six.

• 1:28:03Speaker 04

  As much as a six year old can, like in my limited understanding of reality and the world, and I think I did. I remember sitting on my bedroom floor and feeling like I need God. I, I need God to, to rescue me, to, to, to lead me in this life. And that.

• 1:28:27Shawn Ryan?

  Age six?

• 1:28:28Speaker 04

  Age six. Yeah. Yeah. And, and that being real. And I mean, that doesn't mean that I wasn't like, when I was a teenager, I did go through a period of, if you want to call it deconstruction or whatever. I, I wasn't an abandonment of my faith. It wasn't a, a crisis of faith. I think those are too strong for what was actually I was experiencing. But I was, I was investigating. I figured, you know, okay, my parents raised me to believe something. Do I believe it based on the fact that they told me to? Now, I don't think that's a bad reason. I want my kids to believe what I tell them, right? But I think everybody at some point goes through a period of time where they kind of have to

• 1:29:12Speaker 04

  figure out where the dividing lines are between their parents and them. And part of that for me was.

• 1:29:20Speaker 04

  An investigation of, okay, what does the Quran say? What does the Bhagavad Gita say? What does the Book of Mormon say? What does, what are atheists writing about? That maybe has some credibility? And I did, you know, dig into those because I wanted to be honest with the fact that believing a lie, even if it's a convenient lie, is still not worth believing. And I wanted to follow what was true. And so if I was living a delusion, to some degree, I didn't think I was. But if I was, I wanted to at least be aware of

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  what that delusion was and what maybe was a better explanation for the world around me. Right? So you'd think that that powerful supernatural experience as a child would have solidified something. And it definitely was a piece of the puzzle. But I think I still needed to remedy the intellectual questions that I had. They were different than the ones I was asking as an 11 year old. When I was 11, I was up at night with the why me questions? You know, I'm a, I'm a good kid. My parents are good people. Why is this happening to me? Well, when I was a teenager, it was more, did Jesus actually exist? Like, what's, what's this thing? Can I believe this? Like 2,000 years old and I'm trying to live my life by it?

• 1:30:49Speaker 04

  What, what, what are the, what are the evidences? What are the reasons? What are, what are the data points that point that to me? Because ultimately, I think

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  the worldview and the Christian worldview, it's existentially satisfying, but it's also intellectually robust. And that there's a cumulative case of all sorts of things, whether that's historical or philosophical or sociological, that contribute to the truth claims that it's ultimately making about who we are, why we're here, where are we going? Questions that all humanity has always asked themselves. But it's because I think those are imprinted on our, our being, on our soul as image bearers of God. But it was exploring those in the capacity that I, I, I as a teenager could explore in the same way that,

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  you know, the commitment that I made at six years old, I believe was genuine. And the investigation that I did when I was seventeen or eighteen years old was genuine. And that that's just grown, right? As I've been exposed to more, been given the opportunity to research, to investigate, to learn, to grow. Um, I think that's only operated to bolster my belief. Doesn't mean that there haven't been times where I've questioned things or thought, you know, is this, is this really all true? But

• 1:32:20Shawn Ryan?

  What are some of the things in there that you thought were hard to find true?

• 1:32:24Speaker 04

  Hard to find true.

• 1:32:25Shawn Ryan?

  You struggled with personally?

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think what we were talking about before, the, the, the problem of pain and suffering, I think is a genuinely good objection to Christianity because it's far, it's, it goes beyond an intellectual question. It's a, it's a personal question. It, it, it speaks to us in a way that a very tidy theological or philosophical answer might not actually suffice. You know, if I'm hurting, if I have a child or a family member or someone who's close to me, if they're sick, if they're dying, if something, if a tragic accident happens, it's hard to, to, to really wrestle with that. And that's why I think, you know, what we were talking about before, the Psalm twenty

• 1:33:11Speaker 04

  two, my God, my God, why have you forsaken me? In one way, I think the transparency and the honesty of scripture is something that I want to align myself with because it speaks to the reality of when I hurt, there's something there that I can, that I can reach out to. God is not afraid of our objections, of our doubts, of our insecurities. And that's been very comforting to me, especially this previous year. My, my, uh, my two-year-old daughter was having seizures. Uh, we almost lost her at one point.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  This last fall, she was hit by a distracted driver while we were crossing the road. And nightmare situations for me as a father, like to sit in a hospital room with my wife thinking we're going to lose our daughter. And yet, to still believe that God is in control, that God is good, that, you know, we're gonna get through this because God is with us. In the midst of that, I think that goes beyond any, like, the, the, the personal existential

• 1:34:31Speaker 04

  struggle is hard, but the personal existential comfort is also very, very comforting in, in a lot of those moments. You know, to, to give up my desire for control and say, listen, there's nothing I could do. The doctors are running around, they're intubating her, they're, you know, she's a, I can see her heartbeat being irregular and, and saying like, God, I don't know. I don't know what's gonna happen here. And yet, there can still be peace in that, despite that. And if that had gone south, I could rest in that God is good and that He has a perfect plan, even if I don't understand it.

• 1:35:15Speaker 04

  But it's those questions that sometimes genuinely make me feel like, man, I wish I understood what's going on here. I wish, I wish I could figure out why God allows these things to happen. Because I don't know. I'll give you another example. After I experienced my, my healing, I encountered people who were sick and who were, say, themselves like quadriplegics. And to wrestle with, okay, I believe you healed me, but what about that guy? Like, why, why did you choose? It's almost like a survivor's guilt. What about them? Why, why are they still in, in their particular predicament?

• 1:36:01Speaker 04

  I don't, I don't have an answer to that. And, and that's, that's a hard one to reconcile. But I have enough to rest on that I know that God is good. I know that the Christian worldview is true. And I know that despite what my maybe fleeting or subjective insecurities are about those things. And there's a comfort in that as well.

• 1:36:33Shawn Ryan?

  Did you struggle a lot when you were dealing that with your daughter? With your faith? Or it was rock solid by then?

• 1:36:38Speaker 04

  I mean, I think, I think we all struggle in different capacities, right? Like.

• 1:36:43Shawn Ryan?

  You still struggle with all the research you've done? Dead Sea Scrolls, everything, you still struggle?

• 1:36:49Speaker 04

  Well, I think, you know, the, the human condition is that we're fickle. And nobody is bulletproof. And the, like I said before, like thi- this world is beautiful, but it's also profoundly broken. And I think we're supposed to feel that brokenness. Like that lump that's in my throat? I believe God put that there. Because I think a God who is himself worried about things like hope and justice. He's instilled us with a desire to also be concerned with justice. Be concerned with injustice. Be concerned with hurt and the brokenness. And like, we can say all day long, God, why don't you do something?

• 1:37:35Speaker 04

  But I think God could equally say, you can do something too. You know, I've given you faculties and abilities and this, this world is not moving without your contribution to it. And that's why we're, we're called to go out into the world, to make disciples of all nations, because our actions mean something. And does that mean that, you know, I don't wake up in the morning and really struggle with this thing or that thing? No. I, there, there are periods in my life, periods of time where I just sit down and think like, man, I don't know. I don't know what's going on here. But when I have those moments, I think falling back onto

• 1:38:21Speaker 04

  the foundation of the investigation that I have done. You know, I think that the publicly available evidence points to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview. To the degree that you would have to move so much evidence out of the way to make me not believe it at this point. That even when I don't understand something, I can trust that maybe God knows something I don't. And there's, there's a level of.

• 1:38:57Speaker 04

  Giving up control in those moments that I think is appropriate. Not giving up control in that, you know, I'm just turning my brain off and I'm, you know, I'm just a robot at that point. But that God calls me personally and understands me personally because he knit me together in my mother's womb. And there's, there's a, an intimacy there that exists. The God of the Bible is, you know, I sometimes say, you know, when God revealed himself to the patriarchs, to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, to Moses, he didn't say, you know, I'm the

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  all-knowing, all-powerful, all-everywhere God. He said, I'm the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. I'm the God relationally. I'm making a covenant. I'm making an agreement. I'm making a promise with my people. And then that all ultimately culminates in him stepping into time and reality in Jesus and having friends, having colleagues and laughing and traveling and crying and experiencing all of those things. I think that there's, there's, there's something that sets apart the Christian worldview with Jesus, that he's a real person that really lived, that we can point to. You know, in one sense, if the Buddha didn't exist, you could still technically have Buddhism. You could have the philosophies.

• 1:40:25Speaker 04

  You could have the noble truths and, you know, the path and all of those things. It didn't have to be Gutama Siddhartha who came up with those things. It could have been anybody. And likewise, in Islam, it could have been anybody. It didn't have to be Muhammad. The God of Islam could have chosen any person to be the prophet that he revealed his truth to, but it does have to be Jesus. It cannot be anybody else. And there is a historical grounding of the Christian faith, that the tomb is either empty or it's not. And if it's empty, now C.S. Lewis, who I referenced before, he said, Christianity is true is of infinitely importance. If it's not true, is of no importance.

• 1:41:10Speaker 04

  The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

• 1:41:15Speaker 04

  And he's famous for the whole liar lunatic or lord. Kind of trilemma. If you look at what Jesus did and what he said about himself, he's either a liar and a con man. He's either a lunatic and he's crazy. Or he's the creator of the universe and he's lord. Now, we could also add one more legend. We could say, well, he's just, you know, he's just a good figure. He's just a good person to pattern our lives after. I don't actually think Jesus gives you the room to, to, to look at him like that. Because Jesus didn't just say, here's a philosophy to live by. He said, I'm the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the father but through me.

• 1:41:56Speaker 04

  And if you don't believe that I am invoking the divine name from the Old Testament, then you will die in your sins. You know, he doesn't give us the room to just say, you're a good example. You know, I said this on Rogan where I said, you know, if Jesus is just a pattern, then you don't need a savior. Cause you can do it yourself. You just need an example. If it's, if Jesus is only an example to live by, then all you need to do is, you know, tie up your boots a little tighter and do better. But the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross wasn't because Jesus came to show us how to live. It was to live the life we couldn't live.

• 1:42:41Speaker 04

  And on that basis, like I said before, you're saved by works, but it's Jesus's work. It's not yours.

• 1:42:55Shawn Ryan?

  I want to talk about, I don't know what you call it, but we, and I wanted to bring this up earlier when we were talking about, um, all the other stuff, all the reform, reform. What, what, is it Christian, Christian? Jeremy told me about this.

• 1:43:13Speaker 04

  The reformers, the reformation?

• 1:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  You're, you have some kind of reform. Am I wrong?

• 1:43:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I'm, I'm part of kind of a tradition of Protestant Christianity that would typically be referred to as reformed. Their capital R reformed. And so what that is, is it's, uh, going back to the Protestant reformation. So individuals like Luther and Calvin and Zwingli and Melanchthon, who were

• 1:43:40Speaker 04

  There were proto-Reformers, there were individuals prior to that, John Huys and John Wycliffe.

• 1:43:48Speaker 04

  And what that period of time is in the Protestant Reformation was it was a number of individuals who were looking at the church around them and they were saying, you know, there have been these traditions that have developed, these accretions over time, and we need to get back to the gospel, we need to get back to primitive Christianity. There was a lot of things that were, had taken place in the Middle Ages, a lot of corruption within the church hierarchy. There were a number of popes who basically bought themselves into the position of the papacy and had children out of wedlock and all these sorts of things. It was a little

• 1:44:30Speaker 04

  bit of a crazy time. And there was, what kind of spawned that, the, in, in what we typically mark as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation is 1517 when Martin Luther nails his 95 theses to the door, the chapel door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany. So that's kind of this placeholder marker as the beginning of the Reformation. In, in, in a historical sense, what Luther did wasn't actually all that odd. You know, nowadays, the equivalent of going to a football game now in Wittenberg, Germany in the 16th century was that one theologian

• 1:45:14Speaker 04

  would put up their debate challenge on the door and another theologian would take it up and they'd go to the pub and they would debate, go back and forth. And so, in a very practical sense, Luther wasn't doing, like this wasn't an act of vandalism by nailing something to a door and he actually could have very well pasted it, but the nailing and the hammer makes a good image.

• 1:45:37Speaker 04

  But what he was doing was he was challenging the church and particularly the Pope's authority to forgive sins in what are referred to as indulgences. So there's this idea, and I'll try not to go into too much detail about like the treasury of merit, but the idea is that you can, by giving money to the church, buy forgiveness of sins to get yourselves so many years off of purgatory. So in this particular time, there was a lot of corruption in that they were trying to rebuild St. Peter's Cathedral in Rome. And one of the ways they did this was that they sent these individuals out who were basically

• 1:46:19Speaker 04

  salesmen, and there was a saying, "When a coin in the coffer rings, a soul from purgatory springs." And the idea was that, you know, you give your money and you can get either your family members who have passed away, or maybe you in the future, time off of purgatory. And so Luther is looking at this and he's seeing people being taken advantage of. At this point, he is, he's a professor, he's teaching at the seminary, but he's also a minister, he's a priest in the church in Wittenberg. And he sees this and he's seeing this as people who don't really have the means to give being taken advantage of for the purpose of rebuilding the St. Peter's in Rome.

• 1:47:03Speaker 04

  And so he writes up these theses and part and parcel to it is that he's saying, if the Pope has the authority to forgive sins, why doesn't he just do it? If he can pull people out of purgatory by the grace and loving kindness that he possesses, why doesn't he just do it? Why do you have to pay him? Now, that's a kind of an oversimplification of the 95 articulations of what he puts, but that's a big part of it, and this gets him in trouble. It gets him in trouble because he's really pushing against. It's making sense. I think that's part of it. And also, he was at a very advantageous time. The printing press had just taken off.

• 1:47:43Speaker 04

  So it's not that there were other, there weren't other people who were challenging the Pope's authority or the Magisterium's ability. But because people then take his writings and they print them. And through technology are able to get this out. And it's just, you know, it catches wildfire. Now, all of a sudden Luther's teachings are all over Europe. And so the availability of the technological advancement aids. The, the change and the questioning and all of these things. Well, so Luther. Is kind of championed with starting some of this. And then that, that proceeds into more and more. And even. The questioning of, okay, at the time, the Bible is primarily read in Latin. It's not.

• 1:48:29Speaker 04

  Widely available in the vernacular of the people. And so Luther. Endeavors to translate the Bible into German, into the language that people can read. And this is also seen as controversial, because the lady are not seen as being. Able to properly interpret the word of God. You need kind of the intermediaries of the priests and. And that the powers that be to tell you exactly what's going on. And so. These individuals are called the reformers. They're reforming the church to go back. So there are these things, it's like a tree and moss has grown all over it. And Luther is looking at this and he's saying, there's a tree in there.

• 1:49:08Speaker 04

  And it's a good tree and it's a healthy tree and it's a beautiful tree. Let's just shave all that moss off, all of these traditions that we've developed. And so the kind of cries of the reformation are scripture alone. Faith alone, by grace alone, to the glory of God alone. I actually have it inscribed on the side of my Bible right here. Solus scriptura, sola gratia, sola fide, sola christus, sola dea gloria. Right? Scripture alone, grace alone, faith alone, in Christ alone, to the glory of God alone. Wow. And that, that was the cry of the reformation is that. They were saying, I mean, those ideas kind of got articulated in those Latin phrases a little bit later on. But the idea is that Scripture is unique in that it is the voice of God.

• 1:49:53Speaker 04

  It's unique in what it is and what it does. And that that doesn't mean that tradition is not important. That doesn't mean that the church is not important. But it means that Scripture is our only sole infallible rule of faith and practice for the church. That if you have a tradition, but the tradition contradicts or contravenes Scripture, then you go to Scripture. You don't, the tradition is not on the same par. Whereas in the Catholic Church then and now, you do have the understanding of an infallible church, an infallible magisterium, and an infallible Scripture. But they're on more of an even playing field.

• 1:50:36Speaker 04

  And so the Protestant Reformation said, no, no, no. Councils err. Popes err. People err. God doesn't err. And so let's go to Scripture. Let's go to that which is infallible. Let's make sure we're doing our due diligence, you know? This didn't make everyone a pope to themselves. We still, you have to read it within a proper understanding of the context and the history. There's a meaning to the text, and you have to do your due diligence to get to that meaning. But ultimately, in what this is and what it does, it's unique. It has an ontological status of what it is and its being that is, as Peter says, all

• 1:51:21Speaker 04

  Scripture is, there's this Greek word they use, theopnostas, God breathed. And so that's, that's different. And I had a systematic theology professor when I was in grad school, who always said, "Tradition has a voice, and emotion has a voice. They have a voice, and they have a vote, but Scripture has the veto." Because Scripture is the one that comes, its origination is God alone. And so in that sense, the reformed tradition, following guys like Luther and Calvin and others, Is the tradition within historical Protestantism that tries to focus on that.

• 1:52:05Speaker 04

  Those are the ideals of, you know, this is, this is our plumb line. Everything else is measured against this. And people can get it wrong. Church leaders can get it wrong. Popes can get it wrong. And they do, and they will. But if this properly understood within its historical context, within digging into what it's actually intending to say, the author had an intention. There are many applications, but there's only one intention of the text in so far as it is communicated by the author. The human author inspired by God. But that's kind of a brief overview, maybe insufficient,

• 1:52:49Speaker 04

  of kind of the tradition that I, I find myself in. I am a Baptist and I'm reformed. You try to go all the way back to what was written. Yeah, I mean, ultimately, the thing that's different about, say, the Protestant tradition that's different from maybe the Greek Orthodox tradition or the Roman Catholic tradition is that Protestants aren't attempting to look at the church within, say, the first hundred years and say, they need to look exactly like me. Right? Like my church needs to look like a first century Galilean church. I don't, I don't, that's not the claim. And, and it is, in one sense, the claim of Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

• 1:53:30Speaker 04

  And often, kind of the accusation is that you're not going to find anyone who looks like a Protestant within the early church. I don't, I think that's an overgeneralization. But the claim is not, do the traditions that the Protestants adhere to within their church practice mirror exactly what the, like a church in the first, second, third century looked like? As much as it is, are our beliefs at their...

• 1:54:01Speaker 04

  Central points of understanding and articulation, that which the early church articulated, primarily from here, right? Because even, you know, even Paul writes to the churches, they're included in Scripture. He writes to the church in Corinth and says, "Listen, you're getting stuff wrong. Stop it." Right? So it's not like if it's earlier, it's better, necessarily. We're still going to get wrong, things wrong, right? Paul writes and he says, "There's a guy in your congregation, he's sleeping with his, you know, mother-in-law. Stop it. It's gross. It's evil." And so, it's that there is a constant needing to be shaped by

• 1:54:42Speaker 04

  the Word of God and let the central teachings of what God has inspired be that thing which, which draws us together.

• 1:54:52Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:54:55Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:54:58Shawn Ryan?

  I'm learning a lot. I'm learning a lot today. Let's take one more break and then I want to get into Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 1:55:05Speaker 04

  Let's do it.

• 1:55:09Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:56:30Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:57:15Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Wes, we're back from the break, getting ready to dive into the Dead Sea Scrolls, but we had, we had a, another offline conversation. I love these, turns into rabbit holes, but we had, we had an offline conversation about in vitro, and that kind of got my mind triggered into, you know, there's a lot of new things that are happening nowadays that with, with advances in technology that just weren't even a possibility or even in, in anybody's mind back then, I would, I would imagine, in vitro being one of them. Sex changes, AI, like there's

• 1:57:56Shawn Ryan?

  a whole slew of possibilities in present day that were not there back then. And so I'm just, I'm just curious, I mean, with the in vitro thing, you know, we just had that discussion. We don't have to get into it if you don't want to, or we can, but, but point being, with all these new advances in technology and it's, it's, it is, I mean, shit, I don't know what you would call it other than creation, but... Where do you send people to for guidance, for moral guidance on any one of these subjects?

• 1:58:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:36Shawn Ryan?

  And there's a lot more that I didn't mention.

• 1:58:38Speaker 04

  Oh, of course. I mean, AI alone, right? When we're talking about, there are all sorts of questions about consciousness in regards to what we're looking at with AI. Like, is AI, is it solving the Turing test? Can it recognize its own existence and reality? And it's, there have been examples, I think, all throughout history of things that are spoken to directly within Scripture. And so it's easy when we're talking about moral prescriptions to just go to the place where the moral prescriptions apply and do this, don't do this, that kind of thing. But there are so many things that are in these weird gray areas

• 1:59:23Speaker 04

  that, like whether you're talking about pastors, or counselors, or theologians, or whoever, it's really hard to try to pin down. There isn't just an easy do this, don't do this. Here's what the outline says. You know, off air, I was saying, you don't, you don't open to Second Opinions, Chapter 3, and you have that section on the exact thing you're looking for. But I think what's interesting about the Bible is that despite it being, you know, its most recent book being 2,000 years old, it's still informing our moral bases for so many things. We're still using it in some ways as the guiding principles

• 2:00:03Speaker 04

  because it provides an objective framework to understand, you know, whether that's when life begins, or things like consciousness, or purpose, or meaning, or identity, and how we understand things. So I think that though there are issues that aren't spoken to directly, we can look at examples that relate to some of the...

• 2:00:29Speaker 04

  Very different, very, not even within the consciousness of a first century author. But yet morality hasn't changed. Good is good and bad is bad. And there's still things that we need to parse through and figure out. How do we figure out the intricacies of that? And I think that's where something like scripture can give us guiding principles to the best of our ability. Try to speak into those situations, not always straightforward.

• 2:01:07Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 2:01:10Shawn Ryan?

  I don't think any of the thing, I think one of them's pretty straightforward. I don't think the other ones are very straightforward. I think, I mean, I don't think in vitro is, I don't know. You know, I don't know what I, honestly, I didn't know what I thought about it until about 20 minutes ago.

• 2:01:25Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:01:25Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and then I thought I was like, huh, that's an interesting question. You know, and I mean, this, actually something has come up in my own life. I mean, I've, I talk a lot about defense tech here. And I've got the opportunities to invest in some major defense tech firms. And I thought, or companies, and I thought after the, after I made the investments, I was. Actually, there was one pending, but I had already invested in, in, in another one, in a defense tech and company. But then I, then the question after I did it popped up into my head, shit.

• 2:02:06Shawn Ryan?

  Should I have invested in this?

• 2:02:08Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:02:09Shawn Ryan?

  This is, I mean, what do we use these things for?

• 2:02:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:02:13Shawn Ryan?

  And then in the same, on the other hand, it's like, well, yeah, I should have invested in this because this might be the very same damn thing that saves my kids' way of life.

• 2:02:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:02:23Shawn Ryan?

  You know, in the future. And so it's, but it's a question that. I don't know if I could find the answer to uh in there because they didn't have defense tech firms back then and I don't know if you could even invest in, I don't know, a spear maker?

• 2:02:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, well, you know what? It's interesting. You do have similar conversations within the early church period. Because you have, um, say, Roman soldiers who come to faith. And you do have uh in instances where, say, uh, especially in the time of Augustine, St. Augustine, where you have the conversations, if you are a Roman soldier and you've now come to faith, can you really be integrated into the Christian community? And that's where the whole concept of just war theory, particularly fleshed out by St. Augustine, comes into purview. Where, you know, when is it right to fight? What, what do we, what do we truly understand contextually about a passage like Turn the Other Cheek?

• 2:03:25Speaker 04

  What does that mean? Is it, you know, always be passive? Is, is um,

• 2:03:32Speaker 04

  you know, complete cessation of any type of self-defense? What scripture is teaching? I don't think so. I think, I think Augustine got it right. And he outlines that. So there are instances of that.

• 2:03:45Shawn Ryan?

  What did he outline?

• 2:03:46Speaker 04

  Well, he outlined basically that, you know, he has these precepts and he says it, it's, it is right to defend the weak. It is right to make sure that, you know, injustice is not being done. Paul says that the, the government has the authority to wield the sword. And so there's, there's a right that's actually given to the powers that be in order to enact justice. Now, we, especially Christians, it is likewise our duty to speak into that and make sure that the magistrates, the officials are not doing that unjustly.

• 2:04:25Speaker 04

  So there's an accountability of speaking into the laws that are, are being enacted in order that God gives the authority to, whether it's the, the, the pharaoh or the Caesar, the emperor or the king or the governor, or the president or the prime minister, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is right, just because God gives them that power. So we need to hold them accountable when they are not doing that justly. Right? When the laws, because what, what is a law? A law is prescribed morality. When people say you can't force people to be moral, like you can't prescribe your morale.

• 2:05:07Speaker 04

  Well, it's do not murder is prescribed morality. So there's always going to be a level of that where as a Christian, I want our society to live by the laws that scripture actually dictates. I think that's going to be better for it. Now, a good society is one where people's hearts are changed, not just their actions. And so it goes beyond simply making people do things. Because if there's one thing we find out time and time again, is that you can make a law, but we're really good at trying to find the loopholes. We're really good at, maybe we'll obey it to not get in trouble. But the good society, the just society is one where you want people to actually,

• 2:05:49Speaker 04

  their hearts are changed in order that they actually want to obey. Because they understand why it is good for them, for society, for the world to do those things. But Augustine looks at these things and he says, the war is okay as long as it is done for the right reasons. Like, I think we would look at something like World War II. And we would look at the tyranny and the injustice of the Holocaust. And we would say, it was right for nations to get involved in that, to stop that from happening. That doesn't mean that, you know, it's perfect, that everything works out in this nice tied up with a bow way.

• 2:06:33Speaker 04

  But we,

• 2:06:37Speaker 04

  those kind of understandings of the, the world around us and

• 2:06:43Speaker 04

  Safeguarding the weak and looking after those who are marginalized and taking care of people who are being abused. I think that there is a place for that. And we see that within the enacting of Israel in the ancient world being under a theocracy, God is their leader. And God is actually enacting His justice when He tells them to go and wipe out certain nations. Because as the people of God, being His hand of justice in the world at that point, now mind you, this is descriptive, right? It's telling us what happened. It's not prescriptive. It's not saying, okay, Sean and Wes, you go and do likewise now.

• 2:07:28Speaker 04

  This is a different situation. It's telling us what happened, but at the exact same time, we do have an example of God is judging groups of people because they are evil. He's using Israel to do that. He's using people to do that. And a lot of the time, I will have skeptics, atheists, agnostics, talk about, you know, if God is so good, why doesn't He do anything in the world? You know, why isn't He stopping evil? Well, I think we actually have some instances of God stopping evil. And ironically, those are oftentimes when people say, oh, look how bad God is. He's wiping out these peoples. In the grand scheme of things, there's a context to that. He's told Abraham, I'm gonna give you, I'm gonna give you a land, I'm gonna give you

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  a nation, but the sins of the Amorites has not come to its full fruition. So you're gonna wait 400 years. And they wait 400 years for those people to repent. God is being gracious, is slow to His judgment there, and they don't. They don't repent. They get worse. And so when that time comes, after the Exodus, they're going to the land, the people are bad, they're bad, they're evil. And so God judges them. So I think pacifism is not necessarily what my, I believe, Scripture teaches. But you look at what Augustine articulates in saying,

• 2:08:53Speaker 04

  You know, there needs to be an even handedness in this. There needs to be a carefulness to this. You know, even says that the defeated peoples shouldn't feel disgruntled at the end of the battle. That's really hard to do. Maybe that's too ideal of a situation. But unfortunately, going forward from that, especially into the Middle Ages, everybody who pointed to Augustine as a justification for war kind of ignored all of the things that he laid out and only saw fighting, you're allowed to fight. So it didn't always go the way it should have gone. But you know, it's a good example in terms of you saying, you know, I having reservations about

• 2:09:38Speaker 04

  contributing financially and what's the, you know, downstream effect of something like arms, you know, or anything else. These aren't, these aren't easy black and white topics. But I think I trust, I hope that what I see in scripture is that God is not going to judge us based on what we don't know. He's going to judge us on what we do know. And I think God is going to be gracious with us in that if we are, there's caveats to this, obviously. But God judges those who know better worse. We have a story of this. I was reading this recently.

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  So there's first and second Samuel, our two books, which are really kind of one book in the Old Testament. And you have closer to the beginning of first Samuel, I have this story where the Israelites are, they're defeated in a battle and the, the enemies, the Philistines, they take the Ark of the Covenant, which the Israelites have kind of prematurely brought into battle with them because they think it's going to be some sort of magic fix all. It's, it's captured. And the Philistines just pick it up, they take it away. And they put it in the Temple of Dagon. It causes all sorts of problems because the Isle of Dagon falls over and breaks. And they're like, we need to get this thing out of here, right? The God of the Israelites is causing us too much trouble. But they just pick it up and they leave.

• 2:11:04Speaker 04

  Whereas if you go to 2 Samuel, there's a guy named Uzzah. And the Israelites, once again, they're kind of playing fast and loose with God's laws. They go into a battle and they're moving the Ark of the Covenant, but they're not moving it how God actually told them to move it. They put it on a cart and it's being carried with oxen. Whereas they're supposed to have four priests carrying it on either side and march with it. Well, they're improperly and inappropriately carrying the Ark of the Covenant. And the wheel of the wagon hits a pothole or whatever, and the ark becomes unsteady.

• 2:11:47Speaker 04

  And Uzzah, who's right there, puts his hand out to steady the ark. He touches the ark and he immediately dies. And you read that, I remember reading that as a teenager and thinking, wait, hold on. The Philistines in 1 Samuel, they just pick the thing up. They just take it and they leave. What's going on here? I think this is a good example of, you know, Uzzah was part of a nation that said, I'm going to obey laws. I'm going to obey the good laws that God has given us as a chosen people, as an example to the surrounding nations. And there's a responsibility there of what I'm supposed to do and how I'm supposed to, the standard that I'm supposed to be held by. And so Uzzah knew better.

• 2:12:31Speaker 04

  The group that he was with knew better than to move the ark in the way that they were doing. That was inappropriate of them to do that. So because they knew better, God judged them based on that accountability. Accountability was higher. And so when he touches the ark, he dies because the ark is a dangerous thing. But he knows it's a dangerous thing. And he should know better than to just kind of very glibly be treating the presence of God on the mercy seat like he is. Whereas the Philistines don't know any better. Now, it still causes them lots of trouble and they need to get it out of their camp eventually. But I think in like telling that story.

• 2:13:13Speaker 04

  What I'm communicating there is that there's a level of accountability, not that God is arbitrary and subjective in the way that he treats us, but I think that we are going to be judged on the basis of what we do know, not on what we don't know. And that doesn't mean that our sin is insufficient. That doesn't mean that our sin is winked at. But at the exact same time, I think there are certain things that we need to weigh based on our conscience and on the level of accountability and understanding that we are given, and do our best to operate

• 2:13:56Speaker 04

  on that knowledge. And sometimes that's not easy. Sometimes it is. I think this is why we should seek the wisdom and the understanding of people who know a lot more than we do, who are wise, who have walked through these things, who are elders in our...

• 2:14:17Shawn Ryan?

  That's why you're here, Wes.

• 2:14:19Speaker 04

  Well, that's why also I'm here, to learn from you. But so I think we should continually be trying to mature and trying to learn. But at the exact same time, you know, there's going to be things that I do that I'm going to realize in retrospect, maybe, oh, I should have done that very differently. And that's okay. But we should be trying to do our due diligence to try, to the best of our ability, to conform that to Scripture and the right teaching that God reveals to us.

• 2:14:58Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense. A little bit ago, when I had mentioned, when I called it creation, I thought I noticed your face kind of changed there all of a sudden. I didn't.

• 2:15:13Shawn Ryan?

  What would you, what is your definition of creation? Did I, did I strike a chord there accidentally?

• 2:15:19Speaker 04

  Uh, not that I am aware of. Maybe that's an involuntary face twitch.

• 2:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:15:24Speaker 04

  But, uh, uh, maybe I need to see my doctor, get that looked after. There's, um, yeah, I mean, I think it's really interesting, the topic of creation.

• 2:15:33Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, when I, when I brought it up, we were talking about in vitro.

• 2:15:36Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:36Shawn Ryan?

  But then I think about, what else are we doing? We can, we now have the ability to clone.

• 2:15:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:42Shawn Ryan?

  People cloning their animals, we can clone humans. We have organs.

• 2:15:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:45Shawn Ryan?

  We're growing organs.

• 2:15:46Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:15:46Shawn Ryan?

  We can grow organs in a, basically a plastic bag now. Or if you're China, or.

• 2:15:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:15:53Shawn Ryan?

  A bad guy, you can just harvest them. But, you know what I mean? So all these things, and I, I, I don't know what else to call it other than creation.

• 2:16:02Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:16:03Shawn Ryan?

  Um.

• 2:16:05Shawn Ryan?

  But you know, like, what, I'm just, what are your thoughts on all of that?

• 2:16:10Speaker 04

  I think.

• 2:16:10Shawn Ryan?

  Cause it's not, it's different.

• 2:16:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:15Speaker 04

  I, you know, I've heard some people.

• 2:16:16Shawn Ryan?

  Neuralink.

• 2:16:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:17Shawn Ryan?

  Putting a chip in your head.

• 2:16:19Speaker 04

  Exactly. I, I've heard some people argue that

• 2:16:23Speaker 04

  this is evidence that we don't need God, right? Like, we can create, we can make life. What I always think is interesting about.

• 2:16:32Shawn Ryan?

  That's interesting. Is that what this is all about? Is this, I mean, in the grand scheme of things and the battle of good and evil, is this, is that all of that going to create a godless society?

• 2:16:43Speaker 04

  Well, I think if anything, what it points to is that all of these things need an originator. They need a creator, right? Like, and we are created in the image of God, who is himself the author of creation. And so I think it's just part and parcel. It makes sense that we would then try to create something in our image, right? Whether you're talking about AI, or whether you're talking about like computer models or whatever. All of that, just in my mind, points to the fact that we're, we're just patterning ourselves after our own creator.

• 2:17:17Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:17:17Speaker 04

  And all of these things, whether it's a, a beautiful painting, or like a work of art, or, um, you know, how an artist puts together visually, or, you know, there are all different ways that that can manifest. These are testimonies to our ability to.

• 2:17:41Speaker 04

  exemplify what God has instilled in us as humanity. There's something unique about humanity that other living things on this planet just doesn't. They don't do it in the same way. You can get an elephant to paint a picture with its trunk. But is it really meditating on the beauty and the aspects and the angles? And if a monkey painted the Mona Lisa, would it be really thinking about, you know, the expression on the individual's face and how that might be understood by the view? All of these things, I think, are unique to humanity. There's something about us, something about this species on this planet

• 2:18:25Speaker 04

  that is just completely different than every other species. And I think as technology advanced and you get to something like AI or Neuralink or, in my mind, these are just testimonies to we are endowed with an ability to create. I mean, that's the whole, the concept of the Sabbath. Within the old covenant system, you work six days, but the seventh day you rest. And it's not resting, you know, God doesn't rest on the seventh day because God is tired. God rests because he is viewing his creation and he's, he's just looking over it. And so there's an understanding within, I think,

• 2:19:09Speaker 04

  you see how ancient Jewish writings talk about, okay, why do we rest on the Sabbath? What is the purpose of this? There's all sorts of reasons why. One of them is that there's a, there's an understanding that the only being in this universe that has the authority to create is God. And we create six days a week and we stop to acknowledge that God is the author of creation, not us. And so all of our creative acts are going to be an expression of that. Everything from nothing act of God, right? Ex nihilo. But we pause to reflect on the fact that that doesn't come from me.

• 2:19:52Speaker 04

  That comes from the image that I bear. And this is why it's so significant when Jesus calls himself the Lord of the Sabbath, when he's accused of working on the Sabbath. It's in all four Gospels, and John is a little bit different. He says, "My Father is working until now, and I'm also working." But if you kind of put that in the framework of Jesus's historical context, and you look at some of the articulations of ancient Jewish understanding of what the Sabbath is, when Jesus says, "I'm the Lord of the Sabbath", there's an aspect of what he's saying that is, "I'm the only one who's allowed to work on this day." And what he's really claiming, even the Jews get very mad at him for it, is, "You saw that sunrise in the morning?

• 2:20:37Speaker 04

  That was me. I did that. I'm the Lord of the Sabbath." So, you know, being accused of picking some heads of grain with his disciples and eating on Saturday, you know, he's like, "Listen, I'm in control of all of this." And so that goes over our heads because we don't have a framework for it. Jesus's claims to be God are not him saying, "I am God, worship me." It's said in a much more Jewish accent than that. But they are no less a claim of divinity. And so that's when you, when you look at these understandings of what the Sabbath is, of who God is, and how he's the one who is the author of creation, which, by the way, is the title is given to Jesus. He's also said to be the author of creation, the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.

• 2:21:21Speaker 04

  That in John, chapter one, in Colossians, chapter one, in Hebrews, chapter one, all three of those authors give this exhaustive list that nothing was made without Jesus, that everything was made for him and by him. Paul exhausts the prepositions. You know, the author of Hebrews, you know, calls him the progenitor of all things, the, in the exact image and likeness of God.

• 2:21:49Speaker 04

  It's a reflection of our character that we also then create because we're made in the image of a God who is an artist, who paints a picture of the universe with his words. Wow. You brought up the Ark of the Covenant. Mm hmm. What is that? The Ark of the Covenant was the presence of God on earth in the Old Testament. So you have eventually the temple being made, or prior to that is the tabernacle. And then you have this really interesting box that God tells the Israelites to make. And he says, I'm going to dwell with you with the presence like the presence in the garden.

• 2:22:31Speaker 04

  So you go all the way back to Genesis, chapter one, and Adam and Eve are have this communicative relationship with God in a very unique way. In fact, when they eat of the fruit and they realize their shame and their nakedness and they hide, it says that they heard the Lord God walking in the cool of the day. And so there's a presence there that's tangible and real, but that, like I was talking about before, that separation from God, it's created a rift in that relationship. And so there's, there's the rift has made the proximity to

• 2:23:12Speaker 04

  God dangerous. And eventually what you get in God's chosen people, the Israelites, having that the presence in God in the tabernacle and in the temple, God says, I'm going to dwell with you, but you need to be careful. You need to be careful with this. So there's a particular way that you're going to build this. And I'm going to my presence, my glory is going to exist on the top of this box. And that's the Ark of the Covenant. Interestingly enough, when Jesus comes around,

• 2:23:46Speaker 04

  John's Gospel starts out, right? In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. But then in John 1:14, it says, "And the Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us." And that word, that we translate as "made his dwelling", is actually the same word that is used in the Greek translation of the Old Testament, translated prior to Jesus for "tabernacled", so referring to the tent that the Ark of the Covenant, which held the presence of God, had. So, I think it's very overt. It would have been far more overt to the Jewish reader. So, some translations just say "made his presence", "made his dwelling",

• 2:24:27Speaker 04

  there are some translations that say "tabernacled among us", but I think the Jewish reader who's reading the Greek there, if they were aware of the Greek translation of the Old Testament, would have immediately thought, "He's talking about God's presence. He's talking about what was dwelling over the Ark of the Covenant." And guess what? God is with us again, but it's in Jesus. Jesus is that presence. He's dwelling with us. He's walking with us. He's in the midst of His people. And that's what ultimately, you know, in Revelation, in the last book of the Bible, it says that that's gonna be there. That presence is gonna be there, in the new heavens and the new earth.

• 2:25:07Speaker 04

  And so, the Ark of the Covenant was part of this old covenantal system, which is always meant to point to something. And this is, if people are interested in this, reading the Book of Hebrews in the New Testament, the whole theme is how all of these things in the old covenant were shadows cast by Jesus. All of these things are fulfilled. You like Moses? Jesus is the new Moses. You like the priestly system? Jesus is the priest who's never gonna die. He's always gonna intercede on your behalf. You like the angels? Jesus is greater than the angels. You like the temple? Jesus has fulfilled the temple. You are now the presence of the Holy Spirit. You are now the temple. So it's all of these things.

• 2:25:52Speaker 04

  It's an amazing book in that way in that it's talking to Jews who are tempted to go back, to go back. They've been ostracized from the pagan Greco-Roman culture of their day. And now they're proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah and they're being ostracized by their Jewish communities as well. The author of Hebrews says, "There's nothing to go back to. Don't be tempted. Jesus is the fulfillment of all these things. Don't go back to the shadows when you know what casts in." It's this foolish. And ultimately, part of that is that, you know, that presence of God in the tabernacle, that... So there was a, uh, there was a curtain in front of the Holy of Holies, where the Ark of the Covenant was in the temple.

• 2:26:34Speaker 04

  And in the Gospels, it says that when Jesus died, the, the, um, curtain was actually ripped in two. And there's a symbolic meaning in there in that the divide between the priests who get to go into the Holy of Holies once a year on Yom Kippur, on the day of atonement, well, now, you, that, that, that's been, that divide, that's been eradicated. Because, the author of Hebrews says, "You have a priest who now intercedes on your behalf, where you can go into the Holy of Holies, into the presence of God. You can talk to God directly." So that was a long-winded answer. Wow. What the Ark of the Covenant is that. All right, the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 2:27:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. What are they? So the Dead Sea Scrolls are a collection of ancient Jewish writings. They were discovered between 1947 and 1956. We have discovered some since then, just fragments. But the story is that there were some Bedouin on the northwest side of the Dead Sea, uh, between the border of Israel and Jordan. And they were herding some sheep. And, um, they discovered these jars full of documents. So in the Roman Jewish Wars, which happened kind of into the mid, late, uh, first century, but after Jesus, which ultimately culminated in 70 AD, when Rome...

• 2:28:08Speaker 04

  They marched into Jerusalem and they sacked Jerusalem and they destroyed the temple.

• 2:28:14Speaker 04

  These Jews went and they hid, kind of maybe knowing that danger was coming, they hid these documents in these caves in the hills along the coast of the northeast side of the Dead Sea. That's why they're called the Dead Sea Scrolls, because that's the location. Eleven caves altogether that they were discovered in, probably with the intention to come back and get them when things were a little bit like had simmered down. But they got wiped out and so they never had the chance to go back and get them. So ironically, the arid environment of the region there preserved these things for close to 2,000 years. We discovered them in, like I said, the late 1940s, I mean into the 1950s.

• 2:28:59Speaker 04

  And they revealed a ton of, around 970 documents in between 10,000 and 11,000 fragments. So some of them are, you know, entire books. Others of them are very, very fragmentary. They need to be pieced together. And interestingly enough, the Dead Sea Scrolls are on exhibition at the Museum of the Bible in Washington DC. Oh, really? Right now. Wow. And I will actually be giving a tour on March 28th. No kidding? Of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So if people are listening and this goes out in time, you can actually have a tour of the Dead Sea Scrolls with me and my partnership with the Museum of the Bible.

• 2:29:44Speaker 04

  But otherwise, I think it's worth seeing. I think these are probably the most important archaeological discovery of the 20th century. Wow. And they shed so much light on.

• 2:29:58Speaker 04

  Ancient Judaism, leading up to the time of Jesus, in understandings of different Jewish thought and practice, but also every book of the Bible, apart from two of the Old Testament, was discovered in these. And some of them were so well-preserved that what they did is they pushed back our understanding of the text of the Bible, close to 1,000 years, sometimes even further than that. Because for a long time, our copies of particularly the Hebrew Old Testament, so we had translations, like I've referred to the Greek translation of the Old Testament, those have existed for a long time. It's called the Septuagint

• 2:30:42Speaker 04

  is one of the mainstreams of the Greek translation of the Old Testament. Most people in the time of Jesus were speaking and reading Greek, if they were able to read, because that was the lingua franca, the language of the day. And so about 200 years prior to Jesus, a bunch of the books, particularly the Torah, the first five books of the Bible were translated from the Hebrew into the Greek. And then as time went on, more and more books were translated of the Old Testament into Greek. So that started about the third century B.C. It didn't really finish until the first century A.D., but our Hebrew copies of most of the Old

• 2:31:23Speaker 04

  Testament were from the Middle Ages for a long, long time. Wow. And what the Dead Sea Scrolls did is, all of a sudden, we have pre-first century copies of some of these books. And we're able to compare them, to compare something like the Great Psalm Scroll, or the Great Isaiah Scroll, with copies of what's called the Maseritic text, which is the text of the Hebrew Bible from the Middle Ages, copied by these scribes, the Maserites. And

• 2:31:57Speaker 04

  They're surprisingly similar, shockingly similar. Some of them are are exact. Not all of them are. But it the testimony of the fidelity between the time when we get something like the Leningrad Codex in the Middle Ages to something like the Dead Sea Scrolls is a huge gap. And yet you you have now evidence of this faithful copying process over the centuries of scribes to the point where you can follow them, you know, to the letter and see the fidelity of of these texts.

• 2:32:39Shawn Ryan?

  Is there any New Testament in there?

• 2:32:42Speaker 04

  No, so it's all Old Testament. So the thing with the Dead Sea Scrolls is that most of them predate Jesus. Some of them are written in around the time when Jesus was was living. But they're mostly the writings we think of a group called the Essenes, who were a sectarian group of Jews who had removed themselves from the Jerusalem community and gone out into the desert in this area called Qumran. So they were a if you read the New Testament, you're going to hear about groups like the Sadducees and the Pharisees. The Essenes were a group aside from that. And they had gone out in the desert and they had kind of their own rules and regulations. But they also copied a lot of these books.

• 2:33:25Speaker 04

  And so along with a lot of other books, they had like rules and and wrote about what their their religious practices were and then had some other theological writings that they deemed valuable. But they clearly viewed what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible of scriptures is as incredibly important, as scriptural, as their guiding principles. But they often viewed the propheticness of those as applying to their day right then and there, like they thought. Kind of apocalyptically that they were going to be the reason why, you know, everything was solved because of their, uh, their very faithful practice. Okay.

• 2:34:10Speaker 04

  In Jerusalem, they'd capitulated, they were, you know, in, in bed with Rome, and they'd removed themselves, they were pure, they were holy, and they had some other, you know, practices that were a little bit more sectarian and agmatic there. So not all of the documents in the Dead Sea Scrolls are part of the Qumran community. A lot of them are, but then there are other writings from groups that were hidden in the caves that kind of, and then some of them are just like very unusual. There, there's a treasure map. What's the treasure map to? So it's, it's known as the copper scroll. So it's the only one that's not on either parchment or on papyrus, but it's on very

• 2:34:52Speaker 04

  thin sheets of copper and it's rolled up and it's a treasure map with all of these locations, uh, of, of a lot of gold and silver. Really? So some people have tried to kind of decode it and figure out where, you know, is this some of the stuff that's the treasure from the temple? Is this, you know, some of the treasure of Solomon from the Old Testament? It's not entirely clear, but it does appear to be like the person who wrote it does seem to think that this is where treasure is, but that's kind of an outlier. A lot of the others have to do with religious practice or kind of historical scriptural things.

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• 2:37:56Shawn Ryan?

  What percentage of this is in the Bible? Or is a book in the Bible?

• 2:38:00Speaker 04

  So about, uh... Um, so all of the books of the Bible, apart from one prophetic book and Esther, were found in amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls. It's also in a number of different languages. So about 75% of it is written in Hebrew, but some of it is written in Greek and some in Aramaic and a minority, a very small minority in Nabatean. So that's where it's like, it's kind of a grouping. The Dead Sea Scrolls is an umbrella term for all of these writings. They just happened to be discovered in these

• 2:38:39Speaker 04

  11 caves on the northwest side of the Dead Sea. But they're incredibly important and shed light on even things like, there's one particular manuscript which talks about the Messiah and talks about the Messiah in divine terms. And so this kind of sheds light on our understanding of accusations that early Christians are imposing a foreign idea on to Jesus, you know, that the Messiah was going to be a divine figure. Well, we have actually some texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which actually do kind of indicate that the Messiah who's about to come, this anointed one, he's actually going to have

• 2:39:24Speaker 04

  a divine quality to him that exceeds just a mere man.

• 2:39:27Shawn Ryan?

  They're writing about this before he came?

• 2:39:30Speaker 04

  Mm hmm.

• 2:39:30Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:39:31Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, that was the expectation that the Messiah was going to come. So that's going on all throughout, you know, the Old Testament period. But the Essenes, they have an understanding that there's going to be two Messias, one from the line of Aaron, who's going to be a priestly Messiah, and one from the line of David, who's going to be a kingly Messiah. And that these people are going to fulfill the expectation of making all things right with the nation of Israel, particularly their kind of sect of Israel that they see as the pure one. And part of that was going to be, they were going to drive out the Romans and make all things right. And

• 2:40:16Speaker 04

  They have a lot of writings about them being the children of light and it's gonna, they're gonna defeat the children of darkness, which could be assumed as, you know, the Greeks, the Romans, or whoever. But either way, they're very apocalyptic in their understanding of these things.

• 2:40:34Speaker 04

  What else have we learned from them? I mean, they're, they're very, uh, I mean, the Daisy Scrolls are so fascinating because they shed so much understanding on like how Jews were, say, parsing out some of the things within the Old Testament that maybe, um, we'd like to know more about. So something like the Enochian literature. I don't know. So there's a, the Book of Enoch. So there's, there's actually three books of Enoch, first, second, and third Enoch. The one that's typically referred to as the Book of Enoch is First Enoch. And some, it's, it's, it's an amalgamated group of different literature,

• 2:41:20Speaker 04

  the Book of the Watchers, the Book of the Giants, uh, the Book of Parables, these kinds of things, that we all put into one book that we call First Enoch. Some of it's really old. Uh, and actually, right now, on display at the Museum of the Bible, you can see a fragment of astronomical Enoch, which is on display, I think for the first time ever. I don't think it's ever been displayed, this fragment of astronomical Enoch. But what the documents that make up what we call First Enoch are trying to extrapolate on is what's going on before the flood. So you have in Genesis, Chapter Six, this very, you know, cryptic passage of, "The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful, and they came and they slept with them. And these women gave birth to these children

• 2:42:03Speaker 04

  that were the Nephilim, that were the heroes of old, men of renown." And so, there's a bunch of different interpretations in the ancient world as to what this means. The, um, the Greek translation of the Old Testament translates Nephilim as, uh, Gigas, which is giants. And so, there's a, there's one particular understanding of that. Uh, and there's both a kind of naturalistic explanation that the sons of God weren't necessarily angels. But then, there's another stream of interpretation that's fleshed out in something like the Book of Enoch, where it talks about, okay, well, who are these sons of God? And so, why were they, um,

• 2:42:46Speaker 04

  Why, why, what were their, their progeny? What were the Nephilim? And how did this come into being? And so it kind of does this through a narrative about the great grandfather of Noah, Enoch, and flushes some of these things out. And this goes into like a long history of leading up to the New Testament, where there's a, you know, the demons kind of show up in the New Testament. There really isn't all that much said in the Old Testament about demons. But in some of this ancient Jewish literature that's incorporated and found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, we have some of these discussions of things like, what are the demons?

• 2:43:28Speaker 04

  Well, there was a pretty strong thread of thinking within ancient Judaism, that demons were disembodied spirits of the Nephilim. So the Nephilim, if you're taking a supernatural understanding of who they are, their fathers are angels and their mothers are humans. So they're kind of these half supernatural, half carnal things. So when they die, their spirits don't have anywhere to go. So now they're trapped and they're wandering the earth. They're aimless and they're constantly trying to get back into a physical form. And so they possess people.

• 2:44:09Speaker 04

  And because they're not really meant to do that, because they're these wayward supernatural beings, it never really works out and they end up making people do all sorts of crazy things. And they're, they're cursed because they're unholy. They're the, the progeny of fallen angels. And so there's all this stuff. So some of this literature is fleshing that out. Now, is that really what's going on? I don't know.

• 2:44:35Speaker 01

  What do you think about that?

• 2:44:37Speaker 04

  I think it's very, very interesting. I think some of it makes sense. I think on things that scripture whispers about, I don't want to yell too loudly. I'm very cautious. I'm, I think it's entirely plausible, given what the, what we see within scripture and the fact that it's not a hundred percent clear exactly what demons or even angels are. But that's what something like the book of Enoch is trying to flesh out. And so some of this literature. What kind of falls into the category of what's called pseudographical writing? So pseudo means false, right, and graphic means writing. So it's a false writing.

• 2:45:19Speaker 04

  So it's attributed to an author who's not really the author or about an author that's not necessarily meant to be thought of realistically as that author. So Enoch, the Book of Enoch almost certainly wasn't written pre-flood in the time of Enoch. And there's all sorts of ways that we can tease that out with even the timekeeping that it includes is very influenced by the Hellenistic timekeeping, the Greek timekeeping. In the day, there are allusions to the Book of Daniel, to the Book of Deuteronomy and the Book of Numbers, which are in the Enochian literature, which means that they're probably being written after those, and especially with the Book of Daniel, which is in the Persian period.

• 2:46:04Speaker 04

  That's quite late. So, and even some ancient Jewish writers like Josephus, who comes around at the end of the first century, very beginning of the second century, when he has his conversation in a writing of his, where he's talking about scripture, he specifically says that nothing was written before Moses. So he kind of disqualifies Enoch as being, you know, this is claiming to be written prior to, there's no scripture that's written prior to that. So that's kind of his category of articulating that. But, I mean, these things are, you look at the ancient world and how they're trying to flesh things out.

• 2:46:48Speaker 04

  And though they're some, in some ways, very ambiguous, like scripture tells us what we need to know, not always what we want to know, but I don't think that that means that we cancel out any idea of a theory or a probability or a possibility of, say, you know, what is a demon? I don't claim to totally know. But I think it's very interesting that the Jews themselves in the ancient world, prior to and leading up to and during the time of Jesus, they're also discussing these things, wrestling with them. And coming up with these ideas that we can read too.

• 2:47:26Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 2:47:27Speaker 04

  And kind of.

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• 2:47:58Speaker 00

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• 2:48:28Speaker 04

  Like, postulate on.

• 2:48:31Shawn Ryan?

  Why did, why did, um, well, how many Dead Sea Scrolls didn't make it? How many of the scrolls did not make it into the Bible?

• 2:48:37Speaker 04

  So, uh, yeah, so, I mean, part of the trickiness, like I said before, is that the Dead Sea Scrolls are kind of an umbrella category. It's like saying library, right? Like, there's a whole bunch, there's a range of literature. So by the time in and around Jesus, the Protestant, what we have in the Protestant Old Testament, was, I would argue, established as the Hebrew scriptures. So, modern Orthodox Jews today, their Bible is the Tanakh, the Torah, the Nivim, and the Ketzevim, the law of the prophets and the writings. That's the same number of books that are in a Protestant Old Testament. So there are other books that are also included in the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 2:49:22Speaker 04

  Like I said, some of them are apocalyptic. The War Scroll is a really interesting one, which is, you know, another apocalypse. So we have an apocalyptic book in our Bible, Revelation, right? But apocalypses weren't that uncommon in ancient Jewish writings. In fact, Enoch is, in many ways, an apocalyptic book.

• 2:49:46Speaker 04

  But the War Scroll is an apocalyptic book. And uh, so there's different categories that are um included within the Dead Sea Scrolls.

• 2:49:59Shawn Ryan?

  But what do you mean different? I mean, it sounds like the way I'm hearing that is there's different apocalypses.

• 2:50:04Speaker 04

  Hmm.

• 2:50:05Shawn Ryan?

  Is that what you're saying?

• 2:50:07Speaker 04

  So apocalypse is just a category of literature. It's like saying biography or letter or so the one that ends up in the Bible is the book of Revelation. And that's tied to specifically the John, who's, you know, traditionally associated with John, uh, the apostle of Jesus. And so when we're talking about the canon of scripture, what books are or aren't included in our Bible. What the early church is doing, first of all, they have a direct connection in association with the early Jesus community. So there's a chain of custody in that there are individuals who are disciples of the disciples of Jesus. So you have guys like, so the dagger I gave you is named after Irenaeus.

• 2:50:50Speaker 04

  Irenaeus is part of a community where they're called the apostolic fathers, where their own teachers are the apostles. So in one sense, the earliest Jesus community has a direct line of communication with people who knew Jesus.

• 2:51:08Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:51:08Speaker 04

  And so when they're talking about, okay, you were the old covenant and there were books that were associated with the old covenant. Right? God makes a covenant with Moses, you have the Torah, you have the law. God makes covenant with Israel, you have prophetic writings. And there was an understanding in ancient Judaism that covenant and writings were intricately connected. So Jesus comes along, he establishes the new covenant. He establishes even like the signs of that in the Last Supper, in the, the Eucharist, the Lord's table. And the apostles see themselves as kind of the arbiters of the new covenant.

• 2:51:51Speaker 04

  So the natural question for the earliest Christians who were Jews, who believe in Jesus as the Messiah is, okay, new covenant? Where are the books? Cause that understanding is, is carried over. It's an ancient Jewish understanding. God makes a promise, he makes a covenant with the people and it's followed up by books. We have the new covenant, where are the books? Kind of the natural, organic question that follows that. And so, very, very early on, the four biographies of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they are being read as scripture. Justin Martyr, this early Christian writer, refers to them as the memoirs of the apostles. He says, when Christians gather together early in the morning, they read the memoirs of the apostles.

• 2:52:36Speaker 04

  And, and the letters of Paul are very early collected together. And even in one single document, so we, in the late second, early third century, we have two collections of manuscripts, one they're referred to as P46 and P45. And those are a grouping of the fourfold Gospel Canon and Acts and Paul's letters. So, like I said before, most of these are circulating independently. Okay. As like, you have a copy of Paul's letters to Romans. Because, once again, it's super expensive, right? I mentioned Codex Vaticanus earlier. There's another one, Codex Sinaticus, which comes from the fourth century. It would have taken 360 sheep to make.

• 2:53:18Speaker 04

  So, like, no small commitment and effort and financial, you know, contribution. So, you would usually just have them in single books. But, the four Gospels, we do find collections of them all together. And whenever we have conversations of what is scripture, there's very little debate about the Gospels. And there's knowledge of other Gospels, the Gospel of Thomas, Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Philip. But, they're always mentioned in connection of saying, they have no connection to the actual apostles. We know what are the documents that have connection to the apostles? It's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

• 2:54:00Speaker 04

  The Gospel of Thomas doesn't, it's, it's, it's a forgery, it's false. Thomas was dead by the time it was written. So, we have early Christians talking about this stuff. And, in going back to your original question, like, when we have these conversations on canon, the...

• 2:54:21Speaker 04

  The Christians are wrestling, some books are a shoe-in. The Gospels, we can tie directly to Matthew, he was a disciple of Jesus. John, he was a disciple of Jesus. Luke is a traveling companion to Paul and Mark is intricately and closely tied to Peter. So those are kind of a shoe-in, right? And then you have the Letters of Paul. Those are kind of a shoe-in, but then you have questions about some of the others. And some of those questions have to do with the fact that you have other letters floating around with apostles' names. So in our New Testaments, we have first, second and third John, right? The Letters of John and first and second Peter.

• 2:55:01Speaker 04

  Those took a little bit longer for the dust to settle on to get into what we would consider as like a closed canon. And it was partly because the early Christians were looking and they were looking around and they were saying, okay, there are other groups writing documents and they're co-opting popular figures' names like Peter and like John. Because those are very, you know, key individuals in the early Jesus community. So we need to do our due diligence because we have, we have first and second Peter. We have this other writing called the Gospel of Peter. We have an Apocalypse of Peter. We have an Acts of Peter.

• 2:55:42Speaker 04

  Let's, let's make sure we know, let's make sure we're actually reading the book that is tied to the actual Peter. And so some of these books take a little bit longer to get full wide acceptance. And I think that's a good thing. And in terms of like books that are maybe found in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that are like other Jewish writings. The Jews had already fleshed a lot of that out in that they saw some of these books as very valuable, very like key into the historical understandings of the Jewish nation, especially during the time of the Greek occupation and the Haslemene revolt. And like, these are important writings.

• 2:56:26Speaker 04

  But the Jews didn't consider them scripture. And we can look at individuals, like I mentioned before, Josephus, who talk about this and kind of lay out guidelines. And say like, here's, we don't have an innumerable books of Holy Scripture like the Greeks do. We have a set number and here's how we understand that set number.

• 2:56:49Speaker 04

  And Paul says in the book of Romans that the Jews were entrusted with the oracles of God. And so, part of the conversation of the Old Testament scripture is, okay, some people like Jerome in the fourth century, who's responsible for putting together the Latin Vulgate, which was the Latin copy of the Bible that was the Bible of the church for a thousand years. He goes back and he's a, he's a very competent linguist. So he knows Greek and Hebrew and he's going back and he's talking with rabbis and he's saying, okay, well, why do you consider scripture? What are these conversations?

• 2:57:25Speaker 04

  And there's kind of a disagreement between him and Augustine about some Old Testament books. But, and so there are all these conversations happening, but ultimately the dust does settle. And there is an established core of books, and that's the 66. The 66 that's in this Bible are the established core. And there's debate about some others, even leading up to the Reformation, which is why Luther says, you know, let's not worry about some of these other books that there's continual debate for that, you know, even some popes are not, are saying, that's not scripture. Let's, let's stick to the ones that we know the Jews themselves considered scripture.

• 2:58:09Speaker 04

  And that's the central core. And that's what we will hold to as the word of God. But, all that to say, it's the Dead Sea Scrolls that kind of elucidate some of our understandings of that in looking at, okay, what were some of these groups reading? And maybe how were they treating these books in the way that they were copying them? That sheds light on some of these conversations.

• 2:58:32Shawn Ryan?

  Are the, are the other books that aren't in the Bible, are they published somewhere? Can you get them?

• 2:58:37Speaker 04

  Oh yeah. I mean, a Roman Catholic Bible will have what's called the Deuterocanonical books. So Deuterocanon means second canon. So to give the, you know, the Roman Catholic Church their due, they would say second in reception, not second in authority. So they were officially pronounced as part of the official canon at the Council of Trent in the, after the Reformation. There was a counter-Reformation after the Protestant Reformation. And that's when those books were officially designated as these are included in scripture. So you can get, Protestants typically, typically refer to it as the Apocrypha. Uh, which is just a designation that goes back to the ancient church for books that are not canonical.

• 2:59:20Speaker 04

  You're canonical or you're apocryphal. Doesn't mean all apocryphal books are heretical. There's not part of scripture. Um, but you can read them. You have first and first, second and third Maccabees, Tobit, Judith. You know, the Ball in the Dragon. Uh, there's an extra chapter of the Psalms. These are, I think, good, useful books to read. I would encourage everybody to read them. Because I do think that they, they shed light on our understanding of ancient Jewish culture. And something like the Maccabees tell us about the story of Hanukkah. Where you had the Greeks, they go in and they take over Jerusalem.

• 3:00:04Speaker 04

  And, uh, the, the Greek emperor goes in and he, he desecrates the temple by sacrificing a pig on the altar of God to Zeus. So like bad news bears all over the place, right? And, uh, then, um, Judas Maccabeus, uh, Judas the Hammer. He goes in and he, he, he defeats them and he rededicates the temple to God. And that's Hanukkah. This is this story that happens prior to the time of Jesus. And then you get to Jesus and in the Gospel of John, it talks about Jesus going to Jerusalem to the temple for the feast of dedication. That's Hanukkah. So something like the Maccabees can, they can actually shed a lot of light on what's going on, even

• 3:00:50Speaker 04

  in how we understand what Jesus is doing in his own day. Like, why do Jews today celebrate Hanukkah? Well, it's about this historical event that took place prior to Jesus. And we read about that in these very valuable books, these, these historical books. But the, the differentiation is, are these considered scripture? And as a Protestant, I would say no. And I would say that there are good historical reasons to believe that. Going through all of the conversations of the, the last 2,000 years. Um, but I think people should read them, whether they think that they're scriptural or not.

• 3:01:26Shawn Ryan?

  What's in the, what do you call it, the war scroll?

• 3:01:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, the war scroll.

• 3:01:29Shawn Ryan?

  What's that about?

• 3:01:30Speaker 04

  So that's a, that's a battle, so it's either called the war scroll, or the battle of the sons of light versus the sons of darkness. And it's this big cosmic battle of, uh, kind of the, the, the Essenes, the Qumran community, seeing themselves as the ones that are holding down the fort, for the people of God. Um, so the, the high priest under David in the Old Testament was a guy named Zodok. So, uh, there's a, uh, they see themselves as kind of successors of the high priest under David. And they see themselves as the ones who are undefiled from all of the corruption that they see going on in Jerusalem.

• 3:02:11Speaker 04

  So they, there's this, they write this document that is this cosmic battle between angels and demons and all these things. And really, it's a, it's a representation of what they see as, you know, the marching orders of how they need to be as holy as possible. And that there's a cosmic battle that's raging in, in the background, in the supernatural realm, uh, that is going to influence how one day, all things are going to be made right, God's going to win, and they're going to be the ones that are going to be kind of the, the way that this comes into fruition.

• 3:02:53Shawn Ryan?

  Wow, wow. You know, this morning, uh, at breakfast, we were, we were talking about, um, a lot of the people that have studied this have never been to the location where they were found.

• 3:03:03Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 3:03:03Shawn Ryan?

  And why do you think that's important?

• 3:03:06Speaker 04

  I think it-

• 3:03:06Shawn Ryan?

  To be there?

• 3:03:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it connects us to the times and places where these things happened. And so, so one of the, the things that we, with the organization, uh, that I have, the- The pleasure and opportunity to be the Vice President of Apologetics Canada. We have this video series, Can I Trust the Bible? And what we want to do is we want to tell some of those stories in the places where they happened to try to make that kind of connection. So we go to Nog Hamadi, where the Nog Hamadi Library was discovered in the desert in Egypt, where the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Philip were included. And I, we went to the Nog Hamadi Desert. I stand in an approximate location of where it could have been potentially found.

• 3:03:52Speaker 04

  And I tell the story of this Bedouin shepherd who is wandering through the desert. He's digging for what's arguably fertilizer. And he finds this jar and in it are these books. And I think, you know, for me personally, there's something really amazing about kind of just standing and visualizing where this happened. And then being able to tell that story in the location. So the one we recently did, we were just in Turkey. My colleague Gandhi and I, and we are filming in Isnec, which is the modern site of the ancient city of Nicaea. Because the Council of Nicaea often becomes this

• 3:04:34Speaker 04

  kind of catch all for conspiracy theories about whether that's the books, the Bible, or the divinity of Christ. That's kind of the Da Vinci Code-esque argument is that all of these things get pinned on Constantine and the Council of Nicaea. So we went to Nicaea. And the Basilica, the church where they think it happened, was discovered recently. It's in a lake. So the, there's been a drought. The lake's been receding over time. And when the lake receded, it actually revealed the footprint of this ancient church. No way. Yeah, it's really cool. Where is this? This is in Isnec, Turkey. Is this where you, you were just there? Yeah, so we, my colleague Andy and I, we wade out into the lake

• 3:05:18Speaker 04

  in front of the ruins. You can see them. We fly a drone over top and you can see the ruins. It's like this, this footprint of a church. Really amazing stuff. And we talk about. Did you dive it? No, so at this point. When it was discovered, you actually had to dive it. And we planned when we like mapped this out, we were going to dive it. Um, my, my colleague Andy is actually a pretty experienced uh scuba diver. And so that was our intention, but the lake has receded so much that it's basically on dry land at this point.

• 3:05:48Shawn Ryan?

  No kidding.

• 3:05:49Speaker 04

  So we, we, we were like not that far off the shore and uh like the waves are lapping up on the top of, of the ruins.

• 3:05:59Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:05:59Speaker 04

  But um, we went there to tell the story because in 2025, it was 1700 years. Cause it was 325 is when the Council of Nicaea happened. And so we went and we're like, we don't, we don't just want to clear up the details of what didn't and did happen to the Council of Nicaea. We want to do it in Nicaea. We want to do it in front of the, the ruins of the, the sunken basilica. And I think that just, that I hope what that does for the viewer is it connects them in a more tangible way. That these aren't just facts and these aren't just kind of data points. This is real history.

• 3:06:40Speaker 04

  And when we can connect with the real history and talk about what actually happened, that, that connects us to something bigger than just me as a talking head. Um, and I think it just like, those opportunities are

• 3:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  Man, that is, that is amazing.

• 3:07:00Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Wes, we're winding down the interview. I want to ask,

• 3:07:07Shawn Ryan?

  what is the most compelling piece of evidence for you? That proves you've, that proves Jesus's existence. I'm always curious, you know?

• 3:07:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, you know, I think, I don't think it's necessarily one thing. What I'm always blown away with for the multivalent case of the Christian worldview is that when you look at the claims of Christianity and ultimately like them centering on who Jesus is,

• 3:07:43Speaker 04

  there are so many.

• 3:07:46Speaker 04

  crossover interlocking areas of inquiry and evidence. You know, and I, I went to university because I had full intention of going into the police force. What? Yeah, I wanted to be, I wanted to be. Are you serious? Yeah, yeah, I wanted to be a police detective, got out other plans and I kind of went off. Now unbeknownst to me, historiography and detective work are not all that. I was just gonna say that. But in police work, especially with something like, uh, like an investigation on a murder, say, you want a number of lines of evidence that vary on how good or not good they are, right? Because it makes a cumulative case.

• 3:08:31Speaker 04

  Some evidence is a lot better than other evidence, but when you put it all together, it makes that cumulative case to point to the evidence of a specific thing happening. And this is where I think people, people often miss the boat in that we don't just believe the God of the Bible arbitrarily. It's not like I picked Yahweh, but I could have picked Zeus. You know, I believe that there's evidence that ultimately points to the truthfulness of the Christian worldview. So when you have someone like Rickard Gervais, who says, you know, there are 30,000 religions out there, you really think yours is true? In my mind, sometimes I think that's like standing in front of a judge and saying, there are 30,000 people in this town. You really think this guy's the guy who did it?

• 3:09:17Speaker 04

  Well, it depends what the evidence is, right? It depends whether the evidence is pointing in the direction of that person being the culprit. And so it's not just arbitrary. We didn't just pick a random person and put them on trial. There's evidence that actually points to whether that person is guilty or not. And actually, there could be good evidence and bad evidence, and the judge could throw out some evidence as being inconsequential or weak, but it's all of that evidence together. And so when I'm looking at the historical evidence and I'm looking at something like whether that's the transmission history of the, the manuscripts that I see, you know, we can look at the Dead Sea Scrolls and we can see their fidelity to a thousand years later, and that being.

• 3:09:58Speaker 04

  So close that it's staggering sometimes. Or just, you know, a copy. I have some like high-grade photocopies, facsimiles of manuscripts that I do my academic work on. And I have a couple of like late second, early third century copies of the Gospels. And I'm looking at, and I'm, I'm looking at it, I'm reading the Greek. And when I'm site translating it. And I look at my English Bible, I'm like, guess what? I'm translating, like I could, I might as well just open this up.

• 3:10:30Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:10:30Speaker 04

  Because the connectivity is just there. Now, that's not to say there aren't like differences in spelling, word order, or variances. Those do exist. But it's just like the fidelity is just so. Mind-blowing to me personally. And then you look at the internal evidence and you look at the fact that. The names, the places, the facts, the information, all tie it to. The first century. In Galilee of people who either they were there themselves and they're communicating this. Or like the Gospel author Luke says, that he's interviewing eyewitnesses. He says that at the beginning of his Gospel. He's very purposeful, you know, I'm not, I wasn't there.

• 3:11:12Speaker 04

  But I'm writing these things down and making an orderly account. I'm interviewing eyewitnesses so that you may know the things you are taught. And so you look at these levels of the things that we're trying to highlight with the Can I Trust the Bible? Series, the internal evidence. And with the names, the places, the people. And you, you see that and you go, wow, this, this is testifying to it being written. In the place it's claiming to be written, in the timeframe it's claiming to be written. And when we use that exact same methodology and criteria for something like. The Gospel of Judas. Guess what it reveals? That the names, the places, the details outed as being written in third century Egypt. And so you're like.

• 3:11:57Speaker 04

  So. When you ask, well, what is the piece of evidence? I think, I think it's a multivalent web that all conjoins at the truthful claim of all of these things are pointing to this guy, Jesus. Oh, good. They're all pointing. All of this prophecies in the Old Testament. There is an expectation. This guy, Jesus, he comes on the scene. He fulfills in some instances, very specific prophecies. He predicts his own death and resurrection. And then he does it. And as a friend of mine likes to say, people who rise from the dead have more credibility and authority than people who don't rise from the dead. Right?

• 3:12:40Speaker 04

  And so, so I find it so fascinating that I'm, I'm a trained historian. So I look at the historical data. But when I talk to my, my colleagues and friends who are scientists, who are philosophers, who are sociologists, and they also have all of these different kind of lines of argumentation, some of which, you know, I don't like this one. I don't like that one. But it's the cumulative case that points to the truthfulness. So you could eliminate one. And I don't think it would, it wouldn't collapse my worldview. Cause I genuinely believe that at this point with my inquiry and investigation, like I said before, I think it's intellectually robust. But it's also existentially satisfying. It's changed my life.

• 3:13:24Speaker 04

  It's changed the way that I think. You know, C.S. Lewis, who I quoted before, he said, you know, I believe in Jesus like I believe in the Son. Not that I see it, but that by it, I see everything else. And so it's, that's why we call it a worldview. Right? It's how we view the world around us. And when we were talking before about, you know, those, those times where we struggle, the, those seasons of the dark nights of the soul.

• 3:13:53Speaker 04

  It's not that those aren't tangible, but it's when I'm really struggling, I go back to, "Listen, I have something that points to truthfulness." And despite my very subjective feelings, despite what I might be struggling with right now, I genuinely believe this is true. And the truthfulness of that changes the way that I live for the better. That has echoes into not just this life, which should be lived well, which should be lived with integrity. But after my mortal coil is given up and I go into eternity,

• 3:14:37Speaker 04

  that I, more questions will be answered in a way that I never could have understood before.

• 3:14:44Shawn Ryan?

  I'm curious about this too. What has strengthened your faith more? Is it through your research or is it through your personal experiences? When I say personal experiences, I mean the miracle that you're not paralyzed from the waist down now.

• 3:15:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:15:00Shawn Ryan?

  Stuff like that.

• 3:15:01Speaker 04

  I'm not church in either or. I think it's a both and. I don't think, you know, faith isn't an intellectual endeavor. I don't think we're gonna stand before God and he's gonna give us a theological test. Because if he did, I'd fail, right? I think we'd all fail. It goes beyond that. You know, Paul, I read his, in Ephesians, chapter two earlier. He says, "Faith is a gift. It's a gift, or saved by faith through grace." And there's something about that, which has always been very tangible for me, especially in my field, where there are plenty of non-believing atheist agnostic biblical scholars

• 3:15:46Speaker 04

  who know all sorts of things that are even, like, go beyond even my level of understanding. And that's been a testimony to me that you can't, you can't intellectualize yourself into the kingdom of God. It's not about that. It's not about knowing the most. There is something that is genuinely goes beyond, that's transcendent, beyond just the simple understanding. Right? James even says, "You believe that God is one." He says, "Great. Even the demons believe that." And they shudder at that fact. It's not about, you know, who knows God the best? It's probably Satan.

• 3:16:27Speaker 04

  But what, what is different about the understanding that goes beyond? I think the factual knowledge sits as kind of the confidence building of I, I can have hope because I truly believe that this is something that is true with a capital T. But beyond that, I've actually seen Jesus change my life. I've seen Jesus take my heart of stone and give me a heart of flesh and remove desires that I had before to do things that were wrong. You had a heart of stone? Yeah, we all have hearts of stone. I can't see it. We all have hearts of stone and apart from the saving work of the Spirit speaking into our life, you know, we are going to choose death 100% of the time.

• 3:17:09Speaker 04

  Me, I, Wes, you know, without God working in me, I am going to fight him with everything I have because I don't know what's good for me.

• 3:17:23Speaker 04

  And so, I mean, that's why it's such, the invitation that Christ extends is so amazing because he doesn't need to do that. He doesn't need to save us. Like I said before, he's never, he's not better or worse off if I choose to follow, choose to worship. He's still God. He's still ruling and reigning. He's still the author of creation and the creator of the universe. And yet, not only does he invite me into that, but he himself steps into the conversation and he becomes a human being. He comes a baby, vulnerable and, and, and, you know, crying in a manger, a feeding trough in Israel and in Bethlehem.

• 3:18:08Speaker 04

  And how does God show? He, he can't, he can't become any greater, right? So he steps down from the highest highs into the lowest lows to show how great he truly can be. And that, like I said before, if God is love and love is the greatest ethic and the greatest example of that greatest ethic is self-sacrifice, then the God of the Bible has truly in himself exemplified what love embodies. And it's in Jesus Christ.

• 3:18:45Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 3:18:47Speaker 04

  Do you think God speaks to you? I think God speaks to me insofar as

• 3:18:54Speaker 04

  He moves me. I don't think, I've never heard an audible, you know, "Thus saith the Lord's statement." But I think the ways that God communicates with us in, in leading us,

• 3:19:10Speaker 04

  I think through our conscience, in, in how He directs us, in the ways that certain things come together, I think are tangible, that are not necessarily like a prophetic "Thus saith the Lord's statement." The, the author of Hebrews, who I mentioned before, opens his book by saying, "God, having spoken long ago to the fathers and the prophets in many portions, and in many ways, in these last days, spoke to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom He also made the worlds, who is the radiance of His glory and the exact representation of His nature, and upholds all things by the word of His power,

• 3:19:53Speaker 04

  who, having accomplished cleansing of sins, sat down at the right hand of the majesty on high." And I think, you know, there's something beautiful about God presenting us with His word that's tangible, that we can look at and can influence us. And I think in the moments where I've heard God's voice speak to me most is in the quiet moments of reflection of reading Scripture and seeing just the profound truths through all 66 books woven together that speak to things that I didn't even know I needed to know, about who I am, about the people around me, about who God is,

• 3:20:38Speaker 04

  and how that just so drastically and, and impactfully changes the way that I understand the world.

• 3:20:48Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I love that. Would you, uh, would you mind leading us in prayer?

• 3:20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'd love to.

• 3:20:54Shawn Ryan?

  And this, thank you.

• 3:20:58Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor to pray with you.

• 3:21:00Speaker 04

  I, I thank you for this time, Lord. I thank you for Sean. And I thank you for just the giftings and opportunities that you have given him. That you have blessed him with. And Lord, I pray that you would continue to lead him in your understanding for your glory. Lord, would you shape us into the image of your son, Jesus Christ? Each and every day, by the power of your word and your spirit who leads. Lord, that your word would be our rule and your spirit our teacher. And your greater glory, our supreme concern for the growth of your kingdom. In the name of the one who has saved us, Jesus Christ. Amen.

• 3:21:41Shawn Ryan?

  Amen. Wes woke up very restless this morning and you put me at ease.

• 3:21:49Speaker 04

  Oh, I appreciate that.

• 3:21:50Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 3:21:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's been an absolute pleasure.

• 3:21:53Shawn Ryan?

  It has been.

• 3:21:54Speaker 04

  I, I'm.

• 3:21:56Shawn Ryan?

  So glad we met.

• 3:21:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, me too.

• 3:21:59Shawn Ryan?

  God bless.

• 3:22:14Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching the Sean Ryan Show from. If you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.