Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Our Christian formation classes are taught by the clergy of Church of the Incarnation (Dallas, TX). Journey with us as each season unfolds.
So last week we talked about Exodus and kind of introduced the book of Exodus. 40 chapters, we talked about how Exodus is a book that's really in many ways foundational not just for the Old Testament but for the New Testament and for our lives today. And so we looked at it as sort of like a precursor of the Gospel itself, right, in many ways. Any extra copies? Extra copies.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Do we have extra copies? Yeah, look at that. And so, at pretty much every step of the way of the book of Exodus, we have sort of a picture or precursor of the Gospel itself. And so as we go through and look at the book, keep that in mind as we move forward in the book of Exodus. I think what I wanted to do today is sort of continue with the first couple of chapters briefly before we jump into our main text today, is three through 11.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so we look at the first few chapters of Exodus, there's a few things in those first couple of chapters that really stand out to me as you look at this book. And so if you look at your Bibles, if you have a Bible with you or an app or I didn't put a whole lot on the sheet today, sorry. But if you look at the sheet itself, you'll see that in the first couple of chapters, you see this sort of setting up that occurs by the narrator. The narrator is gonna set the stage as it were. It's very literary.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's very intentional to set sort of the plot for the whole book of Exodus. And so you see this idea of like the Israelites, the Hebrew people swelling in population and number early on in the chapter. And then you see this emphasis right after that in the next few verses is this idea of oppression, that the Israelites are being oppressed. It's very clear by the narrator that they are being oppressed, and these people are sort of growing in numbers, they're they're rapidly increasing in population and they're being oppressed. If you have a Bible with you, one thing that I think is really interesting that's easy to miss in these early chapters of Exodus is chapter one verse 11.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You know, you see these Israelites growing, you see them being put to work by the Egyptians, and in verse 11, you see them building store cities. Okay? And this is something we, like, easily skip over when we're reading it. Yeah. Yeah.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. They were oppressed. We kind of move past it. But these store cities, one of them is named Pittom. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Pittom, P I T H O M. Okay? Do you know what that means? The root of that word means the house of atum. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:A t u m, the house of atum. Who is atum? You ever heard of this name before? A t u m? Atum was the Egyptian god, the god of creation.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so the Hebrew people are being put to slave labor to build a city for the Egyptian god. So talk about another layer of oppression, a layer of humiliation. This is actually the Egyptian creator god. So the Hebrew people know the true creator, Yahweh. They know the true god, and yet they're being forced to build a city for Egypt's creator god.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:They built a couple of these cities along the way. One of the things we talked about when we looked at the early chapters when I was talking about the overall themes of the book of Exodus are that you're going to see, and I put it on your sheet this week, some of the major themes of the book of Exodus. One is creation theology, because I think a lot of what you see in the book of Exodus is sort of like a battle over creation theology. The creational forces and activities of God, the true God Yahweh, and the anti creational forces and activities of Pharaoh. And so you see this in oppression right here in these first opening verses of chapter one.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Pharaoh's oppression and his forcing the Israelites into slave labor and death is anticreational activity. Any kind of oppression, any kind of forced labor is anticreational forces. And so and this goes against and takes us to some of the broader themes as well. Another theme being sovereignty. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Who is ultimately sovereign over the situation? So as we're reading the book of Exodus, as you're exploring the book of Exodus, there's this sort of this battle of sovereignty that's gonna take place. We're gonna see this very clearly in chapters three and four. Who's sovereign? Yahweh or Pharaoh?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yahweh or Pharaoh? And so you see this playing out or being set up in chapter one. And then of course towards the end of chapter one you see this command by Pharaoh that every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile and you shall let every daughter live. And so it's gradually setting up this idea of Moses being the deliverer of the Hebrew people. And of course famously he was put in the Nile.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:The Hebrew midwives defied Pharaoh's orders. Okay? They committed what we might call an act of civil disobedience to preserve life. They saw the sanctity of life and they went against Pharaoh's orders and they put baby Moses in a little basket. Now pretty much every English translation is going to have the word basket for what he's put in.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But do you know that the Hebrew word actually means ark? It's a little ark. And for the properly attuned ear of the reader of Scripture, you're going to hear that word ark and you're going to think, that's a vessel of deliverance. That's a vessel of salvation. That's a vessel that carries us through into a new land, into an age or a period of promise.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so this is a vessel of deliverance. This is a vessel, a ship of salvation as it were. Okay? And of course that's where we get the word for nave, right, in the church. Comes from the Latin word for ship because the church with Christ as the head is the vessel of salvation.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Right? And so we have these kind of themes that reverberate throughout the scriptures. Of course, we read it in Noah and Noah's Ark, and then of course, we have it here in Exodus. And so the interesting thing we see about Moses when he's coming out of the water, when he's being rescued and lifted out of the water and brought into new care, is that this is our first exposure to Moses in all of the Bible. And so the first time we're introduced to Moses in the scriptures, he's being lifted up out of the water.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And the last time we hear about a pharaoh, he's being drowned in the water. So this water motif is very strong in Exodus and runs throughout, right? The Nile is the source of life, Okay? It's the source of life for the Egyptian people. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:There is no life outside the Nile, which is why all the cities in Egypt historically are up and down the Nile. Right? Just dotted up and down the Nile, which is why when you see with the plagues, the Nile plays into that and is very forceful and very powerful in terms of its actual function in the day to day life of Egyptians. And so you have here Moses being rescued out of the water, and what's interesting about Moses is that his life, if you look at it kind of big picture, is sort of a series of one exodus after another. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's being exited out of the water, rescued out of the water. He will then flee to Midian, then come back from Midian, and then ultimately, he would lead the Hebrew people into the Promised Land. So it's a series of exoduses for the figure of Moses. And thing that really stands out to me, two things that stand out to me in these first couple chapters as well, is this idea that if you look at the first two chapters of Exodus, I don't think you see God's name mentioned a single time. It's just silent about God leading these activities or governing these activities or being providential throughout these activities.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I don't think there's mention of God or Yahweh or anything at all during these first two chapters. And it kind of reminds me of the book of Esther. Right? You have this idea that the Hebrew people are being cared for, but it's not necessarily explicit in the text itself. And so you have this sort of in the background, of course, then you'll see God's name mentioned in chapter three very clearly.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Another thing that stands out to me too in these first couple of chapters is the role of women. Okay, women are instrumental in delivering the Hebrew people out of bondage. Okay? So much focus gets put on Moses as a figure of deliverance and understandably so and rightfully so in many ways. But women play an integral role throughout the first couple of chapters of the book of Exodus that it's easy to miss the critical piece that they're playing in this whole story.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? The midwives' civil disobedience, the protection of Pharaoh's daughter, and of course, Miriam, Moses' sister. And so over and over again you see this role that women are playing throughout the text itself. So that kind of gets us through the first couple of chapters of Exodus and I want to kind of focus the next little bit of our time on the following chapters. Now, we have in chapter three this idea that Moses has left in chapter two, he has fled to Midian, and he encounters Jethro and Mary is one of Jethro's daughters and he's in Midian for some period of time.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And then eventually Moses finds himself encountered by God at a burning bush. And we see this very dramatic scene in chapter three of Exodus, that Moses encounters God at a burning bush. And when you think of this scene, I'm curious what thoughts come to your mind when you think about the burning bush scene. Has anything kind of emerged for you? Okay, so it's not changing?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Of fire. Pentecost. Okay, good. Okay. So it reminds you of Pentecost, the tongues of fire?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. What else? Do what?
Participant:God's coming with Abraham.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. In what way?
Participant:God appearing in this dreamy, fiery state.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:You think about the smoking pot? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Smoking.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:In 15? Genesis 15? Yeah. Anything else? Okay.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yep. He's staying on holy ground. So he took his shoes off. What about the fire itself? Does that remind you of anything else?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay, good. Right. Right. So, yeah. So, what I see in this text is that fire is an image associated with God consistently throughout the scriptures.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Right? We see God being called a consuming fire in Deuteronomy four. See the tongues of fire in Acts two with Pentecost. Daniel's vision in Daniel seven of the fire at the throne. Right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Fire coming out of the throne, the burning bush scene. Over and over again, God is being described or associated with this idea of a consuming or devouring fire, right? And ultimately where's my pen? Yeah, go ahead. That's interesting you say that because I was just reading in Leviticus yesterday that I think it's Leviticus eight or nine that Aaron's sacrifice he offered to God, which was acceptable, was met with fire that came down.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It said fire came from the Lord. And so I'm kind of wrestling with this myself in terms of how fire is used even as sort of an act of God, not just sort of his being or presence, but an act itself. It's part of judgment. Yeah. And so and and what that judgment even means and how we define that, that's another question too.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So, yeah, a good point. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. So what do we even mean by consuming fire too right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And so yeah, I mean it's this great mystery, right? You know, I love the way Eugene Peterson describes the word mystery. He says mystery is not the absence of meaning but the presence of more meaning than we're able to comprehend. You know, it's not the absence of meaning, but the presence of more meaning than we're able to comprehend. Or Avery Dole said it this way, he's a Catholic theologian in the twentieth century, he said, Mystery is something we can only understand indirectly.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We just can't fully comprehend it. So full of meaning that it's just too much for our limited minds to understand. And so we have here Moses, yes, encountering this bush that does not burn to the ground. And ultimately, I want to read this for you here, the first few verses of chapter three. I think I gave you a few verses on your sheet, but if you have your Bible, feel free to follow along with me.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I'm gonna start with three:one. Now Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian, and he led his flock to the west side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. And the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush. He looked and behold, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed. And Moses said, I will turn aside to see this great sight, why the bush is not burned.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:When the Lord saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, Moses, Moses. And he said, here I am. Then he said, do not come near. Take your sandals off your feet for the place on which you are standing is holy ground. And he said, I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And Moses hid his face for he was afraid to look at God. Then the Lord said, I have surely seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters. I know their sufferings and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey. Incidentally, I'll stop there for a second and say perhaps we can see why the books of Exodus and other books play a central role in the theology of the African American church and other groups who have been oppressed. When you see that the Lord is with people and sees their oppression and sees their struggles historically, the African American church and other groups have seen this text as very central to part of their story and of course it's our story as well as is the whole of the scriptures.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:A land flowing with milk and honey to the place of the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites. I'll skip down here verse 11. But Moses said to God who am I that I should go to Pharaoh and bring the children of Israel out of Egypt? He said, but I will be with you and this shall be the sign for you that I have sent you. When you have brought the people out of Egypt, you shall serve God on this mountain.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And then here in thirteen and fourteen, which I do have on your sheet. Then Moses said to God, if I come to the people of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you, and they ask me what is his name, what shall I say to them? God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, say this to the people of Israel, I am has sent me to you. God also said to Moses, say this to the people of Israel, the Lord, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob has sent me to you.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This is my name forever, and thus I am to be remembered throughout all generations. Okay, I'll stop there. If you were with me in the Genesis class, we talked a little bit, kind of early on last semester, about the different ways that the scriptures use the word God. Okay? Most times in the English translation, when you see the word God in your Bibles, that's usually Elohim.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? It's usually the Hebrew word Elohim, is the majestic name for God. Kind of the majestic, powerful, kind of more general name for God. Okay? Because the ancient Semitic word for God was El.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? Anytime you see El, you think in Semitic terms that this is a reference to God. Okay? Most times you see the word Lord in your English Bibles, it is translating this word, Yahweh, which is the more personal name for God. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:This is how God is known to the Hebrew people. Yahweh. It's a relational term. It's a covenantal name. It's a personal name.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Oftentimes, you'll see it this way. Out of respect for the divine name, the vowels will be dropped off. So you'll see it spelled that way. Okay, and then here we have yet another way of talking about God. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I am who I am, it says in three fourteen. Or maybe your translation says, I am that I am. Look at your translation carefully. Is it capitalized? It's in all caps, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Most all English translations will have this. I mean, I do all caps just in general, so apologize ahead of time. I've been doing this since college, so I almost don't know how to write lowercase anymore. It's been a long time. But this is in all caps in my English Bible.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's probably in yours as well. Same with the next verse, right? The I am sent you, right? And so we need to recognize it as such, right, when we read this. And this has generated a lot of conversation over the centuries, as you can imagine, among theologians and scholars.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What is being said here? What is being communicated to Moses? Okay? How are we to understand this particular this particular text? One thing I like about kind of as I reflect on this text, I'm a church historian by background, so that's just kind of where I go often is church history to help sort of unpack a lot of these things throughout the Bible.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And I'm an early church historian too, the church fathers. And I like the way the church fathers sort of read this text. When they saw this text in Exodus three fourteen, they went immediately to the ideas of being and attributes. The being of God and the attributes of God, when they thought about three fourteen. And what I mean by that is that God is absolute being.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? Capital b being. And as opposed to sort of like lowercase being, us, and we're gonna talk about this more in chapter four, God is absolute being. He's being itself. I am who I am, he said.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And then we get into this kind of idea of attributes being expressed here in three fourteen, is that for the Church Fathers, one after another, this was a display of God's attributes. And it may be hard to see because this is only five words, right? It's only three words in the Hebrew, by the way. It's five words in the English. But what the church fathers saw was the eternality of God, that God is eternal, that God never had a beginning and never has an end.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's not I am who I was. It's not I am who I will be. He says I am who I am. God is eternal. He's absolute.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's immutable. God doesn't change. It's not like he was something and then evolved into something else, and yet will evolve more. He is absolute, unchangeable. His substance does not change.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's also incomprehensible. This is a demonstration of his incomprehensibility. Even just three words in the Hebrew is a demonstration of his incomprehensibility. That is, is that Augustine and other church fathers saw this and they said, Even Moses struggled to understood, like, what was meant by this. Even Moses struggled, which is why I think we have the next verse.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Have you ever noticed the next verse? The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, right? Kind of explaining who this is in terms that Moses could understand. Oh, that's the same God. Look at your Bibles.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Look at your Bibles. You have a reference to God, Elohim. You have references to Lord, Yahweh. And you have the statement, I am who I am. And they're all to be understood as the same, the same being.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? And so, I think the implication here in the church fathers thinking is that when Moses is asking god, you know, who who is with me? Who's sending me? Who's sending me to do this deliverance of the Hebrew people? God's response in certain ways is being itself is sending you.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Absolute being. In other words, God is not some sort of tribal deity that sent you to go deliver the people of Israel out of Egypt. He's not some tribal limited deity. It is being itself. The absolute God, the one true god.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Remember, this is a polytheistic culture. This is polytheism. Right? There was a belief in local gods, local deities. It is very hard in the twenty first century to get our minds around the idea that different countries, different cultures could sort of have local gods and also recognize that you have your local god in a real sense.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We have an idea that people may worship different gods or whatever, different religions, but most of us don't think that sort of there's local deities that empower those particular people, right, and give them their particular strength and their life and their creation and their sustenance. But in the ancient world, it was a much more common belief that there are just this myriad of gods out there empowering different peoples and cultures, and those gods may at times go to battle with one another and fight one another. And so what's being said here is that there is one true God, absolute being. And so Moses has this as an assurance to go on as he moves forward. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And in my mind, this also forces the Christian to think about how Jesus uses the term I am. Do you remember the I am statements in the New Testament? John, right? They're all over the book of John. What are some of them?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:That's a big one. Eight fifty eight, right? I mean, that one right there is like Yeah, absolutely. So when Jesus says in John eight fifty eight, Before Abraham was, I am, He is identifying Himself with the Hebrew God, the God of the Old Testament people. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:What else does He say? I am the bread of life, right? I am the way, the truth, the life. I am the true vine.
Participant:I
Dr. Stephen Bagby:am the good shepherd. All these I am statements. Okay? In the Hebrew mind, they know what this means when you say I am. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And Jesus is intentionally using this, I think, to identify himself, and he's not, you know, the only one who would identify himself with the Hebrew God. Of course, the Apostle Paul does this in Philippians two as well. And so we have here a statement that Moses is being sent by the one true God to deliver the people. Okay. So then we get into four, five, six, seven, eight, and beyond, these chapters.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:And of course, Moses is given greater signs and he's given strength and power to move forward with this mission, and he goes before Pharaoh, and there's this communication by God to Moses that often, understandably, is difficult for us to understand. And it's in four twenty one where God says that he will harden Pharaoh's heart. Okay? Harden Pharaoh's heart so that the people then would be delivered out of Israel. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So, what is meant by this? What is meant that God would harden Pharaoh's heart? Okay? It's mentioned several times in the next several chapters, and once, I think, in the New Testament as well. What is meant by this?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I think we need to sort of pause when we see something like this and give it some room to sort of reflect on it in terms of what this could possibly mean. One, we need to leave some room for an idea of, like, a Hebrew idiom, figure of speech that's being used here. I think another aspect we need to think about is that when you look at this idea of God hardening Pharaoh's heart, it's easy to sort of take that statement, and it's used a few times, and pull it out of its context and isolate it. How could God harden someone's heart? What's going on there?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Can sort of extract it. But if you look at the text itself, the next several chapters of Exodus, you'll see that Pharaoh was not an innocent bystander. He didn't just have these acts put upon him or even perceived to have put upon him. In chapter eight, at least two times it says that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:So in the text itself, Pharaoh is hardening his own heart throughout this process. Okay? One thing I want to communicate this morning is that when we think about this idea of God hardening Pharaoh's heart, we cannot ascribe any kind of act of God of being an act in which he wills evil. Okay? God cannot will evil.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He never wills evil. God is love. God is holy. God is just. One thing I think we struggle with often, and if we're honest with ourselves, we'll often admit, but we never say it out loud, hardly.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:We ask this question of ourselves, is God good? Is God truly good? Yes. God is good. Not only is he good, he is the supreme good.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He is absolute good. He is of infinite goodness. In philosophical terms, he is the good subsisting in itself. This is capital G, capital I kind of territory. In other words, all the good that we do in this world as humans, all the good that every human throughout history has ever done, is at most derivative or participatory.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:God is absolute good, of infinite goodness. So God cannot will something that's contrary to his nature. He can't will evil because evil, historically, since the very earliest of the Church, has always been defined as the privation of good, the absence of good, the lack of good. And God cannot will something that is contrary to his nature. Otherwise, he would be opposing himself.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:He's basically you would be an admittance that he's drawing you away from himself.
Participant:What about 24?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay. And there's some hard ones, no doubt. No doubt. And that's where we have to sort of like and I'm aware of those too. There's several places where several places the Old we're like, doesn't that seem like this happened or this happened?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But I think what I want to put before us today is if God truly is the absolute good of infinite goodness, how could he will something contrary to his nature? And this is what I want to get into too. I know where you're going. I know. I'm not I'm not dismissing it.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:One of the challenges we have is that we often confuse being with being. God is being. That's how I designate capital Bs, by the way, or capital letters. I just can't write lowercase, I'm sorry. God is being itself.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Here, I'll do lowercase here. I can't even do it. Muscle memory, you know? We are beings. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Sometimes we think about ourselves in terms of we sort of want to bring God down to our level so that we can understand how he works. And it's very difficult for us to understand God without sort of bringing him down to the level of being, even a louder or bigger, more powerful being. In the twentieth century, Karl Barth the theologian said that the tendency in his day, which is also a tendency in our day, is to, when you were talking about God, talk we're basically talking about man, but with a louder voice. Thinking about God as another being like us. But God is being itself.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? Let's put it this way. Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages said this. He said, We are related to God, but God is not related to us. That's the difference between being and being.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Okay? We can will things contrary to our nature. We can act in an arbitrary fashion. We can do things in an erratic way as beings, but God is absolute being. So what we're seeing here in the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, one church father called it the idea that God, sort of like the sun withdrawing itself and the water freezing over at night, the hardening that takes place of the water freezing when the sun goes down.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's not that God willed some sort of evil act onto Pharaoh, but it's the idea that God withdrew himself or allowed, in one theologian's words, allowed a prior corruption of the will to run its course. Augustine said this about it, We should consider whether the phrase can be understood this way: I shall harden as if he were saying, shall show how hard his heart is. And so I think Augustine's mindful of some some sort of the language of idiom being used, the language of sort of analogical language. We speak an analogy. Okay?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Is that God's ways are so far above our ways that the scriptures themselves speak in a way that we can understand as finite human beings. John Calvin said at the beginning of his Institutes of the Christian Religion that when God communicates to us through scripture, it's like a nurse lisping to a baby. It's like a lisping that occurs, okay? And we have to be mindful that there is this language, this condescending kind of language that comes down to us so that we can sort of understand the bigger picture. Does that make sense?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Any questions? Yeah, I
Participant:say your questions. It's gonna be a million questions.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Yeah. Is God setting up Is that what you said? For a fall? For a fall? Yeah?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Perhaps? Whoever.
Participant:You you quoted Calvin just a second ago. Is that I hardened or god hardened Farest Hart? Is that the type of verse that Calvinist would say? Well, that's where you get predestination from.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Maybe. I wasn't trying to link those, by the way. I was just I think Calvin's more his statement's more of a general prolegomena type statement. Yeah. I don't know.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Calvin I know where Calvin goes with predestination, but I had I need to think on that a little more. He was just talking about how scripture functions. Yeah.
Participant:I'm gonna explode. Alright. So the definition of good and bad. Is it an evil thing to allow somebody to be bad? Is it if you could change it?
Participant:And is it an evil thing to set Pharaoh up for a fall? I mean, god sees all this ahead of time. God knows what's going to happen. God's doing this whole thing. In order for B to happen, A has to happen.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Uh-huh. Yeah, I see where you're going. Yeah. I let me just say this. I struggle with as well to understand this.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:But I also am firmly committed to God as an infinitely as infinitely good. And I cannot, in my mind, find a way to sort of say that he would ever will something that is contrary to his nature because that would go against everything. How could we trust such a God? I mean, we spend so much time studying God's attributes for a reason. Right?
Participant:I'm thinking of
Dr. Stephen Bagby:it. Yeah. And I'll just wrap up with this. Let me just wrap up with this. I know we've got to go.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:I know the alarm went off. Let me wrap up with this. Let me just say this too, is that if you look at Isaiah 19, God is not done with Egypt. Isaiah 19 is an extraordinary, extraordinary chapter about how Egypt will eventually repent and return to the Lord. Egypt's always this foil throughout the Old Testament, right?
Dr. Stephen Bagby:It's always the bad guys, the enemies. You look at Isaiah 19, eventually they will turn to the Lord and praise the Lord, as will Assyria. He talks about there being a great highway between Egypt and Assyria and Israel, and all will praise the Lord. So there is a future or eschatological dimension to all this. Again, this is a challenging text.
Dr. Stephen Bagby:Just wanted to kind of put it out there. We can talk about it next week. Thanks for your time.