[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hey, thanks so much for listening to this message. My name is Jason and I'm one of the ministers here at the Madison Church of Christ. It's our hope and prayer that the teaching you hear today will bless your life and draw you closer to God. If you're ever in the Madison area, we'd love for you to stop by and study the Bible with us on Sundays at 5pm or Wednesdays at 7pm if you have questions about the Bible or want to know more about the Madison Church, you can find us
[email protected] be sure to subscribe to this podcast as well as our Sermons podcast, Madison Church of Christ Sermons. Thanks again for stopping by. I hope this study is a blessing to you.
[00:00:38] Speaker B: So a little bit of background on me.
This is my family. Brooklyn is being held by my wife, Jen. John John is up on my shoulders.
I asked for prayer requests on Sunday in our class. I said, pray for Jonathan. He's got a procedure to remove adenoids and tubes on Wednesday. And Ethan Fisher asked me who Jonathan was because most people know him as John John because that's how he introduces himself.
And then Isaiah is over here on the right. He's our oldest.
My background is one from Christian school in K12. And then I went to Harding and studied physics and mathematics at Harding. So you probably see why I have so much love for literature and all that kind of stuff because it just ties in so neatly to physics.
But I went to graduate School at UAH to get a Master's and PhD in Physics. My background is in astrophysics. Again, really leaning into the literature stuff there. I worked at Dynetics before it became Leidos, and then I was working at Dynetics when Harding called and said, hey, you are a physics guy. We have a physics professor leaving. They had two physics professors, so half the physics department was leaving, which is, if you're on, if you're a staffing agent, you know that losing 50% of your workforce is a bad thing. So they called and asked if I was interested, and through many conversations I ended up teaching at Harding for five years. Undergraduate physics, intro physics, mechanics, and all that kind of stuff. And this is now my second year at uah teaching mostly undergrad physics. Might get to teach some graduate physics here in the next year or so, which I'm really, really excited about. And I've recently started this semester pursuing a Master's of Divinity at Harding.
So just felt like it had been three years since I finished my PhD and I needed to go back to school. That's all I've really known in life.
I told my students at the beginning of the semester at UAH that I had this revelation this summer of, like, I want to do this program, but should I do this program? And I thought, I'm a professor. My job is to be a professional nerd. Like, of course I should do this. This should be great. So I've got a paper due on Friday. I feel like my students in a lot of senses. I've got a paper due Friday that I only started last night. So that should be a lot of fun. Armand's taking the class with me because I just have a lot of fun roping him into things. And he has a lot of fun saying yes. So if you want to take Systematic theology next fall, it's a really rich class.
But enough about that. Let's dive into the course material a little bit. So we're going to be looking at mountains in the Bible and not so much individual stories in their own right, but what these individual stories do and how they fit into the overall story of the Bible. So biblical writers often pull themes and language from other writers to evoke emotions and link ideas within their readers. This is one of those things, if you consider yourself a Bible nerd, like to have the revelation go off if you haven't before. This has been a recent revelation to me that the biblical authors are Bible nerds. Like, who would have thunk, right? So they tend to borrow from other authors. The New Testament authors borrow from Old Testament authors. The prophets borrow from the books of poetry, the books of poetry borrow from Genesis Chapter one. And so we're really going to dive in deep to see, okay, when we look at God appearing on a mountain, on a particular mountain, then let's see what this thin moment means. And we'll define that next class period.
So we'll see what this thin moment between heaven and earth looks like and what it means. And here God's people are often tested and transformed into the type of people who can ultimately live forever with him on his mountain.
The thing that we are going to come back to over and over and over again is that we ourselves are trying to walk up this mountain. And we'll look into that next time. We're going to do a little bit more of a deep dive this time in terms of the overall story of the Bible. But I'm a college professor. If you just walked in, you might have missed that. But I'm a college professor. So one of the weird things we do is you have course outcomes and I was working on this course, like trying to finalize some thoughts on Saturday, and I thought, well, what am I doing other than trying to figure out what I hope you guys get out of this class by the end of the 13 weeks, 10 weeks, because we have Christmas and Thanksgiving, the 10 weeks that we have together.
So by the end of this course, I'm hoping that you will be able to describe how biblical authors use the five elements of a story story to reveal their theology.
Number two, I hope that you can list key biblical motifs and restate how authors intend those motifs to be read. Number three, list key biblical mountains and explain their significance in their local and global context. And compare and contrast the mountains in the Bible to the mountains of creation and New creation. And number five, summarize how mountains help tell the overarching story of the Bible.
So we the hard part about this is mountains pop up all over the Bible. So trying to narrow it down to approximately 10 individual stories to teach the whole story of the Bible. I mean, our goal in this class is to start next week in Genesis chapter one and end in January in Revelation 22 and see the whole Bible.
We've got a big task ahead of us, but it's doable. I think we can make it. But the idea is, can we answer those hard questions? For example, of, I had a conversation with someone the other day and we got into whether the Old Testament has any value or not. Well, hopefully by the end of this course, you will see that there is tremendous value in the Old Testament, not just in the sense of the stories they tell, but in the way that they plug into the overarching story of the Bible. Hopefully by the end of this, when you get asked about the end times and what that looks like, you're going to be able to articulate a little bit better what your thoughts are in terms of end times. And we're going to do this with the mountain, but you're going to see very quickly that the mountain is just a subset of a lot of different moving pieces that happen throughout the Bible.
So I'm excited about this. We're going to try to get through the whole story of the Bible. And let's we're going to, we're going to follow these guiding questions as we go through this. So the first guiding question is how do all mountains how do all the mountains in between.
I think I wrote it better on here. How do all the mountains in between, so in between Genesis and Revelation point towards Eden or New Eden? And so the idea is if we look at Genesis 1, 2 and 3.
There are other biblical authors that attribute mountain symbology to Genesis 1, 2 and 3. And so if we look at those and realize that, okay, Mount Sinai is kind of giving us an idea of what creation looked like, or if we look ahead to Mount Sinai when Elijah is on it, or maybe Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration, how does that point us to New Eden, to New Creation, to New Jerusalem and Revelation 21? And so Genesis 1, 2 and 3 and Revelation 21 and 22 are almost mirror bookends of each other, if we look at it with the correct lens. And then we want to look at what do mountains in the Bible reveal to us about the theology, namely the two sub bullets there, which didn't get bumped in due to space. But what do mountains tell us about God, and what do mountains tell us about ourselves?
What tends to happen in these stories is you have a really intense interaction between God and human, and you tend to see what God is like, and you tend to see either the failings that man tends to exhibit over and over again, or you see the ways that we succeed, namely listening to God while we are on the mountain. So that's going to be kind of where we are and where we are going. But a lot of this is going to depend upon our understanding of literature.
So for me, this Kirby Parks is here. He was in my Ms. Maxwell's English literature class where we used our shoes to pretend that they were cell phones and would talk to he and I, but several of our classmates. But it's kind of embarrassing when you have a high school friend in class with you. I came all the way to Huntsville to get away from the. But here we are.
So we want to look at what are the key literary elements of the Bible. And so the question you might ask is like, one, what is a physics professor doing in terms of looking at literary elements of the Bible? But two, who cares, right? I teach physics. I spend whole semesters answering the question of who cares. So that's what tonight is. My goal is to try to convince you that trying to look through the Bible in terms of how it can be read as literature can actually be really, really powerful to us.
So if we're trying to look at the Bible as literature, and you're wondering why we're looking at the Bible as literature, one of the things that I want to reiterate from a previous slide is the idea that authors tend to use literary elements to support their theme, their theology.
This is really picked up on. I'VE read a book in preparation for this class. It's by Terence Donaldson. It's called Jesus on the Mountain. It's a deep dive into the mountains in the book of Matthew and how Jesus interacts with people on the mountains. And so in that one, he makes the counter.
He superimposes secular authors saying that, okay, literary elements are to support themes, but, but biblical authors use literary elements to support theology. Really what you should be doing when you realize or look at the Bible as literature is you're looking at what are these different folks here trying to convey to us. The first thing that I want to look at is the idea of what a literature study of the Bible actually looks like. So if you read, if you read scholars who look at the Bible as literature, the three primary groups that I've found so far are people who follow the idea of source criticism. Source criticism is to say, okay, the classic example is the Synoptic Gospels all look very similar to one another. So a source critic might look at that material and say, okay, well, if Matthew, Mark and Luke look similar, did Matthew borrow from Mark or did Mark borrow from Luke, or vice versa. And the common idea is that maybe they all use the same source material. That document that we don't have is called Q, because I guess the other previous 13 letters were taken or something like that. So Q is the document that may be Matthew, Mark and Luke borrowed from to write their Gospels. So that's source criticism, if you're taking notes. The second one is called form criticism. Form criticism states, okay, if we look at the Bible in terms of its literary forms, what do we find? And at the top level, you could probably tell me if you've ever been to a fifth grade Bible class or something like that, that you've got historical books like Chronicles and Kings, and you've got books of poetry which tend to be more like Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. You've got your books of prophecy, you've got letters, you've got all of these different types of literature in the Bible or types of writing in the Bible. And so what are we supposed to read? And then most frustrating to a physicist is I'm looking at this and I was told that this was a book of prophecy. But then if I start reading this, he abruptly switch gears and starts using poetry all of a sudden, like very allegorical language. And then you've got Daniel, who's kind of off in left field and Daniel is looking at this stuff and all of a sudden he switches to like apocalyptic views, and he's seeing all these visions. And so you can't always just look at the. In particular book of the Bible and say that this whole thing is a book of prophecy or this whole thing is. Is a book of poetry. You have to be meditating on the Scriptures to realize, is this a.
Are they being absolutely literal here? Are they being allegorical?
Are they talking end times, like apocalyptic sort of language? And it's something that, if we had it all figured out, there wouldn't be copious volumes of works that were written on trying to determine whether this thing was. Is to be read this way or not. But those are the form critics for this particular passage in the Bible that we're reading. What is its literary form here? So you've got source critics, form critics, and then you've got redaction critics. Which. Redaction, in our English vernacular in this day and age, especially living in Huntsville, usually means that you're looking at a document that has a ton of black ink all over it. But redaction in its simplest sense just means edited.
So you've got redaction, and then you've got your subset of that. Excuse me, form critics. And as a subset of that, you've got your redaction critics. So this is kind of the drawing that we were going to draw out together on my tablet. It was going to be super cool, but we didn't get to do it that way. So I tried to divide these in some sort of Venn diagram. So you've got your source critics here, and they sometimes overlap with the form critics, but the form critics sometimes do their own thing. And then you've got your redaction critics they're talking about. Okay, if you take source and you take form, then let's assume that Mark and Matthew both borrowed from a document called Q. And let's assume that Matthew also looked at Mark's writing. And in doing so, we see that this particular story in each of these Gospels tends to read in this particular way. But Matthew frustratingly adds in things that Mark leaves out or takes out things that Mark puts in. And so that would be a redaction critic approach, and not in the sense of criticism and trying to necessarily poke holes in the Bible, but critic in the sense of someone who appraises a work. Right. And so if we're really trying to get at the heart of, as theologians, as scholars of the Bible, as to what. What was Matthew trying to tell us? For example, if you look at, say, the. The.
The mountain of transfiguration Matthew tends to make use of some language that Mark leaves out completely.
It's easy for me in the way that I was brought up to read the Bible, to think like, yeah, they were just two guys who were trying to tell the same story and maybe they just remembered different things about it. What a redaction critic says is, no, these people were filled with the Holy Spirit. They knew what they were writing and they were trying to evoke very particular things in their audiences. Mark was probably writing to a Roman audience. If he filled in all the details about the background Hebrew structure of the Bible, the Romans, it would fly right over their heads. But Matthew is there to say, no, this, this, this happened because of this prophecy way back in Isaiah, Chapter two, or whatever it might be. And so the idea of redaction critic is to get push out of our heads momentarily the idea that the differences in, say, the Synoptic Gospels are accidental, but rather most of them are maybe intentional.
Okay, so source criticism, form criticism, and redaction criticism are the three things that we are going to be looking at over the course of this study.
And the reason is, is because what we're trying to get at is how does the Bible tell the story of God?
How does the Bible tell the story of man, whose story belongs to the story of God?
And before I go into that, looking at my notes here, I want to be abundantly clear that there are people who follow these. There are secular scholars of theology, of biblical theology, who use these types of textual criticism to poke holes in the Bible. The sources that I've read are following more or less the same methods, but not to poke holes in the Bible, but to illuminate what the Bible authors are trying to say. So, yes, if we start looking at the Bible as literature, one of the reasons that textual critics, especially secular textual critics, are so critical of the Bible is they say, well, look, Matthew made this edit here that is not in the book of Mark. So either he made it up, or it's not true, or it's fantasy, or it's something else.
And that's a very easy trap to fall into, and it's a very dangerous trap to fall into.
But instead, what I want to look at is, okay, if the Bible does read like literature and the authors use motifs over and over and over again, that maybe it's not because they're making it up.
But one of the books that I have, if you want to read a real page Turner, it's only 582 pages. I've not read all of it, it's a reference volume, but it's called the Dictionary of Bible Imagery. The Dictionary of Bible Imagery. They've got this really great passage in what they write where they answer the question. And I find it to be satisfying to myself, they admit in their introduction that yes, we are textual critics, but we are believing textual critics. And they say, hey, listen, just because you see a man arrive at a well and he meets a woman there and one of them draws water and then the woman tends to run away and brings others up. Like that happens with Rebecca, that happens with Rachel, that happens with Jesus with the woman in the well. Like, just because you see that thing does not necessarily make it untrue. And the counter argument that they give is how many times have you watched a movie that is based on real events in real life of guy goes to college and on the first day of college he sits next to a girl, and sitting next to that girl, they strike up a conversation and a few years later, lo and behold, they're married. Right? Like these types of motifs and cyclic patterns happen in real life.
So just saying that they're using literary elements. These things can't be true. They say, no, you've completely cut out the legs from underneath the actual truth that is lying here. That real life follows patterns sometimes, right? Like kids get sick and parents worry about them. And you've got other things that happen in life. You've got governments that are doing their own thing and the government shuts down and you don't know what's going to happen over the next few months. Like, these are not things that ever. It goes back to Ecclesiastes, right? Like there's nothing new under the sun.
So if we read the Bible, these things that happen over and over again, we don't have to just assume that they are fictional because they tend to repeat over and over again. So where I want to return with you at this point is to say, okay, if we think about this Bible as literature, I would like to see if you guys can go back to again. For me, it was 11th grade English class and see if you can help me remember the five main elements to a story.
Does anybody remember the five main elements to a story?
But okay, even if you don't remember those things from your 11th grade literature class, what things do you tend to see in every story that you read?
Large scale structures.
Conflict. Yes, that is one of the ones. Conflict is a major pattern in a story, right? If you have no conflict, you could write a story, but it's going to Be boring.
Nobody wants to read a story without conflict.
There's an app on our Alexa called the Good News Network, and it never cycles through the Good News Network. You know why? Because the algorithm knows that people don't go to the Good News Network to actually look for things because there's no conflict there. We go to look for the world is falling apart and it's falling apart tomorrow, and it's all because of this political party and it's all the. The world is burning because there's conflict. It grabs our attention and we want to hang on to it. So we've got conflict as one of the main areas of story. What else? And oh, before we move on, I completely forgot. What conflicts do we see in the Bible?
Good versus, like. Yeah, the most fundamental one, right. Like this was the original Darth Vader versus Luke Skywalker. Right. In a sense. I mean, we resonate with these stories because this is the story of God, this is the story of humanity. What other conflicts do you see?
Right? You remember back in 11th grade literature class, you've got man versus man and man versus nature and man versus himself. Like, pulling on those threads.
What conflicts do you see in the Bible, big or small?
Okay. Like what?
It's okay.
The book of Romans, right? Like the book of Romans is a cultural conflict. You've got the Jews were kicked out and the Romans came in or were left there, and then when the Jews came back, they realized the Romans could do church without them, and that really hurt their feelings.
And then you have them not being circumcised and maybe they should be.
Oh, man. Major cultural problems in the book of Joshua and Judges are all about cultural problems, right? Like the exile. What else?
Land conflicts, Geopolitical. Right. Like that's a big thing these days is geopolitical conflicts. Yeah, You've got. I mean, again, Joshua and Judges is a tiny nomadic nation who just left Egypt 40 years ago, is coming in and claiming, Making their claim on Canaan, the land that God had promised them.
The one that I had prepared in my notes. In terms of conflict goes back to the good versus evil.
We find conflict on chapter three of the Bible.
I mean, you have God telling that Adam and Eve, you can eat of any tree in the garden, everything is yours.
Just don't eat of that tree, right? Listen to me. Don't eat of the tree, but it's your choice. And the Satan comes in, the snake comes in and says, but what if. Right? If you read the book Perelandra by C.S. lewis, it kind of expounds upon this, at least in his imagination, to say, like, maybe God actually wants you to eat. Maybe this is a test and he wants to see if you're ready to take this for yourself. And it becomes like you're almost rooting for him because of how. Like the idea of the apple dripping with honey in the sense of the proverbial apple dripping with honey. Like, yes, I want this. And I can see that God wants me to have this, too. Like, we play these mind games with ourselves. And so you've got certain authors who say, man, here we are. We love food. Right? Like, who doesn't love food? Food begins all the way back in chapter two. Everything is yours for food.
And so the question is, are you going to desire me or are you going to desire food?
Right.
So that's one of the major conflicts. What other?
We've got one. We got conflict. What other major patterns do you see in story setting? Setting, yes. It makes a big. That's the whole point of this class. Right? Like, we are on mountains. What is the mountain setting going to tell us about our theology? What does the wilderness tell us? That's a huge one. You get exiled to the wilderness because you did not trust me. You get exiled to the wilderness because you did not trust me. The first one in my mind was Eden. You are banished to the wilderness. The second one was the children of Israel got banished to the wilderness for 40 years. You've got Jesus who revisits that and goes to the wilderness for 40 days.
Mountains pop up in there.
So what is that going to tell us? What is the point of this story taking place in the palace of Saul versus taking place in the field setting is a huge one.
That's two. What else do we got?
Climax and resolution are a part of what grand structure of a story? The plot. Yeah, they're all a part of the plot. And so the plot is the major events. And so you've got climax and resolution. But the story usually begins with exposition. Unless you're like a transcendentalist author and you prefer to jump in right in the middle of the action. But the story usually begins with exposition. Right? This is the. If you ever watched a Disney musical animated movie, the first song is always the exposition song. Like the classic one that I saw was the one from Frozen. Do you want some exposition? And that's when the.
You've got the sisters and they want to be together, but they're not. And the parents die. And all the exposition happens in one song. Right. And after the exposition, you usually have what's called the inciting action. And that's where the story kicks off. That's where you find the first conflict. Genesis chapter three is the inciting incident in the story of the Bible where the story really starts to take off. Because now you've got Cain killing his brother and the descendants of Cain who bragging about how they've done so much better at avenging themselves than Cain did. Like they devolved very, very quickly.
So you've got the rising action.
The rising action usually leads to the climax. The climax is the key moment where everything that we've been building to, we've got it. Like I see it. What is that in the Bible?
What would you say is the climactic moment of the Bible?
Resurrection. Absolutely, yes. So you've got the resurrection. He's not here.
We've been trying to tell you this. He's alive.
He's here.
The cycle of sin and death and sickness that you have found yourselves in, it's been taken care of. The debt has been paid, the sickness has been healed, or at least the path towards those things have been given to us, and we have a path back towards resolution. And so usually this begins the falling action, and then you've got your. After the falling action, you tend to have your, oh, I'm drawing a blank. The resolution, which is what Michael already said. You've got your resolution at the end. And see, here's the thing is, I tended to think in terms of. Okay, what's the overarching story of the Bible is. I thought the Bible ended in one of two places. Either it ended overall, like everything's been figured out. So it ends at the resurrection. Yeah, there's other stuff that comes after that, but the grand narrative is over. Or it ends in Revelation. And whether that was like 70 years after the book was written, or it's a pre. Millennial, post millennial thing. Like the Bible ends at Revelation. But like all the rest of that is just other stuff to talk about. It's not really that important. Right, but that's like Acts really, really pushes back against that. It says, no, the story is still going. Yes, the climax has been achieved, but there's a lot of story left to be written. The Holy Spirit is given and the Holy Spirit is still helping write the story.
And then we just finished a Sunday morning Bible class series on the mission of the church, the function of the church and what we talked about, at least in our Bible classes. The mission of the church did not end in Acts. It did not end with Paul's letters to the Romans and all Ephesians and Corinthians, Colossians, right? The story of the church, which is the story of Christ, which is the story of God, is. Is still being written today through the Holy Spirit, through us.
So don't trick yourself or allow someone else to trick yourself to think that, yeah, God has got the end figured out and we're just kind of marching to Zion, to the finish line, right? There's a lot of things that we have left to do to finish, to work with God as he finishes the story.
So we've got, I think we've said plot, conflict, setting. The other one, due to time, is characters. Characters pop up a lot in stories.
It's really hard to write a story without character. Even if, again, going back to the Transcendentalists back in the 1800s of. Even if nature is a character in your book. And that's the only character, like, you tend to have to have someone who has something at stake, going back to conflict.
And all of these things point in towards the last element of story.
The thing that I have drawn here in my notes is this diagram. It was going to be more fun again to draw it in person with you guys. But you've got your plot. There's your exposition, inciting incident, rising, action, climax, falling action and resolution. But you've got your plots, conflicts, setting and character. And they're all pointing into the theme.
In our case, reading the Bible, they're pointing towards theology.
What do we know about God and what do we know about ourselves? What do we know about his creation? That he made?
These things tell us, but how do they tell us?
They tell us through the idea of what's called a motif. And if you haven't studied what a motif is, there's no real consensus on it. Anything can be a motif is one of the quotes that I read while trying to study for this, which again, as a physicist, drives me up the wall. Just tell me what a motif is. I just really want to know.
But a motif can be anything. But most scholars agree that a motif tends to be something that cycles, something that pops up over and over again. The one that I remember from Ms. Maxwell's class that I still don't understand to this day is the color green and the Great Gatsby. Apparently, the color green and the Great Gatsby mean something like hope.
I never really saw that one, but maybe if I went back and reread it, I would.
But how does the setting tell us about the theme as a Motif. What do mountains tell us about theology?
What do conflicts? What does good versus evil? What does man choosing to listen to God or not tell us about theology?
What does the plot, whatever we see God doing after.
After the fall, what do we see his motions doing to tell us about himself and to tell us about ourselves? When we look at characters, the one we tend to leave out, I wrote my first paper about this in the systematic theology class that we talked about is that we tend to.
The big word in the literature that I would never use myself is anthropomorphize the Bible, meaning that we tend to make it human, centered.
And don't get me wrong, humans are a big part of the Bible. They pop up all over the place. But to read the Bible as being one of the.
Pam Menasco gave me a textbook of Bible as literature. And one of the things that they were criticizing the Bible about is like, man, look at Abraham, he's kind of a really crummy guy. At some point, right? Like, if Arman was to.
To go into a new land, or if I were and to say, like, she's not really my wife, she's really my sister, like, that's not a. And then they've got Hagar, and it's kind of questionable in terms of how they treat Hagar at the beginning. And then they have the child via Hagar, and then Sarah's like, I want her gone. And Abraham's like, I washed my hands of this kind of reaching back to Adam and reaching forward to Pilate, like, he's kind of a crummy guy. And so their point was, well, how some religious texts, this is. Even their saints are terrible people.
And my counterargument to that was, well, the story's not about them anyway. The story is about God and what God is doing about these people who should be living up. It's not to belittle what they are supposed to be doing, but they're supposed to be living up to this thing. And when they don't, it's always God who lifts them up.
God is the center of the story. God is the central character, not us.
So if we look at archetypes being a motif that falls under character, if we look at settings, mountains, wilderness, if we look at all these things, what do they tell us about theology? And so in the remaining five minutes of class, I was really going to have fun and have y' all break into groups and pairs to do this, but since we are low on time, I'm going to just walk through it. With you guys is to say, okay, if we recognize these things in the Bible, motifs, repeated patterns that tell a story. This is from that dictionary of biblical imagery.
We tend to see type scenes that are motifs, so plots that tend to get repeated. We tend to see reversals, like, okay, you've got this thing happening and then it. Like Moses and Elijah. We're going to talk about that. They tend to be a reversal of one another.
And another one are images, symbols, metaphors and similes.
So if we zoom out a little bit, what repeated patterns?
Whether you are a new Bible scholar or whether you are a 60 year vet, what repeated patterns do you see in the Bible other than the mountain? I've already claimed that one. Yeah, yeah. So that's going to be one of those plot motifs of a repeated pattern of falling and being lifted back up.
The one that I remember was from my high school Bible class at La Verne Church of Christ. We had on our wall a big timeline of the Bible and when we got to Judges, you had fall, cry out for help and you have God delivering and then sin again. And it just like what? Yeah, it's a cycle. Exactly. What else?
Oh yeah, James, your neck. The wilderness. Yeah, you're good, you're good. The wilderness is one. And that tends to go into this cycle of falling and coming short until you get to Jesus, who intentionally goes out there to do something different with it. James, Inversion of like cultural judgments. So either taking the youngest and raising him up.
Oh yeah, yeah, that's a good one. And making her the most faithful one of all. Yeah, so you've got Rahab and then you've got Jacob and Jacob and Esau and you've got all of these different things. Ephraim and Manasseh. Yeah, that's a good one. That's not on my list. So that was a good one. What else? The barren woman.
Yes, the barren woman pops up a lot in scripture and usually is telling us about something going on either in the greater context of the Bible or in terms of how God treats these. I mean, this is the whole Gospel of Luke, right? Like the Gospel of Luke is one gospel that says how does God interact with the minorities, the. The ones who society turns their back on?
How does God treat them? How does Jesus treat them? That's a huge one. Yes.
And then you've got. Even the woman at the well says, oh, by the way, if you really are the Christ, like at the end of this, are we going to be worshiping on this mountain or this mountain?
Like, because we've got this division that tends to occur between these things. So, yeah, right here. The reluctant hero.
Yeah, Gideon. Gideon comes to mind in terms of the reluctant hero.
Did you have others in mind? A lot of people were called who weren't expecting to be kings or prophets or judges. Yeah, Isaiah and Jeremiah both kind of had that reluctant hero motif. And so my point is, let's pay very, very close attention to these things in terms of what they are trying to. To tell us because maybe there's something more there. The reason that I was giddy nervous to teach this class is because I'd been doing this story study since my junior year of college.
And when I discovered this particular focus on the mountain comes from the Bible project. But when I discovered that, it was like, wow, it breathes a breath of fresh air in terms of what I was studying and understanding. So before we pack up and go, I just wanted to throw this slide up here.
I tend to give homework in my classes.
I also am a teacher, so everything goes on canvas these days. If you haven't been to school in a while, I am putting everything that I have studied to date and I will continue to study and all of my other stuff, it will be placed in this Google Drive here. So if you want to see my notes from tonight, if you'd like access to the pretty graphs that I made and all that kind of stuff, they're already exported as svg, if you like that, or png, if you like that. My notes are PDF, so you can do that. If you don't get this, that's fine.
I give homework and so I don't depend on people to remember the homework because I never remember the homework. So on Tuesday nights, what I'm going to do is say, hey, remember we talked about this thing last week and we're going to be talking about this thing tomorrow night. And I said, your homework, if you choose to accept it, is this. Well, if you want to get on that groupme, feel free to jump on here because for next week, again, if you don't get these, we can come back to them.
I would encourage you to look at the Bible Project how to Read the Bible Series and or look at the Bible Project Mountain Video or the Bible Project podcast about what mountains represent in the Bible. This is where we're going next week. We're going to do a deep dive into, in terms of ancient Near Eastern cultures, how did they see mountains and how did the Hebrews see mountains in conversation with their ancient Near Eastern relatives. So we'll be there next week. Michael.
Yes. I can put the group me one back up there.
So that's your homework. If you don't do it, I'm not assigning grades. It just helps with the discussion going forward. So I invite you to this homework rather than assign it to you. Y' all have a great week. We're two minutes over, so right on cue for me. Y' all have a great day.
