Carmen Joy Imes | Becoming God's Family: The Importance of Community

The world is becoming increasingly proficient at telling stories that deny God. As such, we need thinking Christian to become as natural as breathing. Welcome to the Thinking Christian podcast. I'm Dr. James Spencer. Through calm, thoughtful theological discussions, Thinking Christian highlights the ways God is working in the world and questions the underlying social, cultural, and political assumptions that hinder Christians from becoming more like Christ. Now, on to today's episode of Thinking Christian. Hey, everyone. Welcome to this episode of Thinking Christian. I'm Dr. James Spencer, and I'm joined today by Dr. Carmen Imes. And she has written a book for IVP that is called Becoming God's Family, Why the Church Still Matters. She's also an Associate Professor of Old Testament at Biola University. I've had her on a couple of other times and always enjoy the conversation. And so I really appreciate you coming back on the program. Yeah, thanks for having me again. This will be fun. Absolutely. Well, I thought we might start out, I know this is sort of the third book in a series of books that you've written for IVP. And as I was reading through the galley copy of this one, we're recording this, I think, before the book is officially published. It's available for preorder. And so IVP graciously sent me a galley copy, so I got to read through it. But you referenced the other books a few times. And so I was thinking maybe it would be good just to start with a conversation about the series of books that you're writing and how you're thinking about those and what you're hoping they'll contribute to the church before we jump into this book specifically. Yeah, great question. So I did not set out to write a trilogy. I set out to write one book. I wanted to take my doctoral dissertation on the command not to take the Lord's name in vain, which was totally mind blowing. I wanted to take that technical project and translate it for wider audiences because I felt like every Christian needs to hear this. I argue in the first book, Bearing God's Name, Why Sinai Still Matters, that if we want to know who we are as Christians and why we're here, what's the mission God's given us to do, we have to go back to Mount Sinai. We have to understand what's happening there, how God is bringing people into covenant with himself. He is putting his name on them so that they can be his representatives among the nations. And the law that he gives at Sinai is the means by which they're going to live out that vocation. So I trace the theme of bearing God's name through the whole Bible. It's a theme tracing book. All three of them are. So this book was done. It was published. And like a week later, I thought there needs to be another book. And the publisher had asked me like a couple of months ahead of that, like, do you have an idea for another book? And I was like, nope, I don't. And I have not since suffered from lack of ideas of what to write about. I have way too many ideas. But right after Bearing God's Name came out, I realized that, well, people were starting to make the connection as they heard me talk about Bearing God's Name as a representative role. They would say things like, oh, isn't that kind of like how we're the image of God and or we're made in God's image and we represent him? Yes, there are similarities. There's some overlap between the two vocations, but they're actually not the same scope. So the second book, Being God's Image, Why Creation Still Matters, explores the broader question of what does it mean to be human? And particularly, what does the Bible mean when it says that we're the image of God? I argue that it's best to translate it that God made humankind as his image rather than talking about being made in the image. And so every human being is the image of God. It's not a status that we can lose or that can be diminished or destroyed. And that's the basis for ethical treatment of each other. And it's also the basis for human vocation to steward creation and to work together to ensure everyone's flourishing. So that's book two. Even while I was writing this, I wondered if we needed a book three because I started to notice how deeply entrenched our individualism is here in the West. And I felt like often when we come to the Bible to trace a theme or to look at what the Bible says to me, we're thinking about all about ourselves. What does this mean for me personally? What's God's will for my life? And I realized that I hadn't put a strong enough accent on our corporate identity and our belonging to each other and belonging to the church. And so the third book is tracing the theme of God's people gathered together and how the Spirit comes and shows up when we gather in community. I want to help, especially help Westerners see the communal dimensions. But even those from collectivist contexts, I think, have a lot to learn from what the Bible teaches about us becoming a family. So this partly arose as a response to what COVID did to the church. I think as we moved everything online and everything became disembodied and mediated like this conversation is through screens, I saw churches everywhere asking the question, well, what even is church? What are we doing or what are we supposed to be doing? And how much of that can be done via Zoom or YouTube or remotely? And how much needs to happen in person? And at the same time that the church was rethinking, like church leaders were thinking about that question, church members were kind of going, huh. I don't have to go every week, like staying home in my pajamas is actually kind of nice. And I think maybe like, I'll just keep doing this. Why go back? And so this is my attempt to invite people back to say, if you don't show up at church, you are actually missing out on some of the most surprising blessings that God has for us when we show up in these messy communities that we call church that are imperfect and that are riddled with problems. They are also beautiful and they're God's plan for us to participate. Very cool. I've read all three of them. So I really appreciated the collective emphasis of this last one because what I kind of saw was an interesting movement from the covenant people, the people God put his name on, to humanity more generally, in that image of God conversation, and then now back to more of a covenant sort of community sort of emphasis, which I thought was really cool as well. Yeah, you could say, you could summarize it if you start with being God's image as this is the one about identity. Bearing God's name is the one about vocation. And Becoming God's Family is about belonging. So identity, vocation, and belonging is sort of the movement. And usually when I speak at churches or conferences about the three books, I start with the image of God because it's in Genesis. And so it's kind of like the Chronicles of Narnia. I wrote them out of order. Well, I think they still work and it's very effective. And I will say one of the things I really appreciated about Becoming God's Family is how much time you spend in the Old Testament. I think there's a tendency when you're talking about the subtitle of, you know, Why the Church Still Matters, to jump right into the New Testament where we see the church. And you do some really interesting things with the word ekklesia, which is what we normally translate as church in the New Testament. And so I'm wondering if maybe we start there and just, we'll get back into the Old Testament, but I think it might be helpful for people to understand how you're thinking about ekklesia and maybe a different way of thinking about church, the word, more generally. Yeah. So the word ekklesia I learned is actually a political term that refers to like an entity, like a demographic of people that have some sort of political affiliation, like a nation gathering somehow. But the word is not new in the New Testament. And so this is one thing that I think, as you mentioned, when we talk about the church, we usually think Pentecost and afterwards. Pentecost was the day the church was born. And I want to say, yes, but there is something decisively new happening at Pentecost. But the word ekklesia is used all over the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament to translate the Hebrew word kahal, which is the assembly of God's people at Mount Sinai and other places. When the people of God gather, they're referred to in the Septuagint as an ekklesia. So, yes, there's something new that happens in Acts chapter two, but it really is the heir of all of the all of the gatherings that have come before. God's people have always been gathering. And the New Testament church is the recipients of that tradition. Yeah. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think there is, you know, I recently saw a video of somebody, a fairly popular pastor, sort of talking about replacement theology and, you know, the issue of Israel being replaced by the church. And what I see in your work is a more of a continuity perspective. Yeah. Where there is one group called God's people. And at some point within history, there is a newness, a freshness that comes into that, the incorporation of the Gentiles. And and I don't obviously I don't view that as replacement theology. Yeah. But I think sometimes that can be that continuity perspective is construed as replacement theology. I don't know whether you want to comment on that, but am I getting your perspective right on that first and then.

Yep, I see definitely continuity between the people of God in the Old Testament and the New Testament, not because Israel is over now and we've replaced them, but that we've been grafted in or incorporated into the covenant that was made at Sinai. One of the books that's blowing my mind right now is Jason Staples' book, Paul and the Resurrection of Israel. And I touch on it in this book. I had heard him give a couple excellent podcast interviews on it as I was writing the book, and I began reading his book, but now I'm like reading the whole thing. And he talks about how the people of Israel were divided into the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. And the northern kingdom went off into exile under the Assyrian empire and they were scattered and really lost to history like they intermarried and assimilated wherever they were sent and they never came home after exile. While the southern kingdom of Judah was taken into exile by the Babylonian kingdom and they retained their culture, their language, their heritage, and many of them returned to the land. And so when we read about the Jews in the New Testament, this is largely referring to those from the southern kingdom of Judah. So you can hear this similarity between Jew and Judah or Yehud as it's called in the Persian period. And, and they come back from exile. But there is a sense in which the Old Testament prophecies about the restoration of Israel have not yet been fulfilled. And they're still waiting for the restoration of Israel, which would involve the bringing in of the northern tribes again to return. And what Jason Staples argues is that it's impossible to bring them in as the northern tribes because they've assimilated. And so according to Paul's logic, apparently we need the Gentiles to come into the covenant because they have so integrated with the northern tribes that that's the only way we're going to get all Israel back again. So that's one way of thinking about how we've been incorporated. And I'm hearing a lot of people say, whoa, this is really helpful. Helpful lens to notice that when Paul's talking about Israel, he doesn't mean all the Jewish people, because for him, Jewish people is the southern kingdom. When he talks about the restoration of Israel, it's those northern tribes, which are now we're part of bringing those in somehow. Yeah. And you do talk a little bit about Romans 9 through 11 and Israel is not Israel and all that, you know, all who are Israel is not Israel. And so I think it's just a really helpful perspective for people to understand this doesn't have to get down into dispensational versus covenant theology or anything like that. It can be a continuity and discontinuity perspective. And we're all part of the same group or in your words, family who are connected to Christ, who have become sons and daughters of Abraham by faith. You know, that kind of language, I think is just really crucial and prominent in the New Testament. Yeah. Yeah. Peter calls us members of God's household. Uh, and if we think about the 12 tribes being restored, the 12 tribes were, were the descendants of the 12 sons of Jacob. Um, it's a little more complicated than that because Esau and NASA and Joseph and whatever. Right. You got some of the things. It's family members, right? So, so this is an extended family that we're joining. And, and according to the New Testament, that family language is a really important aspect of how we learn to be together and how we learn to treat one another. This is not a business. We're not selling something. Uh, it's, it's not a corporation. It's not even an educational institution. It's a household. And as a, as members of the same household, we need to learn to share with one another, to show loyalty to one another. And, and that's not like if I help a fellow believer in Christ, it's not like, oh wow, you know, kudos to you that you're being so generous. It's like, no, that's what family members do for each other. This is just kind of obviously how we should be living. Let me ask you a serious question. If something triggered a major market drop in the coming months, would your retirement be ready or exposed? With inflation, market volatility, and ongoing global uncertainty, more families are taking a closer look at whether their retirement plan is truly built to hold up. And many are finding that adding a layer of protection makes a lot of sense. Sanctuary metals is a Christian owned company that helps families strengthen their retirement savings with physical gold and silver through a gold IRA. During uncertain times, many people look to precious metals as a way to add stability when other assets may be under pressure. If you'd like to explore whether a gold IRA is a good fit for your situation, Sanctuary metals makes it easy to get started. Text guide to 94878 to receive your free retirement defense guide or call 888-958-6579 to speak with one of their knowledgeable team members. Again, text guide to 94878 or call 888-958-6579. So do you see the family language as obviously extending from the Old Testament, that family language is more what we're used to, right? A group of people who are biologically related. When it pulls over into the New Testament, do you see that taking on more of a metaphorical aspect or do you find it to be more sort of gesturing toward an intrinsic aspect of reality that's now been made clear within, you know, through the Holy Spirit in our connection with Christ? You understand what I'm asking? I think I would have said metaphorical, but I really like how you just put that because Jesus says, who, who are my mother and who are my brothers? You know, like anyone who does the will of God is my mother and father and brother and sister. He seems to be saying like the matrix for thinking about family needs to, needs to shift. Right. Our primary loyalties and commitments should be to the body of Christ. Yeah, it's radical. So one thing that really hit me as I was working on this is that this is radical language for Western individualistic people. You know, if we're thinking that our main goal in life is autonomy or independence or self-determination, this is, this is like, what? I belong to someone? I have to engage with someone like I have to be interdependent. Like, Ooh, that's hard. Right. But it's also a radical word for collectivists people, people from strong like context where there's a strong group sense, you know, sense of group loyalty, maybe an extended family. That's, that's got, you know, all of your attention and loyalty. Jesus is saying, Nope, that's not the way. That's not the place it belongs. It belongs in the extended family. That is the church. So it's also radical in that context to say, I have to treat my brother and sister in Christ with as much determined loyalty and love as I would my own brother, sister, cousin. Yeah. There's an interesting way in which it, it could foster a breaking of ties and a making of ties like that, that sort of dynamic. And this is not to say that automatically we should mistreat family members, right? Jesus does have strong language about leaving behind, you know, let the dead bury their own dead. So it seems to me like if it, if it came down to a choice that you had to make between a biological family and the family of God, if there was, if there was no way to honor both, then your loyalties should lie with the church. But I think usually we can love our biological families and love the church and it doesn't. Right. It's not usually a zero sum game there. It's not usually. Yeah. Well, let's talk through a little bit of the Old Testament and how this sort of emerges out of the Old Testament, because I find it fascinating. I mean, when you start, even if we just started, you know, a little earlier than Abraham, let's say Cain and Abel, you do have these sort of prototypical narratives where Cain is essentially disqualifying himself from the family of God in many ways. And Abel doesn't really get, I mean, he establishes his right sacrifice, but he's in and out of the narrative fairly quickly. And then you have Seth come in who is now made in the image and likeness of Adam, right? Sort of a connection to that previous book and now carries on this line and lineage. And if you're connected to Seth, you, it seems like you kind of have a shot. Is that, is that sort of the, is that how we should understand how this sort of familial dynamic drives through the Old Testament? I think so. And I think it's clearest with the Abraham story because of how God articulates his promise to Abraham and his family that, that I will bless those who bless you. I will curse those who curse you and all nations will be blessed through you. So there is a sense in which if you want to be part of the people of God, you have to be connected in with the family of Abraham. You can't just be like, man, I don't, I don't have any use for you. So that's a, that's a clear call for connection and a clear call for family. And there are people all throughout the narrative who are opting out by opposing God's purposes, opposing God's kings that he has set up or opposing his prophets who are declaring his word. You can't, another way of putting it, if we jump ahead to New Testament metaphors is the church is the bride of Christ. And Jesus is not a polygamist. He has only one bride. So we can't just like sort ourselves and say, Oh, I'm going to be over here all by myself.

Bride of Christ. Now, we collectively are the bride of Christ. And, you know, you might look at other believers sometimes and think, oh, they're not, you know, I'm not one of them, or they don't belong with me, or we don't belong together. We're kind of on opposite sides of an issue. But the very fact is, if you follow Jesus, every other Jesus follower is your brother or your sister. And that's a radical call to learn to get along, learn to work through our differences. When you think about some of the—because you go through the broad swath of the Old Testament, I mean, everything from Abraham to all the way through Daniel and, you know, some of the exile pieces. One of the areas I thought was really interesting was your work on Exodus there. And so I'm wondering if you could talk through that a little bit. Yeah, I'm flipping open to that to see. I talk about Exodus all day every day, so what did I say in here? You know, I'm writing a commentary on Exodus, and I've been in the book for 14 years, so what did I say in a few pages? Let me ask a question that I don't think I actually got from the book, but it will just give you a pointed question. When Israel leaves Egypt, we tend in our heads, I think, tend to think that it's just Israelites going through the Exodus. Oh, yeah. But there are these other sort of mixed multitudes who go along with them. And you just, I mean, it's referenced, like it's there, it's in the text. It's there. But then we kind of move into, you know, the wilderness wanderings and everything focuses in on Israel, and you sort of forget about the mixed multitudes. Yeah. And so I'm wondering, how do you think about those mixed multitudes within the rubric of the family of God? I love that question. One of the things that I'm very convinced of through the scriptures is that the family of God is multicultural. And that might seem like contradictory because if it's a family, then it's one ethnic group. But what I try to point out is that from the beginning, it's multi-ethnic. You've got Joseph marries an Egyptian woman, so Ephraim and Manasseh, their sons who become tribal heads, are both half Egyptian. So even if you're just within the family, you've got Egyptians. Moses is married to a Midianite and later to a Cushite. So his descendants are mixed. Judah bears children with a Canaanite woman. So there's Canaanites in the family of God. Ruth and Rahab marry in, so we have a Moabite and a Canaanite. And I think that the mixed multitude is a part of this picture. These are people who have chosen to attach themselves to the family of Abraham and they're fully included. And there's instructions for how to include foreigners who want to be included. They're subject to the laws. They celebrate the feasts. It's really remarkable. And I think you're right that we miss this and we're just thinking of being Israelite as an ethnic designation. And we miss those multicultural dimensions. So Exodus is clear on this. When they leave Egypt, the other thing that people often kind of assume is, oh, God is setting them free so they can go live their best life. Just, you know, go choose your own adventure. Do what you will. Now you're free to do whatever you want. But the book very clearly says they're going from serving Pharaoh to serving Yahweh. They were attached to Pharaoh. Their labor belonged to him. Their lives belonged to him. And now they have a switch in masters. They're not free to do whatever they want. They're free to live in a way that honors Yahweh and to create a new community gathered around the presence of God. So at Mount Sinai, they're camped around the mountain where Yahweh shows up. As they leave Sinai, they're camped around the tabernacle that they all helped to build. And their assignments are to camp around it so that God's presence remains the center of community. And, you know, that's such a far cry from how a lot of modern Christians think about the church. We maybe think about the church as as just one more thing on our self-improvement plan. Like I go see a therapist, a spiritual director. I go to the gym. I'm studying a foreign language. I try to read widely and I show up at church. Like this is my way of sort of checking the box of spiritual enrichment. And instead, when we look at ancient Israel, we can see, like, actually everything is supposed to revolve around the presence of God. This is the center of my life, not not a sort of extracurricular activity. No, it's really good. I want to return. I want to return to the I have a couple other questions about the mixed multitude, but I want to just say this because I think the way you articulated the exodus coming out from serving Pharaoh to serving God is something I've been thinking about a lot. I was doing some research on early Christian origins in the United States and the use of the exodus in some of the rhetoric that goes on like around the Civil War and then into the Civil War or the Revolutionary War and then into the Civil War. And one of the things that I've come to is like a liberation theology, more modern liberation theologies that often activate the exodus in terms of its political liberation. There's very seldom treatments within liberation theologies that sit back and say, we're being liberated so that we can serve God. We're being liberated so that we can sit underneath the sovereignty of God. It's more that sort of self-determined aspect. And so I think that the way you articulated it, it's very much in the ether of just how we think in general. We're being set free to do whatever we feel like. And with Israel, it's no, you're being set free to serve the Lord and be loyal to him and exercise allegiance. And he's going to give you the laws and rules to help guide you down that path. Yeah. And we, people maybe are attracted to Christianity because they think Christianity will give them a way of, of better self-actualization. Like, well, I'm going to, this is going to be a smoother path to success in my life. Right. And it's like, read Paul. He's quite clear that you are embracing a path of suffering and that it's our, it's our suffering that makes us like Christ and that accomplishes what God wants to do in the world. So this, this path actually isn't guaranteed to be easier, smooth. I just heard a chapel message this week about Luke chapter 4, where Jesus preaches this wonderful inaugural sermon and then they try to kill him within a few minutes. And her point was, you know, if we, if we're doing the will of God, that does not guarantee a smooth and easy ride. Yeah. We're actually signing up for something that is intense. Yeah. The only thing that's guaranteed is probably your definition of success is going to be radically transformed. I mean, that's kind of how that works. I think I've come to the place where I'm not pursuing success. My goal on my best days when I'm thinking clearly, my goal in life is not success, but faithfulness. The results are something we leave up to God. He's not asking us to be successful. He's asking us to be faithful. Yeah. Very good. Let me flip back to the mixed multitudes because I think my question is something like, I remember there's the point where God was going to send a plague and the Israelites who heeded the, or I'm sorry, the Egyptians who heeded the warning, bring their cattle and their servants in from the fields. And the ones who don't pay attention to that, who didn't fear the Lord, they're just, they're like, whatever, we're going to leave our cattle and our servants out there. This nothing's gonna happen. Right. And we kind of all know what did. But my, I guess my question is when you think about these dynamics within that Exodus story and then you think about the New Testament comments that Paul makes, like not all those who are from Abraham, according to the flesh or sons of Abraham, that they're sons of Abraham by faith. Do you see that familial metaphor almost nascent within these Exodus narratives where there are these people who fear the Lord and have no biological covenant connection to Abraham, but they're fearing the Lord regardless. And now sort of come in to that family. Yeah, absolutely. It's making me think of the old Carlton Heston version of the 10 commandments movie where they're actually, they actually show some Egyptians who like are, and I'm, I'm in, I want, I want to be with these guys. Come with these guys. Yeah. Let's go with Yahweh. He seems like he's a little stronger than what we got going on here in Egypt. Yeah. And so it kind of imagines what would it have been like for Egyptians to join them on the trip? How would they have felt toward them? And what sort of, yeah, we could use our imagination, but I, I do think that familial metaphor really works well because they, they're in, they have to be incorporated into the family of Israel. There's no land inheritance for anyone who's not part of the 12 tribes. There's no option of like, You're one of the 12 tribes or you're like, start a 13th. You know, that's not how it works. Right. They have to, they have to intermarry in order to have a place to live and a place to grow their food and all that. Well, as your point, there are those laws governing how somebody would become part of the covenant community if they're not already Israelites from birth. And so you do have that sort of sense in which, oh, they can incorporate other people into this. Okay. But what I liked about the, the broad

it more, you know, intensely. I mean, that's what's happening in the New Testament. The Gentiles are coming in and being incorporated. This is not lacking from the Old Testament. No, it's there. It's just not strongly emphasized in the way that we all, you know, we tend to see it in the New Testament. Yeah, I think one reason we miss it is because we have this habit of every time we're reading a story, we identify with the hero or with the like the main character. We think like, that's me. And then we like miss the fact that there's these marginalized peoples who are getting brought in. And if we really stop to think about it, we'd be like, oh, that's me, actually. Or I'm part of the oppressor empire nation. Like if we think about world politics, I'm not the underdog now. I'm in the country with the power and the military might to sort of call the shots internationally at some level. So that's, that provokes a different set of responsibilities. And I think we really see this as God sets his people free. They are slaves and they go to being a nation gathered under his rule. And one of God's clear priorities in the laws is to make sure that they don't become like Pharaoh. If they don't govern their nation in a way that exploits others. So one of the strongest laws in Exodus is in chapter 22, verse 21. Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt. That's right. And there's this sense that like, God wants to make sure that they don't just think, okay, we were on the bottom and now we're on the top, which is what you get going from Genesis to Exodus. And I talk about this in the book. Sarah has an Egyptian slave. She mistreats her. And then Exodus, the Egyptians are mistreating the Hebrews and God doesn't want to just deliver them and have it happen all over again. He's like, no, no more mistreating. Let's be done with that. Let me ask you a serious question. 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It's interesting you say that because you probably see that, I'm wondering maybe if you see that in the initial attempt of Moses to deliver the Israelites where he buries the Egyptian in the desert. Like he's trying to deliver, but he's trying to deliver in the wrong way in a way that God wouldn't necessarily get the glory for that. He's doing it in his own strength. And so then he's chased away. I think the narrative is really making the point like, look, Moses is not the deliverer here, right? So when Moses comes back as this failure, who's been cowed and, you know, hanging out in Midian for all those years, it's clear that if he's going to deliver the Israelites from Egypt, this is the work of God. This isn't, you know, Moses bringing back an army. And I think you also see it in the Sabbath command. I mean, the Deuteronomic Sabbath command especially. Yes. Yes, that you're supposed to let the servants in your household rest along with you. Again, don't become exploitative. Yeah, I wonder if some of Moses' failure in chapter 2 with the overseer, Egyptian overseer, is that he doesn't really understand the scope of the problem yet. You know, like killing one overseer does not solve the systemic injustice that's present in Egypt. You actually have to have a change of regime. These little kind of one-offs aren't going to do it. And yet it was the courage of the daughter of Pharaoh to have a one-off act of resistance that prepares us to have Moses and then he is the one commissioned by God to rescue. So yeah, there's a lot of complex things going on there. Well, and what a fantastic place to go to find foreigners who seem to be serving the Lord. I know there's some textual challenges with identifying, you know, whether the midwives were actually Egyptians or whether they were, you know, Hebrew midwives who were, you know, ministering or whatever it was. But my tendency is to think they were Egyptian midwives who end up fearing the Lord and refusing to carry out Pharaoh's orders. And if that's correct, then you have a very, an early reference to sort of these almost faithful foreigners within the nation of Egypt who are thwarting Pharaoh's ignorance at that moment. And if they're Hebrews, you've got the daughter of Pharaoh just a few verses later. So it could be either way. Either way you get And either way they have this, they offer this beautiful example of fearing God instead of fearing Pharaoh. They are more afraid of answering to God at the end of the day than they are of answering to Pharaoh. That's right. That's right. Well, let's pivot a little bit. I know we haven't, we haven't covered a ton of ground. I got Genesis, Exodus, but let's pivot a little bit to how you see this sort of playing out in the church today. Like, as you think about the, the ideas that you wrote in this book, the family of God concept, what do you think this should, how do you think believers today should be thinking then differently about the church and why the church actually still matters, given what you've exposited from the scriptures here? Yeah. One of the first things I want to say, and this is actually where I start in the book, is that the church doesn't always get it right. That sometimes God's people are the ones who cause harm. So I take a look at, at how Abraham and Sarah abuse and mistreat Hagar. And even though they're the chosen people and they're supposed to be bringing blessing to all nations, they're actually causing exploitation instead. And yet, and yet we see in scripture, God meets Hagar. He reveals himself to her. He provides for her. He offers her a future. And so I think it's for, for all those out there who are skeptical of the church or wary of the church because of the harm that's been done either to themselves or they just read it in the headlines or they know someone who's experienced church hurt or abuse. It, I want to say the Bible doesn't ask us to cover that stuff over and pretend everything's okay. The Bible gives us an unflinching look at the problems in the community. It does not paint them in a positive light, but it demonstrates that God has not forgotten us and that his, his desire is to move us more and more into reflecting his character to each other and to a watching world. And so, so we don't give up on church just because some churches have caused harm. We don't give up on the people of God because some of the people of God have caused harm. God is inviting us to bring our whole selves to it and to participate in what he wants to do in and through the church. And that, that requires inconvenience on our part. It requires forgiveness. It requires messy, difficult conversations as we work through differences of opinion about what's okay and what's not okay or what's the best way to do things. Like any family, the church has conflict and the church has issues. And rather than just throw it out, the Bible is calling us to engage more, more deeply, more responsibly with hope for a different future. Yeah, I thought that book of your, part of your book was really effective and what passage it made me go to, there were two passages. One is in 1 Corinthians 9 where Paul talks about enduring all things for the sake of the gospel. I think there's an aspect of this where in community, we end up enduring an awful lot. There, he's talking about giving up his rights and, you know, not taking up his apostolic rights, but I think we do endure an awful lot within community that's inconvenient and that we would probably find offensive and off-putting, but we need to endure that to be part of the community. The other passage that I brought to mind that I thought was, this sort of enlightened was the incident between Levi, Simeon, and Shechem. And the way that Levi and Simeon go about using Vengeance. Yeah. And I think the take I took on it this last time was they use the covenant sign as a ploy to weaken the Shechemites and then kill them. And so Jacob's concern that he's going to look bad in the midst of the land, you kind of sit back and you're like, well, maybe he's not just afraid of reprisals. This is core to the Israelite identity. These guys have just now, you know, had all the people of Shechem be circumcised, bring them into the covenant, and then kill them. And so it's just an interesting dynamic that I don't think I'd really thought that way about that passage before. I hadn't made the connection until you just said that.

the movie The Mission, where Catholic priests are baptizing people and then killing them. Yeah, yeah, very similar. Yeah, it is a very similar dynamic. And it has to do with our inability to view other people as made in God's image or as God's image, part of the human family, and part of, like, everyone we meet is actually a potential covenant member. Everyone is made by God to reflect his glory, and therefore is not beyond saving, not beyond incorporating in. And yet we have these deeply ingrained prejudices that make us want to separate from other people instead of invite them in. That's one of the main things that I think the New Testament is harping on. That's not the right word, but like, like, pushing against, emphasizing all the time is this tendency that we have to separate into factions or demographics. You know, Paul's like, why are you, why are you not eating with one another? You need to be all around the same table, Gentile and Jew and slave and free and male and female. God's called you to be one body, and yet they had this problem of sorting themselves into classes or into ethnic groups. And we have the same problem today. We are more class divided and race divided than ever in history. And if we really caught the vision of the New Testament for the church, we would be coming together to form one body rather than sorting ourselves into subgroups. Would you say, I mean, after reading the whole manuscript, one of the things I kind of walked away thinking was that if we're really going to be and make disciples more faithfully as a church, part of what we're going to have to do is we're going to have to learn to sacrifice a lot of what we want in order to be part of this community. So it isn't just about going to church to get something out of it. It's also about being part of the church in order to give God the glory. It's primarily about that. And doing that requires us to sort of sit back and swallow a lot of pride, you know, maybe restrain ourselves from acting on our impulses. Right. And so you see that trend line throughout Scripture. I don't know what your insights would be on something like that, but I mean, is that. Yeah, I think we need to bring ourselves, we attend church, we become part of a church family in order to serve, even if there's no immediate tangible benefit for me personally, even if I walk away feeling like I didn't really learn anything this morning. Excuse me, I wasn't really inspired or I didn't really have like a clear takeaway of what I'm gonna do now. We sometimes evaluate a church service on whether it moved us in a certain way or whether it scratched where we were itching. And that's not what it's about. Although it often does that. And it's great if we learn something, if we feel inspired. Great. But we're actually there as an act of obedience because God says not to give up the habit of meeting together. He says to show up. And I love the way Andrew Root puts it, that the church is a community of people that gathers together to wait for God. It's not primarily about what we're doing or what we're receiving. We're there waiting for what only God can give us. And so we keep gathering in recognition that we don't have all the answers. Yeah. What is it? Ephesians 3.20? You know, God is God can do abundantly more than we could ever ask or think. And we sort of open up that idea. I usually think of it as, you know, when we're discipleship, when we're learning to obey God, we're opening up the possibility for God to do abundantly more than we could ever ask or think in building his kingdom. I mean, I think that's just what we do when we're waiting on God, when we're being obedient and waiting on him. We're trusting that he knows better than us and that we don't have to force the action. And so I really, really appreciated your work here. Any final thoughts sort of to kind of close this out on thinking about God's family and why the church still matters? I would say I would love to leave listeners with an invitation. Maybe you feel like nobody's noticed if you don't show up at church, but the spirit of God notices and you have something to offer and you, we're not complete without you. So I would encourage you to come back if you've left. You've been on the fence thinking about leaving or been a little bit less connected. Plug in, invest. We have no idea what God is up to. We might not know until eternity what a difference it made for us to show up and sit alongside others, to be present with them, to worship, to learn from God's word, and to wait for God to act. Awesome way to end the show. Thank you so much for being back on. Really enjoyed this book and always enjoy our conversations. So this is fantastic. Thanks for having me. No, no problem. I will have the link to the book in the show notes, everybody. And this is an IVP title. IVP gives our show, our listeners 20% discount on all the books if you order off IVP's website. So just click the link in the show notes. Use the discount code that's in those show notes and you'll get 20% off the book. I'd really recommend this one. I've enjoyed all three in the series. This one, you know, it appealed to my Old Testament sensibilities. And so I really recommend this one as well. Fantastic stuff. Do you remember when it releases? I didn't see. No, it releases October 28th, but IVP's already shipping them. So if people use the discount code and order from IVP, they'll get it right away. They'll get it right away. Awesome. So go click that link. And I believe you also have a YouTube channel that you do, right? So we'll put that link in the show notes, but just tell people what that is as well. Yeah, so I have a weekly YouTube channel. It's called Torah Tuesday, but I've actually taken a break from Torah Tuesday for the past few months. I've been releasing book recommendation videos. So when you check it out, you'll see either Torah Tuesday or book recommendation videos. And I also just launched a sub stack newsletter. So if you want to follow my work, find me on sub stack and you can subscribe for free. Very cool. All right. Well, thank you so much again for being here. This was a wonderful conversation. Check out the show notes for the book links, the sub stack, the YouTube and everything else. Appreciate everybody listening and we'll catch on the next episode of Thinking Christian. Take care, everybody. I just want to take a second to thank the team at Life Audio for their partnership with us on the Thinking Christian podcast. If you go to lifeaudio.com, you'll find dozens of other faith-centered podcasts in their network. They've got shows about prayer, Bible study, parenting, and more. Hi friend, are you stressed? Maybe even worried about so many needs around you that you've forgotten you are worth taking care of too. Well, I'm Bonnie Gray, the host of Breathe, the stress less podcast. I want to invite you to join me as I share practical tips based on science, inspired by God's word, to help you spark joy and restore God's peace and love to your soul. Subscribe now and go to lifeaudio.com.