Thinking about the Old Testament: A Conversation with Dr. Kevin Chen

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. Kevin Chen. Kevin is the professor of Old Testament Studies at Gateway Seminary. See, I knew I was going to get it wrong. He is a professor of Old Testament Studies at Gateway Seminary and the THM program director. More importantly, for the moment, he is also the author of Wonders from Your Law, Nexus Passages, and the Promise of an Exegetical Intertextual Old Testament Theology. And so we're going to be discussing that book a little bit today and talking through it in a way, hopefully, that you all can understand and access really, really well. This was a great book, Kevin. I really enjoyed reading through it. I'm an Old Testament guy myself. I did my PhD at Trinity, and so it's awesome to have another Old Testament person here and excited to have you on the show. So thanks for coming. Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be on with you, especially with a fellow Old Testament buff. Well, to start out, you know, I always kind of like to hear people's stories initially just to orient listeners to, you know, why you chose to pursue Old Testament studies in the first place and then maybe what led you into this book in particular. Yeah. When I was an MDiv student at Western Seminaries, San Jose Extension, I had the chance to take summer intensive courses from Dr. John Selhammer, who to people like us rings a bell as a giant of evangelical Old Testament scholarship. He taught at Trinity, as I'm sure you know, before and at several other schools. When I took courses from him, he was at Southeastern in North Carolina, but he had also taught at Western before, so he had a connection to the school that I was studying the MDiv for. And I took his courses in the summer in, I think it was three consecutive summers. And really from the first time I took one of his classes, I was just blown away. He walks in, he's got his Hebrew Bible that he's been using for decades. He's got no notes, apparently, and he's just teaching us like all day because these are summer intensive courses for several days in a row. And I honestly can say that I couldn't get enough. It was inspiring. Yeah, he was always just a fantastic teacher in addition to being a great scholar. So he's funny, you know, he's really engaging. And so I think that's where it all began as far as, well, maybe if I were ever to do doctoral work, I would love to be able to do it with him. And I was fortunate enough that that actually happened. So I studied with him at Southeastern just before he left for what was then Golden Gate and then I transferred and finished with him at what was then still called Golden Gate. And so my interest in this topic, Old Testament theology and using intertextuality, there's a lot of influence from him in it. Yeah, I never had him in class, but his book Pentateuch as narrative was one of the first books we used in one of my early MDiv Old Testament courses. And I loved it. I mean, it was it was just fantastic. And so that's excellent. I think this book, man, one of the reasons I really liked it was the novel approach that you took. I think the idea of nexus passages has probably been, you know, sort of knocked on across Old Testament scholarship. I thought you did an excellent job of discussing the debates around the center of Old Testament theology and sort of setting that up so that as you moved into your nexus passages, we could get a sense of why that's different. What you're doing is a little different than just finding a center. And so maybe talk through what are you what do you mean by nexus passages? How would you describe that? And how does it differ from, you know, finding a center to the Old Testament in an Old Testament theology? Yeah, thanks for the really thoughtful questions from obviously from another fellow Old Testament guy. I mean, nexus passages, that term itself is one that I made up. But the idea behind it is not new. So for people who are involved with biblical studies, we hear the term terms like New Testament use of the Old Testament and then things like allusion, intertextuality, even Old Testament use of the Old Testament. Those are all not always referring to exactly the same thing, but they're all referring to the same kind of general category of phenomena. Namely that texts are related to one another. And so for a nexus passage, I'm basically using that as a way of referring to any passage in the Old Testament that has especially high connectivity to other passages. So the way I start my book is that every passage is connected to other passages in the Bible, right? So you pick any random verse and it's definitely connected to the verse before and the verse after and maybe beyond that within the same particular passage. But there's some passages in the Bible, in the Old Testament in particular, that have especially high interconnectivity. You might say that they have especially high degree of intertextuality. So any passage that's like, has that characteristic, I just broadly call it a nexus passage just because it's a nexus for many other passages to connect to it. So even the 10 passages that I chose, I'm not trying to say that those are the only 10 or even the top 10. I'm really trying to illustrate an approach for us to better see how unified the text of the Old Testament is. Now related to another part of your question about the search for a center that happens in the field of Old Testament theology, I think that what I'm doing is different from the seeking of, say, a thematic center. That's a really common and even helpful way to try to better understand the unity of the Bible. You know, you might pick a center like covenant or Israel or salvation history or some other theme that might even combine multiple themes under one phrase or something. But for that particular approach, as useful as it is in helping us to see one theme getting traced throughout scripture, it's not starting from exegesis of passages and then entire biblical books and trying to build it up from there. It's more like kind of a, it's kind of like a reflection on the whole Bible's content and you kind of already have a grasp of what some of the major themes are, and maybe you pick one of them and kind of trace it through. So I think what I'm trying to do with nexus passages is really to respect as much as possible as I can, the text itself and trying to start from exegesis and branching out from there through these nexus passages to show how interconnected the Bible is. And you did a fair amount on reviewing biblical theology, especially from the Old Testament lens. And I'm wondering, how do you think about, one of the things that I run into when I'm teaching the Old Testament an awful lot is people want to jump to the New Testament and reinterpret the Old Testament texts just in light of the New Testament. I say just because I don't want to suggest that that's not a valid way of doing it, but it is, I would call it a narrow way of doing it. Right. We just look at it from that perspective. And so how do you think about these nexus passages in their, in the accretion of meaning as that grows and progresses across time so that when they're stated, let's say something like in Exodus 15, I know you, you did Exodus 15 was a nexus passage, which just as a side note, before I ever went to seminary, I was at a church and there was a pastor there and he thought I should preach before I went to seminary. And I chose Exodus 15, 1 through 18 to preach on. Let me ask you a serious question. 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But, you know, when you think about Exodus 15, 1 through 18, Song of the Sea, right? It's obviously got big themes. It's just sort of, it's got so much meaning that can come bursting out of it. So how do you think about these nexus passages as sort of reconnecting down the road and taking on or realizing their potential, maybe? Yeah, that's a great question, and I agree with 100% with the opening comments that you made in prefacing your question, namely that I think as a Christian, I obviously accept the authority of the Old and New Testaments, including when the New Testament says things about the Old Testament. But I think the other reality there is that the New Testament is not a comprehensive treatment of the Old Testament. And so if you only look at the Old Testament through the New Testament lens, you'll get an accurate, but like you said, a narrow or an incomplete picture of it. So I think that what I'm trying to do with this book, and I think really maybe in general with whether it's my teaching or other writing, it sounds like you too, is to help more and more people see for themselves just how rich and beautiful and enjoyable the Old Testament is. And I think nexus passages are a great way to do that. In choosing Exodus 15, I was on the one hand trying to pick a passage that deals with the theme of Exodus without then like shifting my whole approach to a thematic approach where I'm tracing the theme of Exodus throughout the whole scripture. So that chapter is purposely called the Exodus according to the Song of the Sea. So I'm trying to show how that particular song, on the one hand, is very important within Exodus itself, within the Pentateuch itself. So nexus connections or intertextuality within its own book, that counts. So whether it's the Song of the Sea that's really concluding the Exodus narrative, there's been so much tension building for the past 14 chapters from Exodus 1 to 14, the 10 plagues, Passover, Pharaoh changes his mind, the crossing of the Red Sea, and then you finally have the celebration. And it's a really special passage in the Pentateuch in the sense that it's like a praise psalm. And yeah, if you're reading the Psalms, there's a lot of those. But if you're reading the Pentateuch, there's not a lot of those. I don't think there's any other, anything like it in the Pentateuch. So as far as like the people of God together praising God for his salvation, it's a high point in the Pentateuch itself. There's other detailed connections that can be drawn out as well. But then kind of the cool thing about nexus passages is that a lot of times they don't only have connections within their own book, like in this case, the Pentateuch, but they also echo or reverberate into other books in the Old Testament. And so sometimes those echoes, they can be really strong. So I cite passages like Isaiah chapter 12. It's another song that's celebrating the Lord's salvation, but it's a future salvation. But then it uses some of the same language from Exodus chapter 15, the Song of the Sea. The Lord is my salvation. And you'll find the same line used, reused, really, in Psalm 118. And so when you kind of visualize this in your mind or with the diagrams in my book, then you've got, okay, you've got Exodus 15 and it's connecting to Isaiah chapter 12, and it's also connecting to Psalm 118. And so I think on the literary and textual level, it's showing that these later two texts, they are rooted in something earlier. And if you look at it from the biblical author's perspective, it strongly suggests that these later two biblical authors, they're aware of what's going on in the Song of the Sea and it impacts their own writing. I think it's intro. I think it's an important point to make because this can start to feel thematic. But what you're pointing to is intertextual actual connections. So repetition of phrases, repetition of words, you know, those kind of things. And so maybe put that a little better than I am, you know, the difference between a theme, right, and the intertextuality. How much of that, I studied under Greg Beal at Wheaton for my biblical exegesis. Yeah, it's awesome. And, you know, his work on biblical allusions is just crazy. I mean, the amount of things this guy has in his head that he actually gets down on paper and the things that he sees in the text are just fascinating and I think really important. But he's doing something slightly different than intertextuality, even, I would say. He's doing, you know, more of an inference from the worldview encapsulated down into a word or a brief phrase. And then, you know, sort of pulling those images forward. I think it's really fruitful and I love the way he does it. But I think there's a difference between what you're doing and what he's doing. And so I'm trying to get that clear. Yeah, I think to describe what I'm trying to do is whenever possible, I'm looking for repetitions of words, multiple words, sometimes phrases, because I think what you're trying to do is to make as compelling an argument or a case as possible that these two texts, for example, they really are intentionally related. So to go back to the Song of the Sea example, to use the language as precisely as I can, that Isaiah 12 really is alluding to the Song of the Sea and that Psalm 118, whoever the psalmist was, is actually intentionally referring back to the Song of the Sea. And in order to do that, the strongest case that you can make is going to be based on word repetitions. It's not that themes aren't important. It's just that themes are a broader category. So like the theme of Exodus, for example, you would look for a certain things. You wouldn't look for the word Exodus, right? Because the word Exodus is not going to be there. You're not going to find it. Right. But you're going to look for, I don't know, maybe you're going to look for the deliverance of God's people across the body of water or like, you know, like plague or plague-like judgments upon God's enemies. You're going to look for stuff like that. So themes are still important and they are still involved with my book. And I think nobody really wants to fully avoid the themes. I'm not trying to, but I think what I'm, where I'm leaning on the most in order to make the case that, say, two texts are related is going to start with words and those repetitions. It makes good sense. I, you know, looking down the passages you treat, one of the things that I noticed was there are a lot of poetic sort of texts in these genres. I mean, even arguably, depending on who you talk to, Genesis 1-1 through 2-3 at the very least is a little less narrative and a little more poetry, or it's some sort of hybrid between the two. Sure. Exodus, Numbers 24, Deuteronomy 32, you know, the suffering servant, all those different ones have this poetic flavor. And I'm just wondering, I have a sense of why you might have, why those lend themselves to being nexus passages, but I don't want to put words in your mouth. So I'm kind of interested to see why you gravitated toward the poetry and the poetic inclusions there. Yeah. Another great question. I think this would also reflect Sailhamer's influence and proposal for the structure.

Nature and theology of the Pentateuch. So just for those who aren't that familiar with it, his theory or view of the structure of the Pentateuch is that it has four major poems or poetic sections that conclude long narrative sections in the Pentateuch. And so you would have, I mean, this is a broad brush, but you have mostly narrative or narrative predominating in Genesis 1-48. 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. And then you have Jacob's poetic blessing of his sons in Genesis 49, and then you have a short epilogue that concludes the preceding long block of narrative. And that pretty much repeats, it repeats three times in a way that covers all of the Pentateuch's material. So even if you trace it all the way into Deuteronomy, you've got a lot of poetry at the end in Deuteronomy 32-33 and then the death of Moses in the following chapter. So that would be part of the reason. I follow him in agreeing that those poems are very important to the structure of the Pentateuch. And then I think even if you didn't start from there, if you just like looked at the poem itself and you just said, okay, I'm just going to be agnostic about the structure of the Pentateuch temporarily. I think for something like Numbers 24, Deuteronomy 32, and then especially Genesis 1-3, there's just like, there's a lot of intertextual connections to those passages we already talked about, Exodus 15. It's interesting too, you know, when I was looking through the list, I was thinking of, I was trying to think what Nexus passages would I identify that aren't in here? Because you said they're not in here. And one of them I came to just immediately was the Song of Hannah, the beginning of 1 Samuel 1-8, and another poem. It's deserving. Yeah, I mean, what I was thinking was, I'm like, part of the reason that I think I'm gravitating and maybe you're gravitating toward the poems as well is because any given narrative doesn't sum up a sufficient amount of material. They're too episodic, almost. The poems are panoramic. And so they're giving you this deeper sense of theology of the whole, which would, I think, lend itself to being those, I think you described it as like switching stations in your book. You know, you give the subway map and then you have the switching station. I'm like, they can be switching stations because there's so many connections within those versus any given narrative piece. It does tend to get a little bit more episodic. Yes. I love the way you put it. I agree with that. And I like that. Yeah, I think it's just fascinating to think about because those are the passages. I mean, as an Old Testament geek, right? I don't usually gravitate toward the poems. Most of the time I spend on the narrative because that's just what I did. But immediately when I thought about it, I'm like going to all these different poems and I'm like, that's crazy. Yeah. And I love the narrative myself, too. But like you're saying, what the poems are doing is they're kicking it up a notch and they're doing this kind of macro level reflection, even theological, sometimes eschatological reflection. So whether it's Hannah's song or other ones, they're key. Yeah, it just feels like the narratives are a little too subtle to serve as big level nexus passages. You know what I mean? You could go to like a key text, something like Genesis 15-6, which you see, you know, so multiple times then quoted. That, I think, is different than what you're really pointing to in a nexus passage, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, like I had 2 Samuel 7. I mean, that's that's an easy one, right? That's like low-hanging fruit and it is a narrative passage. But of course, right. But there's not that many, like you're saying, narrative passages are going to have that much reach like a 2 Samuel 7. Do you see them going backwards as well? So this was a question I had when I was reading the book and you deal with it at some points, but I'm thinking something like, you know, the new covenant section in Jeremiah or something like that, right? Where it kind of backwards and forwards. Absolutely. I absolutely do. And it's funny that you mentioned Jeremiah 31 because in my original proposal, Jeremiah 31 was going to be one of the passages. I was originally going to have four passages each in law, prophets, writings, but the book was getting a little long and maybe I was getting a little tired, too. So I went 4-3-3. And then the one that got cut from the prophets was Jeremiah 31, not because it shouldn't be a nexus passage or isn't, but really just as a matter of, it was just really a practical consideration by myself. You can't do them all. Yeah. Because there's more. But ultimately, I think that hopefully even validates the approach even more if there's even more passages out there that somebody could play out the same approach. But yeah, Jeremiah 31 clearly refers back to the Pentateuch. And when I was discussing the Davidic covenant for 2 Samuel 7, you get connections back to the Abrahamic covenant. So it's fun. Depending on which one you choose and where it is in the canon, it can connect backwards, too. And so I was a law guy when I did my dissertation. I did the Sabbath commands in Deuteronomy and Exodus. And I spent most of my time in the law just whenever I was studying. And so here's a question. I would argue probably the same thing I just did about narrative, that the law is a little too narrow to actually serve as a nexus passage. You could see the lines from a nexus passage connecting back into a legal text. And so I think of something like 2 Samuel 7 even and Deuteronomy 17, the laws of the coming king, right? Here's what the king is supposed to do and those kind of things. But I don't know that I see a legal text. I'm trying to think through. I think the closest I came to was maybe Deuteronomy 6, 4, and 5. But again, that feels too brief to really do what you're doing with a nexus text. Am I getting that right or wrong? What are your thoughts on that? Yeah. I think one of the things with my definition is that I didn't really draw like a hard line in saying like it has to have this much connectivity in order to qualify. So I wasn't really trying to do that. But I think what you're saying basically makes sense to me. Like, because I was thinking about that, too, right? There are like maybe a few passages like you mentioned, like the Shema that, you know, has a pretty high level of interconnectivity to other Old Testament passages. I didn't think I should have thought of that one. But the one that I thought of in the book was like, don't intermarry, right, with the Canaanites. Like that keeps coming up. But at least for that one, Deuteronomy 7, like the theological payoff isn't really as high. It's just that Israel keeps failing to keep that command. Exactly. So whether it's Joshua, Judges, or Solomon, or like Ezra and Nehemiah, then it's like, okay, that's a lot of connections, but you're not really getting the theological synthesis that you do with some of the other ones. Yeah, it still feels a little bit too narrow in a way. And even if I look at, you know, the Shema or Leviticus 19 with the call to love one's neighbor as oneself, it feels a little, I hate to say this, but it feels a little one-note versus some of the other nexus passages that you're identifying that have a lot of span. Like they're just, and so while I can appreciate that you didn't narrow it down and say, no, it has to have 10 connections, otherwise it's not a nexus, like completely arbitrary number. It does, what your work gives is a feel for the expansiveness of these passages and the way they sort of interconnect and reverberate throughout scripture. Make those connections versus something like a, you know, don't muzzle an oxen while it's treading grain. We see it a couple more times, but. Right, that's it. Yeah. Do we really wanna, we really wanna say it's like a hub of theology. Yeah, probably not. Yeah. Yeah. So it was just, I don't know. I was.

I'm wondering if you had any law in there that you could think of that would have really done and illustrate what you've illustrated with some of these other passages, that deep connectivity across. You know, it didn't even cross my mind, but if there were some that would, I mean, to try one as a nexus passage, but the ones that would have the best chance, I think, would be something like a Shema, something like a Sabbath command. It'd be something that, you know, kind of some kind of famous law, like within Scripture. Right, right. That you could, yeah, draw some things together. Yeah. Yeah, I just, like I said, I love the methodology, and I think the fact that we're agreeing on passages that you didn't put in the book, it obviously clearly articulated what you're thinking. And so I'm just kind of trying to dig in a little deeper and see if I'm missing something in the way you think about it. But overall, I mean, let's... Let me ask you a serious question. 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I'm, I guess my next question then is somewhat related, and this is, you know, I'm at an Old Testament guy asking another Old Testament guy about the New Testament. Would you see this same method applying in the New Testament? Yeah, that's another great question. Yeah, where you have much less, let's say, poetic literature or even what we might say less contemplative literature, you know, it is a little bit more occasional in most of its aspects. And so how would you think about those? How would you think about the New Testament? What do you see there? I think that there's potential. And it's funny, there's been a couple other people that have asked the same question. They're like, could you do this same thing for certain New Testament texts? And I think you could. I mean, I hadn't gone looking for them, but one of the ideas that I was playing with in the earlier stages of writing this book is whether to have one New Testament passage, you know, at the end of the book or a conclusion or something like that. And I was thinking, well, what about just the road to Emmaus, right? With they're talking about Scripture as they're walking along the road. And of course, like Jesus comes along and teaches them. We don't know what all that stuff that he told them in detail. But just like the scene itself of, it's like the Shema, right? Like you talk about the Scripture when you're walking along the road, you know, it's causing their hearts to burn. And then it's all directed towards Christ, right? Because that's Christ's conclusion. And that's also my conclusion, right? At looking at some of these nexus passages from the Old Testament. So I think that there's, I think that there's some potential there. My mind went to Magnificat. Oh yeah. In the Song of Simeon, right? Yeah. But I think I was just already primed for the poetry. And then I tried to think it through in Hebrews. I did a little work in Hebrews 7 with Melchizedek and that whole thing. And it's like, it connects, but it's, I don't know how, the New Testament is interesting because you, unlike the Old Testament, which has so much more narrative, right? You don't always see that the New Testament documents hold together, obviously, and they're consistent in their theological presentation, but they're not presenting a solid narrative. They are more, although epistles are occasional, you know, acts has the narrative to it, but then not everything connects back to acts. And so I guess I'm wondering, you know, if you feel like that narrative structure is a necessity within the nexus sort of passage approach, or, you know, I think that's where I got a little stuck on it when I was thinking about it. I'm like, yeah, it might be harder for the New Testament just because of the occasional nature, the more ad hoc sort of treatment. Yes. Yeah, I haven't thought about it in the epistles. I don't know. Yeah, I would start with the narratives and see if there's any narrative texts that maybe they themselves are drawing on multiple Old Testament texts at the same time. Yeah, it kind of feels like that's the way it would go, but yeah, just anyway, interesting. Just wanted to see if you had any particular thoughts on that. Yeah, nothing, nothing really specific yet. Still, still with everybody else wondering how this might play out, maybe in a different way. Yeah, but still hopefully in a, in a productive way. So I had a couple of questions then about maybe practical Bible study in this, in this sort of methodology. Because one of the things when I'm teaching, I teach a Bible study on Wednesday mornings and we've been going through a number of different Old Testament texts. And we actually just did last week, Hannah's Song going through 1st Samuel. And so I went through Hannah's Song and it was sort of giving them this sense that look, all of these theological ideas are going to show back up in Samuel, right? This frames out the book. This is what's going to happen, right? We're just going to now see it in particular episodes. I'm wondering if you see this as a viable way to help people enter into the Old Testament in a little bit deeper way, simply because, you know, I could hand somebody these, you know, what is it? 10 passages, right, that you've got in your book. And they could essentially see a lot of the interconnections then with other passages in the Old Testament. So it seems to me like it would lend itself to a really practical way of introducing people to the Old Testament. Yeah, I think, I think, I hope that it would help someone take a next step in understanding the Old Testament better. I'm thinking also of somebody that maybe has no idea what's even in the Old Testament. So I think for that kind of learner, which is great to have, you obviously want to start with the content, the basic content and storyline of the Old Testament first. But if somebody already has that kind of foundation and they still feel like, boy, I really have a hard time seeing how some of these pieces fit together and how things interconnect, then yeah, I think showing them how some of these intertextual connections play out can be really helpful. And, you know, I'm not, I'm obviously not the only one doing that. But I think this general approach can really help people make better sense of the Old Testament as a whole. Because I think it's easy to get lost in all the, especially in the Pentateuch. Yes. And I have always liked Theolhammer's structure to this. And part of the reason I've always liked it is because you can tend to get lost in the narratives and in the laws. Yes. It can get fairly tedious if you're not, you know, sort of continually scanning down and then scanning back up, you know, getting into the text and then surfacing for air a little bit. Yes, exactly. You know, this structure gives that, you know, hey, I can get a broad understanding of what's happened here from a theological perspective. And then as I dive back into the narratives, I can start having a, I have a framework for understanding kind of what's going on in this narrative and why it's happening, why it's included, those kind of questions. But I'd never thought of it really outside the Pentateuch quite as much as I did before, as I did before reading your book. Now I'm thinking of it more afterward. And so it's, it's an interesting and I think very helpful way of thinking through it. Yep. Thank you. So end of the day, man, I mean, what, when I look through this list and I'm thinking through how, how can people start identifying nexus passages? How do you see this sort of transforming the way people might do Old Testament theology? What's your hope for Old Testament scholars who are looking at this as a method, as a, as a way in to Old Testament theology and, and really rethinking maybe how to approach the Old Testament as opposed to just looking for a center or just looking for, you know, themes or what have you? Yeah.

I guess I should clarify that I still think that there is a center that some of these nexus passages demonstrate, and I just passingly referenced it earlier, but I really do think that the Messiah is the center of the Old Testament, but I do that through exegesis and trying to respect the meaning of each book. So even in the approach that I use in this book, which is focused on nexus passages, to me, even in my own broader approach, it fits perfectly with studying the Bible book by book, as some people do when they approach biblical theology. The argument that I make, just to summarize it briefly, is that what happens in some of these nexus passages is that they leverage a lot of major themes in the Old Testament for the sake of talking about the eschatological King. So I try to lay that out in the Numbers 24 chapter especially, where you've got creation themes and Exodus themes and wisdom themes, all really important themes in the Old Testament. And they're being directed toward a prophecy of the star of Jacob, which is also tying you into the Abrahamic covenant. So there's like just so many things that are climaxing in Numbers 24 in Christ, and you can see that in the text itself. So yeah, I'm forgetting some of the other parts of your question earlier. No, no, I'll clarify too. I wasn't trying to speak against a thematic approach or a center approach. But I do think that this is a different, like I say, a different way in. And I think that oftentimes what I see in thematic approaches is things start to get a little too high level, and so the details start to get a little fuzzy. You can start to get claims that are less substantiated by the text or do don't allow for the nuance that the text itself would have for a particular statement than you do when you start at this level or look at it from this level. You wouldn't even have to start there, but get to this level. Now those themes can start taking on a better texture, a different texture. And I would say the same thing about a center. Covenant as center, let's say, or Messiah as center, that's going to have a lot of texture to it. It's going to be, you know, it's not just a pristine picture. There's a lot of globbed on to there that you, you know, it's almost like a game of Tetris, right? You're putting it all, you know, all together. And so, yeah, I see that ground-up approach really driving a sense of, 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. Yes. Nuance and detail, I guess, for lack of a better term. Yeah, I'm trying to do exegesis from start to finish. And even the intertextuality is part of my exegetical method. So I feel like maybe that's what you're getting at. Like sometimes thematic approaches or you start with a center, it can feel a little top-down at a certain point. And I'm trying to go bottom-up because I think that ultimately that's the stronger argument. Yeah, and I think it'll be the better conclusions. I think it'll actually lead to better arguments. You'll actually get a better sense of the Old Testament text in and of itself than if you start with something top-down and then try to find the text to support that. Yes, because then you've got a lot of themes and you've got a lot of centers and it's like, which one, right? And you can say, okay, they're all important, which is fine, but then we still don't really have a clear conclusion, like you're saying, that's arising from exegesis from start to finish. Right, because all these themes do have to, they fit together somehow. Exactly. And they give a coherent picture together. It's just that a lot of times I think when we're trying to do that with a thematic approach, what ends up happening is you've almost got like a kid's puzzle that you're putting together. There's six pieces to it. It's like, boom. But what you're doing is you're taking like a thousand-piece puzzle and you're putting it all together and trying to shape this picture up and to understand how these things are interacting and interclining. Yes. Again, I would say I love the subway analogy. I mean, talk a little bit about the subway picture in your book. I thought it was like kind of a masterful thing because I'm like, I immediately get what you're trying to do. Thank you. Yeah, I think part of it comes from being fortunate enough to have been to some of these places, whether it's like, you know, my dad taking us on family vacation and he's like, okay, you guys go, like me and my brother, like go figure out how we're going to get from here to here. So we're like over there staring at these maps. And so you get the feeling of like staring at this map that's like super complicated. That's like a real experience for me. And then like the experience of actually like being able to get somewhere pretty far away that would be pretty inaccessible otherwise is a real experience. And then being in some of these transfer stations that I've read in the book, it's like, whoa, this is, this is like a really big station and it connects like two, three, four, five lines. And I don't know where the connection, how the, you know, the creative spark happened, you know, that, okay, let's, because I, you know, it's been a few, several years of, you know, off and on being on such a big transportation network. But then I don't know, it just, I guess it just, it just came to me. I was like, okay, well, this is kind of like some of these passages in the Old Testament. This could be a pretty fun metaphor illustration. And as I thought about it more, I was like, whoa, I can kind of extend the metaphor pretty far and it works, not perfectly if you keep extending it, but it has a pretty, you know, it's pretty robust. I think so too. And I, I mean, I love the idea of those switching stations. I mean, I've been in those too. And you do, you have so many off-ramps. You can go down and those are all going to connect to other things. And I think that's almost the essence of a nexus passage. I mean, I think that's why, like when I was trying to think of a law that would do that, I couldn't really find one. You can get one that, you know, goes one or two directions, but it's not, you don't have that same feel of that switching station. Yeah. Yeah. It's hard to map it to like a grand central station, you know, in real life. It might connect a few lines, but it's like, you know. More like a blue line stop in Chicago. It's like you go one way or another, but you can't really go much, you know, there's not a lot of choice. Right. And so it's not that it has no intertextuality. It's not that it doesn't reinforce an important theme or something like that. It's just that it isn't quite as, it doesn't have as many tentacles as some of these others have. Fascinating stuff. Yeah. Yeah. So what's on the horizon next? I mean, I know you've written on, you know, Messianic themes and now you've got this book. What are you working on next? You got anything in the pipeline? Yeah. So the current project is a Daniel commentary for Langham. It's part of their Asia Bible commentary series. Many volumes are already out, but I'm one of the latter ones. So I'm in Daniel eight right now. The manuscript is due next year. So Lord willing, that'll come out in, I don't know, a couple of years or something. Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you being on the show. And I usually ask my guests one kind of final question, man. And I'll be interested to see what your response is. So the show is Thinking Christian. And so I usually ask, why, what do you think the church should be thinking about today to help them be and make more faithful disciples? What should the church be thinking about today in order to make more faithful disciples? Yeah, be and make more faithful disciples. What are we missing?

Where's the what's the hole you see in the church's thinking and their focus? You know, and like, what do we need to be looking at a little more closely to be and make more faithful disciples? I could I could hazard an answer. I don't mean that it's the silver bullet. That's right. I don't even think it directly relates to my book, which is okay. That's fine. Yeah. But I mean, I would go back to Jesus's call to discipleship for us to remember that he calls us to deny ourselves, take up our cross and follow him and take that seriously. What does that mean for us in what is sometimes and oftentimes a more affluent or comfortable society, which is good in a lot of ways for us in our daily lives and in our church lives, et cetera. But how can we increasingly demonstrate to our society that we really are followers of Christ in a biblical sense? We believe in Jesus. That's fundamental. We repent of our sins. And but what does that what does that how does that play out in American society? How can we maybe find not new ways, but maybe identify some blind spots in which we aren't carrying our cross in a way that maybe we could. When you're working with seminary students, just, you know, sort of the next generation of pastors, theologians, you know, biblical scholars. Do you get the sense that they understand that what they're doing is an act of discipleship? That this is part of their not just training for a profession, but an equipping to actually be a disciple of Jesus Christ. Sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. I think some students do. And kind of like your question alludes to, sometimes it can feel like I'm just doing this because I have to, I need the degree. And then it becomes a little more mechanical or going through the motions. And I would hope for. I mean, it's still great that they're in seminary, but hopefully those of us who are teaching them can give them a broader vision or a bigger vision for what they're doing in theological education. Very cool, man. Well, I appreciated this book. I enjoyed reading it. I thought it was fascinating. I love the approach. So thanks for writing it. Just, if nothing else, I really appreciate it. Having you on to talk about it and just get some of my questions answered and pick your brain a little bit on some of these random questions I had about it. So hopefully it does well. And I would just recommend everybody who's listening, check out Wonders from Your Law. We'll put the link in the show notes. IVP has given us a 20% discount, so you'll get 20% discount if you'd like to order it. Fascinating book. If you're interested in the Old Testament at all, it would be a fantastic place to start on your journey and check out more about digging deeper into the Old Testament. So I would highly recommend it. But Wonders from Your Law by Kevin Chen. And Kevin, thanks for being on the show, man. I really appreciate you being here. You're welcome. Had a great time. Thanks so much, James. All right, everybody. We'll catch you on the next episode of Thinking Christian. 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. Have you ever attempted to read the entire Bible? Did you do it or did you only make it partway? I'm John Stonge and I host a podcast that will make it possible for you to make it through the entire Bible one chapter at a time. I've been hosting the Chapter a Day Audio Bible podcast since 2015 and every single day of the week I read one chapter of Scripture, then follow that up with a time of prayer. And if you're looking for daily insights and inspiration directly from God's Word, I hope you'll give the Chapter a Day Audio Bible a listen. You can find it at lifeaudio.com or on your favorite podcasting app.