https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=ovrKBNGjEOA
So you may be wondering why I have two cameras and I’m pretty sure the laptop’s going to be able to record this, but I’m not 100% sure so I’m setting the camcorder up too, just in case. Let’s say a prayer. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death, amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, amen. Alright so, thank you all for coming. If I had fully realized the implications of doing my first presentation, the week vacation Bible School started, I might have decided to delay this by a week, but we’re here and we’re going to get through it, but it was kind of a hectic first day, so I’m hoping I’m able to do this. And kind of the start of this is I’ve been learning a lot, even in the past year, even after leaving seminary, about kind of a more symbolic interpretation of the Bible, and really diving into that, really finding that very useful for my prayer life, very useful for my preaching. And so, you know, a lot of what I learned in seminary was fairly true and useful stuff. It was kind of approaching that historical critical approach to the scriptures, but I find that this symbolic approach to the book of Revelation has proven very fruitful for me. So, I’m hoping to learn how to read the book of Revelation well. And so, the first thing I’m going to do is we’re just going to talk about what it means to have a symbolic view on things, right, and what symbolism kind of means and what it kind of implies. And then in the later weeks, we’re actually going to start walking through the book of Revelation chapter by chapter. So tonight, it’s just going to be me talking about symbolism, right? Okay, so question for you. How much information is there in the universe? Infinite? Infinite may as well be infinite, right? And like, when are you going to know all of it? Like, you’re never going to get to know, you’re never going to get to the bottom of literally everything that is. And so, what we do is we filter things, right, and we filter things a lot. We see reality through a filter, right? We don’t really see reality directly. We see kind of our filtered version of reality. And so, this little video I’m going to pop up on the screen here is going to demonstrate that for us, if I can get it to play. There you are. If you see this one before you, it’s better. All right, count how many times the white players pass the ball. The correct answer is 16 passes. Did you spot the gorilla? Yes. For people who haven’t seen or heard about a video like this before, about half miss the gorilla. If you knew about the gorilla, you probably saw it. But did you notice the curtain changing color or the player on the black team leaving the game? Let’s rewind and watch it again. Here comes the gorilla, and there goes a player, and the curtain is changing from red to yellow. And it’s changing from red to gold. When you’re looking for a gorilla, you often miss other unexpected events. And that’s the monkey business illusion. Learn more about this illusion and the original gorilla, the monkey business illusion. All right, so just to get a count, how many people saw the gorilla? All right, so a decent number you saw the gorilla. Now, how many people saw the curtain change color? Nobody. All right, and how many of you saw the black player leaving? All right, so our filters, right, our psychological filters help us do two things, is that we let in the information that we consider relevant and that we filter out everything else, right? Because even, you know, just this room, just the tiniest slice of reality, contains more information depending on what level of analysis we wanted to use than we could ever possibly handle, right? And so none of us, none of us really has access to a God’s eye view of things, right? Now, God’s the one who’s on top of everything, and we’re not. You know, how does this filtering work? Well, the first part of our filtration system is just the fact that we’re embodied, right? That you are in a body. And what that means is that you can only be in a particular time, at a particular place, right? So you only have access to that, and it’s further filtered through your senses, right? Your eyes can only see like this portion of an electromagnetic spectrum, that’s this portion. You can only hear certain things, but even that’s like too much information for your consciousness to handle, even everything coming out of your senses. And so most of what our filtering is, is looking for task-related things, right? So the way that video worked that we watched is that it gives you a task, right? Count how many times the players in the white shirts pass the ball. And you know, what you do is you just tune into the information that’s relevant to you at that time, right? How many times does the players in the white shirts pass the ball? And so it doesn’t matter what color the background is, it doesn’t matter anything that the players on the black team are doing, right? The only thing you’re worried about is what’s going on with those players wearing the white shirt. And so that’s kind of a very complex way that we’ve been situated and how we filter these things, right? And that’s, it’s just an inevitable part of being human, it’s just something we’ve got to deal with. All right, so would somebody please describe the solar system for me? All right, anybody? Aaron, you’re looking bold. Describe the solar system. Just basic, I’m explaining this to a second grader. What’s the solar system? It is a gathering of all types of stars. I’ll just talk about our solar system though. What’s at the middle? The sun. The sun’s at the middle of the solar system, all right. And what comes next? Moon, stars? Mercury. Mercury. Mercury. And then, all right, and then, and so we’ve got the sun at the center, and we’ve got Mercury going around, and we’ve got Venus, and then we finally have the Earth with its little moon orbiting around it. Then Mars, and then asteroids maybe, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, not a planet anymore, right? Okay, now, does everybody think that that’s an accurate model of the solar system? Well, you are all heretics. You are all heretics. You are all heretics. Is it not written? God said, let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters. And God made the firmament and separated the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament. And it was so, and God called the firmament heaven, and there was evening and there was morning, a second day. Well, what about all the water that’s on top of the heavens? You failed to mention that, any of you? Can I call a friend? Alright. Now, if you read the Bible carefully, and you get a sense of this biblical worldview that we’re dealing with, right? You get basically a sense of this, right? That we’ve got this firmament on top, and then there’s waters above, there’s waters underneath, you know? And then the moon and the stars are kind of inside the firmament, right? And that’s a completely different kind of worldview than the way we describe the solar system, is it? So which one is it? Which one’s correct? Well, we spent all that time talking about filters, didn’t we? So what do you think the answer is? You’ve got to use the right filter, depending on what the task you’re going about is. You’ve got to use the right kind of filter. So, as 21st century Americans, our dominant filter is materialism, right? And I don’t mean in the sense of trying to acquire possessions. I mean the sense that we tend to think of things as the entire universe is just being made up solely of matter and energy. Now, why would we do this? That’s what we know. That’s what you can see and much more you can know, right? And so if you were using that biblical cosmology, right, that biblical view of the universe, how would you send a rocket up there? You wouldn’t, right? There’s just water up there. And so, you know, there’s a whole lot of things that that kind of biblical worldview doesn’t do well, you know? It didn’t do kind of this scientific materialism well. That’s why scientific materialism really wasn’t invented until the 16th century, you know? That’s when you could see the first seeds of it, the scientific revolution. That was a way of seeing the universe that we had to learn how to do. And it’s not very natural, right? Have you guys ever had computer problems? All right, who here has yelled at a computer? Right. Is that computer voice activated? Does the process of yelling at a computer actually fix anything? Why do you yell at a computer? I was shocked when I dropped my meeting card. We yell at computers because one of our most fundamental categories is persons, right? How we interact with persons, how we deal with persons, how we handle persons. And we just sort of project that category into all sorts of things. Computers, cars, when they don’t work. Even when they do work, you know, like you name your boat and you might talk to your boat. You know, people do that kind of things. So the materials filter, right, something that we had to learn, something that we kind of go to as 21st century Americans, and it’s useful, right? It’s a good filter. It does a lot of things well. Now, it makes huge parts of the Bible look silly to all sorts of people. That’s kind of the number one reason. People have done the statistics. Why do people, you know, young people leave the church? And the number one reason is that they can’t really square what they’re reading in the Bible with what they’re learning in their science classes, right? And the technology that they see all around them. They seem completely disconnected and guess what? The technology all around them in their science classes is really immediately relevant, right? And it’s really useful. And so they just gravitate towards that. It’s like, this is real. You know, these Sunday school things, they don’t seem to fit. And so what I’m really hoping to do here is to learn how to read the Bible well so we can get at what it’s really talking about rather than, you know, just throwing the Bible out. We’re throwing the materialist frame out, right? Got to find the right way, the right way. What are we doing here? How do we read the Bible? Okay. So we’re talking about symbols, right? Talking about symbols. Now, the word symbol is originally a Greek word, right? And it means to place things together, right? To place things together. Sin is like synthesis to bring together. And then bolas actually throw. So it’s like you’re throwing things and seeing if they stick. So symbols then are how we really interact with reality, right? How we really interact with reality. So I want you to imagine that you receive a text message, right? You receive a text message. Is that your son was in a car accident and he’s in a hospital and it’s serious, right? You can imagine perhaps some of you have been in similar situations where somebody very deeply important to you, somebody is hurt and like what happens to you, you know? Like your heart’s going to start pounding, you know? And you’re going to be thrown into this kind of state of confusion. Everything that you were doing previously, all of that just goes away. It’s like this whole, the whole world kind of changes when that happens, right? The whole world kind of changes. And a materialist filter is going to look at that text message that you received, right? It’s going to look at the text message you received and it’s just going to say, well, that’s just, you know, lights on a screen. That’s just pixels on a screen, right? And that’s not a particularly useful way to think about that text message, right? Because that text message, right, that right there is a symbol of how your life is going to be different from now on, right? It’s a symbol of how deeply everything changes. And so, you know, everything that happens after that, the hurried trip to the hospital, you know, the anxiety, the sleepless nights, the consultation with the doctors, telling your other family members, everything, everything about how your life is changing at that moment is going to be compressed into that symbol. I knew everything changed when I got the text message, right? I knew that was the moment. I saw it. Everything was different, right? And that’s the correct way of thinking about these symbols, right? Is that it takes all sorts of things that you already know is to be true and it compresses things, reality, into an image. And the thing about the symbolism in the Bible, right, is that we’ve got the greatest possible storyteller giving us these symbols, right? The greatest possible storyteller giving us kind of the deep patterns of reality. And so, kind of something I hope I’m able to show as we go through is this idea that the symbolism of the Bible scales, right? It scales kind of up and down levels of being, so it can be true kind of even on an ordinary, everyday, physical level. A lot of the symbolism can be true on a personal level or in a small community or in kind of the broad swaths of history, right? So it can kind of scale up and down everything and it can also scale across time, right? Now, this is a good point to talk about, oh my, where did that, that’s the slide I want, that’s the slide I want, to talk about prophecy and revelation, right? Now, as we talk about these, this symbolism, we’re talking about the Bible. We could talk about the Book of Revelation being a prophetic book, right, and indeed everything in the Bible being in some way prophetic. And our idea about prophecy is always like, well, what’s going to happen in the future, right? And that’s kind of our go-to notion of what prophecy means. But if you read a lot of biblical prophecy, it’s not so much telling you what’s going to happen in the future. That’s certainly an aspect of it. It’s not wrong to say that. But what the prophet was is the one who speaks in front of God, right, who’s sort of the spokesperson of God, who speaks the mouth of God, speaks the words of God. And a lot of times biblical prophecy isn’t so much about telling what’s going to happen in the future, but a lot of times it’s a moral admonition to stop sinning and to do right. A lot of times it’s just interpreting current events from the perspective of how we relate to God, right? And so when I talk about prophecy, it’s really not necessarily helpful always to just think of it very narrowly as what’s going to happen in the future, right? And then we talk about Revelation, right? So if you find older Bibles out there, you’ll actually see that the Book of Revelation is called the Apocalypse of John, right? And when we hear the word apocalypse, we immediately just go for end of the world, right? That’s what the apocalypse is. It’s just the end of the world. But what the original Greek actually means is sort of as a revelation, right? So that’s why we now translate the Book of Revelation as the Book of Revelation, because that’s more clear to the way that modern English works. It’s like peeling back the layer, right? And seeing kind of what’s going on underneath the appearances, what’s going on underneath the surfaces. And sort of the notion behind a lot of this apocalyptic literature and especially the Book of Revelation is that there’s this cosmic battle going on all around us, right? Like these massive forces of good versus evil just behind the veil, just beyond what you’re able to see. And we’re going to peel that veil back and we’re going to show you what’s really happening, right? And that sounds really great, but it doesn’t seem to relate necessarily to your everyday life, right? This idea that there’s a cosmic battle, like you kind of hope that you’re not involved in it, right? Because it’s like, oh boy, that sounds scary, doesn’t it? So let’s just imagine that you know you need to get up early, right? And it’s like it’s really important for you to fulfill your duties to those in your life, for you to even just have like a basically good day. It’s like I got to get up by 520 today. And if I don’t do that, my whole day is going to be off. Like nothing that I want to do is going to be as right. I’m going to be hurrying through things. I’m going to be dropping things left and right. It’s not going to go well, right? Well, that moment when your alarm goes off is a battle between good and evil, isn’t it? Right? Because you know what the good is. It’s like, oh gosh, I got to get out of bed. And you know, it’s going to hurt. Initially, it’s going to hurt getting out of bed. But if I do get out of bed, things are going to go well. And if I sleep in like I really want to at this moment, things are going to go poorly, right? Now think about how many people you interact with in any given day. You know, think about all of the things that you do that help other people out. And you’ve got this busy day coming up for you. And if you live this day well, you’re going to make somebody else’s day better. And that person’s not going to have to deal with all of that stuff that you might have messed up for that person who was relying on you at that moment, right? And so then that person’s going to have a better day on account of you having a good day. And how many people is that person going to interact with in any given day, right? And if you’ve made that person’s day a little bit better, then that person has a possibility of actually making another person’s day quite a bit better, too. And you could see how there’s no such thing really as an individual, right? I mean, of course there’s such a thing as an individual, right? But not in the way that we might like to think of it. Like you’re just sort of floating in space and that nothing you ever do really matters to anybody else. So what you do actually matters to a whole lot of people. And people who are lonely and isolated are generally not well even physically, right? It’s like we’re just wired to be social beings. And so any time that you have a fairly clear choice between good and evil, between what you know is right, what your conscience is bugging you to do, and something that you would like to just skip on, that right there is a cosmic battle. That right there is tilting the scales of the universe either towards more good or more evil, right? And so as we go through the book of Revelation, as we see just kind of these frightening images, right? And this way of thinking about things, it’s like this matters. This is a part of our lives. This isn’t just some book that we can think about but doesn’t really have any impact on us. So what I’m hoping to get at is that symbolism is real, right? And so the kind of the definition I’m using here is that real is anything that I’m not really in charge of, that I can’t just control. So I can imagine that it’s cooler here in this room, and I can imagine that all I want. It’s imaginary that it’s cooler, but I can’t actually just imagine it and change it to be different. It pushes back. The real pushes back on you. It doesn’t let you just push it around. And so I want to say that symbolism is real, you know? That it’s not something that I can just make up arbitrarily. Now, in a sense, if we’re really thinking about these deep patterns of reality, right? About these deep things that repeat themselves over and over again, that kind of go up and down the whole ladder of being and are across time. These things that we can recognize happening over and over again. So let’s talk about stories. Who taught you what a story was? Who explained to you that a story is supposed to have characters and a conflict and a narrative arc, you know, establishing things, conflict, conflict, conflict, climax and resolution? Did anybody ever explain to you what a story is? No. You know, your parents just sat down. I got a lot of Dr. Seuss, you know, and that had little narrative arcs in it. You know, I will not eat it in a house. I will not eat it with a mouse. I will not, you know, I can’t remember all of it, but there was a narrative arc to that, right? And there was also kind of the musical repetition of it. But, you know, like if you could tell a good story to a four-year-old, you know, that story, that four-year-old’s just gripped, right? Like they’re really zoned into the story, you know? Well, that right there, that pattern, that pattern of a narrative, like that’s real, right? So like imagine I told you a story about that time that Father Dale and I got in a real big fight, right? So I was sitting in my office and there’s kind of papers all over, all over my table. Yeah, and it was about 73 degrees in the office that day. And I had my computer on and I had Microsoft Outlook and YouTube open. And yeah, I was actually, I was also wearing a clerical shirt like this, but I had dress shoes on. And school was going on at the time when that happened. And there wasn’t actually much of a fight, you know. He just came in and we discussed something. The end. That’s a really bad story, right? And I don’t have to explain to you why that’s a bad story, you know. And so all of you were able to independently judge that’s a bad story, right? That’s a really, you know, there was all sorts of stuff that didn’t make sense, that didn’t fit. So these narratives, that’s a deep abiding pattern of reality, right? Or the difference between at least a decent story and a bad story. It’s a deep abiding pattern. And so you could say in a sense that these symbols, that these patterns are more real than objects, right? Like how long have we had stories for? As long as there have been human beings, there have been stories, you know. And people tell each other stories all the time, right? You come home, you greet your spouse, you say, how was your day? And the spouse might tell you a story about something that happened. It’s a simple story, it doesn’t have to be anything dramatic or great, but that pattern, that pattern, you know, the difference between a good story and a bad story, like you know it. You know when something interesting is going on and somebody’s just kind of jibber jabbering, like maybe I am right now. And so those patterns, in a sense, they’re more real than objects in the universe. And then in another sense, objects and events in the universe are more real than symbols, right? Because these patterns don’t just float out there in the world, all right? They are always embodied in particular places, right, in particular people. So there’s no such thing as just like the idea of a free-floating narrative. It’s always embodied in something. And we can talk about narratives, but really these symbols always have to become real at some point in a way that we can encounter with them. So symbolism is real and it’s not arbitrary, right? So we can think about those red octagons we got all over town, right? Those red octagons we got all over town. What do you do when you pull up to one of these red octagons? You stop? Or maybe you just kind of slow down and make sure nobody’s coming? Yeah, all right. But now that’s an arbitrary sign, right? Like there’s nothing intrinsic to a red octagon that makes your vehicle stop, right? And we need arbitrary signs sometimes. You just got to do what you got to do sometimes with these arbitrary signs. Symbolism is not like that. It’s not arbitrary. And so we look at Holy Communion, right? What was the sign that Jesus chose to represent Holy Communion? Bread and wine, right? And what does the Holy Communion symbolize? Well, that symbolizes Jesus feeding us, right? Feeding us with his own body and blood. Well, that makes perfect sense then that bread and wine would be chosen to do that, right? Because that’s something you eat, that’s something you drink, and that was kind of the staple diet of the Mediterranean at the time. That was something that everybody would eat. It didn’t matter how poor you were, you could get your hand on bread and wine, you know? They would generally mix their wine with water in those times, but we don’t really do that now. So, all right. So we’re going to go back to the solar system, right? We’re going to go back to the solar system. We’re going to try and figure out why on the second day it’s so important that God divides the water, right? That’s what God did on the second day. God divides the water above from the water below. Now, in all sorts of symbolic interpretation, water is identified as chaos, right? That place where everything is constantly changing, that place where there’s nothing firm, nothing stable for you to grab onto, right? And it makes perfect sense that water would be that kind of symbol. It’s not an arbitrary symbol, it’s a real symbol. All right, think about a river, right? And there’s, you know, there’s parts of the United States where at one time the state boundary was decided by a river, and then somebody, let’s say in Kansas, would buy a certain piece of the state, and I should have used a closer state because I can’t remember what’s bordering Kansas. How about we go with Minnesota now? So we’ll say the Red River, right? And then the Red River would be marking the state boundaries, and then this little piece of land right here would have been bought in North Dakota, right? And then at one point the course of the Red River changes, right? And now this little piece of North Dakota is actually across the river from a piece of Minnesota, you know? So it’s like, that’s what rivers do, right? They’re unstable, they’re constantly moving. It’s not the same water twice. Well, of course that’s chaos, right? That is change itself. That is like some place where you don’t have anything firm to set on. It’s challenging for human life to survive in water, right? Like if there’s too much water, what’s it going to do to you? You could drown, right? No matter how good a swimmer you are, eventually you’re going to get tired, you know? You need to have something solid to rest on. And so chaos and water are also kind of linked symbolically with death, right? That place where life can’t survive. Now you may say, well, fish can survive there, and I say, who cares? You’re not a fish, you know? We’re talking about symbolisms that human comes up with. You know, fish don’t have symbolic interpretations of the world. So it doesn’t matter that fish and all sorts of plant lives can live down there, because you’re a human being. And going into the water, that’s chaos, and too much of it, that means death. Now the life in the water is also kind of monstrous, right? I mean, have you ever thought about how fish don’t blink? Like have you tried not blinking for 10 seconds? Right? That’s a monster right there. And fish are fairly common, you know? But what about like a really big fish? Like that’s a monster right there. Octopuses. You know, those like deep sea, the deeper you go into the water, the more monstrous the fish get, right? Like you’ve got these crazy bioluminescent ones, they’re like transparent. They’ve got like a little light part of them that it’s just wild stuff down there, right? That’s death. That’s chaos right there. And then the deeper you go, what do you get? It gets darker and it gets colder, right? Darker and colder. You’re getting farther and farther away from the sun, the source of life, and you’re getting colder, deeper, darker. But what do you need? What do you need perhaps even right now? You need water to survive, right? That is a part of our human life. And settlements of cities in ancient times, right? Where would they build cities? They would build cities on the shore of the ocean. They would build cities on the rivers. Because it was useful to be near a water source, right? Phoenix should not exist. Right? Phoenix is a testament to human pride, to the arrogance of modernity, because we think we could put that many people that far away from a water supply. You know, it’s just complete madness right there. Wapiton, Wapiton sensible. Red River’s right there. We’ve got water nearby. But I’m sure many of you remember 1997, right? Right, yeah. So it’s always dangerous. But OK. And then, you know, it marks boundaries, right? Those state boundaries again being marked by water, you know? And we separate the order from the chaos, right? And so none of this is arbitrary, right? None of this symbolism of water as being chaos, as being death, as being new potential, right? Like, water is also, you know, chaos is also potential. Chaos is where new things come from, right? Think about it. You know, if something is stable, it doesn’t change, right? In order for something new to come about, you have to change it. You have to enter into that chaos, right? So, you know, I think that association with water makes an awful lot of sense, right? When you’ve got a desert, does anything grow there? And what’s missing? Water. Water is missing there. If you all of a sudden pipe in a bunch of water, eventually, you know, it’ll form some kind of a pond, and then what’s going to sprout up? Well, whatever seeds are able to get there, if they can find water in the desert, that new life is going to sprout up. So even though it’s also, you know, chaos, death, and destruction, right? The flood wiping away everything on Earth, it’s also the potential for new life, right? And that’s what chaos is. None of that is arbitrary, right? All of that comes down to our just our very real encounter with water across all of human history. And so that’s why it was important that God would separate a space in the water for people to live in, all right? That’s what’s going on there. That’s why that model of the universe on the left is a perfectly good model of the universe from the symbolic worldview, right? Think about it. Think about, let’s take a house, right? Let’s take a house. We all have houses, right? Maybe an apartment, maybe a townhouse. What do you have? Well, you generally have at least four walls. You’ve got a roof. You’ve got a floor, right? And what does the four walls, the roof, and the floor do? Well, they keep everything out, right? It creates a space where human beings can actually live. You say, well, you know, bears can live outside. Like, okay, they have dens, right? They repeat the exact same pattern, right? Wild dogs, they all have their dens. They all have their little place that keeps all of the death and the chaos and the cold out and creates a space where human beings can live, you know, or where any sort of life can live. And so that’s the way human beings are, right? We carve little bits of order out of the chaos, right? We carve little bits of habitable order where we can live out of the chaos. Think about going camping, right? What do you do? Well, maybe you sleep out under the stars, but that’s not going to be a great long-term solution, right? What do you do? You bring along some kind of a shelter that will keep the elements out, keep you in. It’s that pattern, that pattern repeats over and over again. Let’s think about civilization versus the wilderness, right? Where we’ve carved out a place where the stoplights work, where there’s electricity, there’s indoor plumbing, there’s shops. You know how to interact with a shop. You know what to do when you get inside the shop. It’s that pattern again. You go out into the Bob Marshall wilderness. All of a sudden, there’s no roads, there’s no electricity, there’s no indoor plumbing. You’re out in the wilderness. Things are more chaotic, and people don’t live there long-term, right? So this, what God revealed to us in the book of Genesis on day two when he was separating a space between the waters that’s deeply symbolically relevant. That’s how human beings live. We live in little bits of order surrounded by chaos, and I could probably go on for quite a while about all the ways that this works, all the ways that it works. So that’s a perfectly true way of looking at the universe. And from the materialist frame, our solar system there on the right, it’s also true, but you’re doing something different. You’re trying to send a rover to Mars. You’re trying to explain why, see those lights coming down, the meteors, trying to explain the Ouroborialis. It does all sorts of things, but what that doesn’t tell you to do is what God wants you to do. It doesn’t tell you who a human being is. It doesn’t tell you the way you’re supposed to live your life. So that’s what’s going on there. All right. Both are true, but symbolism has a use for you that is most useful. And so kind of looking at this symbolic thinking, I said that the goal is to learn how to read the book of Revelation well. But if you could do the book of Revelation well, you can do the whole Bible well, right? Because it’s the most obviously symbolic text in the Bible, and so you better learn how to do symbolism if you’re going to approach it, right? But that symbolism in the Bible is all over the place, right? And you can find it if you’re willing to dig a little bit about it. And then also, you know, Christians are kind of spooked out by the book of Revelation. And like, guess what, guys? This is our Bible, and we need to be like kind of the masters of it. And so with just a little bit of education, a little bit of learning how to do this symbolic reading of the Bible, it can be really helpful. All right. So when I was a little guy, right, when I was a little guy, I was convinced, and I just like picked this up somewhere. I don’t even know where. I don’t know if anybody ever sat down and talked to me about it, but I’d heard of the book of Revelation, and what I was convicted was that this was just what was going to happen at the end of the world, right? That’s what apocalypse meant. And, you know, is that true? Does the book of Revelation tell us what’s going to happen at the end of the world? And I got a little older, right? And I was always a precocious kind of kid. I would just, I think in seventh grade, I just picked up the Bible and just started reading it, you know, because I’d read anything I could get my hands on. And somewhere around that time, I read somewhere that the book of Revelation was a coded text trying to encourage first century Christians who were suffering under persecution, right? And then they looked at just kind of the different symbolism. It’s like, okay, you know, like this beast represents the Roman Empire, and this piece represents the imperial cult, and this is Nero, and now is that true? Well, yes. It’s all kind of in there, right? Is it a code for Christian suffering in the first century? Does it tell us about the end of the world? Well, different sections kind of have different focuses. But if you’re able to understand the symbolic reading of the text well, then what you can see is that it can be both at the same time, that that symbolism of what happened then can be happening now and will be to come. Now, there’s other parts of the book of Revelation, and I’ll get into this in the nitty-gritty where it is rather more obviously about the end times, but that’s maybe less of the book than you think. I’ve got a little bit of time extra here, and I saw this YouTube video about a symbolic interpretation of the parable of the sower, and I thought just going through that as an exercise and how that can be an image of the whole world could be helpful to us. And so you’ve all heard the parable of the sower before. The sower goes out to sow, and some of the seed fell on hard soil, on the path, and the birds of the sky came and ate it up. And some seed fell on the rocky soil where it sprang up at once, but when the sun came it withered for lack of roots. And then some seed fell among thorns and thistles, which grew up with it and choked it, and the seed did not produce any fruit. But some seed fell on good soil, and it produced a hundred or sixty or thirty-fold. Let him who has ears ought to hear. Now what’s your go-to interpretation of that passage? What is it talking about? Who is the sower? God? Right. Okay. Very good. And then where are we in this story? Where the seed, right. And sort of, you know, it describes how different people encounter this word of God, which is being sown by God. And that is, that’s kind of the primary interpretation, right. Like if you read it in context, that’s sort of what it is. But it also can describe just about anything, right. So let’s imagine that I want to place this gavel somewhere, right. I want to place it where this camera is. Well, what do I have to do first? You got to move it, right? All right. So some seed fell on the path where it couldn’t get in. And the birds of heaven came and ate it up, right. So there needs to be space for something new to come in, right. And if it’s already being occupied, then there’s no way you can get something new in there, right. And so that’s what that path and the seed is talking about, right. What the path and the seed is talking about is that there needs to be a space for something new to come in. And if there’s no space, there’s nothing new coming in. So let’s say you want to start a new habit, right. You want to start a new habit of, let’s say, getting up 20 minutes earlier and spending that time in prayer, right. This is a simple thing that many Christians might like to do. Well, what do you have to do first before you can do that? You’ve got to get rid of that 20 minutes of sleep, right. You got to plow that up. And if you don’t get rid of that 20 minutes of sleep, that space is going to be occupied by sleep, right. So the seed can’t get in there, right. So you can see how this symbolism scales, right. We could talk about the conversion of an individual human being, right. Somebody whose heart is just not open to a new idea, right. Somebody who just can’t accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior. There’s no room for it in their heart. Word bounces right off, right. And then you want to put a new habit in. Well, that pattern describes that. If you’re not willing to actually get out of bed and disrupt that sleep, there’s no way that you’re going to put that 20 minutes of prayer in. And if I’m not willing to move this tripod, I can’t get the gavel in there, right. That pattern, that symbolism, it scales. It scales across time, right. How many times have that sort of interaction happened? More than we could possibly count. And it scales up and down, right. You could think of nations where the gospel was preached and people didn’t really take to it. It’s not a whole lot of nations, but it does happen. Now, we could think about, let’s think about North Africa, right. North Africa, we’re talking about the land of, talking about the land of Clement of Alexandria. We’re talking about St. Athanasius. We’re talking about St. Augustine, right. This North African place, part of the Roman Empire, where Christianity flourished, right. And then what happened? Well, Islam, the Muslim conquest of those lands, right. And that was like kind of the first place of the old Roman Empire that they took. They spread their way through there, right. Now, what is that? That’s the weeds coming up and, oh, I’m going to get in trouble for that. But that’s the weeds coming up and choking the word, where they’re no longer able to bear fruit. You could think about, you know, how that symbolism scales over and over again. Maybe you get up for 20 minutes for like a week, maybe two weeks, you disrupt it. And then you go back to sleeping in for those 20 minutes, right. That’s, it didn’t get deep enough. There was no roots. And when the sun came, it was scorched. You didn’t have space for it. So anyway, that’s a particularly compelling case of, I would think, of this symbolic reading of scripture. So I hope that this has been helpful to you. And this is definitely going to be the most abstract, the most complicated, the most up in the air that I’m going to be during these presentations, right. So if you found this a little bit tough, a little bit hard, maybe you didn’t get it, please just come back. Give me one more week. Give me one more week. Once we actually get into the nitty gritty of the Bible of actually applying this symbolism to an actual text, like I just did, it should become a little more natural. And I think what I was saying about the materialist frame and kind of that dominance that it holds in our culture, I think that’s a problem. It really, you know, it turns our young people away from the saving truth that is present in the Bible. And you just you tend to miss a lot, a lot of what God has for us. If you try and put everything into a materialist frame, if you try and just think about everything being matter and energy, and you’ve got an intuitive sense of this. Hoping to give everybody here a better way of speaking about symbolism, a better way of speaking about reality, such that you can live a richer life with our God in heaven. And so, yeah, I’m excited about this. We’re going to go start in the Bible next week, encountering the biblical texts. And I hope you guys come along, because I think this will be great. Any questions? Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, the symbolism of a golf course where you’ve got that kind of habitable order surrounded by the chaotic water, you’ve got the trees, you’ve got the grass where you can’t find the ball, right, where you’re out of boundaries. Yeah, yeah. It’s a vision of the whole cosmos right there, isn’t it? And then man striving for perfection within that context. Against all odds. Against his own imperfections, mostly. And the stinking, you know, these stupid clubs, they just don’t work right. The symbolic stuff’s a little addicting, you know, like once you find you’re starting it, you just can’t stop. Everything’s symbolic. And, you know, if anybody really wanted to come to it, it’s going to be on YouTube. So I’ll have that posted fairly soon.