https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=G09y4iMYb6Y
So, Drew McMahon asked, Hi Jonathan, can you explain why the census that Mary and Joseph were traveling for was important, an aspect of the story of Jesus’ birth? I think that it has to do with this idea of accounting for things. It has a little bit to do with the problem of civilization or the problem of this idea of the symbolism of the beast that we talked about, the symbolism of the number of the beast and accounting for all things. A census is, like in scripture, you’re not supposed to have a census. King David is, in the story of King David, there’s criticism about the census, which is not done properly because it’s dangerous to count things. I know this sounds weird, it’s like the secular people will just freak out. It’s dangerous because when you count things you crystallize them, because you actually make them, you fix them. So when you do that you can finalize them. If you count something you fix it and you can finalize it. If you do that you’re kind of accelerating its shattering, maybe is the best way to kind of understand that. It’s hard for people to understand what I’m saying, but if you see it in excess you can maybe understand it. So imagine someone who is obsessed with all the details. Someone who is obsessed with every single detail about something. If you become obsessed with all the details and you don’t leave fluidity on the edge of processes that you’re involved with, you run the risk of killing that thing. You can kill something through excessive attention and accounting for detail. So maybe that’s a better way for you to understand that. If you understand it in its extreme, which would be something like I’m on a construction site and I ask for the guys on my construction site to account for every nail that they use and every screw that they put in. And I want them to come to me in the end with an explanation of how many nails they put in each board and where the boards were and I want to account for all that. It’s like I am going to kill this project. I’m going to destroy it. And so now understand that as the relationship between accounting for things and their bringing about their end. You can bring about the end of something through accounting. And I think that that is what is being manifested in the notion of the census. It’s like, yeah, it’s like Rome is coming to an end. Something like that. Yeah, something like that. Not that there are other censuses. Obviously, there are censuses all the time. I’m just saying why it’s in the story, why it’s important that it’s in the story. Of course, I don’t think today that there’s anything wrong with the census, but we need to understand the pattern as best as we can. Why is it that it would be a big deal in the ancient world for this to exist? Lisa Parrott says, productivity apps. Yeah, yeah. Some of these productivity apps are the very opposite of productivity because they kind of ask you to account for all the things you’re doing and it can totally kill you. I started going to the gym, as an example. Sorry. I started going to the gym because my daughter wanted to go to the gym. I was like, okay, fine, I’ll go to the gym with you. So I started going to the gym and they gave us this app with the program. And then in the app, you can like for everything, if you want to, you can put in the weight from how you use for every rep, you can put in how much time it took you. It’s like if you did that, my goodness, like would you ever return to the gym if you actually did that? It’s ridiculous.