Question & Answer Service 2025-Part 2

Sermon Transcript

Pastor Mike: All right, well, it’s Q&A weekend, as you were told. And that means it’s your chance to set the agenda for the morning. Maybe something we’ve been studying in Second Corinthians. Maybe something you’re facing in the Christian life. Maybe something that’s whatever, just giving you a charley horse in your brain. Whatever’s on your mind. We have Pastor Doug over here. We have somebody over here, I think, somewhere. Hey, there’s Pastor Jacob hiding over there. I’ve got Nathan in the back there. So even in the lobby we will give you a microphone. So we’ll start here. Looks like Pastor Doug is on the hunt. All right, let’s see what we have today.

Question: Hi, Pastor Mike. I have a question completely out of left pocket. I blame my aunt from Ohio. So here we go. She asked where did Cain’s and Abel’s wives come from? And I started thinking about that, especially in the Old Testament, how generations were expanded and how they would grow. And I wanted to also tack onto that question, how do we think about it, I don’t want to say procreation, but like how do we think about families expanding? Old Testament to New Testament, and kind of the biblical background on that. Like why are we no longer, you know, like growing families from within families kind of thing? So two-parter question. I know, kind of weird. I blame my aunt.

Pastor Mike: It’s not, it’s not weird at all. And I’m not sure I caught all of the second part of your question. But Cain and Abel, we read the story and we think, oh, this is all the children that Adam and Eve had. And that’s not the case. All we’ve got to do is keep reading. Eve had all kinds of children and she lived into her 900s, okay. Now if you’re fertile and the earth is a whole different place where you’re living in a healthy place with great DNA and no chromosomal problems and this is a perfect environment that’s only made imperfect in a way that is much different than after the flood. I mean, no disrespect, but she’s popping out children left and right. Is that OK? Okay. And so you think, oh, well, it seems like by the time we get to the 15th century BC, God says don’t marry your sister and why is that a prohibition then but not in Genesis? Well, why? Same reason, well at least when I was going to get my marriage license, they wanted to make sure we take a blood test, to make sure I wasn’t marrying my first cousin because of the chromosomal problems that come when you do that. Well, that’s not going to be a problem early on. And even by the time Cain kills his brother Abel, he’s concerned about what’s going to happen to him as he goes among the villages where they know what he’s done. So if you think about, I know we say it, 900 years, 900 years, 900 years, nine years is a long time for us. I just want you to think, if you think back 50 years, can you imagine if you lived 250 years? That’s when the country was founded. I mean, this is an amazing amount of time. And so time is crunched when we read a couple of verses, and we forget about the fact that all kinds of people were born. And it talks about Eve bearing all kinds of children, just read through Chapter 5. So if the question was where did they get their wives? They got their wives by marrying their very close relatives. Why was that not a problem? Because, well, that’s all the choice they had and they were all having children. And by the time you’re deciding who you’re going to marry you could have had a lot of choices and you can just scatter plot this or, you know, create a family tree and realize this gets exponentially, the population explosion is just massive. So what was the second half of your question something about procreation?

Question: Based on the Old Testament and how they were procreating within families back then, like you were saying, like close relatives, they were doing that back then. But how would you compare that to now, especially with the New Testament and why we’re no longer called to do that? That was kind of the second question.

Pastor Mike: Right, I just think that the law of Moses in the 15th century BC is reflecting what I think by necessity is important, that you don’t want to marry a close relative because your genetic weaknesses are going to multiply genetic problems. But think about 600 years before Moses, Abraham was marrying his half-sister. This was common in the patriarchal period. And important, at least for the namesake of their own clans. So it grew to be something less common, simply because I think it started to become something that, by practice, was obviously not healthy. And God then codified it into law. Does that answer that? Does that make sense? No, no, blame your aunt. I know it’s really your question. It’s OK. You don’t have to hide behind your aunt. I know you don’t have an aunt. It’s okay. (audience laughing) No, I’m just kidding. I’m sure it’s your aunt’s. Say hi to your aunt for me.

Question: There’s a lot of discussion about the nation state of Israel versus biblical Israel and the differences or perceived differences. Could you point us to some resources to rightly think about it? Because there’s definitely a lot of controversy about should we really be supporting the nation state, the political state of Israel, versus the concept of biblical Israel?

Pastor Mike: Right. Well, it was muddy even in the times of the Old Testament. Think back to where this all started, right? This started in Genesis Chapter 12, and in Genesis Chapter 12, God says, here’s a guy named Abraham, Abram at the time, and he was going to be the father of this great nation. So this was all about genetic lineage, and God was going to make a great nation out of him. And then through him, “all the families of the earth would be blessed.” And ultimately that’s pointing to the international work of the Church. But this was something that according to Romans Chapter 11, God’s not done with the nation of Israel yet. So we look at it as pre-millennialists saying there’s still a plan that God has for Israel. And we’re looking forward to that. And we know that God’s going to do what he says he’s going do and a deliverer is going to come to Jacob from Zion and all Israel is going be saved, at least in that last generation, and we’re going to have that happen, and we believe there’s, in Revelation Chapter 20, six times it talks about a thousand-year period, and believe that’s the fulfillment of it all. Okay, well what about that? Are they all going to be descended from the lineage of Abraham? Well that wasn’t even the case in Moses’ time, right? Think about it. There was a clear call for the mixed multitude to come out with Moses. Now Moses was clearly descended from Abraham because he was from the tribe of Levi, and that was stated. And they were proud of their tribes and they camped according to their twelve tribes in a particular order around the tabernacle. So they identified with a tribe but they had mixed multitudes who went with them. There were always proselytes coming. They identified with the nation of Israel but if you came to be a part of the nation of Israel you were under, early on, the oversight of the nation and you were considered a part of the nation. And there was no problem with that. By the time we had a monarchy in the 11th century, 10th century BC, Saul, David, Solomon, and then on through the divided kingdom, you were a citizen of Israel. Did that mean that you were of Naphtali or of Issachar? You knew where you were from? Well, you are associated with Israel but you may not have been descended from Israel, but you are a proselyte, right? You came as a proselyte. Now, Jews were very careful about this. You read Ezra and Nehemiah after their time in exile one of the things that they were very upset about is I can’t believe you intermarried. So there was a lot of zeal to keep the national line clean if you will. Clean, that sounds like a moral issue. For them it was a national issue. We want to be descended from Abraham. We want to be ethnically Israel. So, even in the New Testament as Paul is making a discussion, a case, and you can try and make this theological, but it is a theological statement. I don’t want to confuse it by answering questions you’re not asking. But when Paul talks about not all those who are descended from Israel are Israel, well, there is something about the fact that there is a spiritual component to us being a part of trusting in what Israel was supposed to be. But there’s also a national part. So, the national part in being under the nation is something identifiable. So if today you say, well, if I go to Israel today and I ask a guy who’s driving a bus, which we often talk to Jews driving buses when I go there, and I say, hey, what tribe are you from? They don’t know what tribe they’re from. And yet you would think that even in the first century and yet you see even in the book of Luke that he identifies people from a tribe. Here’s the thing, God knows what tribe they’re from if in fact they are descended from Abraham. But even if they’re not, which I think a lot of them are, because by the time we get to Revelation Chapter 7, God says I have 12,000 from each of the twelve tribes. I have 144,000 who are identified from each of the twelve tribes. So God is keeping track and one day they will be designated from heaven as they’re from the Twelve Tribes of Israel and these are the people I’m going to use to do a massive, in my view, evangelistic resurgence of Messianic Judaism in Israel. God has always had an open door in terms of you joining the nation of Israel. Now if you say okay Benjamin Netanyahu is leading a political entity in the Knesset and really this is not religious, it doesn’t mean that this is not Israel as we would say in the Old Testament. Hezekiah, in Hezekiah’s day, well it wasn’t very godly. Well he was godly and they had reforms in Hezekiah’s day but if you said is this really Abraham’s line? Well, not everyone, but it was the nation of Israel, warts and all. Take it or leave it. And today you’d say, well, most of them are descendants from Abraham. It is the identifiable nation of Israel. Now, they’re claiming the land, as they rightly should, in at least my book, in that this is the land that was given to Abraham. And it was the land that was taken by Joshua. And of course, we know the history of the Arab/Israeli wars and here they have, just like we’re sitting on land right now that was won by war, they are the deed owners on land, which they’ve given the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and I mean we know all of that from history and the headlines. But yes, I would say that is Israel. It’s national Israel. A lot of people are descendants from Abraham, and I understand it to be Israel. Now, I understand they have warts and wrinkles. It doesn’t mean they get a pass in doing whatever they want, but I’m going to look at Romans 11 and I’m going to say they’re enemies for the sake of the gospel. They reject Jesus Christ. So when I sit there and talk to an Israeli in Israel or here in Orange County, if you reject Christ, we are opponents as it comes to theology, right? But they’re beloved for the sake of the patriarchs because God’s calling and promises are irrevocable. So God has a plan for ethnic Israel, which is national Israel as defined by the borders, by the Knesset today. Can they do no wrong? Of course they can do wrong. But don’t start talking about what the Libs on the campus of UCI are saying with their pro-Gaza rallies. There is no parity between what’s gone on between the Palestinians, as they call them, and Israel today. And I don’t think you’re going there with this. So I get the question, and it’s a great question because, you know, I’m not going to say as some people would say well there is an Israel but it’s not the Israel over there today. Well I understand that. It’s hard to find a part… I’ll give you an example, it’s hard to look between 1040 BC and 721 BC in the northern part of Israel and find anything where you’d say well this looks like a good representation of Abraham’s descendants. You wouldn’t find a godly king. And then you’d think okay they’ve even split from the southern tribes and they have no access to Jerusalem and they’ve set up their own rival worship center. What do we do with them? We’d say they’re Israel. We should say they’re Israel. God said they’re Israel. But even when we read First and Second Chronicles we know that we get a tacit reference to them. We don’t even follow the kings of the north because the godly line was in the south because Jesus was going to come from the south. So I recognize that… Well I’m just saying it’s a good question. We could spend all morning on that, but that’s a great question. Does that answer… Does that help? It’s all little squishy.

Question: Good morning, Pastor Mike. I have a question about prayer. I was telling my friend the other day that I’m praying for this long list of people that the Lord would do a mighty work and bring them to salvation. And she said, oh no, you’ve been praying all wrong. You should be praying for their change of heart because they have free will. I don’t want to be praying wrong. Can you help me out here?

Pastor Mike: Well, yeah… Listen, your friend… We should all meet at the Compass Cafe and have a little chat. Because if she’s narcing you over the way you said what you’re saying, I just think she needs to drink some decaf. Because this is to me, she’s got enough theological information to be dangerous and a little disruptive. We’re praying things all the time which is appealing to God knowing that God is the God of the universe and you know what everything is contingent on God. I can’t get out of bed in the morning without God, but oftentimes I don’t start with the foundational, first principles of existence, you know. When I prayed for this morning I didn’t say God just please let my heartbeat because I can’t live without, you know… I can work either way. I could say oh God give me the will not to wimp out and go do something else. I just think, no, our heart needs to be an appeal to God for the will of God to be “done on earth as it is in heaven.” I don’t mind thinking specifically about the ins and outs of what we want God to do but your prayer is perfectly fine. And yes I want the eyes of the unbelievers to be opened but even I like your prayer better than hers because I’m thinking of First John Chapter 5 and Second Corinthians Chapter 4 verse 4, which we just studied. The eyes of the unbelievers are blinded by Satan. That’s a big powerful set of hands over the eyes of unbelievers. I’m praying for God to do a mighty work, as you said. I want to, as Paul talked about, the fact that he’s being…, this is why Jesus was sent to open the eyes of the unbelievers, in essence, to bring them out of the power of Satan to the power of God. That’s a divine work. It’s like Michael standing before Satan about the body of Moses and saying, “the Lord rebuke you.” It’s not like saying, well, Satan has a free will, and he proved that in Ezekiel 28 and Isaiah 14, and so I should just pray that Satan’s will be changed so that he’ll give me the body of Moses. Just, like stop, right? Just stop. Just, yeah, there’s nothing wrong with you praying exactly what you prayed. And do you understand the confluence of understanding human responsibility and willful choices and volition and God’s sovereignty? You understand that. And I’m going to say, just smile and go, OK, and just say… Yeah, I don’t know. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about that comment.

Question: Good morning, Pastor Mike. Recently we were traveling and ran into a couple of people who were from Canada and we started talking about the MAiD program, the Medical Assistance In Dying, and I’m just curious about your opinion on that. Right now it permits people to seek out physician-aided death if they’re suffering from an incurable disease that causes intolerable suffering. But in 2027 they’re switching that to mean mental illness as well. What’s your opinion of it? And predominantly the example this guy I talked about was can you be a Christian suffering from some incurable disease and go and seek out suicide by a physician?

Pastor Mike: Well, let’s start with, I think, the fundamental answer, which is no. I think the answer is no. But to answer why I think this is never a good idea just for the common person on the street is watch the goalpost continually move. It always does. You know, think of the abortion situation with “the health of the mother.” When that becomes part of the law, then it’s like, well, what does that mean? The mental health, well what does it mean? Everything changes. When it comes to now, well we’re going to let you kill yourself, we’ll inject you with something to kill yourself if you’re suffering. Well what kind of suffering? Well it could be mental suffering. Well, every other day I have enough mental suffering to qualify for killing myself. (audience laughing) So I just don’t think we want to go there. Here’s what God calls us to do, and I think this is a general grace of God. We need to have the courage to live life, right? And when we’re struck with pain or with suffering, especially us as Christians, what we need is grace, we need strength, we need to be able to say we’re going to carry on. It doesn’t mean like the Proverbs say we don’t give wine to him who’s perishing. If you need medicinal help, if you need to temper the pain, great. It starts with Tylenol and it goes to Laudanum or whatever you have and give it to me. I mean if I get hit in the head and I’m suffering give me whatever I need. I’m all about palliative care. I’m not about you killing someone, because life is something that is granted by God, and God gets to decide when to take it. So, natural death and conception. Those are the bookends, and I think we need to stick with those in any discussion about life. And yeah, assisted suicide, euthanasia, think of that word, it’s a compound word, “Eu”, it comes from, it is the Greek particle for “good” followed by “Thanatos” which means “death,” so “good death” it’s all over the Bible. Saul, on Mount Gilboa doesn’t want to be abused by the Philistines so he kills himself, he has his armor-bearer kill him. It’s a good death. He thinks it’s better for me to die here so why don’t you kill me. So it’s not unusual, it’s happened a lot, a lot of people kill themselves but it’s not a good death, it’s a bad choice. What you better be praying for is courage and strength and God’s grace. Do you need comfort? Yes. Do we have medical, medicinal help now? Sure. I want you to try to mitigate my pain, if possible. But putting me out, I’m not a dog. You’re not going to put me down. And I don’t want to put anybody down as though they’re an animal. That’s not how we deal with human beings. Because there’s something different. And you can see there are so many things we could talk about as it relates to this question. The devolution of human beings, treating them like animals and we’re not. And this is a lot of the outgrowth of a naturalistic view of humanity. So yes, I don’t think there’s any kind of good policy on euthanasia. If we’re talking about do-not-resuscitate orders and all that. Okay, that’s a different discussion. I’m all about no heroic efforts given certain situations and I have a whole set of criteria which I think most Christians would agree with when it comes to when do I do that. Is death imminent, right? Do I have at least a consensus of professional opinion that this isn’t, you know, there’s no medical hope here. Okay great. I have written in my, you know, my trust here’s what I want, but it’s not what is happening north of the border or in Europe or what’s coming to America as what the professionals are going to say, here’s what will let you kill your family members. I know it’s going to take courage and I know it’s going to take patience and endurance and perseverance. But that’s what we need. That’s what our forefathers have been doing, right? That’s what your great-grandparents have been doing with their suffering and death, and we need to do the same. We need to “man up” in the face of our suffering and death.

Question: I was wondering with the news of the population reducing and so forth, and I have friends who choose not to have babies. As Christians are we in sin when we’re not choosing to procreate?

Pastor Mike: It depends on the reason. That’s like saying, I am a male, and I know that females are made to be compatible with males. And what if I don’t get married? Am I in sin? Well, it depends on why I’m not getting married, right? Jesus didn’t get married. Paul didn’t get married. A lot of good Christian men haven’t been married. So I could say there are reasons to not get married. Jesus told us the reason. If I’m going to be single for the sake of the kingdom then okay. Well the kingdom is a bigger priority and Paul makes that case in First Corinthians 7. Kids can be the same reason but that’s not why most people are choosing not to have kids. So I don’t have a problem if someone says I’ve got three kids or two kids or whatever and I’m not going to have any more and here’s why. Give me a good reason. But I just think if we’re following the culture which most people do, and think about it, most people do church for an hour a week or two hours a week, and that’s about all the Christian thinking they have. And then they try to blame it on, well, you know, sure it fits into my Christian thinking. Well, we need to think about Christianity 168 hours a week, and then we can say does this really fit into a Christian worldview? And I’m going to say, yeah, if you get married one of the things about marriage is children. That is what God has designed this for. And Jonathan Last wrote a book a long time ago, I don’t think he’s a Christian, maybe he’s Catholic, I don’t know, but “What to Expect When No One’s Expecting” and I’ve quoted it many times. I quoted before it was popular to talk about demographics and I got in a lot of trouble for quoting it. But it woke me up to the fact that we have a problem in the West because we’re not populating. And because of that I think a lot of people are saying it now and it’s a problem and it’s a problem that I think reflects selfishness. Selfishness is a dead end. So, yes, I think couples should get married and should have children, that’s the norm. And there ought to be a very high standard to say I’m not going to have children. And I think I can establish that in Scripture because that is the norm in Scripture. And since the pill and all the stuff that’s happened to say well it would be more convenient here if I didn’t have kids, convenience is not a reason to not have children, right? There’s got to be a bigger reason and a lot of people are thinking about me and now and not the future. We need to think about the future, and we need to think about raising up the next generation. Because we’re going to be gone really fast. We’re not living in Adam’s and Eve’s day, or anything prior to the flood, where we had 1,000 years to kind of figure out the next generations. We don’t even have 100 years to figure out the next generation, so we better get at it. And that’s why I love that our nurseries are full, and they need to be even more full. And at some point, maybe you can’t afford to have more kids, I get that. But it’s funny the things we can afford when we say we can’t afford another child. But whatever, there are reasons to not have kids, obviously good reasons. But a lot of the reasons I hear aren’t that good. I don’t know, does that help? Yeah? You’re just trying to get me to say stuff that you want to say to people? (audience laughing) I’m getting used to this morning.

Question: Hi, Pastor Mike. My sister is a pastor but I believe the Bible indicates this role isn’t biblically supported. She’s aware of my perspective, yet she invites me to attend her sermons. I’m very close to her and I love her dearly, but what should I do?

Pastor Mike: You shouldn’t go. She’s not a pastor. She’s not. She doesn’t qualify as a pastor. She’s not qualified as a pastor. She is not ontologically qualified to be a pastor. And if she teaches and exercises authority on a platform with the Bible in a mixed congregation, she’s violating God’s Word and you shouldn’t participate. Just like you shouldn’t go to a homosexual wedding, you shouldn’t go there because it’s not biblical, and you shouldn’t go to a mixed congregation where a woman is standing up and proclaiming God’s Word authoritatively. You shouldn’t. I don’t care if it’s your mother, you shouldn’t do it. That’s what I’m telling you because it’s not biblical. Yeah, that’s a short answer, and I hope you enjoyed your time at Compass Bible Church. (audience laughing) Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. How do I say that nicely? Yeah, that’s the answer. That’s the answer. Okay. Who else can I bless this morning with an answer? (audience laughing) Where’s the microphone? Hey, we can’t make up the rules, right? We just can’t make them up. God is so clear in the Scripture. He roots it in creation order. He roots it in creation order. And because of that, that’s just the way it is. As I’ve often said, if God allowed women to be pastors there would be no male pastors. I guarantee it. We would not “man up” to do it. No one would want to do it. I don’t want to do it, but I know plenty of women who want to do it, so it’s just OK. You do it. I’m hardly joking with that statement.

Question: Over the past couple of years, I’ve learned the truth that there are many things in this life that are beyond one’s control. But recently, I’ve come to realize that some people have their own problems and somehow they come to me about it. Now, I have compassion and empathy towards them, but sometimes I get frustrated about it, mostly because I don’t know why they’re telling me this and I really don’t have the solution for that. So what would be the biblical right way to handle a situation like this?

Pastor Mike: Great question. Yeah. We feel that all the time, don’t we? I mean, you can imagine my life, right? Every day. And it’s not like they call me because something good happened to them this week, right? And all I can do is try to think biblically and think what can I say right now? What can I say? I mean there’s no verse in the Bible about what to say when someone’s dog dies and there are things about divorce or whatever. But I can’t, I can’t… What can I say? So I just think it’s a lot of just being there to hear people’s pain and saying, I’d love to just be there for you, pray with you, walk you through whatever you’re dealing with. I’d love to think with you about your problem. Tell me what you think you should do about this problem. Yeah. I mean, if there is a clear biblical answer, and maybe you don’t know it, but you think there is, then you need to try and find someone who might be able to have that. And find one of your leaders here at the church and say, hey, I have a friend who has got this, I’d like to help them, but I don’t know where to go. But for a lot of things there’s not a clear answer. This is what wisdom is, trying to apply God’s Word in whatever the situation and we try to find something. Some things are clear and I can answer things in a sentence, other things, you know, we’re just looking for principles to try and apply. But what people need are friends, that’s why they tell you these things. They want someone to share the burden. And I do think that’s a good line from Galatians Chapter 6, you “bear one another’s burdens, and that so fulfill the law of Christ.” What’s the law Christ? To love one another. And what is love? That’s to not say, oh, you keep your problems to yourself. I had a guy I don’t know very well dump on me yesterday on a text. This guy lives in another state and he is going through a bad thing that just hit him yesterday and he texts me. And he says, I don’t want to tell a bunch of people, but I think I can trust you with this, and his life is falling apart. So I’m praying for him. I had to write down a reminder to pray for him because I don’t think about him all the time. And all I can do is check in with him every day. How are you doing? What’s going on? How are you feeling? How can I pray for you today? So just being there for people is trying to care for someone, bear someone’s burden and be there for them. And if you think there probably is something in the Bible about this then talk to people who you know at church and see If you can’t go further.

Question: All right, so Sarah lived a long time in the Bible. So why are we having 40 years where we’re just like, or 60 years instead of where she was living a long time instead?

Pastor Mike: If you track all of the recorded dates for when people died in the book of Genesis, and just go through the Pentateuch, you will find that they’re living into the 900s right out of the gate. And then there’s the flood in Genesis Chapter 6, right? Genesis Chapter 6 through 9. And all of a sudden now, the longevity starts to plummet. Now we don’t have the dates of every character. It doesn’t tell us what year they died. But those that we have, if you scatter plot it and you watch the trend line, it goes precipitously down. You get some like 400, 300, 250. And what’s funny is along the way, occasionally for an important figure, it’ll say he died at a good old age. And by the time we get to David, when that’s 1,000 years after Abraham, David dies at 90. And it says he died at a good old age. Well, that ain’t a good old age if you’re Abraham, right? Or Noah. So what you need to realize is that leads me to believe that there was something radical about the change of the earth and the inhabitability of the earth, which I think matches the geologic evidence that we have about the earth and the habitability of the earth prior to the flood and post-flood. And as I took geology classes at the University of Arizona, total secular classes, something happened on our planet that changed everything about the planet, which I think made our dinosaurs go extinct, that created our ice caps and what they call, you know, the ice ages. Something major happened, which, I’m thinking Genesis Chapter 6 through 9 happened, and all cultural anthropologists talk about their flood stories in every culture. I believe the Bible is true. This is a flood that took place all over the planet. It changed everything about the way the sun beats its radiation down on us. And I think people started to cut their lives down, kind of like what it says in Genesis Chapter 6, that the days of man are going to be cut short. “His days shall be 120 years.” And that’s if they make it on Good Morning America and live that long. So I’m going to blame it on the flood. And part of that is, and I often say this about natural evil, moral evil we can explain at least by the fact that people are given volition and they can do a lot of bad things. But why is it that we have natural evil? Why do we have cancer? Why do we have birth defects, all the rest? God is not allowing people with a moral evil, a bent to evil, to have material that’s perfect. That’s why the curse takes place in Genesis Chapter 3. But when he says in Genesis Chapter 6, “that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually,” and it grieved the heart of God. That concern, I’m thinking, has to be with the fact that they’re living almost 1,000 years. And you think, OK, they have a lot of time to figure out how to sin. I’m getting to be the age now where I just want to sit around. I don’t want to do anything anymore. That’s hard to believe, maybe, for some of you. But if you’re as old as I am, I want to sit a lot more. I’d like to lie down right now, actually. (audience laughing) My point is this: if I were healthy and as vibrant as Adam was at 600, I’d have a lot of time with an evil heart to devise a lot of evil. And so when God cuts everything down at the flood and he knows what he’s going to do here, changing the environment, he makes the planet earth a lot less habitable. And so man’s life was cut short. And I think that was for the good of humanity. And that’s why we have some stories in Genesis like Abraham, where he, you know, and Moses, where they’re living in 210, 120, 140, and it goes down and then it settles in. And then it’s up and down based on the health of a culture or the plagues or whatever. It depends on the hardship of a particular culture. I mean, some were thriving, like in, you know, in the Greco-Roman times or even in Egyptian times, but it depends on where you’re studying it.

Question: I have a question about envy, and I was wondering, so when we’re in like group settings or online or places where we don’t personally know all the people, how responsible are we to filter what we’re saying so we don’t accidentally tempt someone else to envy? But then if we take that too far, we could just like not say anything, just in case there’s like someone who might hear something.

Pastor Mike: I don’t think you’re that responsible at all. Yeah. I don’t think you should think much about that. Okay and that was an overstatement. Let’s think about this and okay I’m going to be me and say things I shouldn’t say. Let’s think about ladies. You go to coffee with a bunch of ladies. Let’s just say you’re a very attractive woman and you know you are. Okay, how responsible are you as to how you dress, right? Not because you’re going to lure some man, you’re going with all the gals, right? How responsible are you to dress in a particular way so they don’t envy just how hot you are? Well, the first answer is kind of the same. It’s like you’re not that responsible, really. You’re a beautiful woman and that’s just the way it is. But I guess there are limits to that, right? Sure. I mean, you are not going to say, well, then you should see my abs. So I guess I’m going to dress so everyone can see my abs here and they can envy those too, right? No, I mean there are limits to this. Do you see what I’m saying? So let’s put that into all the other things. Maybe you have your PhD when you were nine, and you don’t need to tell everybody that. So yeah. But maybe your PhD information about whatever the topic is, there’s no need for you not to say what you need to say because it can be helpful. I do think your disposition should not be self-aggrandizing ever. It should be to be helpful, but I don’t ever want to stop being helpful, thinking, oh, you might be envious that I know something, right? And a woman shouldn’t be afraid to go sit with other women at a coffee shop and dress up or look in the mirror and say I look good today, right? It’s like C.S. Lewis said this whole thing about humility is not for a beautiful woman to think she’s not a beautiful woman or a smart man to not think he’s a smart man. That’s not what God’s intention is with humility. There’s something about a self-aggrandizement though of saying I’m all that and therefore I should be or should get. I am what I am by the grace of God, and so is everyone else. So we give credit where credit is due and none of the credit ultimately goes to us. Brains, beauty and brawn are all dished out by God. We can be stewards of all that. So in one sense envy is the sin of the person who decides to envy you. But all of us got up this morning we looked in the mirror to make sure we were presentable and women by nature are beautiful and they should be beautiful. But you should also be modest because particularly for men you I don’t want to be alluring to men. So, there’s a responsibility. It’s a different question if you say how responsible should I be in how I appear to men and their penchant for lust. Well there’s a little greater responsibility there than there would be for women to envy you. But envy is such an insidious thing I think there’s less responsibility for you to go and say well I better be careful for what I say because I don’t want anybody to envy me. It has limits but I still have the same kind of general disposition of saying not much. Not much. Go be yourself. As long as you’re not self-aggrandizing, self-promoting, look at me, I’m selfish, you should acknowledge my greatness. And if that comes through in any way, then I think you’re in the wrong. But don’t act like you’re not smart, if you happen to be, or pretty, if you are, or talented, or accomplished, right? And I’ve had people accuse me of a lot of things and I think that’s not at all what I did, or what I think or what I tried to say. But, whatever. Here’s what Paul said, don’t “think of yourself more highly than you ought to think, but to think with sober judgment.” So I think that’s what C.S. Lewis was getting at when he said, a beautiful woman shouldn’t think she’s ugly and a smart man shouldn’t think he’s stupid and an accomplished man, the CEO of a great company shouldn’t think that he’s the janitor. Just stop, stop. We should think so to have a sound judgment. So I just think you shouldn’t be overly responsible for someone else’s sin. Now, modesty and lust there’s something to that. That’s where Paul says when we go to church it’s not a fashion show. You should be careful about your hemline or your cleavage and all that kind of stuff. We’re not there for you to put on dresses and try to look so beautiful. We’re there to focused on God. So beauty is fine and I think all the things we see in the Bible about women, sure that women are beautiful and that should be something that is seen but it’s not something that is self-aggrandizing and look at the glory of me today. But your question was about going to talk with women, how responsible should I be in muzzling myself because they could be envious? I just want to make sure there’s nothing about self-promotion. Does that help? Ah, that’s going to get me in trouble, that whole dialogue right there.

Question: Hi, Pastor Mike, thank you. This is really good to have a question and answer like this. I have a follow-up question on the Israel part. What I understood was in Mosaic law they had the land, but then God took it away because they didn’t do what they were supposed to do and he exiled them. In Ezra, we do see that Cyrus sent them back but the author’s intention doesn’t seem to be that actually got the land back. And in the New Testament, we see that Jesus got the land and not just the land of Israel, but the whole creation under him. So why do we still talk about Israel? Because everything is under Christ and it’s just not the small part of land which is important, but the whole thing. And as Christians are we not just supposed to love people? Not for the sake of the country but for the sake of what is right and what is on either side of whether it’s Gaza or Israel, whoever is doing the right thing, we should support them and we should love everyone.

Pastor Mike: It’s a legitimate way to look at theology and many people do. And that’s the way you put it is that Jesus then was given the deed to the whole earth. Matthew 28, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations.” And some people interpret that exactly as you placed it. What relevance is there then to Israel? And I’m going to say the relevance is as I went straight to it and I’d say a lot of careful pondering thinking in Romans Chapters 9, 10 and 11 in particular will make us think well maybe God’s not done with it yet, then I reference Revelation Chapter 20 because there’s some time, it’s mentioned six times a thousand year period that’s coming, and then I have to take all my knowledge of the Old Testament and ask, okay all the things that God promised In Jeremiah in particular, in Ezekiel in particular, did all of that happen? Did all of that happen when Jesus came? Or after? Is it happening now? This is very specific. It’s very specific about the land of Israel. It’s very specific about Judah. It’s very specific about the twelve tribes. I mean, the northern tribes, after 721 BC, were all but dispersed among the Assyrians. And then it was like, well what’s going to happen? Well, Jeremiah says the dry valley of dry bones, they’re going to come back together and they are going to have sinews and flesh and muscle and they’re going to come back together and God’s going take the stick of Ephraim and Judah “and make them one stick … in my hand.” Where did that happen? What you have to do to say what you said and many people do and I respect them because I have a lot of friends who believe exactly what you said, they will say well it happened spiritually and now we’re all kind of Ephraim and Judah. OK. And I think we’ll go have lunch together. No problem. And then I’m going to say, if you want to talk about Israel and Gaza, we should look at it the way we would look at it, and I’m just speaking as, I don’t believe that, but if I’m going to respect someone who believes it, well, you better look at that the way we’d look at the border of Mexico and the United States. We should all want justice. And to say we want to love everybody, if they came in from Tijuana and came and killed a bunch of Americans in San Diego we shall have the right just response to that. And I don’t think the media or anybody, UCI or UCLA or USC is thinking rightly about that. So, I’m all about that, even if I’m an a-millennialist, which you’re really saying, the theology of it, you’ve got the essence of it whether you call it that or not, I still want to think right about international borders. And I don’t think that’s happening today. So I’ll tip the hat to a legitimate theological perspective. I don’t agree with it because I think Scriptural data leads me to believe there is a national Israel that is yet to come. I don’t know that it’s under the current regime now of the Knesset and Netanyahu, maybe it’s not. Maybe they’ll obliterate it all and maybe a thousand years from now it’ll be the kind of return that Romans 11 is talking about. I’m not the kind to write a book about, like Hal Lindsey did or some of these guys who are writing books about this is it, this is it. I don’t know that this is it. How am I supposed to know if this is it? But I do believe there’s a reassembling in the land and all of Israel will be saved in the last day when Jesus comes. The book of Zechariah would be another good book to read, particularly the last three chapters. That’s going to happen in Israel, and I don’t think it has happened when Christ first came. I think it’s going to happen when Christ comes again. And I think that’s all going to happen in Israel with Israelis, with people from the twelve tribes of Israel, and a lot of proselytes, too, in the land. So I’m of that persuasion. That makes me a pre-millennialist, and others who are a-millennialists would say, in essence, you said it in a very, you know, layman’s term, but they would say what you just said. And I can live happily with an a-millennialists. But I wouldn’t hire one to teach in our church, but I’m happy to have them in our church. But love, that’s where I’m a little concerned about. I want to make sure that we don’t use that word to not think rightly. Even if we saw the border of Gaza and Israel the way we see the border of Mexico and the United States, we need to think rightly about that. And sometimes, even though my neighbor’s bumper sticker says war is not the answer, sometimes war is the answer. Romans 13 makes that clear. Sometimes that’s the only answer, just like the only answer sometimes for a cop is to have a gun on his hip. Sometimes the gun is the answer. And the Bible’s made that really clear. “They don’t bear the sword in vain.” And maybe a couple of sermons I preached on that about “Guns and Grenades” was one of them. Another one was God and government and wars and whatever, bombs, I don’t know. I have very creative titles, obviously, but you can look them all up on pastormike.com.

Question: Hi there, good morning Pastor Mike. How do you battle the sin of idleness and do you have verses that could help us with that?

Pastor Mike: Yeah, was it Kevin DeYoung who wrote that book, “Just Do Something”? Was that Kevin DeYoung who wrote that? I guess some people would need that prompt, right? Just do something. But if I were going to write a book, and Kevin’s smarter than me, but I would say this. If I was asked that question, which I just was, so let’s stop talking like that. I would want to deepen my love. I would want to say, do I love? Because in Scripture, love is always active, right? Love acts. And I’d think of a passage like First John Chapter 3 verses 16 and 17 and 18, but 16 and 17 in particular, right? This is how we know what love is, that Christ “laid down his life for us,” so if we love we’re “going to lay down our lives for the brothers.” And I’m thinking that doesn’t mean just lying on the couch, right? I’m going to lay down my life. So, if I “see my brother in need, yet close my heart … how does the love of God abide in me?” Right? So I’m not supposed to love in words, right? I’m supposed to live in deeds. So I want to love enough to have that be organic. Now, I can’t remember all that Kevin wrote in the book, and I’m sure it’s great, because he’s very smart and a very devout Christian, insightful. And I do think sometimes we need to tell ourselves, just get up and do something. You have to do something! But I’d want that something to be motivated by real concern. Love is having a real deep concern for the welfare of other people. And in my mind, maybe you don’t know enough people, right? If you know enough people there are needs that need to be met. How can I help? I mean, the longer I’ve done this, I guess that’s ends up being my mantra. Like, how can I help? Right? It’s the line on my radio show. It’s the thing that I think is like, how can I be helpful here? And when I think about the things that I’ve done that have kept me busy, it all started with could this be helpful? And so that will keep you busy if it’s motivated by I want to love, I want to help, I want this to help someone. So I’d probably go there and try to say I want to develop love for people. So how do I develop love? I would pray to God every morning, God help me love more. Who can I love today? How can I develop a greater love? Well, I would learn about God’s love for me and then I would want to reflect that because that’s exactly where First John Chapter 3 goes. Does that help at all? That would keep me from being idle, I would think.

Question: Good morning. We just spent two weeks back East with my devout Catholic family, including my father, who is a deacon in the Catholic Church. And it reminded me, I think last summer, I went to church with them and all of a sudden noticed, oh, that’s not one of our books when they were going through one of the readings. And I forget, as I dove into this way before we got married, but I’m forgetting now why those seven books of the Septuagint were separated. What made them different? Were they not part of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Were they not found at the same time? Were they made up? I’m just curious why they weren’t in there.

Pastor Mike: Okay, let’s just clarify some terms. We’re talking about, not the Septuagint, that’s the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament. We were talking about the Apocrypha, and the Apocrypha has a number of books, depending on how you count them, 12 to 14, and some people think, particularly if they have a Catholic background, they think, well these were taken out by those Protestants. That is not true. They were added by the Catholics. And they were added by the Catholics at a council called the Council of Trent about 400 years after the Protestant Reformation had started. And the reason they were added, and they may debate this, but you can read the Council of Trent, it’s very clear, they were not happy that the Protestants got all ticked off, to use a California term, at the fact that they attacked the authority of the church for the selling of indulgences to build their cathedrals by trying to say if you give money to the church to build the cathedrals, we will let your uncle or your parent out of purgatory. Well that’s all predicated on the fact that there is a purgatory and that you can do something good, a good deed or a prayer or something, and we can spring your dead relative out of a place of suffering. Now everyone, you can see where this is a great crowbar. I can get congregants who are living, I mean, think about it. To have a church, there’s no tax to come to church. This is not a movie theater. No one paid to get here this morning. We can’t buy an E-Z Up Canopy Tent, I can’t buy a microphone, we can’t have a keyboard, we can’t have a speaker unless there’s money. So how do we get money to do all this? Well, people have to give. Well, it’d be great if I said, let’s just think about your grandma for a minute. She’s suffering right now. If you gave $700 or more, I could get her out of that place of suffering! I could at least cut off five years. If you want to give $7,000 I could get her out next month. Now if I could do that I would probably raise a lot of money. We’d have a better tent out here in the parking lot while the auditorium is being renovated. That’s really what happened in the fact that it sparked the Reformation. That was one of the main things that they were attacking. The Council of Trent, they said, well, there is a reference in the story of the Maccabees when Antiochus Epiphanes had ransacked the temple in 160 BC, 165 BC, and the Maccabean family came back in the revolt and took it back, Judas Maccabeus had seen slain soldiers on the field, and they were carrying amulets, little good luck charms and he prayed for them. This is what the story in First Maccabees, Second Maccabees says. And his concern was look at these guys. They were carrying good luck charms. We’re not supposed to do that. We’re supposed to trust in the Lord, not in good luck charms. That was enough for the Catholics to say we need to make this like legitimate Scripture. Everyone had been reading the Apocrypha for years. Why? Because it was intertestamental history, at least some of it. A lot of it was just a summation, a distillation of Old Testament wisdom literature. Some of it they called it additions to Esther, additions to Daniel. They were fanciful stories. Some of it, Tobit, was a fanciful story during the time of the return of the exiles. So, the real stories that were worth reading were the historical stories of what happened between 400 BC and the time of Christ. And so everyone read them. The Protestant Reformers read them, we had hundreds of years before the Council of Trent said this is Scripture. And they said, literally said, you are going to hell if you do not believe that these 12 to 14 books are on par with Scripture. So the Catholics made them Scripture. No one believed they were Scripture before that. As a matter of fact, even back in the day, everyone knew there was a 400-year gap of silence between the prophets. God had not spoken. They knew between Malachi, who was the last Old Testament prophet, both in the canon and in the historical chronology, and the time that the angels show up to talk to Zechariah. Everyone believed that. But these books were written, and all you have to do is read them and you’ll know they’re historically inaccurate. They tell some history, but they get some facts mixed up that don’t match what we know to be true, not only in extra-biblical history, but in Old Testament history. So we didn’t take them out. The Apocrypha is fine to read. You can read the Apocrypha. Gives you some history about the Maccabean Revolt, which is helpful if you want to learn what happened in those 400 silent years. But it’s not Scripture. And they make it Scripture because of one story in the book. And it helped them to counter the Protestants because they say, see, here’s a godly man praying for dead people. He’s praying for dead people to help them after they die, and those Protestants say you can’t help them after they die. See, the Catholics say they were right. That’s why it was added.

Question: Morning, Pastor Mike. My question is about demons in the Bible. Back in Mark, I guess in Mark and in Luke, Jesus came upon two men who had demons, and he exorcised them, put them in the pigs, and they went over the cliff. Well, my question is there are many places in the Bible where there are demons, and they’re excised. Where do they go?

Pastor Mike: Somewhere else. If you think about what’s going on here in a Jewish enclave you’re not supposed to be eating pork. At least not until the whole ceremonial laws were revoked, which was going to happen on the cross when the veil tore. It was kind of a win-win in the fact that the demons, they’re not going to die because the pigs drown, but they didn’t want to go to a place where they were going to be confined. And we saw that in other demons when they encountered Christ and they spoke through human vessels and said are you here to torture us before the time? It’s not supposed to happen till the end. And we’re roaming around on the earth just like Satan was in Job Chapter 1. We’re free to do our stuff. That’s what you said. Now you’re going to put us in jail early? Well, here, they beg to get out of this guy, and they don’t want to go to confinement. And then they say, just let us out. Let us go somewhere else. Don’t confine us there. And so he lets them go in the pigs, which ruins a whole flock of pigs for a bunch of Jews who should have been kosher anyway. It’s kind of a comical thing that Christ does. Obviously not funny to this crowd (audience hardly laughs) but I found it humorous. But where do the demons go from there? They don’t need oxygen, they’re spirits. So it was just something they did because they certainly come to kill, steal, and destroy, and they destroyed the economic viability of those pig farmers. So where did they go? Well, there are demons around right now, today, everywhere. I mean, just read Ephesians Chapter 2 verses 1 through 4. Read Ephesians Chapter 6, the whole armor of God. Why? Because I’m supposed to be praying, and I’m supposed to be trusting God. I’m supposed to have faith in God, I’m supposed to wield the sword of the Spirit. Why? Because I’m supposed to put the fiery darts of the enemy down. This is all stuff we deal with every single day, but we don’t think in terms of demonic. The demonic expressions in such supernatural ways, and I dealt with this last night. You may want to go listen to that. I gave a lot more detail. I think it was because of the unique nature of Christ appearing. But we’re dealing with all that through means that matter more than using a head spin around like in the exorcist movie. So I don’t know, where do they go? Is that what you mean? Yeah, so they’re going to do their thing, but they’re not spatial. The only thing about them taking over a person, that’s really a better way to say it. Demon-caused passivity, I often say that phrase as opposed to demon possession. They’re just utilizing a person to do something and that’s all they want in us anyway, at least even in a minor way. They’d like you to sin instead of doing what’s righteous and that you want to do righteous things. As I said last week or the week before, your core desire is to do righteous, but you give in to your flesh, they’re cheering that on. They’re tempters, right? They’re following their boss, and the boss is the ultimate tempter. Is there a follow-up question to that? Does that help at all?

Question: A little bit of a follow-up. So in the Daily Bible Reading this week, I think in Acts 19, we read that Paul came upon a man with an evil spirit. Is that the same?

Pastor Mike: Well, yeah, and I made this point last night. The apostles were the divine representatives with the same authority as Christ. That’s just built into the name, “Apostolos.” They were envoys of Christ. So the demonic work in the book of Acts, along with the Gospels, I think is unique to that season. And yeah, but it’s not that we’re not encountering Satan’s work in the church every week. It’s not that you don’t deal with it in your home every day. If you look through the New Testament, outside of Acts and the Gospels, and you say, what is Satan’s agenda, right? Look at it, right? It’s like even Cain and Abel, it says in the New Testament, the kind of envy and strife is the work of the enemy. That’s what he wants. So when you see envy in your family, when you see strife in your family, when you say marriage breakdown in your extended family, all of that is Satan’s, that’s what he wants to accomplish. When there’s arguing and factionalism in the Church, Paul says there are people in your congregation, Timothy, who are held captive by Satan to do his will. Now, Satan’s probably busy with other stuff, but I don’t know, maybe not, but that’s code for demons. His henchmen are in the Church causing division, right? There’s division in our church. I’m sure it has not hit a notable level, I hope, not that it hadn’t reached my desk yet, but whatever division and conflict is in the Church, Satan is fanning that into a flame. But we’re praying, and we’re working, and we are putting that down as best we can. As Paul was telling Timothy, to correct those who are opponents, and were quarreling, and do the best you can with the agency of all the armor of God, which is one way to put it. Not all of them are given corresponding weapons, but the point is all the things we’re supposed to do to try and counter that. It doesn’t mean that we’re going to see the kinds of supernatural expressions of it that they saw in Acts and the Gospels. And I’m thinking if you’re waiting for that to think that you’re dealing with demons, we’re dealing with demons every day, right? They’re tempting, they’re fanning into flame all of our fleshly desires. So yeah, read Ephesians Chapter 6 afresh, and just look at what it says. We’re trying to extinguish the fiery darts of the enemy by just trusting God, using his Word, praying. That’s what we’re doing every day. Why are we doing it? Just to gain knowledge? Well we’re trying to fight a battle, a spiritual battle, then go back to Ephesians 2 verses 1 through 4. That’s what we’re trying to fight, right? Even in the lives of non-Christians. Does that help at all?

Question: Okay, so I apologize. This is your third question on this today. I’m going to get emotional because my husband’s Palestinian and his whole family’s Palestinian. They’re all very strong Christians. And can I sit? My legs are shaking. And it makes me so sad. His grandparents are from there. They have cousins there. They’ve been murdered. So many children have been killed. And as a holy country, I had my father-in-law, I asked him to send me because my husband’s upset. He had to walk away. Does a holy country give the right to kill thousands and take the homes of thousands just because Israel’s a holy country?

Pastor Mike: I never said that and if he walked away hearing that he didn’t hear what I said.

Question: My husband sent me a question because he doesn’t have time to ask him one.

Pastor Mike: Well, yeah, no one’s saying that. And I said, no one gets a pass. If you want to see it even as we heard, and I’m fine with respecting a-millennialism, I still want to treat it as though a bunch of Mexicans came into San Diego. I still want to deal with it as I would with international law anywhere. How do we deal with people coming to a music concert and killing people and imprisoning people? How do we deal with that? When you think of the extent of that, and you think about training people in schools to learn from kindergarten that Israelis are swine and they need to be exterminated and the whole point of Hamas is to exterminate Israel and remove them from that land. At some point you’re going to have to say I think a sovereign nation has the right at least to say we have to defend our borders and we have no idea what that’s like in America. And we sit here in a first-world country thinking, you know, that’s not good that they’re bombing the Gaza Strip. I just think we need to realize that the modern Israeli warfare has probably been the most surgical warfare that can possibly be done. And yes, people are dying on both sides. Any war you look at, we could go through the history of wars in the United States, overseas, anywhere you want. Most Americans don’t know what it’s like to have warfare on their soil, right? You can admit that here. And war is ugly, and war, and you should hear my sermons on war, not that I’ve been in war, I’ve not served in the service, all I can tell is what the Bible teaches about war. In a sinful world, there are going to be wars and rumors of wars. Wars mean there are going to be battles that are going to have to be fought to try to somehow establish justice. And it is not just for one nation, just because of someone’s background, to want to exterminate another nation without cause. And I would say that’s going on all over the Middle East. There has to be some just response when you’re killing off a bunch of people without cause. And that is the response that I know the world doesn’t like. But I just don’t think we’re looking at it very objectively, at least from the college campuses of the United States. So don’t get swept up into a lot of the media. And I realize people come from these countries. I mean, my next-door neighbor is…, I mean there are people in our church from Middle Eastern countries. We want what is just and right. I would love for there to be peace in the Middle East. I want that. But I don’t want any country, anywhere, saying because of the color of your skin, because of your genetics, we have the right to hate you and want to kill you. That should never happen. That’s wrong. And I want everyone to stop. But that’s not how the world works. I’d love to stand up and preach a sermon and say, everybody stop it. Stop it. How do we stop it? The only way to stop some things is to go up to Santa Ana. And we have to go to the court system and put people in handcuffs. Why do we have to do that? Because they might run away. Well, why don’t we just tell them not to run away? Because we have to enforce the law. International law is based on international morality. There has to be some sense of right and wrong. So this is complicated. I get it. But I just want to say, no one is giving Israel a pass to do anything unrighteous. The whole Old Testament is God’s narrative of punishing Israel for doing unrighteous things. That’s what we see. It was promised by Moses in 1445 BC when he wrote by God’s guidance the book of Deuteronomy and he says, if you sin, I’m going to take you out of the land and you will be punished. And that’s exactly what happens in 586 BC. They get expelled from the land. And for 70 years, they can’t go back and they’re punished. God is all about punishing evil and he’s going to do it. And when a nation decides to do something evil, they will be punished. America’s going to be punished. I mean, we’re on our way to being punished, trust me. It’s happening all over the world, the ebb and flow of war and peace, it continues on. Jesus promised it, there will be “wars and rumors of wars,” just like there’ll be pestilence. And he promised COVID, that’s what God promised. You’re going to have it until the end. Don’t be alarmed, this is what you’re going to have, earthquakes, rumors of wars, COVID. So we had COVIDs, we’ve had wars, so get ready for the earthquake, because that’s coming next. There’s going to be all of this going on until Christ comes back. So if there’s more to the question, and I’d love to address what the real concern is, I’d like it all to stop. I’m all for stopping it. I’m not giving anyone a pass for doing anything wrong, right? I’m a pastor. I have a seminary degree. That gives me no right to kill anyone. It gives me no right to go in and steal anything out of my neighbor’s house. No one should give me a pass on that. I should go to jail for doing that. That’s what I think about anything. I don’t care what your background is. You shouldn’t do anything wrong. That’s my belief, 100%. That’s what I’m saying about any country, I don’t care what the country is. So no one’s giving anyone a pass. If anyone heard that today, you didn’t hear it from me. I am saying God has a plan for Israel, and he is going to restore the nation. That’s what I believe. I think that’s what the Bible teaches. Mark my words. Watch it play out. But it doesn’t give them the right to do whatever they want. I know it’s an emotional thing, I’m sorry.

Question: This is a question a follow-up to the assisted suicide. I just wanted to know your thoughts on palliative care like when is it biblically okay? Is it biblical okay for somebody to opt for comfort care, end-of-life care or biblically okay for somebody who assists on that end-of-life care? Because it’s never comfortable or easy. If you just had any words of encouragement for somebody who assists with that.

Pastor Mike: For more detailed answers on what I think the Bible has to say about that, in my anthropology study, which is on the back of the worksheet, and I called it “Sin and Humanity” or something like that, there’s a section on palliative care. I mean, it’s not in depth, but it’s where at least I talk about the principles. And I think they’re, you know, I can’t just because I get cancer say, oh, immediately, I’m going to go into palliative care, right? I should seek to always be in favor of choosing life and I should see what’s available and I should seek to figure out how to remedy the problem. If my hand gets cut off in the garage in some stupid thing that I do with a rip saw or something, I don’t go, well, that’s it. I’m just going to bleed out here in the garbage. I should be pro-life. I should say, OK, I should seek to remedy this. And I think, so in the medical field that’s the beauty of being in the medical field. We want your servants to help with that process if we want to remedy anything that is going to endanger life. But at some point, you know, you get to the place where I don’t think there’s anything else we can do. And that’s the hard decision that a lot of people who sit around you, they don’t know what that’s about. That’s happening in hospitals every single day where professionals have to make a decision. They have to tell a family, I’m not sure we can do anything else. And as pastors and as nurses and doctors, we have to be a part of that discussion sitting with non-medical people and saying, okay, I think we’re at a place now where all that’s left is sending them home to hospice, palliative care, trying to make them comfortable. I don’t think there’s anything else we can do. That has, there’s a series of things that I think, and it’s all about wording it in a certain way, to say, here’s what I think the criteria for that is. But here’s what the non-Christian world, even when you talk to your doctors about this or it’s your mom or your wife or whatever. They assume that you’re probably scratching and clawing for life the way the non-Christians are. Now again it goes against the earlier question that a lot of people just want to die, but Christians have a different perspective on this. I am about being pro-life, I want to choose life, but I’m not clawing and scratching to stay alive. So there comes a line that I think for me is very reasonable when I’m going to say, OK, I’ve done all that I can reasonably do to maintain my life. And I may not even be conscious to figure this out, but I hope my wife and those around can say, OK, and all right, now let’s send him home and he’s going to naturally die. And I talk about this in my lecture on this. I do think that death is, there’s something natural, it seems contradictory, but in the process of dying. And you’ve watched people die, I’ve watched people die, a lot of people die. The idea of death is coming upon you, right? You’re plowing toward death. And you can only do so much to stop that. And so I would recommend that lecture to you. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a physician, but I’m looking at it from a biblical perspective to try and say, how do I address the moral and theological and ethical issues related to palliative care, hospice care, comfort care, and dying?

Pastor Mike: Okay, that was fun. The whole thing was so fun. (audience clapping) Let me pray for you real quick and I’ll let you go. God, thanks for this crowd, this team. Thanks so much for our church. I know just all over the map with so many important questions. Just govern us and guide us as we continue to seek answers from your Word as we sharpen one another. Just pray you give us just more and more of your thoughts on every topic.

In Jesus’ name. Amen.