Ask a Pastor | Understanding the Bible

00:08
Rich Rudowske
Welcome to the essentially translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. I’m rich Friedowski. 

00:13
Emily Wilson
And I’m Emily Wilson. And we’re so glad that you’re joining us today. So have you gotten a chance to subscribe yet? If not, you should. Number one. And there’s also an opportunity for that to be happening on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or on audible to hear the latest and the greatest. But if you’re listening on lbt.org, we’d love to hear your feedback. So please send us an email at info@lbt.org and we’d love to hear your comments. 

00:42
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. Old school email still works. It still works, yeah. So in today’s episode, we did something a little different. As some of our listeners may know, Lutheran Bible translators international offices are on the campus of St. Paul Lutheran High School in Concordia, Missouri, which really gives us a great opportunity to connect across generations with the student body here. Some of the St. Paul students, like many high school students, have some big questions about the Bible and what it means to be a Christian. So my son Josh is a student at St. Paul. He went around and collected questions from his friends and classmates here. And I teamed up with Pastor Tom Lang, who teaches religion, including christian apologetics here at St. Paul, to answer some of their questions. 

01:23
Emily Wilson
And when I saw those questions, yeah, they didn’t give it too easy. They had some pretty tough questions, I think pretty impressive. 

01:30
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. 

01:30
Emily Wilson
But they’re really real. Their questions in your answers, I think, are for everyone, really. Whether you’re a new Christian, whether you’re born into a christian home, I think it really builds perspective for people of what they really want to know and that we can give a response in faith and assurance and confidence. 

01:51
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. Yeah. And it just kind of shows that there’s a lot of questions that those of us who are more deeply connected to the christian faith don’t think of. But these questions are coming from young folks who have a different outlook on life and even folks from other places around the world who don’t come with all the just preconceived ideas of Christianity. So it’s a great group of kids and great group of questions to work on a little bit about St. Paul. St. Paul Lutheran High School is the last of the Lutheran Church Missouri synod’s residential high schools serving to form young men and women for service to Christ here in Concordia, Missouri, since 1883. 

02:26
Emily Wilson
Wow. 

02:27
Rich Rudowske
In non Covid times, St. Paul usually has over 200 students. Right now, there’s 168, 52 of which are international students from 21 different countries. So the Lord has brought the mission field right here to Concordia with an opportunity to share the gospel to a global audience. 

02:44
Emily Wilson
So we really hope you enjoyed this first episode in what we hope to be a series of ask a pastor. 

02:55
Rich Rudowske
This is a special episode of the centrally translatable podcast. We’ve had a number of students here at St. Paul Lutheran High School in Concordia, Missouri, where LBT’s headquarters is located, submit some questions to answer from the pastors. And so the pastors today to answer those questions are myself and pastor Tom Lang, who teaches religion here at St. Paul Lutheran High School. So welcome to the podcast, Tom. 

03:20
Pastor Tom Lang
Thank you. Glad to be here. 

03:22
Rich Rudowske
And we are going to work through the questions here. We have the questions recorded by the students and we’ll hear those and then respond to them. What language did God say? Let there be light in? Okay, what language did God say? Let there be light in? Well, that is a good question. The Hebrew Bible, he says it in Hebrew, but nobody knows what the original language of the world was. If there was one universal language, which seems to be what is indicated at the story of the tower of Babel, right. That there was one universal language, there’s no evidence that it remained as a distinct language after the confusion of language or if there was no proto language anymore. 

04:15
Rich Rudowske
There are linguists who try to study that and they make all kinds of theory in the same way you talked about folks theorizing with evolution and other things, they theorize about proto languages. In Africa, where I worked as a missionary and a linguist, there’s a whole language family called Bantu languages. And if you get into the academic linguistics, there’s a language called Proto Bantu that they make all these things and make evidence for. But the fact of the matter is nobody has ever actually observed this language in existence because it probably didn’t exist. And anyways, that’s the long answer, saying nobody knows exactly what language God said, let there be light in. It’s recorded in the hebrew language. Language is obviously a very valuable part of the human experience, and God values language insofar as for the gospel. 

05:07
Rich Rudowske
And the reason the gospel has moved across cultures and taken root is that it’s been able to be translated and find a new home in a new culture through language, which is different than most religions, where most religions have an original language that you have to know to be able to access truth, whether it’s the ancient languages that the Vedas are written in hindu religion, or the arabic language for the Quran in the muslim religion, that is not the case, that there is original greek and hebrew texts, but even those aren’t necessarily the original languages of the original speakers. And the translation principle has been part of the christian experience. There’s a little more to the question. 

05:51
Pastor Tom Lang
Than what was asked, but when I think of it, I have to think of the magician’s nephew and Aslan singing the world into existence. There were no humans there at that time, so God didn’t have to speak in a way that anybody could understand. So maybe some really beautiful heavenly language that we can only imagine until we get to heaven and get to hear it with our own ears. 

06:22
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that’s true. Why do archaeologists talk about the world being millions of years old? And how do you dispute this? All right, so, yeah, this one, I would have been surprised if it had not been on here. Why archaeologists talk about the world being millions of years old, or how do you dispute those? In other words, science, in quotes says that the world is millions or even older than that, billions of years old. How does this square with biblical revelation? 

06:56
Pastor Tom Lang
All right. Yeah, it could be a long answer. 

07:00
Rich Rudowske
There’s books about that, right? 

07:03
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah. We do live in an age where a majority of what we, as you said, science in quotes, is committed to ancient ages of the world. And so how did that happen? It really goes back to assumptions, presuppositions. If you assume the world came about by purely natural processes, that there was no supernatural being involved, then in order for life to come in all of its variety and complexity that we see, then you’ve got to have a long time for that to happen. If one moment there’s only dust and the next moment there are people, that’s called a miracle. 

07:42
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

07:42
Pastor Tom Lang
But if four and a half billion years go by between the dust or the primordial soup or whatever they say that was there, and then four and a half billion years later, there are people and all the other plants and animals we have today, then you have a way of escaping what otherwise would be an obvious miracle. 

07:59
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

07:59
Pastor Tom Lang
So when Charles Darwin began to popularize theory of evolution back in the late 18 hundreds, I think it was published in 1859, his origin of species, it really went hand in hand with geologists reinterpreting features of the earth. So during the 18 hundreds, the biblical flood as an explanation for most of the rock layers and a lot of the big erosion events in the world, like the Grand Canyon, that had been the dominant theory. But then it started to fall out of favor among scholars, and the idea of the earth processes happening very gradually started to take hold. I think it’s important to know that they all had that same assumption, that either there wasn’t a God there at all or that he didn’t do anything. 

08:45
Pastor Tom Lang
Some of them were deists, so they believed that there might have been a God there in the first place, but now he’s just sitting back and watching. So he didn’t get involved in the world at all with miracles like the flood, for example. So they needed to find different explanations for the origin of everything that were purely natural, not supernatural. So, as I said, this really gained steam in the late 18 hundreds. And then fast forward about 150 years later. If you’re seeking a degree of any kind of science, any kind of scientific field, in a major university today, you’re taught to do your science apart from any kind of supernatural explanation. And so that just naturally includes that deep time, that millions or billions of years. 

09:30
Pastor Tom Lang
So even students who come in believing in God and trusting the Bible are pressured to put that aside while doing science. And in their minds, they either lose their faith in God or they trust in God’s word, but somehow find a way to fit millions of years and God’s word together. So that’s kind of the background of how we got where we are today. Then later, if you’re doing some research work or you want to get published in a scientific journal, you can’t write a paper that promotes young earth views and get published. So there’s this system in place in the scientific community that unfortunately excludes certain theories, because in most people’s minds, the age of the earth has been settled, but it really hasn’t. So that’s a very long answer to the first part of the question. 

10:18
Pastor Tom Lang
Why does the scientific community talk about millions of years? Really, the short answer would be assumptions on top of assumptions. Then the second part of the question, how do you dispute those? Well, it depends. Are you trying to dispute it in your own mind so that you feel confident about what you believe and you can trust the Bible, or are you trying to convince somebody else? So in your own mind, just know that evolution, which is kind of the foundation of all of this deep time that we’re talking about, has never been observed, right? Life has never come from non life. In fact, there’s a law called biogenesis that says it can’t. And yet somehow evolution still says it can. 

11:05
Pastor Tom Lang
People who work in the area of trying to figure out how life could have come from non life, the more they learn, the more impossible they realize it is. Right. And every example of observable evolution that are talked about in science books are just adaptation. So we’ve got birds with different beak sizes, but they’re still the same kind of birds. We’ve got bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics, but they’re still bacteria. Sure, fruit flies that have four wings instead of two, but they’re still fruit flies and they can’t even fly very well because the extra set of wings is useless. So we don’t need millions of years for evolution to happen because it didn’t happen. 

11:45
Rich Rudowske
Sure. Yeah. I mean, I used to be 80 pounds heavier too, but now I can run and I’m fit, so we can adapt, but. Yeah, right. 

11:53
Pastor Tom Lang
You’re still rich. 

11:54
Rich Rudowske
I am still the same person. That’s right. I think that kind of taking a step back from this question just to talk about for a second the role of reason in western culture is really what is also at play here. Because somewhere along the line, as people discovered that there were observable things that you could observe and repeat with basic things, scientific experiments, and you could see how elements go together or how if you measure things and you have things in the right diameter and put them in water, they’ll float. But if it’s too heavy, you start to observe these observable phenomenon. I think people started to push that to see how far can we observe a regular and observable mechanistic way that things work. 

12:45
Rich Rudowske
And at a certain point, people made the move to say that everything could be observable that way without by human reason. Everything eventually could be understood by human reason. And that is not how for most of human history, people have proceeded, christian or otherwise, that there’s always been a belief that there is something out there that we are subject to who knows more than we do. So for christians, we certainly acknowledge that God has given us reason and has richly blessed us through the use of reason in medical field, inventions and life being easier. You can visit a place like in the US or 200 years ago, like Abraham Lincoln’s village that he lived in Illinois. I mean, I would hated to have lived in that time in those cabins and going and hauling water and fire. 

13:42
Pastor Tom Lang
But that was all they knew. 

13:44
Rich Rudowske
That was all they knew. That’s true. So God has blessed us through human reason, but human reason subject to God’s word. And that’s the move that people moved away from, that I would say that we need to return to as christians that we recognize there’s a certain limit to human reason. And as you mentioned, nobody’s ever observed this evolution in the same way nobody’s ever observed creation either. The difference is that we have revelation from God who says, this is what happened, and evolutionists just have an idea that somebody made up. 

14:20
Pastor Tom Lang
Right. 

14:20
Rich Rudowske
And so we would say that we’ll take the revelation from God, and that’s how we fill in the gaps of what we don’t know. There’s a lot more that could be said about that. And there are some interesting theories about how time itself is measured and how that could have changed, and there’s maybe some things that are feasible there. But what we do know is that the scriptures talk about creation in a certain way, right? And because of our faith in God, that’s the key thing, is that faith has been discounted as not as valuable as something that we can observe. Whereas for most of history, faith is considered more valuable. Faith is belief in something because you believe in the one who told you. For most of history was seen as more valuable than what you could observe. 

15:09
Pastor Tom Lang
In my apologetics class, we talk about the age of the earth quite a bit. I share a number of studies, just a few little things that some of your listeners could share with a friend, maybe. So, for example, if they want to talk about carbon 14 dating, which used to date, is used to date living things that have after they’ve died. So once a living thing has died, that’s kind of when the clock starts ticking and the carbon 14 breaks down in relation to the regular carbon. It’s useful to know that every coal deposit, which is plant material, so organic material on the planet that’s ever been tested using carbon 14 dating has tested in the thousands of years, even coal deposits that are allegedly tens of millions of years old. Okay, some people will say, well, what about carbon 14 dating? 

16:07
Pastor Tom Lang
You don’t have to be afraid of that argument. What about carbon 14 dating? Let’s talk about that fellow teacher here on campus. He points to the existence of comets. What are comets? They’re balls of ice. They’ve got that big tail behind them. What’s that big tail? It used to be comet. Right? And so they’re constantly getting smaller. If the universe really was billions of years old, comets would be long gone, because the universe is not making new comets. So people have this ancient ages. They’ve got this mindset. There have to be ancient ages. So people have invented this birthplace for comets outside the solar system called the ort cloud. 

16:46
Rich Rudowske
Oh, really? 

16:47
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah. Named after Ort. Who named it? Or who came up with the idea. Okay, is there any evidence at all that this ort cloud exists? None whatsoever. But the reasoning is we have comets. Comets can’t last millions of years somewhere. They must come from somewhere. So let’s hypothesize this ort collide place. 

17:07
Rich Rudowske
All right. Fascinating. 

17:09
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah. 

17:14
Emily Wilson
How does the ice age fit into the Bible? 

17:17
Rich Rudowske
How does the ice age fit into the Bible? I think you touched on that a little, but do you want to tackle that a little bit more? 

17:23
Pastor Tom Lang
Oh, sure, yeah. This one doesn’t have to take a real long time. The general theory among creationists is that the ice age is a natural after effect of the flood. In Genesis, it says, the fountains of the great deep burst forth. So that gives us the idea that there’s some pretty major kind of violent activity going on in the earth during the time of the flood, including volcanic activity. So there would have been quite a bit of ash and other aerosols from volcanoes up in the atmosphere, and that would have filtered the sunlight for different models show thousands of years after the flood, before all of that finally dissipates and things get back to whatever normal would have been back then. So that would have led to a longtime cooling process right after the flood. 

18:15
Pastor Tom Lang
And kind of in support of that is an interesting little fact that, as you know, many Bible scholars think that job may be the oldest book in the Bible or one of the oldest books in the Bible, and so written probably shortly after the flood. And guess which Book of the Bible has the most references to snow and ice? The Book of Job. 

18:36
Rich Rudowske
Really? That’s fascinating. 

18:37
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah, kind of interesting. So support for that relationship between the flood and the ice age. 

18:46
Emily Wilson
Is there a way to tell how long it’s been since creation? 

18:51
Rich Rudowske
So is there a way to tell how long it has been since creation? I guess we kind of touched on that already. But anything more? 

19:00
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah, I just thought of good old Bishop Usher, you know, Archbishop Usher, who was in Ireland in the early 16 hundreds, and he used the Bible to calculate a year of creation. He came up with 4004 BC. And the way he did that is there are different places in the Bible where we find those lists of families and ages of people. And so if you look hard enough, as Usher did, which he had to do without any Bible search software, by the way, you can put all of those lists together and come up with a pretty good guess as to when creation might have happened. Unfortunately, I see some modern day cartoons that try to make Usher look like a fool. 

19:39
Pastor Tom Lang
They make his bishop’s hat look like a dunce cap, and they give him buck teeth and kind of a vacant expression in his eyes. But poor guy, he was quite a scholar. And his life’s work, you may be familiar with it, a huge book called the Annals of the world traces the history of many ancient groups and really important work because he made use of some resources that he had in those days that we don’t have available to us anymore. But what I really find interesting is that the mayan Indians, who are well known for their scientific achievements, who kept a solar calendar more accurate than any other devised until recent years, also estimated the year of creation. And I don’t know exactly how they did it. 

20:25
Pastor Tom Lang
Did they have their own ancient texts that they went by or maybe an oral history that they went by? I don’t know, but they just about agreed with Usher. Wow. If memory serves me right, I think their creation year is 39 96 within eight years. So not too bad. I find that kind of fascinating. So that’s one of those things where I go, one of these days I’m going to look into that and see how they came up with that number. But one of these days hasn’t come yet. 

20:51
Rich Rudowske
Yeah. And so just to play the other side, some, there are these genealogies in the Bible, and they have ages and these fathers and these sons. And for the most part, you can assume that there’s direct father to son. And some of them, though, it’s unclear, and that’s not unusual in the non western world, which you got to remember, the biblical texts are non western texts. I mean, western thought is newer than the biblical text, so it’s not unusual in the non western world for the genealogy to skip and just highlight the important folks, too. So there could be some degree of non specificity with the years where there’s maybe a little less reliable. 

21:35
Rich Rudowske
However, having said that, certainly in western tradition, that date that you mentioned has been the general thought for if those ages are indeed precise and can be counted that way. Even in the lutheran church Missouri synod, the first hymnal of the lutheran church Missouri synod, which had an instruction book component to it, went through exactly rehearsing the same stuff from Bishop Usher and actually made a point of specifying that was an important point of learning that the earth was approximately this old. Based on these facts, that’s been an important part of western Christianity for a good while. 

22:13
Pastor Tom Lang
So, rich, what do you think would be kind of a maximum creation date if the most amount of years could be added to those times when we don’t know if it’s talking about a father and son or a grandfather and son, or maybe even a great grandfather and son. Just your own personal opinion. 

22:35
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, and I don’t have good. If I was really pushed, I couldn’t say. Here’s why I think that exactly. But to me, based on what’s in texts and the uncertainty about how long did the world exist before the fall, how many generations might be missing in genealogies and other scientific evidence, such as what you’ve mentioned with carbon 14 dating, it can’t be any older than 10,000 years old max, I think. So the dates we’re talking about are more like 6000. But it just doesn’t seem like it’s more than like a five figure number of years. Just, there’s nothing really that seems to point to that. And I think you’d really have a lot of gaps even if you would say 10,000 years. There’s a lot of gaps that are unexplained, but it’s not impossible the way that western history works. 

23:22
Pastor Tom Lang
Okay, that’s what I’ve heard as well. I just wanted to know if you felt that. Usually in my apologetics classes, I say maximum 10,000 years old. According to the Bible chronologies. 

23:40
Emily Wilson
How much time do you think passed between Adam and Eve being made and the fall? 

23:46
Pastor Tom Lang
I really doubt there was very much time at all. Unfortunately for Adam and Eve, they didn’t get a hold to spend a whole lot of time in paradise. I don’t think it would have been nice for them to enjoy that for a little longer. And the reason I think this is because of God’s command to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth right before the fall into sin. That was in Genesis 128. So I think we can assume that they were probably pretty attracted to each other because they were the one couple in the world that was literally made for each other. And since there was no sin, I don’t think that they would have had any trouble getting pregnant. So to me that’s the clearest argument in favor of them spending, unfortunately for them, pretty short time in paradise. 

24:31
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I was going to look it up and I forgot Luther has something just kind of arbitrary, like a week or something like that. There’s no real proof. 

24:39
Pastor Tom Lang
It’s just like. Right. Anyways, not a very long time, right? 

24:42
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, not much. Not long. Why are angels in their biblical descriptions so crazy looking? Okay, I know the high school student that asked this one because he lives in my home and we talk about this. So there is a lot of descriptions of angels or messengers from God, like in Ezekiel or some of the other prophets that have these wheels and eyes upon eyes and stuff like that, not these angelic cherub type figures that are often in christian art. So I think that’s a fact. I mean, if you read your Bible, you see that often these messengers that appear, they elicit a substantial amount of fear in the people that they appear to. And sometimes that is because they are definitely unusual looking. And why are they described that way? Well, because that’s what they actually. 

25:39
Pastor Tom Lang
That’s what they look like. 

25:40
Rich Rudowske
I don’t know if I got much more to say about that. 

25:43
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah, I think it’s kind of awesome, actually. I am looking forward to seeing some of the heavenly creatures. I imagine them in my mind, so I’m looking forward to seeing how they really look. An all powerful God should have some pretty cool creatures as part of his heavenly host, heavenly army. 

26:07
Rich Rudowske
My favorite is in Ezekiel, this whole throne of God that’s lifted up and travels. There’s this imagery of it lifting up and traveling from the temple in Jerusalem to Babylon and settling in. One of the verses says that it had rims that were high and awesome. So growing up where I grew up, that has a certain picture. 

26:26
Pastor Tom Lang
Those are awesome rims. 

26:33
Rich Rudowske
Do you think that in the 400 years when no more prophets came around that the word of God in its understanding could have been tempered with. So in the question there then, the 400 years where no prophets came around, between Malachi or the last book of the Old Testament, I think chronologically, generally thought of as the last book chronologically too. And then the New Testament, where either Matthew or Mark is one of the first books written, as far as gospels go anyways. Was the word of God and its understanding tampered with? I don’t think so. And it’s not like there’s nothing literature wise that exists between those times. There is quite a bit more literature that does exist that’s actually kind of instructive for reading. 

27:19
Rich Rudowske
There’s a set of books that are in the canon of some christian churches even to this day, called the Apocrypha. Books that are kind of intertestamental books. When you read them, they are quite different than most of the books that we see in our Old Testament or our New Testament. For folks that are from our faith tradition, that have 66 canonical books in the Bible, but they have some history, if you’re familiar with the book of Esther in the Old Testament, they do kind of feel like Esther a little bit. And you can see how there is a development of what becomes the jewish religion by the time of Christ that doesn’t really exist at the time of Malachi or the end of the Old Testament. In the same way, there’s some developments that happen there. 

28:04
Rich Rudowske
And so reading those intertestamental books and other literature help you see kind of how you got there. And in general, it doesn’t seem that there was any tampering with those older books. In that process, there is a reinterpretation of them or a different understanding of what they mean and what they’re pointing to. Like this idea of a messiah, of the anointed one being a figure like the Maccabees who show up in this intertestamental period, a general that’s going to come and set Israel free from captors. I mean, that really picks up steam during this time frame based on history. 

28:41
Pastor Tom Lang
But that kind of a superhero type person is what they thought of their messiah. 

28:45
Rich Rudowske
Absolutely. But there’s not really a changing of the books for that. And that’s an important thing, I think, is that the Bible texts say what they say, but there’s always an element of interpretation and what a main thing that Jesus was doing in his ministry was returning the interpretation back to what was intended and in some cases clarifying, because it was never really rightly understood, too. So that’s how I’d answer that question. Why do you believe there were no more prophets after Jesus Christ’s death? There were no prophets or enlightened people, because Jesus was the one to whom all the prophets testified and pointed to. So there was no longer a need for prophets to point to Christ. 

29:32
Rich Rudowske
Everything, a lot of what’s prophesied in the Old Testament, while it may point to events that happened prior to Christ, and it may even point to events that will happen at the end of time. Also, many of them point to Christ. And so the word points to Christ. In John chapter five, jesus says, you study these scriptures diligently because you think in them that you find eternal life. But these are the scriptures that testify to me. Now, having said that, I think there’s still people who the role of the pastor, for example, to proclaim the gospel still exists, the role of the evangelist to go, and the role of the missionary to cross into new cultures or places where people don’t know Christ, those things still exist. And so in that way, there’s a prophetic role. 

30:17
Rich Rudowske
But when you think of prophets like in the Old Testament, or even John the Baptist in the New Testament, who Jesus said, this was the greatest of the prophets, but also the last one, because the prophets were to point to. 

30:31
Pastor Tom Lang
You know, I used to teach logical fallacies in one of my classes, and I looked at that and I thought, is this a loaded question? Because I don’t necessarily believe that there are no. So, for example, the book of acts talks about this guy named Agabus who prophesied a couple of different things. Philip had four daughters who prophesied. Paul had some things that really sound like prophecies that he said, the book of revelation to John is prophecy, I think we would say. So let’s keep in mind also, I think when we read the Old Testament, we hear about prophets all over the place, but that doesn’t mean that they were your next door neighbors on both sides back then. Either of the millions of people living in those days, who are the books written about? 

31:19
Pastor Tom Lang
They’re written about the prophets or the kings or other people, but there are plenty of people around like I consider I would be one of those people who were just ordinary people living their lives and doing their, you know, trusting in the Lord and following him. And I think also just the fact that the Holy Spirit has given gifts to people, it’s up to him who those gifts are given to, so we can’t manipulate him into giving us a certain gift. So I can say, hey, holy Spirit, I’d really like the gift of tongues or prophecy, but that’s his call, right, if I should have that gift or. 

32:00
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that’s a really good point, that the New Testament epistles and Paul’s writings, he talks about gifts of prophecy, so there is still something there, but they are to whom God gives them for his purpose. I think that’s another, and I think there have been times again in the history of even the christian church, where people have used or kind of looked for those signs and gifts and made them, signs that included or excluded people, rather than waiting to see how God had decided to use them. So we don’t ignore that somebody could have a prophetic gift. We would also expect that it will be in line with scripture and not used to lord it over. That’s theme that keeps coming back. Whenever somebody uses their power or position for their own benefit. It’s probably not of Christ. 

32:48
Pastor Tom Lang
Well, I remember when I was in the seminary, what were the two signs that a prophet was a true prophet? It was, first of all, that they weren’t agreed with prior revelation, and secondly, that their prophecy came true. And if you didn’t have those two things, then you weren’t a true prophet. So if anybody goes off and starts their own teaching, then that’s obviously not God speaking through them. That’s a false prophet. If we’ve got time for a funny story. 

33:17
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, go ahead. 

33:18
Pastor Tom Lang
There’s a woman in my church back indiana, and she really wanted to sing a solo on Christmas Eve, and she had a part of the choir voice. She didn’t have a solo voice, but she told me, I really feel like God is calling me to sing a solo, and I was pretty sure he wasn’t, but she could be pretty convincing. So she went ahead and sang the solo, and it unfortunately didn’t go real well. Sometimes people will, maybe emotionally they’ll wish they had a word from the Lord, but not really. I think nobody has to say no. Prophets in the Old Testament said, I think this is what the Lord says. They said, this is what the Lord says. So they were sure not just hoping that God said something to them. 

34:09
Rich Rudowske
Very true. And this is off the topic of the question, but even for any students or anybody listening who feels and sense that God’s calling me to do something, when it’s like ministry or the pastoral role in the lutheran church, we certainly acknowledge that God does have that inner call on people’s lives, but there’s a process where that’s externally verified as well, because collectively we think of God working through his church. And so if God has put that on my heart to do something, he’s going to also make others aware. 

34:49
Emily Wilson
Why is it that the God from the Old Testament is angry, but the New Testament, God is loving and caring, and then after Jesus’death, God appears to just disappear? 

35:03
Rich Rudowske
Take a stab at that one first. 

35:04
Pastor Tom Lang
I’ll tackle this one. So, yeah, this is a tough question, and it’s hard to answer in just a few minutes, but this is a question that has troubled me or I’ve wrestled with in the past, I guess I could say, sure. And in every case I’ve studied, when you look at why God does some of those things in the Old Testament that seem to be, as the question says, angry God, when God just abruptly says, you die for some reason, there’s actually a really long period of patience that comes before that. In every case that I know of, for example, the two big ones I think of were the flood, when all but eight people died in the conquest of Canaan, when God told the Israelites to completely destroy all the people who lived in the land. 

35:48
Pastor Tom Lang
Those are the ones that seem to trouble people. But I think God was as patient as he could possibly be, especially with the flood. And that’s one I’m going to kind of zero in on why do I think that? Because it says that there was one man in his family who found favor in God’s eyes. So of the whole population of the earth, which could have been well into the millions at this time, some people even think billions, depending on if there were diseases or wars or other things like that might have killed a lot of people. Of that huge population of the earth, there’s one man and his family that are left. So what if God waits one more generation until Noah dies? What would happen to his sons? Would they follow in his footsteps? 

36:31
Pastor Tom Lang
Or would they have gotten swallowed up in the unbelief of the rest of the world? So I think he waited until the last possible generation. And not only that, God told Noah a hundred years ahead of time that the flood was coming. So Noah was warning people. The book of Hebrews calls Noah a preacher of righteousness. And building this big boat was also a big visual aid to let people know that this guy Noah may be crazy, but at least he was serious about what he was talking about. And then another thing I think is really important is to keep in mind what’s at stake. It’s not just the eternal souls of the millions or possibly billions of people on earth at that time, it’s the eternal souls of the millions or billions who would follow, who would be born to them. 

37:16
Rich Rudowske
Right? 

37:17
Pastor Tom Lang
So how are they going to believe if there’s no one left to tell them? Well, some people say, well, God could come to them directly. He did that all the time in the Old Testament. Yes, but he came to people who knew him. When somebody is in unbelief, there’s kind of a certain blindness that comes over them. And God doesn’t force himself on people. If he did, then that wouldn’t be faith anymore, that wouldn’t be a love relationship with God. That would be God exercising his power over us. And he could do that because he’s stronger than us. He can make us do stuff which wouldn’t make God a loving God, it would make him kind of a big bully God, right? And then I think of what else is at stake. 

37:57
Pastor Tom Lang
What about the very promise God made to Adam and Eve, that one of their offspring would be victorious over the devil? That offspring, of course, was Jesus. How did Jesus come into the world? He was the child of a believing mother. If God didn’t send the flood and Noah’s sons became unbelievers, and everybody after them were unbelievers too, then there’s no Abraham, there’s no promises, there’s no children of Israel, no prophets, no believing Mary for Jesus to be born to another valid point to make about the flood. Those eight people who survived passed on stories. And there are over 200 cultures that have some sort of flood story as part of their history. So all of those cultures have this constant reminder God judged the world once. It could happen again. We need to obey God. 

38:46
Pastor Tom Lang
The last time people didn’t obey God, here’s what happened. We don’t want that to happen again. So that history of that huge judgment, I think really helped future generations stay in check, I would think, at least. 

38:57
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, there’s certainly for the flood narrative, there’s all kinds of evidence of cultures spread all over the face of the earth that have some kind of big flood. You just this last Sunday preached here in town and talked about the story of Moses, the serpents in the wilderness. That’s another one there too, right? I mean, it was an excellent point that we see the punishment, but what is God preserving people from just a lifetime of not knowing him and falling away and then generations after that? That’s a lot worse. We can’t see the big picture of what God can see. And I think that’s something I remember the first time I really learned and thought about this, that when we say God is good or God is love, we have some sense of good and some sense of love. 

39:50
Rich Rudowske
And the natural tendency is to just assume that God’s version of that is just a great big version of what I think is good or what I think is love. But as God says in Isaiah, my ways are not your ways, nor are your thoughts my thoughts. As far as the heavens are above the earth, so are my thoughts above your thoughts and my ways above your ways. And so that’s really a call to say that what looks like it’s not love or even looks like punishment, it is punishment, but somehow it’s also still good in a way that we can’t fully grasp. And so we’re not here to defend God or try to give him a way out. But at the same time, somehow both things are true, that God works in these ways, and yet God is. 

40:34
Pastor Tom Lang
Yeah, very true. I just noticed that there’s a last part of this question that we don’t really tackle yet. After Jesus’death, God just appears to disappear. I don’t know what you think about that, rich, but I think we as christians probably don’t give the Holy Spirit as much credit as we should. We live in an era where the Holy Spirit has been poured out on all people and the Old Testament believers did not have that. Now we have the Holy Spirit, we have Christ, who has promised to be in us. And so we can’t really compare what our reality as modern day believers, as New Testament believers who have between the two comings of Christ is like compared to what the reality was for those Old Testament believers who didn’t have the Holy Spirit poured out yet, who didn’t know God in the flesh. 

41:34
Pastor Tom Lang
So we have a very different kind of relationship with God, and I don’t think we can fully appreciate, yeah, we. 

41:39
Rich Rudowske
Can’T probably even begin to appreciate how the Holy Spirit’s poured out on us. As Paul says, we have the mind of Christ. I mean, the closest thing that I personally have experienced picturing is being in a whole different culture where people have really no christian worldview and are really still kind of stuck or working in animistic worldview. And to see the hopelessness and darkness that people sort of walk with there, it seems like maybe much more of the world and humanity had that experience prior to this time. But yes, you’re right, the Holy Spirit points to Christ and is God himself dwelling and given to us in baptism? What is the single greatest thing that proves that God’s war is real? I think this one is a great one to end on for a podcast from a Bible translation agency. 

42:35
Rich Rudowske
But what is the single greatest thing that proves God’s word is real? 

42:40
Pastor Tom Lang
All right, well, I think you should have the last word on this one because like you said, podcast from a Bible translation group, that is an important issue for you. But it is for every Christian, too. For me personally. As the book of Hebrews says, the word of God is living and active. So when I come to God’s word, I know God is speaking to me. Through it, I’m encountering a personal God and not just a book. And that’s really proof to me personally. And I’ve had just so many times in my life when God clearly, and I would say sometimes even miraculously, spoke to me through his word. 

43:23
Pastor Tom Lang
Got a long story I could share on another podcast sometime, but just times when I’ve gotten comfort or peace or guidance from his word in all kinds of ways, through studying it, of course, but also through prayer, through discussing it with friends, and even through a series of dreams. Once if someone asks me, how do you know God is real? I always tell them, if a God is there who loves you, he would want you to know it. Right? 

43:53
Rich Rudowske
Right. 

43:53
Pastor Tom Lang
So read his word, and you don’t have to read it cover to cover. But get some advice from a christian friend or a pastor and read his word and ask him to show himself to you. And sooner or later he will. Because we have a living God. He’s not just a God who died and is gone. And we read about him in a history book. He is present with us now, and I’ve experienced that in my own life. So that has proven it to me very clearly. 

44:24
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, I think that God’s word one hand is a collection, a book full of books. And there’s a lot of strange things in those books. And I think sometimes folks can really get wrapped around the axle, so to speak, about, like, how can I believe any of it if I can’t believe all of it, or if I can’t understand it all, even? And the reality is that nobody really being honest can say they understand all of the Bible, right. Yet it hangs together with a unity that just is impeccable for the fact that it’s written by many, multiple authors over multiple cultures and multiple languages, multiple centuries. And there’s a cohesiveness to it and a life to it that’s testified in it. But also the testimony of christians throughout history about the impact of God’s word and how it has worked in their lives. 

45:27
Rich Rudowske
Also, to me, adds to the thing that proves that God’s word is real. When people talk about how, when they spend time engaging in God’s word and how they are moved and how their lives are transformed through that process, that proves that it’s real, even just a simple thing. As we’re recording this podcast, we’re at one year from when, here in this office and at this school where I work, in an office on the same campus with the school that you teach at. But this campus shut down a year ago tomorrow. And I remember at that time just saying, this is like new territory. And I committed myself to some intentional reading of God’s word and the way that my spirit was lifted and the comfort and peace and insight that came to me during that time, it was really intensive time. 

46:19
Rich Rudowske
Just reaffirmed for me again that this word is alive, this book is alive, and God speaks through it. And if you have something where the creator of the world has said, I want to know you, and I’ve spoken through to you through this book, why wouldn’t you take a reader? Absolutely. You would pick that up. And there’s a funny comic in a satire site called the Babylon Bee that the headline is Christian, sitting literally 3ft away from the Bible, wishes God would speak to him, and that if you want God to speak to you, open your Bible and read it. And again, the testimony of so many christians, and even in my own life, that what the word says is true and there’s no other book I can pick up that moves me and shapes me the same way. 

47:08
Rich Rudowske
That’s what Luther said, too, about the word of God. In fact, he, in the introduction to the first edition of Luther’s works, basically know I don’t want this project to go forward, but I can see that it’s going to, whether I give it my approval or not. So. So be it. But let me just ask that the reader not on any account be hindered from reading God’s word. Don’t read my stuff. 

47:33
Pastor Tom Lang
Don’t read my stuff. 

47:34
Rich Rudowske
Read God’s word. And that to me is the single greatest thing that proves that is true, that when you read it, the testimony of christians throughout time, and my own personal experience as well, is that God. 

47:46
Pastor Tom Lang
Works through his word. Excellent. So good. Good word. 

47:51
Rich Rudowske
Yes. So thanks. We want to say thanks to the students at St. Paul’s Lutheran High School in Concordia, Missouri, for your questions. And I think we’ll have to do this again sometime. But, yeah, these are, you can tell that folks are wrestling with some ideas. And one hand, I don’t envy high school students being a kid at this age, in this era and this culture, wrestling with so many different ways of understanding the world. And so I appreciate these questions and we hope that our answers help some. We’d sure love to talk more. For anybody who listens and would like to reach out to either one of us, we’d sure love to talk with you more and do this again sometime. All right. We’ve been answering questions. Ask the pastor. From students at St. 

48:36
Rich Rudowske
Paul Lutheran High School, I’m pastor Richardowski with pastor Tom Lang, who teaches religion here at the high school. Thanks. It’s been a lot of fun. 

48:43
Pastor Tom Lang
You’re welcome. My pleasure. 

48:49
Emily Wilson
So I think those questions were really thoughtful, and I know we’ve chatted before about how pastors would love for their congregations to ask some of those kinds of questions. So how was it feeling? 

48:59
Rich Rudowske
Yeah, that is really true. I don’t know a pastor who wouldn’t love for a member of his congregation to say, you know, I heard this or I read this in the Bible and I don’t understand. Can you help me understand it? And the christian faith historically has been about wrestling with God’s word and asking tough questions and honestly trying to wrestle through from what God has revealed. These questions were just really honest and thoughtful questions. And so it was a great opportunity to dig into some areas that folks are wrestling with in today’s culture. And so it was a lot of fun. 

49:35
Emily Wilson
Well, we really want to say thank you to the students who submitted those questions and to Pastor Tom Lang for joining us on this special episode. You can find more about the ministry of St. Paul Lutheran High School by visiting their website. To support their work or learn about enrollment, visit splhs.org. 

49:55
Rich Rudowske
Thank you for listening to the centrally translatable podcast brought to you by Lutheran Bible translators. You can find past episodes of the podcast@lbt.org slash podcast or subscribe on audible, Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Follow lutheran Bible translators’social media channels on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. Or go to lbt.org to find out how you can get involved in the Bible translation movement and put God’s word in their hands. The essentially translatable podcast is produced and edited by Andrew Olson and distributed by Sarah Lyons. Executive producer is Emily Wilson. Podcast artwork was designed by Caleb Rotewald. Music written and performed by Rob Weit. I’m Rich Rudowski. So long for now.