Hey my friends, it's Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. And today is the day that we're done with the sin lists, or at least the specific of it. We're getting into the aftermath now. We've done a a useful Bible exercise here, and this is something to celebrate. We've looked at a theme, a clump of Bible that deals with the same kind of stuff. And now we're going to be in a position to look at patterns and have a big picture sense of this, maybe even a little bit divorced from the discomfort of it for a day or two here. And then we're going to round the corner into the fruit of the spirit stuff and the hope stuff and all the good things that come out of that because this list, these lists we're looking at, they are not the final word. The converse of that is the final word, and we're earning that right now. So I'm going to Jeff play some music and we'll pick up where we left off yesterday. All right, there's a couple of them in Revelation as well. I'm tempted to skip them, but let's just be thorough. Let's just finish this thing out, right? We got this far. We're still talking. We're not completely falling apart mentally here, hopefully, at this point. We're just we're doing the work like the announcers of the Rockies game. You look at the thing, that's what happened, that's what's on the list. There we go. We're all adults. We see what happened. That's where we're at. We're grinding through it. We're doing it. Let's finish strong. Revelation 21.8. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death. Now, here we're talking about a totally different epoch, a totally different era of the unfolding of history. A lot has happened here. And I know that there are many of you in the conversation, like, I don't like it's not that I don't like her and am uncomfortable with the fiery lake of burning sulfur language. Like I'm downright troubled by that. And you know what? Over the course of the podcast, we will get to the passages that will give us the opportunity to unpack that at greater length. The one note that I would offer to this sin list and the consequences that go with it, this final judgment of God is this is like the end of stuff that we're talking about here. This is the completion of history and theology. This is the end of sin and evil. And guess who commits sin and evil? It's is people. If you want justice for that and you want to believe that somehow it all gets sorted out, all of the worst, most awful things, most unjust things that have been done in this world, well, uh I mean it's fun to talk about that and be like, oh, I want that to h like God's justice when you actually see it, uh, it's kind of horrifying. And it makes perfect sense that you, me, all of us, when we actually get to the part where the judgment of God, the final judgment of God happens, um yeah, it would make sense that that would cause us to recoil and that it would raise questions. It's a terrifying proposition. I'm not gonna be flippant about it or dismiss your questions. If you're troubled by that, it's supposed to be troubling. If you're bothered, it's having the desired effect. Final list, maybe mercifully, right? I'm gonna start in Revelation twenty two, twelve, because I think the whole quote here from Jesus is important. Behold, I'm coming soon, my reward is with me, and I will give to everyone according to what he's done. I'm the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end. Blessed are those who wash their robes that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city. Outsiders are the dogs, those who practice magic arts, the sexually immoral, the murderers, the idolaters, and everyone who loves and practices falsehood. I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David and the bright morning star. And then after the quote it says, The Spirit and the bride say, Come, and let him who hears say, Come. Whoever is thirsty, let him come, and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life. And I mean, that's there's a little bit more. That's pretty much how, you know, the Bible rounds out. Okay. Well, uh, that was rough. That took a little bit of podcast to get all the way through those lists. That is probably the least fun I've had in the entire course of doing this with you. Yet now we've done it. I maybe I'm forgetting something. I'm not, I didn't write the Bible. I'm not perfect at this, but I brainstormed pretty hard. And those were the sin lists that came to mind. Maybe I forgot something, but you get the gist, right? We get the gist. Humanity is a mess. It was a mess in the old testament. It was a mess when the old testament wrapped up. We tried everything in the old testament to fix it. As you and I have discussed, every possible solution that could be proposed for how to make that whole thing better. Like more government. Oh, that was too much government. Let's try less government. Oh, that was too little government. Let's try no government, maybe. Oh no, that oh my goodness, that didn't work at all either. Let's try kill all the bad people in war. Oh no, now the people who did the killing are the bad people. What if we have a flood and we just wipe out all the people who do things on the sin list, but the people who are good and would never do something like that, we'll just have them not get caught up in the flood. But then the second they get off the boat, they go and start doing stupid stuff all over again. The disease of sin is carried in the heart of humankind. It's baked into the flesh. And that same ambiguity of that language as it translates to English that we talked about for like a whole week or even two weeks here, as we've worked through the concept of the flesh and the sinful nature and all that. That idea is bigger than just naughty, my friends. The flesh is more than just, hmm, I got something that I shouldn't want, but I want it anyway. Speaking of nobody's looking, and then bad things happen. No, I mean, there's that. It's the most smoking gun, goofish and gallant bad behavior kind of stuff. But the flesh, I it's bigger than that. It's our it's our humanity, it's our weakness, it's the fact that we have physical needs that an infinite being would not have, like food and sustenance. It's the fact that we feel pleasure and pain. It's the fact that we forget crap. Then we sometimes I'm not even mean to do the right thing, but part of the flesh is forgetfulness, is not seeing the whole picture, it's ignorance. There are just so many levels articulated throughout the Bible of what flows both from the greedy, sinful, overtly resistant to God, evil aspects of the flesh and the heart of man, but also the stuff that flows just simply out of our weakness, our frailty, our brevity, the fact that we don't even live long enough to learn all the stuff that we would need to learn to even start to scrape getting by on our own, or even knowing what we're supposed to do or how to get everything right in every situation. About the time you start to get wise from experience, your mind sometimes starts to fail. No, I'm sitting here, I got the last page of the Bible open right now. And what I see from beginning to end is a story of a humanity who, yeah, sometimes is just straightforward, hostily, overtly evil toward God and rebellious, but also a humanity who just can't help itself. And we got problems. And the more exciting story that I see from beginning to end, all the way to this page 1979 that I'm looking at here at the end of the Bible, at the end of the book of Revelation, the more positive thing that I see is the whole thing, this whole document is a giant story of God bending over backwards to fix it, to offer real atonement, not fake atonement. Like you said, you're sorry, and you issued a statement. You know, we're gonna try to forgive and forget, or you know what? General political amnesty has been declared. You're all legally absolved of any legal guilt. It ain't like that at all. We're talking about real atonement with teeth. Like justice still happened. The price was paid, accounts are squared, but it happened at God's expense. And who gets caught up in this cosmic, timeless, eternal, all of history story of redemption? Yeah, you and me, anybody who's in Christ. And all of the ick and yuck of those sin lists that we look at, that's dealt with. It's paid for. Not by forsaking justice and just letting it go, tough luck. But by retargeting where the justice is is paid out and where it's dealt with. You know, throughout those sin lists, I'm I'm looking at a list here of kind of the crossover points and how much things came up. And I want to break that down. That's gonna get its own day, I guess. And then we're gonna be done with sinless. I mean, the tomorrow is gonna be easy, by the way. I'd like to think we rounded out in a happy place here today, because the Bible is good news. The message of Christ is good news. The gospel is literally good news. The bad news, the sin lists. The bad news is our situation. Well documented throughout the Bible, well documented throughout history, well documented throughout our lives. The good news and the reason this podcast exists, and the reason you've ever heard of the Bible, and the reason you've ever heard of Jesus and Christianity, is because it's dealt with and it's resolved by Christ. And we got to talk about that today. And that's the ultimate thrust of the book of Galatians as well. I didn't linger on the sin list to be like, you know, find a backdoor way to get to you and be like, hey, we've never met, but I think there might be some dirty stuff. And I think you need to work on it. And I'm the knower of things, and I don't have anything bad, so I'm telling you, no, no, no, no, no. The bad stuff sets up the good stuff, the bad stuff is stuff we learn through the cruel teacher that is the law, but in learning through that tough master, wow, do we ever come to love our father and appreciate the position that we earn, or they didn't earn it. We were given at Christ's expense as sons and daughters and heirs and agents of the king, members of his household, welcome to participate and help build what he's doing. Welcome and invited to be a part of this, the very same redemptive story by which we find atonement and forgiveness and hope and life in spite of all of the crap on that list that we just grinded through for three days. So tomorrow we'll do a little more clinical analysis of just kind of how it all adds up. It seems silly to have done the work and not pay that off, but I think it'll be a little bit lighter and a little bit easier going down. And then we're gonna get on to the list of the good stuff, and you're gonna like the list of the good stuff. We got a few tastes of it the last few days. Grace and peace to all of you, my friends. We are all in the same boat. We are all the same, even if the specific details of the weird stuff about us are a little bit different. We're all in the same boat. And the message of this forgiveness and this grace is for all of us. The Bible says his word does not return void, so I hope good things come out of even looking at very difficult stuff in the Bible, very difficult passages. All right, on to the next thing. I'm Matt. This is the 10-minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do this again soon.