Hey everybody at Matt. It's the 10 Minute Bible Hour Podcast. This is a special day because we have company. Today we are joined by this is Jeff from Colorado.
SPEAKER_02Big fan. Jeff is a pastor at Grace Church in Longmont, Colorado. And Jeff is the guy who does all the music on this program. He wrote all of that and then he did all the instrumentizing and everything. And he has a new album that he put out that is the music from this podcast. What? When did the album come out?
SPEAKER_00Uh February 29th. It was a Leap Day miracle.
SPEAKER_02Oh, it sure is. How about that? That'll make it more memorable for everybody. And I listened to it on Spotify, so I know it's there, but you put it other places too, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's on all the digital platforms Amazon, Apple Music, Bandcamp. Just search for Jeff Foot Sea of Tranquility.
SPEAKER_02Okay, Sea of Tranquility. Cool. I got other questions for you as well. Yeah. But we have a more pressing question on our hands, and this is why I wanted to have you come and hang around because you and I are buddies and we think about things like this together. There's a really good question in the subreddit. And every now and then I like to grab these and uh kick them around with somebody here. So here's the question. Dustin J. Coates asks, Why does God care about his own glory? He went on to write this stuff. Matt made a comment in episode 99 that the glory of God is the bottom line of just about everything in Christianity in the Bible and creation. And then he goes on, paraphrase here, to talk about an email forward that he saw about an arrogant person who said, like, if everybody kisses up to me, then I'll give them like gifts or share my wealth with them. And the point of the email was this person's an egotistical jerk. And to quote Justin, uh, can't be that great of a person if the rewards come as an expectation that his friends treat him in this way. And he goes on to say, the satire isn't smart or funny and probably didn't convince anyone of anything, but I guess it stuck with me enough that I still think about it a little bit from time to time. And Matt's comment brought it to mind again. Specifically, it got me wondering why God cares so much about his own glory. Imagine if a person announced that everything in their life, actions, thoughts, relationships, goals, et cetera, were in pursuit of their own glory. Everyone else would call them arrogant and narcissistic. And then he's like, well, maybe that is how people work. But then he rounds out saying, but the Bible seems to praise that behavior in God that we would condemn in humans. Why is that? Jeff, what do you think?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's a lot of assumptions we should probably get out of the way first, um, if we're going to really talk about that, because it's kind of similar to the discussions out there about is God fair, is God loving, if he does X, Y, or Z? There's an element where we try to hold God to human standards, and if he were a human doing these things, whatever they are, whether it's a matter of justice, a matter of love, in this case a matter of glory, comparing him to the human standards would be i i it wouldn't work. He he would fail in those areas. But the assumption that he's not like us, I think is a key one, or the conclusion that this is an entirely different being that doesn't necessarily fit our categories. And the Bible holds out that he cre he is the definition of beauty, he is the definition of love, he is the definition of goodness, and that there's an intrinsic value to him as other that we have in our hearts to aspire to or to want to worship when we see it in other things. Um and so I think it does boil down to the the nature of God versus humans, and because he's different and transcendent and uh kind of other than what we've experienced from other people, those things don't really apply in terms of our judgment upon them. Like, well, that's too arrogant um for him to think that. I think it's uh it it starts there. It has to be in this kind of difference of type.
SPEAKER_02I agree with you. I think the nature of God is where the rub happens on this question. And probably a couple hundred years ago when people hadn't yet buddified Jesus to make Jesus more like just a regular dude you could have a beer with. Yeah. I think a few hundred years ago when God was still very other and everybody was very impressed with the idea of God and the idea of God's sovereignty, before before it got to the point where you kind of had to sell people on the idea of God and Jesus. Back then, I'm guessing not as many people were threatened by the idea of God being interested in his own glory. But it is kind of weird and off-putting now because I mean, you've heard me talk about this principle of what you win people with is what you win people to. And well, if you win people with the idea of kind of a buddy God who's a lot like us, but just better, kind of like, you know, Thor or Captain America. I mean, they still look like us and they have to eat and go to the bathroom and stuff, but I mean, they're just better than us. You know, if you if you present God in that way and people sign up for a God like that, that's kind of a faith time bomb because eventually you're gonna ask questions like this and you're gonna be like, well, that seems jerky. Even though Thor and Captain America are very impressive, they should still have a modicum of humility and not everything is about them. And that complaint is completely true. My concern then is not that someone who is one to that brand of Christianity would ask that question. My concern was with the initial assumptions and how you know the whole idea of Christian faith was explained to that person on the front end. I'm not saying that's the deal with what happened with just uh with Dustin, rather, here. What I am saying is that I think that is a more common phenomenon now. And so it's more natural for people to be like, God is an exaggerated version of a person, and no person should be arrogant like that and concerned with their own glory. People should be humble. But I throw this back to you, my friend. Why should people be humble?
SPEAKER_00Well, there's there's a couple answers to that. I think it it starts you you talked about how things changed from a hundred years ago or whatever. One of my favorite books ever written is called The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis, and and he talks in there about even in the 40s when he wrote it, that that culture was losing a sense of intrinsic value in things. He was talking about waterfalls. We don't call them sublime because we think they're sublime. He said they are by nature sublime. When you see a waterfall, you feel something, you think something. It's beautiful. And I think nowadays, especially, we want things to mean what we bring to them. And so they can only mean what we bring. Well, what if something has intrinsic value? And like Lewis said, I believe it. You know, we living here in Colorado, I look to the mountains and I feel something. Those things are impressive, they're magnificent. Not because I choose that they are magnificent, they're just magnificent, and it elicits that in me to feel that way. And and if you put all of those qualities in a being, when you experience that being, it's not a matter of humility or arrogance, it's a matter of intrinsic value in that thing, in that being. It's not just that we attribute that to him, it's that he is those things. And I think part of the reason it's hard for us now is because we struggle to think of things having an intrinsic objective value. We want it to be what we feel it is, instead of it is what it is, and then we feel something. But the second part of your question, why should we be humble or or shouldn't God be more humble? I think Christianity is at its most powerful in terms of the story when we understand God is these things and yet still humbled himself to become a human. If he's not magnificent, if he's not transcendent, if he's not holy, if he's not worthy of all this glory, then coming to earth and being, you know, buddy Jesus, big deal. If he's just a nice guy, then it's not transformative, it's not really, you know, to use your favorite word, redemptive, it's just a thing that happened. But if he really is all these things, objectively and intrinsically, and then chooses to be born in a manger, placed, you know, uh born in a in a stall where there's no room for them, placed in a manger, to subject himself to being homeless for most of his ministry, eventually to being tortured and killed. That's humility of the highest order, that he would do that. And I think that's where the power of the message of the cross comes in is this isn't just some guy who started a religion who went to the cross. This is somebody who bears that glory and has that objective majesty who chose to do this out out of love for us. To me, that's far more powerful than who does he think he is that he's worthy of this glory. It's just a different question, I guess.
SPEAKER_02I think all of that is very well said, and I would submit that a lesser reason that it makes sense for us to be humble, other than the very big picture cosmic existential ones you just laid out, would just be that we do stupid stuff. Hey, all the people I've ever known, including and especially me, do stupid stuff, and we don't know stuff, and we think we know stuff, and then we get egg on our face because we didn't know the things. And I thought I knew the things, but I didn't know the things.
SPEAKER_00I've known you for a long time, and that's all true.
SPEAKER_02Yes, thank you. And I'm I am so glad that you are willing to just level with me about that. But but then then the reality is that if we're doing the arrogant thing as humans, I mean, come on, we are quibbling over the tiniest microscopic percentage of difference in terms of our relative goodness with other people instead of just being like, yeah, we all got problems, don't we? But then God, he doesn't have any problems. He has no problems, he's never learned anything, he always knew all the things. He has always been in control of all the things. In fact, the reason that there's things instead of not things is because of a mental decree of this deity who operates outside of space-time and decided that there would be such a thing as space-time. So I guess if we imagine us to be pretty good and God to be an exaggerated, better version of us, then yeah, I think the whole I'm obsessed with my own glory thing is narcissistic and weird on his part. But if we understand us for what we are and understand to use your word, God as other, completely other, well, then this gets a little bit different. And the glory of God is not really just about the glory of God. The glory of God is the glory of truth. It's the glory of everything, it's the beatification of everything, it's the perfection of everything. The glory of God, because of how transcendent God is, has this overflow effect that touches everything. Whereas the glory of me, let me see, that benefits, let me go through the list. Me. Yep, that's it. So the glory of me doesn't help anything other than me. The glory of God brings redemption and light and completion to everything. So it is in the best interest of everybody for God to be glorified and for his truth and his reality to be made known. And that's why, I mean, you know the verse, but Philippians 2 11, the whole idea that every tongue confessed that Jesus Christ is Lord to the glory of God the Father. The concept from oh, what verse is it I never remember. 1 Corinthians 10, something something about whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. So the glory of God is both inevitable, and the glory of God is something that we get the honor of participating in, in even the seemingly very mundane things of life, like eating or drinking or whatever we do.
SPEAKER_00Well, it definitely pays off for us to be about the glory of God. That's where we're, John Piper said, the most fulfilled is when God is the most glorified. There's I don't want to go too far onto this, but one of my favorite Hebrew words is kavod, which means glory in the Old Testament. And it also means fat. It means, you know, presence and weight and significance. And you know, I think in English glory it can mean so many things, but you know, in in the Old Testament, God's glory is uh pretty much spoken of as a significant presence. And I I think that's part of it too, is we are satisfied when there is something significant to what we're doing. And that significance comes from Him, not from the world or not from our own selfishness. It's we get to participate in His weight of glory that affects us and strengthens us and gives us joy and all those things. And and I I think you're exactly right. If it's just about us, that's that's so tiny in the cosmic sense. Whereas the the significance of God makes everything fulfilling.
SPEAKER_02So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God, which means that the creative things we undertake are also part of this equation. And I've known you to be creative since forever. You've always been good at it, you keep getting better at it. I think this album you just put out is not like, oh, you're my friend, and it's good, good. I think it's like actually good good, like how rock used to be, where it had an idea and the album walks you through a journey and an evolution of a character, and it gives you stuff to think about and it sounds good. Where were you going for with this thing beyond the obvious, which is the glory of God?
SPEAKER_00Well, I will try to be humble in all those nice compliments and say thank you. Um the uh the music just kind of came out. I finished uh Place to Record here where I'm recording this and wanted to try out learn the software and figure out how to do all this musical ideas in my head, and that's just how it kind of started. Um but I realized over as I did more and more that there was a storyline in there. Uh, and so I tried to write some of the lyrics towards that, and I just wanted to make the music I like listening to. I wasn't aiming for a target or a demographic. It was these are my influences, this is what's coming out of me, and it's super fun.
SPEAKER_02The music you like listening to, what is what is the greatest rock song of all time?
SPEAKER_00The greatest rock song of all time. I'm gonna go with Rosanna by Toto. I knew you were gonna say Rosanna by Toto. It's catchy, but phenomenal musicians. That's definitely what I like. It's music that's catchy, that's got a great hook or a melody, but the musicianship underneath it is complex and well done. I'm an instrumentalist first and uh singer second, although I I appreciate the help you got gave me on getting these vocals on this album as good as they are, but they sound great.
SPEAKER_02They sound great.
SPEAKER_00I want memorable music that's catchy, that's that's fun to listen to, but underneath it all has you know good, complex musicianship.
SPEAKER_02Okay, last thing. You said there was a story to this. Can you give me like the super quick rundown of what it is?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it's a story about a guy who is really fed up with the world and all of the nonsense of his life and of the world and of government, and so the first song he uh steals a rocket ship because he's out, he's looking for peace and tranquility and he wants to find it. Uh, and so he goes to the moon and uh uh hence the title of the album, Sea of Tranquility, and he finds it, but then he realizes he's lonely and uh starts to lose his mind a little bit, and then uh things get worse from there. He runs into some another totalitarian government, and he's right back where he started. But there is a girl uh that he meets and it kind of goes from there. So it's it's in a nutshell, it's it's one man's search for peace.
SPEAKER_02All of the music that we use on the front end and back end of the podcast, if you haven't figured it out, we have a different piece that we use for each day of the week. And so it's all on a rotation. All of that is from the album. It's gonna be really fun for you when you go and listen to this thing and you're like, oh, oh, this song is cool. And then it kind of kicks in with a little bass drop or whatever. You're like, oh, oh, that's from the thing. I know this part. And it's gonna be in your head all day. So I hope you check it out. This is Jeff Foote, Sea of Tranquility is the album. That sounded really late night talk show host like. Let me try that again. Jeff, I really like your album. I really like your album. I think other people will too. So hopefully everybody will go and give that a listen. Uh, last thought on the way out the door here, Dustin J. Coates. If you want to shoot me an email at thmbh at gmail.com, I'm gonna send you something. I'm gonna try to start doing that when we use people's questions from the subreddit or from email or Twitter or whatever in an episode. It just seems fair because you gave us a good thing to talk about. So appreciate the smart question. Jeff, thanks for jumping on, processing stuff with me. Congrats on the album, buddy.
SPEAKER_00Hey, thank you so much. Thanks for using my stuff on the podcast. It's been great. Thanks for letting us. It makes the whole thing better.
SPEAKER_02All right, I'm gonna wrap it up there. Let's uh get back after more stuff here in Matthew next time around. I'm Matt, 10 minute Bible Hour Podcast. Let's do it again soon.