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Does God Really Care About Numbers? Let's Find Out
40 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Dan Sanchez and Pastor Ridley Barron explored the book of Numbers, discussing its significance beyond just counting people. They tackled the topic of numerology, addressing how numbers have been used symbolically in Scripture but warning against assigning mystical meanings to them. Their conversation also highlighted how fear and familiarity can keep people stuck in their own "wilderness," much like the Israelites hesitated to enter the Promised Land. They wrapped up with a deep dive into Moses’ intercession for Israel and an insightful discussion about whether God "changed His mind." Timestamps00:00 Intro – Does God care about numbers? 02:22 The dangers of numerology and finding meaning in numbers 07:24 How bias and human psychology create patterns where none exist 11:30 The wilderness mindset—why we stay stuck in struggles 15:19 Slavery, freedom, and learning to trust God 22:33 "Selah Says" segment – Did God lie when He said He’d destroy Israel? 27:12 God's knowledge of the future and open theism debateTune in next week as the journey through the Bible continues into Deuteronomy!
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Transcript
Introduction to Grove Hill Church Podcast
00:00:00
Dan Sanchez
Welcome back to the Grove Hill Church Podcast. I'm Dan Sanchez and joined again by Ridley Barron to talk about this journey we're taking into the Bible. And we are in the book of Numbers, which is very exciting for an accountant.
00:00:14
Dan Sanchez
No, just kidding.
00:00:14
Ridley
and
00:00:15
Dan Sanchez
There's a lot going on in Numbers. It's actually full of stories.
00:00:18
Ridley
Yeah, yeah.
00:00:18
Dan Sanchez
Some of
Exploring the Book of Numbers
00:00:19
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:00:19
Dan Sanchez
my favorite stories, actually.
00:00:20
Dan Sanchez
I love the story of Balaam in this this book. We're not going to talk too much about that. so I feel like that one will get hit in other parts and different conversations and life groups because it's such a fun little side story.
00:00:32
Dan Sanchez
so there's all kinds of things going on in this book it's it's there's a a lot of there's law givings there's story i'm trying to think of the other types of genres that are i think there's a third genre represented in this book but i can't think of what it what it is prophecy yeah
00:00:46
Ridley
There's a little bit of prophecy in there. Yep. Yep. There's some historical narrative. Yeah. There's a lot of good stuff.
00:00:52
Dan Sanchez
so there's a variety of stuff going on here there's certainly a lot of ups and downs but before we get into those want to talk about the name of the book. Numbers.
Does God Care About Numbers?
00:01:03
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:01:04
Dan Sanchez
Numbers. It's a big thing. And I want to ask, Ridley, does God care about numbers? Because he didn't name the book.
00:01:13
Ridley
Hmm.
00:01:14
Dan Sanchez
We named the book later.
00:01:16
Ridley
Right.
00:01:16
Dan Sanchez
Does God care about the numbers?
00:01:19
Ridley
Right. oh If going to ask me for a very broad answer, my answer is not really. i think there are numbers that carry certain symbolism for us in Scripture that God uses as teaching marks throughout His Word.
00:01:36
Ridley
But I feel like you can take that too far into a kind of a mystical kind of thing, like...
00:01:41
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:01:42
Ridley
Numbers represent certain people in history or numbers add up to create certain dates for events, which becomes almost like trying to predict the future.
Origins and Interpretations of Numerology
00:01:52
Ridley
i think you can get a little too carried away with it. So I think we have to recognize that numbers play a role in some some symbols and teaching of of God. But I don't know that I would i would say he cares much about it.
00:02:07
Dan Sanchez
So the topic, that's funny. i was I was talking about numbers in general as I'm like, is God to care about like, I don't know like the number of salvations or like the numbers of people or this number of this or number of that.
00:02:16
Ridley
Yeah.
00:02:19
Dan Sanchez
But then you're you're diving into, because I talked about it right before we jumped on to the podcast, the topic of numerology.
00:02:26
Ridley
Yeah.
00:02:27
Dan Sanchez
or bringing meaning to the numbers, significance to the numbers, right?
00:02:29
Ridley
Yeah. yeah
00:02:32
Dan Sanchez
And that's existed. actually had to Google it. What is the history of numerology? Which is these kind of like, but I don't know how to describe it other than like an almost a mysticism around the numbers.
00:02:43
Dan Sanchez
And of course it's tied up.
00:02:43
Ridley
yeah
00:02:44
Dan Sanchez
It's Christians have been into this for a while, but it has ancient roots in Egypt and Babylon.
00:02:46
Ridley
You're right.
00:02:49
Dan Sanchez
So it goes way back
00:02:49
Ridley
I'm not.
00:02:51
Dan Sanchez
Even the Egyptians assign mystical meanings to numbers, particularly linked to religious rituals, architecture, think pyramids, calendar systems,
00:02:57
Ridley
not.
00:03:00
Dan Sanchez
Of course, it's been even in Hebrew history, about 100 years before Christ, ah ah ah hebrew hebrew were the Hebrews were looking up letter correspondence to numbers, you know like the number of let numbers of letters in a word and how it might correlate to other words.
Mysticism and the Misleading Nature of Numerology
00:03:19
Dan Sanchez
So this kind of mystical connection between words starts to add a sense of spirituality to it.
00:03:19
Ridley
Right.
00:03:24
Dan Sanchez
Early Christianity, we start to get three represents the Trinity.
00:03:25
Ridley
Yeah.
00:03:27
Dan Sanchez
Seven is this number of Perfection 666 is the evil number, you know, of the mark of the beast, and it develops a medieval.
00:03:32
Ridley
You're right, right.
00:03:35
Dan Sanchez
And then it it kind of comes back to modern day when somebody around the early 1900s really starts talking about numerology in like almost like a self-help mysticism type of way.
00:03:44
Ridley
Yeah, yeah.
00:03:44
Dan Sanchez
And it's influenced many things from there, like Kabbalah. Kabbalism is really influenced by numerology.
00:03:50
Ridley
Yeah. Yeah.
00:03:52
Dan Sanchez
And now is almost like this pseudoscience. And I find that Christians really get into it and even ascribe.
00:03:56
Ridley
yeah
00:03:58
Dan Sanchez
I've heard many people, many Christians in many states ascribe significant meaning to it, even taking direction for their lives, sometimes based on numerology or or meaning in the numbers.
00:04:06
Ridley
yeah
00:04:09
Ridley
yeah
00:04:10
Dan Sanchez
Is that what you're talking about as into something to kind of stay away from?
00:04:11
Ridley
yeah
00:04:13
Dan Sanchez
Or is it something of interest to explore once in a while?
00:04:15
Ridley
Yeah, I think to me, that's the part where it crosses the line where I get uncomfortable. And I think for me, it's because if we examine what God's desire is for a relationship with us, he wants us coming back to him and having daily conversations about the direction of our lives and those kinds of things, not sitting down and counting the number of letters in a word or how many words in a paragraph or those kinds of things and how those things add up and point to specific Again, i I kind of almost feel it's like the Christian version of a Ouija board. How are we going to find the future? Yes or no? And, you know, even people who've gone as far as trying to add up the number 666 to find out who's going to be the Antichrist.
Authority of Numbers vs. Divine Guidance
00:04:55
Ridley
But yeah, you go back to the early beginnings of it in the Hebrews. I think it was more of a almost I hate to use this. phrase, but like a mnemonic device, you know, three for the Trinity and seven for the perfection and completeness and 10 for authority.
00:05:11
Ridley
And it was, it was these things. i think God used those as teaching points, a place to hang our hats as he was showing us the story of his life.
00:05:18
Dan Sanchez
Yeah. Yeah.
00:05:20
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:05:20
Ridley
But then I think if you go beyond that and start replacing numbers with conversations with God to try to find direction for your life, you kind of got into an uncomfortable place for me.
00:05:30
Dan Sanchez
yeah I remember when I was in middle school, somebody handed me this like typed out email. it was a chain mail going around, but my dad thought it was funny. So he printed it out. It was around like, it but it was around, it was just, it was 2001 around, just it was like probably like a year after 9-11, right? And the magical numbers were 9 and 11, right?
00:05:51
Dan Sanchez
So like it was looking at all these things like, read the red cross or like all these different things and the letters and the amount of numbers of the letters and the names and how we couldn't trust them because they're they're in on it and all this kind of stuff.
00:06:00
Ridley
Right.
00:06:03
Dan Sanchez
And it was this like really fantastical chain mail that was going around that made it essentially the weird conspiracy theory. Whoa,
00:06:10
Ridley
Yeah, even today now, among the younger generation specifically, there there are those who refer to their spirit numbers. and it's, they actually will get tattoos on their bodies with those particular numbers.
00:06:18
Dan Sanchez
I haven't heard of this one.
00:06:24
Ridley
And when I asked one of them, what, you mean a spirit number? Well, every time I look up that number's around, you know, it would be on a clock or it'll be the name of a movie or it'll be a word in a song.
00:06:34
Ridley
And I'm like, okay, that's where I'm getting really uncomfortable with you putting too much authority in a number of your life versus God trying to direct your life.
00:06:40
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:06:43
Dan Sanchez
What is the logical fallacy that that's called? Let's see.
00:06:48
Ridley
I know what you're talking about, but I can't remember.
00:06:50
Dan Sanchez
there is a logical fallacy where it' it's a bias confirmation. That's what it is, I think.
00:06:54
Ridley
Yes, bias confirmation.
00:06:55
Dan Sanchez
Right? Where you're, I mean, it's funny because we do this in Christianity all the time. Even in missions, they're like, well, start praying if you should go overseas to Kenya and start asking for God and he'll start showing you signs.
00:07:03
Ridley
Right.
00:07:05
Dan Sanchez
All of a sudden you'll start to see it in the newspaper, Kenya, and you'll start to see your friends talking about Kenya and a postcard will come from Kenya. You're like, or it's just bias confirmation. Right?
00:07:15
Ridley
right. right
00:07:16
Dan Sanchez
Because you've been thinking about Kenya and now all of a sudden, all the places where it was normally exposed to you, just magic, like it didn't magically appear. You were just paying attention to it. Kind of like when you're looking at a big pile of Legos and you're searching for red.
00:07:29
Dan Sanchez
All of a sudden, all you see is red and you but you zone out everything else. And every only pieces you see in that big pile of red.
00:07:35
Ridley
Yep.
00:07:35
Dan Sanchez
Sorry for you non-Lego builders in there.
00:07:37
Ridley
but
00:07:37
Dan Sanchez
But what kind of childhood did you have that you don't know what I'm talking about?
00:07:39
Ridley
Yeah, right.
00:07:40
Dan Sanchez
Right?
00:07:41
Ridley
You're exactly right though, Dan, because I, you know, using your analogy, you start thinking about Kenya and
00:07:41
Dan Sanchez
Right.
00:07:47
Ridley
And you may go through a day and hear 70 other countries mentioned, but all you ever hear is Kenya, Kenya, Kenya, you know?
00:07:52
Dan Sanchez
Here's Kenya. Yeah. yeah
00:07:54
Ridley
And so, yeah, there's this this tendency to sometimes build our own affirmation for certain things in our lives by using false signals like this kind.
00:08:05
Dan Sanchez
And for those who are still wondering, like, well, but I've seen so many connections to this number thing before. There's this known known psychological behavior called apo... I'm going to... I can read the name. It's like right front of it. I don't know how pronounce it's pronounced, but it's apophenia.
00:08:23
Dan Sanchez
I believe it's said. And it's the ability for the human brain to find connections around things, right?
00:08:28
Ridley
Oh, oh.
00:08:29
Dan Sanchez
We do this all the time in other areas of our lives. And it happens with some some people get really hooked in the numbers or trying to find meaning. This is where conspiracy theories come from often is we're trying to find patterns in the data that we do have
00:08:42
Ridley
Right.
00:08:43
Dan Sanchez
And we do it even with each other. Like we see somebody do X, Y, and Z, and therefore we put together the patterns and we tell ourselves a story about what that person's motivations are or what they're up to. We do it with our spouses the most, right?
00:08:56
Dan Sanchez
We assume they're just being lazy or they assume this because we're putting one and two together. We're trying to identify the pattern and assigning a label to it. That's essentially what's happening with numerology a lot is we're looking for patterns and data, but just it's just by random chance.
00:09:13
Ridley
Yeah.
00:09:14
Dan Sanchez
So.
00:09:14
Ridley
Yeah.
The Wilderness and the Israelites' Journey
00:09:15
Ridley
So. Back to the whole question of the book of Numbers and why Numbers. I think I think i told you all this the first week we were in there, that the Hebrew title for this book was actually Into the Wilderness.
00:09:26
Ridley
It was much later that Christian writers came along and renamed it Numbers because it was just easier to deal with. And it refers specifically to God numbering the people of Israel.
00:09:37
Ridley
Not for his benefit. I mean, obviously he knew how many there were. But it was almost like an encouragement to them to say, you've got an army and it's got this number of people in it as you get ready to go in and take over the promised land.
00:09:49
Dan Sanchez
So with all that, with all the stuff we just said about numerology, God still uses a lot of numbers throughout the Bible.
00:09:54
Ridley
Uh-huh.
00:09:58
Ridley
Oh, yeah. Yeah.
00:10:00
Dan Sanchez
So it seems like there is something to it, like counting things.
00:10:02
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:10:03
Dan Sanchez
God cares about people coming to Christ. He even says in the last days, that will and it will become intense, but not so intense. Otherwise, the number of saints, you know, it'll be like you will lose too many saints in the process. So they cuts it short, right?
00:10:17
Dan Sanchez
So there is something about that. You know, he uses a lot of numbers to describe things and measure things and to describe like even winning winning souls over so there is something there
00:10:30
Ridley
i do think I do think that what God has an ability to do that humans find harder to do is God has the ability to look at numbers and see the details and the stories behind those numbers.
00:10:43
Ridley
For instance, what you just compared, the 144,000 souls are the number of prayers that are offered up by the saints over the course of time, the number of people who are going into the promised land.
00:10:56
Ridley
He doesn't hear 600 plus thousand fighting men. He hears these are my children who are about to take over the promise that I have given them, you know, and so he he can see way beyond those things and have an affection and a compassion for those numbers in a way that we can't.
00:11:14
Ridley
Those numbers speak different things to us than what they speak to him.
00:11:18
Dan Sanchez
one of the things you brought up in the sermon, and I just thought it was such a good illustration that I wanted to talk about it again, was this almost metaphor of being stuck in the wilderness.
Metaphors of the Wilderness and Modern Spiritual Journeys
00:11:31
Dan Sanchez
The Israelites messed up and they got to spend a lot of extra time in the wilderness. And if... we mess up.
00:11:41
Dan Sanchez
Like we, we end up staying longer in the wilderness than we actually have to, because we're choosing not to have faith.
00:11:44
Ridley
Yeah.
00:11:47
Dan Sanchez
We're choosing not to have hope.
00:11:51
Ridley
Yep.
00:11:51
Dan Sanchez
And a big part of me was sitting there being like, huh, like sometimes we still have to go through the wilderness. Like they still had to go through there. They were still there for what, two years?
00:11:58
Ridley
Yes. Yes.
00:12:01
Dan Sanchez
But sometimes we we just choose to stay there.
00:12:04
Ridley
Yeah.
00:12:04
Dan Sanchez
It's like we know what we need to go do, but we're just going to continue sitting in our own filth and dealing with it rather than doing rather than doing the thing we need we need to do
00:12:10
Ridley
Yeah. So if you look, if you look at, yeah, if you look at the story we're in, and in the old Testament at this point, you have a people, 2 million plus people who have wandered through a very uncomfortable situation in the wilderness.
00:12:24
Ridley
Even with God's provision, it's not ideal. I mean, living in tents, picking up man off the ground, those kinds of things. So it's not not the perfect setup. And then they come to the promised land and they're standing at the edge of the promised land. They have the opportunity to go in and take everything that God has already promised they would have.
00:12:41
Ridley
But instead, they chose the wilderness because to go into the promised land would be a different kind of uncomfortable for them. But to stay in that wilderness was it was almost like a security blanket. We know that. Even though it's not comfortable, it's familiar for us.
00:12:57
Ridley
And I think many people who are and being invited by God to step out of their, we'll call it the wilderness, but maybe their sinful lifestyle or maybe their brokenness or maybe their bad habits, whatever it is that God's calling you out of, sometimes we choose to stay where we're at because even though it's not good for us, it's more comfortable than the challenge of moving forward.
00:13:20
Dan Sanchez
Almost wondered if a lot of it for the Israelites, and maybe for us too, is this mindset they might have had as a slave. Because that's where they came from. They had spent generations as a slave.
00:13:30
Ridley
Oh, yeah.
00:13:31
Dan Sanchez
They don't know anything but slavery.
00:13:32
Ridley
Right.
00:13:33
Dan Sanchez
And as a slave, I'm like, you don't have a lot of hope. You don't have a lot of faith. you You get what you get, and there's not much you can do about it.
00:13:39
Ridley
Right.
00:13:40
Dan Sanchez
I almost wonder if they're bringing a certain mindset of that same thing into the wilderness with them, and instead of actually taking some some agency or some ability to go to God and plead with him over the thing, they just whine about it.
00:13:46
Ridley
Right.
00:13:53
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:13:54
Ridley
I don't know how prominent it was, but there are stories after the Civil War here in the United States in the 1860s of slaves who obviously at the end of the war were set free.
00:14:06
Ridley
The Emancipation Proclamation has freed them. Lincoln's done his part. The war has confirmed it. Many of them who would not leave the plantations because they didn't know how to live outside of the the authority of or a ruler over them.
00:14:20
Ridley
It scared them to try to live life on their own. I think the same kind of thing probably is the mentality you're talking about here for these people to go in and to conquer this promised land is going to put them in a place where now they are under no authority really for, for a little while, because they didn't recognize God to be the authority that he wanted to be for him. He had this unique relationship he desired for them, but in their mind, it meant they were going to be on their own. And that was scary for some of them.
00:14:51
Ridley
If you've grown up all your life with somebody telling you where to go, what time to get up, what to do all day long, making those decisions on your own can be very, very scary.
00:14:59
Dan Sanchez
Sometimes I wonder if we get stuck in the same thing because the book of Romans talks a lot about us being slaves of sin and needing to change masters.
00:15:05
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:15:07
Dan Sanchez
Essentially, I'm like, I wonder if I'm just caught in the mindset of a slave and not having enough faith and hope to step away from one master and go to a far better master.
00:15:12
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:15:16
Ridley
Mm-hmm.
00:15:17
Dan Sanchez
If there's some correlations there.
00:15:17
Ridley
Yeah, I think that... For sure, the unknown scares a lot of us. In fact, I think that's why many of us do fall into rituals and patterns of comfort in our lives. Not all of them are bad. I mean, you know, we have we have rituals that help us get through our days, like brushing our teeth at a certain time and taking a shower a certain place every day or whatever.
00:15:40
Ridley
But then there are other rituals we can fall into, which include some of our religious practices that we do, not because they feed us, but because they keep us comfortable. And I think God's command for people of Israel as well as for us every day is keep following me into what is not comfortable and not ritualistic because there's a greater adventure out there that that you want to take hold of.
00:16:03
Dan Sanchez
So what are some of the uncomfortable things people are
00:16:08
Dan Sanchez
stopping from moving in into? I imagine it's so moving out of something, of sin, and bringing it into the light, and moving sometimes into something.
00:16:12
Ridley
Yeah. Yeah.
00:16:16
Dan Sanchez
Like, they're comfortable and they're doing well, but God's calling them into something greater. Scary and hard, but still greater.
00:16:20
Ridley
So here, here's one that's probably not going to be very popular. We might even get some responses to this, to this podcast. Uh, I would say anxiety is one, people just saying,
00:16:32
Dan Sanchez
I thought you were going to say tithing.
00:16:36
Ridley
that would have been an easy one. and anxiety today has become a catch all explanation for poor behavior from some people.
00:16:46
Ridley
And I don't deny that there are some very extreme cases where people do have some kind of anxieties. But I feel like there are lots of people, even young people who say, well, I'm just an anxious person. And God's calling you to say, OK, drop that anxiety and experience the freedom that comes from it.
00:17:04
Ridley
But to to drop the anxiety would require you to be a mature enough to take responsibility for your feelings. And that's the scary place.
00:17:12
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:17:14
Ridley
Financial, our financial practices, not tithing necessarily, but that's included, our financial practices. Instead of getting a hold of our debt, many of us would rather just keep using the credit cards and keep paying the minimum balance every month instead of taking the hard steps that come to financial freedom, which are learn to live on the basics. Learn not to have the luxuries for a little bit of while.
00:17:39
Ridley
and The crazy thing is on the other side of that is exactly what God promised. This freedom that comes from the promised land once you let those things go.
00:17:48
Dan Sanchez
Speaking back to anxiety, do you usually find that someone who's dealing with a lot of anxiety just needs to move forward despite the anxiety in order to start to wrestle with it? Not that that's the only thing they do, but that action is a big part of that.
00:18:02
Dan Sanchez
Or is there another method you take?
00:18:03
Ridley
I think there is some, what's the word I'm looking for? Yeah, I think, yeah, to to just sometimes just to take one step and and put it in front of the other, knowing that maybe it might be a little scary, and yes, maybe even a little risky, and there is a chance you might experience a little bit of harm along the way.
00:18:25
Ridley
But the reward is great for taking those steps, much greater than the pain that you're going to go through and trying to shake off those feelings of anxiety that you have kind of parked yourself in for too long, you know?
00:18:39
Dan Sanchez
I know I used to be an anxious individual, especially around social settings. And now I'm here like talking on podcasts and I can speak in front of people and just meet people now.
00:18:42
Ridley
Yeah. Yeah.
00:18:46
Dan Sanchez
But when I was in high school, was extremely introverted and just afraid.
00:18:50
Ridley
Yeah.
00:18:50
Dan Sanchez
And it's funny, this one quote, it's I find it to be biblical, and it's by a guy that I actually don't know at all. I haven't read anything else from him. from George Bernard Shaw.
00:18:58
Ridley
yeah
00:18:59
Dan Sanchez
At least I credited accredited him.
00:19:00
Ridley
yeah
00:19:02
Dan Sanchez
But he said, I learned how to ride learned how to speak like how I learned how to ride a bike by continuously making a fool of myself until I got used to it. I don't know what it was. It gave me permission to be silly, to be dumb, to not be afraid because you're going make, if you're, if you're expecting to be a fool, then it's kind of like, well, then I might as well just keep going despite whatever happens.
00:19:12
Ridley
Yeah. yeah
00:19:21
Dan Sanchez
And the point is I'm moving forward and eventually I won't be.
00:19:25
Ridley
Yeah. Yeah. Let me get real personal here so that everybody doesn't get all carried away with the last example I
Personal Struggles and Comfort Zones
00:19:32
Ridley
used. one of them One of the places that I find as a place of comfort for me personally that I fall back into he is my eating habits.
00:19:41
Ridley
I, I, food is comfort for me. If I'm pretty stressed, I can sit down eat a whole bag of popcorn or preferably a whole bag of M&Ms. That's my thing. I love chocolate. Chocolate's always been an issue for me.
00:19:53
Ridley
I joke about it a lot when I'm preaching or when I'm talking with people. And I even give my wife a hard time because she does a great job of holding me accountable. Why do I do that?
00:20:04
Ridley
Because it's comfort. Is it is it comfortable to move away from that? Not really, because that means I have to take responsibility for my choices and I have to be willing to make the hard choices throughout the day every single day because it's easy to fall back into that trap.
00:20:19
Ridley
But that the other side of it is physical health. There's freedom from the guilt of eating that. And more importantly is the maturity I have to assume and taking responsibility for my feelings.
00:20:33
Ridley
Instead of just eating my way through my feelings, I have to sit down and have conversations with God says, okay, I'm just real, I'm real mad at this moment, or I'm real sad or lonely at this moment. And it's, and it really is a dangerous threat for me. My dad probably by the time he died was probably about 60 to 70 pounds heavier than I am.
00:20:55
Ridley
And he died from issues related to carrying around too much weight. So I, you know, i have to be real. It would be much easier for me to wake up every morning and just live life the way I want to.
00:21:08
Ridley
But part of my mornings is I get up and try to do a little bit of exercise every day to help fight those things. man, it'd be a whole lot more comfortable just lay down on the couch and need a bag of parkour and every night, but I just can't do that.
00:21:20
Dan Sanchez
It's hard. I was starting to get to that stage of life where it's just easier. i actually do wake up really early, but I like to get to work and work on the things I'm excited about. That's woke up early to work on And I don't usually like working out in the morning, but if I don't work out in the morning, I certainly don't get to through the rest of the day.
00:21:36
Dan Sanchez
Life gets really busy.
00:21:36
Ridley
Right.
00:21:38
Dan Sanchez
And so hitting the rower early in the morning's a priority and don't always get to it because, well, I even like working out, but I'm like, yeah, I'd rather work on this other thing.
00:21:38
Ridley
Yeah.
00:21:47
Ridley
yeah well I mean I'm even at that stage where uh physically it hurts I mean because joints and muscles that are just not doing what they used to so it's real easy some days to just go man but my shoulders bother me I need to take a break but I keep thinking to myself I take a break I won't ever get back into it so yeah
00:21:48
Dan Sanchez
It's really easy.
00:22:02
Dan Sanchez
yeah
00:22:06
Dan Sanchez
yeah
00:22:10
Dan Sanchez
And to wrap this up, I have another Sayla Says, which is pretty much what i'm going to call this segment for the rest of the year.
00:22:15
Ridley
Go Sailor.
00:22:15
Dan Sanchez
she's She delivers sex.
Moses' Leadership and Intercession
00:22:18
Dan Sanchez
She's tasked with finding a question to ask so that she could participate in life group. And she always she always brings out a question that all of us are looking at each other being like, hey, that's a good question.
00:22:26
Dan Sanchez
don't know. Here's an answer, but i don't know if it's the best answer, but. And this week in the story of numbers, there is a moment where God just wants to wipe them all out, start fresh with Moses.
00:22:39
Dan Sanchez
And Moses is saying, God, no, like, hold on. If you wipe them out, what's what's Egypt going to think? You know, what's what's these nations going to think? He's like contending for God's glory here.
00:22:54
Dan Sanchez
And Selah asked like, well, when God said he's going to wipe out the people and knows because he knows everything, he knows he's not going to, isn't he lying?
00:23:03
Ridley
Hmm. That's a great question.
00:23:05
Dan Sanchez
And I'm like, so why did he do it that way?
00:23:08
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:23:11
Ridley
So let let me back up and offer two possibilities here. Number one, does God know that he's not going to do it?
00:23:21
Ridley
Well, of course he does because he knows everything, but is it possible that God saw another way forward that included wiping out all of them and still maintaining his promises?
00:23:33
Ridley
You know, uh, somebody Wednesday night at the Bible study asked that question. If he wiped them all out, wouldn't that do away with the covenant that gave to Abraham? Well, no, because he would have kept Moses alive, who was one of Abraham's descendants.
00:23:44
Ridley
So technically the chain would have still kept going. but God did God know that he was not going to do it? Yes, because he knows everything. So what was this all about? Well, I think it was about God offering an opportunity for Moses to learn something about himself, for Moses to lean in as an interceder for the people that he was leading.
00:24:07
Ridley
And it was a great invitation for him to continue to to grow in his own dialogue with God of what was going on. And so if you want to get technical, maybe you could say, yeah, God was misleading him, or maybe it was God setting up a scenario by which he would teach Moses something in this situation.
00:24:27
Ridley
And, okay.
00:24:27
Dan Sanchez
I'm going to go with answer two. Because answer one sounds a lot like open theism to me.
00:24:32
Ridley
Well, it does. It does. And that's why I did not, did not say I was a proponent that one.
00:24:35
Dan Sanchez
like,
00:24:37
Ridley
I think to me, this is the beauty of God.
00:24:37
Dan Sanchez
Which...
00:24:40
Ridley
and And it's hard for us sometimes to put into words and describe what God is up to. but if we could pull back the scriptures and and look into Moses's heart, I bet there was a place where Moses got up off the ground after that conversation with God and thought, wow, where did that come from?
00:25:00
Ridley
Because he himself had wanted to wipe out these people several times. He kept saying to God, why have you given them to me? They're a headache. And yet here he is interceding for those people. And so What we see in this story that on the surface looks like God changing his mind is really Moses changing into the man of God that God wanted him to be.
00:25:19
Ridley
And so God has put this obstacle in front of him and given him an opportunity to do what a man would do. And Moses has passed the test with flying colors by falling on his face before God to intercede for his people.
00:25:33
Dan Sanchez
And for those of you who are wondering about what open theism is, it's the idea that God doesn't control the future and doesn't know the
Open Theism and Scriptural Interpretation
00:25:42
Dan Sanchez
future perfectly. He sees all the paths forward, but actually the future isn't something to be known.
00:25:49
Dan Sanchez
is that it like and And therefore, his prophecies are only more intense because he can see, he can calculate all the known possibilities of what people are going to do way ahead before they know because he knows so much that he can predict what's going to happen.
00:26:03
Dan Sanchez
Kind of like you can can predict that some, like we can all make some predictions that are going to be accurate. Like, so that team's, you can see when a team is starting to head downhill, you're like, they're going lose the game.
00:26:08
Ridley
Right, right.
00:26:13
Dan Sanchez
It's getting in their head now.
00:26:13
Ridley
Hmm.
00:26:14
Dan Sanchez
You can see it as a coach or sometimes as a parent on the field. You're like, they're going lose. It's in their head. They're going to botch it now.
00:26:21
Ridley
dan Dan Sanchez is not a prophet, but he knows his pastor well enough that if he walked into a room with a bowl of popcorn and bowl of IMS, which one I'm going to choose?
00:26:22
Dan Sanchez
And they do.
00:26:29
Dan Sanchez
Choose those M&Ms.
00:26:29
Ridley
Yeah.
00:26:30
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:26:30
Ridley
Yeah.
00:26:31
Dan Sanchez
And the popcorn.
00:26:32
Ridley
Well, there you go.
00:26:32
Dan Sanchez
Let's be honest. But open theism is that idea that God doesn't know because there's nothing to know and therefore deals with the future as it comes like we do, but is much more inept at doing it.
00:26:41
Ridley
Yeah.
00:26:47
Dan Sanchez
it's It's a relatively new idea that it's only, what, a few decades old from David Boyd. I know because he lived up in Minneapolis right next to John Piper.
00:26:54
Ridley
Okay. I should say I didn't know that's where it came from.
00:26:56
Dan Sanchez
I'm like, interesting.
00:26:58
Ridley
Yeah.
00:26:58
Dan Sanchez
You have John Piper and David Boyd, like just a few blocks from each other, but yeah.
00:27:00
Ridley
Yeah.
00:27:03
Ridley
I think to me, that's speaking to that, that that's one of the, probably one of the amazing things about God's character is that back in Genesis, when all this thing started, he knew the end from the beginning, which is what the Bible tells us.
00:27:17
Dan Sanchez
Yeah.
00:27:17
Ridley
And yet he's still very interested in everything that's happening from Genesis to Revelation. still actively engaged with us and luring us in with his love.
00:27:26
Dan Sanchez
yeah Some people say he set the big picture things and that we get to make a lot of choices with him and in between. And I'd say that's generally true. The big question becomes whether salvations are predetermined or not. And that's the big in-house debate that's lasted for a long time now.
00:27:40
Ridley
Yeah, that's when you get into the big mystery picture right there, the big question marks.
00:27:44
Dan Sanchez
Who knows? But Ridley, thank you so much for answering Salus question of the week because that's a fun one.
00:27:49
Ridley
Of course.
00:27:50
Dan Sanchez
I'm looking forward to the next one get to visit next week. And I look forward to, again, another, have one more week.
00:27:57
Ridley
Yes.
00:27:57
Dan Sanchez
you you One more, a little bit more in numbers.
00:27:59
Ridley
but One more numbers and then we're into Deuteronomy.
00:28:01
Dan Sanchez
then And then into Deuteronomy, which is a fun book too. So until that time, thank you.
00:28:04
Ridley
Yeah.