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50: Offended By God’s Mercy with Pastor Jim Mueller image

50: Offended By God’s Mercy with Pastor Jim Mueller

S4 E50 · Normal Goes A Long Way
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301 Plays3 years ago

Pastor Jim Mueller makes his return to the podcast. Jim is the Lead Pastor at Messiah Lutheran Church in St. Charles, Missouri, where Jill Devine attends. Jill wanted to discuss a recent message Jim preached on and wanted more clarification on sin.

Highlights from the episode include:

*Deciphering the different types of sin

*Getting To Know Jesus by Paul Schult

*Jonah’s story

*Glorifying Jeffrey Dahmer and individuals like him

Here are the previous episodes Jim has appeared on:

Episode 4: What Does It Mean To Be A Christian?

BONUS (4b): Going Deeper With Pastor Jim Mueller

Episode 6: A Thanksgiving Blessing

Episode 15: What Is Lent All About?

BONUS (15b): Going Deeper With Pastor Jim Mueller

Episode 17: Two Pastors Discuss The Resurrection Of Jesus

Normal Goes A Long Way Website: https://www.normalgoesalongway.com/

Normal Goes A Long Way Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/normalgoesalongway/

Normal Goes A Long Way Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Normal-Goes-A-Long-Way-110089491250735

Normal Goes A Long Way is brought to you by Messiah St. Charles: https://messiahstcharles.org/

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Transcript

Introduction: Jill's Faith Journey

00:00:00
Speaker
The following podcast is a Jill Devine Media production. Christianity has become known for judgy people, strange words, ancient stories, confusing rules, and a members-only mindset. This is why I stayed away from the church for so long, but it's not supposed to be that way.

Objective: Faith and Real-Life Conversations

00:00:17
Speaker
I'm Jill Devine, a former radio personality with three tattoos, a love for a good tequila, and who's never read the entire Bible.
00:00:24
Speaker
Yet here I am hosting a podcast about faith. The normal goes a long way podcast is your home for real conversations with real people using real language about how faith and real life intersect. Welcome to the conversation.

Storytelling in Faith

00:00:47
Speaker
This season is all about storytelling and
00:00:53
Speaker
how we're relating that to people's faith lives. And so I'm going to use me as an example for some storytelling today.

Understanding Sin with Pastor Jim

00:01:02
Speaker
And I have brought back a popular guest, Pastor Jim Mueller. Hey, Jill. Thanks for welcoming me back. You can hear Jim in multiple episodes. I'll have them all linked on our show notes at normalgoesalongway.com. And this is going to be a really
00:01:20
Speaker
broad statement when I say I asked you to come on to talk about sin. And we've talked about sin. I mean, we talked about Easter and sin and even I'm just the idea of sin. But I want to take it to another level because of a couple of things. And this goes with my story. I got this book out that
00:01:46
Speaker
When I became, and I should say to the listener in case they don't know, you are my teaching pastor at the church that I go to and the church I work at. And one of the things that we have is a membership class, if you would choose to be a member. And there's a book that they use for that class called Getting to Know Jesus. And my husband and I took this class, it was probably 2018. And I decided to,
00:02:17
Speaker
go back and look at it and just see if anything sparked my curiosity, so to speak. And I kept coming back to something that you recently preached on to. And I thought, hmm, I'm having these questions still or had them somebody else's. And when I talk about sin, I am talking about the first thing that comes to mind, evil people.
00:02:47
Speaker
And so when I was looking through this book, I kept noticing all these different things that I wrote down, evil people or what does it mean?

Evil vs. God's Relationship Desires

00:02:58
Speaker
How can God want a relationship with everyone and how could he be okay with
00:03:05
Speaker
what these people did. And then there's been this, I don't know, popularity, I guess you would say, where you look at some different kinds of Netflix shows or Amazon Prime or just original shows that are either documentaries or shows, fictions created around these evil people. Jeffrey Dahmer comes to mind when I say that.
00:03:35
Speaker
And you preached about that at the end of the year, 2022, in a series called Offended by Mercy. And so some of these questions that I had when we were first taking the class have been answered for me, or they have been not so on my heart, because there's a little bit of with growing my faith that I understand, but I'm still,
00:04:03
Speaker
It is hard for me to say things like Jeffrey Dahmer to you. It is hard for me to say that out loud or it's hard for me to think about the individuals or I'm looking at news stories and it says, remains of a three year old fat, you know? Another school shooting, right? Yes. Oh, this stuff just like terrorizes our hearts. And I know the ultimate answer is it's between God and the person.
00:04:33
Speaker
Right? I don't know. Is that the way to think of it? I just know that I still struggle with that.
00:04:41
Speaker
First off, I think it's great that you're still getting into that book that you studied a few years ago. For y'all that don't know, Getting to Know Jesus is written by Paul Scholt, who is a friend of mine, and he used to be a pastor here in the St. Louis area. So I love Paul, he's amazing, and if it's a book you ever want to pick up, just kind of looking through the basics of
00:05:03
Speaker
hey, what is the Christian faith? It's a book I recommend too. So I'm glad that all these years later you keep getting into it and you're looking back at your old questions and maybe wondering, hey, how has my faith grown? Or what questions do I still have? I think that's just awesome. And it's normal, normal language too, which is, yeah. He's writing to real people. Right. So where do we begin on this? Where do we dive into? I know it's complicated, but
00:05:34
Speaker
you know, is one sin truly not bigger than another? How, I guess let's go back to your preaching on offended by mercy. And that had to do with Jonah. Most individuals, even if they're not in the Christian faith, know who Jonah is, but do you want to do a quick summary on Jonah and what we know him for?
00:05:58
Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of people look at the story of Jonah and they kind of stop at the whale. Yeah. In a sense, they look at the story of Jonah and they ask themselves,

Lessons from Jonah's Story

00:06:09
Speaker
do I believe the Bible, when the Bible has a story about a guy getting thrown overboard and surviving in a whale or some sort of giant fish,
00:06:19
Speaker
for three days and then getting spit out and still living. And they think that's the point of this story, Jonah. Like, did it happen or did it not? Is this a myth or is it not? And is the Bible true? But really the whale part of the story isn't even the story. The story is Jonah, a prophet, struggling with his God. Because as long as God wanted him to speak to Israel,
00:06:49
Speaker
Jonah was happy to do it. If he's gonna confront the Israelite king, he'll do it. If he has to speak to a group of people and say hard things and challenge them, he'll do it. But the minute God says, I want you to go to Nineveh, to go to Assyria, who's been your enemy for almost 100 years. In fact, you've been having wars with them during this time. These are the people that maybe Jonah and his friends
00:07:17
Speaker
probably hated more than anybody else. For God to ask Jonah to go to Nineveh and to preach a warning to them, that's what he was offended by. He was offended that God would want them to hear a message. And then what if they repented? He knew God would have mercy and that made him so angry and he's offended by God's mercy. And the way I look at it, I think that's true for a lot of us. Like I'm a believer.
00:07:48
Speaker
and you're a believer, and it's wonderful for God to say, Jill, I forgive you, or Jim, I forgive you. But when you look at God's forgiveness for somebody else, maybe somebody who's wronged you, somebody who's lived in your mind a worse life than you, or somebody that's done horrific things, that's when we start to get offended by mercy. When you explained Nineveh, and what was the other,
00:08:17
Speaker
Nineveh is a place within Assyria, the wire nation. Modern day Iraq. That's what I was just gonna ask. Can you do a modern day explanation of that? So Jonah's a prophet, which means God has spoken to him. And God's like, I want you as a prophet to go spread the good news. So that's what Jonah's supposed to do. And one of the things that you had mentioned in
00:08:47
Speaker
the sermon. I'm going to get it wrong again because I always bring it up to you. But you had the statement to think about really kind of took me by surprise. So.
00:09:00
Speaker
Let's think about who we hate or the worst thing ever. You made the statement that Jonah had two possibilities. Walk me through that again. Yeah, so kind of two possibilities. You go and preach to Nineveh, you hate them, they hate you. You get up and say really hard things. Number one, they might kill you for it. Like how dare you come speak to us this way. And number two, they could repent.
00:09:30
Speaker
And God could have mercy on them. And I think for Jonah, he didn't know which one was worse. I mean, both outcomes were terrible because he didn't want them to become forgiven. He didn't want them to receive mercy. He didn't want their country saved. He didn't want anything good to happen to them. Because they were evil to him.
00:09:51
Speaker
or I mean, in his mind and like evil, they were just bad. And he had good reason to think this. This isn't just racism. I'm not saying that's not a part of it. This isn't just a nationalism on Jonah's part. I'm not saying Jonah didn't struggle from a little bit too rampant nationalism for Israel.
00:10:11
Speaker
There's a lot of reasons to not like them. I mean, Assyria was known for skinning people alive and torturing them that way, letting them bake into the hot sun with no skin to protect you. I mean, it's horrific, it's scary, it's disgusting, and they were known to perform child sacrifices. Maybe the single thing in the Old Testament that's spoken out more against
00:10:38
Speaker
is when the God of Israel looks out at the world and says, this is how everybody's practicing religion. They would resort to child sacrifice. And the God of Israel is constantly sending out his prophets saying, this is so evil. This is so wrong. So yeah, from Jonah's point of view, from our point of view, of course, I mean, none of a, they were doing terrible things.
00:11:01
Speaker
They're not, they were not good people. And from Jonah's point of view, the fact that some sort of destruction was gonna come upon them was just, and he's right. But God could have mercy if God wanted to have mercy.

Forgiveness: Dahmer's Conversion and More

00:11:18
Speaker
You specifically talked about Jeffrey Dahmer. Yeah, sure. In this series too. Let's walk through that again.
00:11:38
Speaker
You're not interested in that. You're not interested in him. But if there's one part you should watch, it's the part where he is in jail and he's saved. I don't know because I didn't watch it. And there's been some question about that. So let's go there. So when somebody comes to you with that. Yeah. So for a lot of times for research and writing that I'm doing or preaching that I'm doing, speaking, there's a number of things I'll assign myself. Some of them might be theological, but
00:11:52
Speaker
I have not watched the series.
00:12:07
Speaker
probably a wider portion are secular in nature. I'll read into psychology, history, sociology, whatever seems pertinent for what we're kind of planning out for a year. In this case, when I was thinking about being offended by mercy, because I grew up when Jeffrey Dahmer was committing many of his crimes. So I knew the story and I knew the rumors about him.
00:12:35
Speaker
But when I saw that it had become like the number one series on Netflix and one of the most wildly popular. And of course, people would ask me as their pastor, they would say, why are people interested in this? Why are people watching this? Why is it so popular?
00:12:51
Speaker
So I decided, you know what? Why don't I figure that out? This isn't something that my kids wanted to watch with me. They're teenagers. I guess they could, but it wasn't something they wanted to watch with me and good. And my wife certainly was not going to watch this. She is not interested in learning more about evil. She sees enough evil just in the regular world that we live in. She does not want to be exposed to that. And I think most people, a lot of people at least probably feel the same way and good for them. They should be sheltered.
00:13:21
Speaker
from these kinds of things. But for me, I assigned myself to watch the series and I wanted to personally experience as a father and as a husband, I personally wanted to experience the storytelling and to fully know how evil or what kind of evil he did. I'd heard about cannibalism, I had heard about
00:13:48
Speaker
the terrible murders. I had heard about the sadistic sexual acts. When you watch the series, you experience it just a little bit more. And then I read up on him as well, just to make sure that the series was trying to do things accurately. And yeah, you get to that scene at the end. As you have now, like the subtitle of the show says, I mean, this is a monster. They have shown him to be a monster. The things he did were monstrous.
00:14:18
Speaker
And then you get to the scene in prison where he knows he deserves to die. It's clear. He knew that what he did, nobody else was capable of doing. And there's a scene with the priest, and I gotta say Netflix, I have rarely seen such a presentation of the gospel that's so clear.
00:14:38
Speaker
that's so accurate about Jesus and God's grace and exactly what the cross and forgiveness, what that can mean for an individual, no matter what they've done, no matter what baggage they have. It's so beautiful and it's so clear. And then we're left with the idea, and this is the understanding that he gave his heart to Christ. We would say he converted. He became a Christian. He became a believer. And then we have to ask,
00:15:08
Speaker
is God's mercy so great that maybe the most evil person in my lifetime that I can imagine, Jeffrey Dahmer, is in heaven. And that God has received his son back and loves his son and sees Jeffrey Dahmer the same way that I see my kids. As a pastor, I know that's what I preach every single week. And as a human, that's when we have to wrestle with, are we gonna be
00:15:36
Speaker
offended by mercy. That's what the Jonah series was. That's why I did the research. I haven't had it in my dreams. So so far, it hasn't done too much damage to me, Jill, but you wonder about that sometimes. You know, like when you're a kid and you watch a scary movie and you have nightmares, like, I haven't had that my dreams. And I think that's good. Maybe God's even protected my heart a little bit just to make sure, hey, you know, let let my boy sleep well, and God's taking care of me. But

Is Christianity's Forgiveness Fair?

00:16:05
Speaker
For any of you that have watched it, hey, wrestle with that scene. Wrestle with the whole thing. I think we all need to wrestle. You used the word sin right at the beginning. Let's wrestle with the sin and the brokenness that is in humanity and what humanity is capable of. Do you think, as you said, and again, I have not watched it, that you saw this beautiful representation of the gospel and I'm sitting here thinking,
00:16:34
Speaker
how wonderful could it be for someone who's not a believer or, you know, maybe they're just trying to figure it all out, is convicted by that and comes to church, opens a Bible, reaches out to a pastor, reaches out to a person who is walking in their faith. How great is that? But then on the flip side, I'm wondering, there has to be people that are go,
00:17:02
Speaker
that are saying something bad about it, like, oh, this is, do you know what I mean? Like, I love, and I think people that have been listening to this podcast over time know that I want to see the good in all. I want good. I want love. I hope anyone that saw that part is like, yes, I'm ready. I'm ready to learn. I'm ready to talk to my pastor. I'm ready to go find a pastor. I'm ready to find a church. It's the people that I'm,
00:17:32
Speaker
I can't control that are gonna give God a bad name because of that. That's hard too, if that makes sense. It does. I actually, that's a serious thing for people who are on the fence about faith. That's a serious thing for them to wrestle with. Because yeah, you see that and you're like, wait, if that's really what Christianity is all about, is that when you put your faith in Christ,
00:17:59
Speaker
all of your baggage is just washed away. That's not fair. And you know what, they're right. It's not fair. A monster like that could be forgiven so much. The only thing I would challenge with that is we all have to look in the mirror and really examine ourselves. What about me? What do I deserve? And when I,
00:18:27
Speaker
When I look back at all my baggage, past, present, and the stuff that's gonna be in the future, there comes a point where I think all of us have to admit, you know what, I don't deserve heaven. I have not been the neighbor I need to be. I try to be. I haven't always really tried to be. I think there's been times in my life where I deliberately tried to do wrong, but I mean, I try to be loving and kind.
00:18:54
Speaker
I think this is maybe, this is the great thing about that scene. The priest didn't look at Jeffrey in the show. And from what I understand from history is true. He didn't tell him that God saw the good in him. He told him God was the good for him. He was pointing him to Christ and Christ's goodness. Now, I think God
00:19:18
Speaker
can see everything that any of us could be. Yeah, God does see potential in us. God sees his own image that he created us into, and he sees who you could be. But even if you had never done anything good, and there was no good in you at all, God became the good for him. And that's the gospel.
00:19:43
Speaker
You know, it's not just, I look at Jill and I say, Jill, you're a pretty good person. I see the pretty good in you. And I know you have your faults. No, it's saying, Jill, no matter what you've done, no matter how much good or bad, it doesn't matter. Christ loves you. Christ has done this for you. I'm gonna value you the way that Christ valued you. That's, man, that's good news.
00:20:10
Speaker
You were talking about your wife and your kids, but especially your wife saying, I do not want to watch that. I don't want to watch any more evil. And I was like, yes, again, I haven't watched that. I also started thinking about and I wrote this down because.
00:20:29
Speaker
The latest, well, right after, I mean, it depends on when you, I get to get to things late because of my two kids. So sometimes something comes out and I'm like, what, when did that come out? But on Peacock, the Casey Anthony story. And a lot of people have been watching that and they're like, I get evil. Now that I have kids, I cannot believe this. And so I wrote down after you mentioned that about your wife, wait a minute.
00:20:58
Speaker
Should we be watching these things so that we can have a better understanding and try to help be the people that Jesus wants us to be? Which is, can you tell I'm psyched? It's so hard to say that because
00:21:19
Speaker
I, again, I haven't watched it, your wife hasn't watched it, but maybe that's what we have to do. Do we have to educate ourselves and put ourselves into these situations to understand?

True Crime: Understanding Evil or Danger?

00:21:30
Speaker
Maybe some of this. I don't think for everybody. Okay. I don't think for everybody. Cause I think, I think everybody's heart, you have to know what your heart can handle. Yeah. Like I know, I know mine. I would, I would be a broken mess all the time. Not everybody can be a social worker.
00:21:47
Speaker
It takes special people to be a social worker because sometimes you have to walk through some serious mud that's in people's lives. And not everybody can be a police officer because you see some horrific things. I have a cousin who's a police officer. He's wonderful. And when we get together, let's say Thanksgiving or something in the past,
00:22:11
Speaker
And I'll say, how's your heart right now? And he goes, I'm glad you asked. Because he's got stuff to say. And they have a chaplain that meets with their department and everything. He's in the Austin area. But he'll say, I'm glad you asked. He goes, I don't have anybody to talk to this stuff about. I'm like, all right, go ahead. Shoot. Give it all to me. Let me know. And he saw this. And he saw this. And then just last night, he's tired today because all the things you would expect him to say,
00:22:42
Speaker
you know, all the things you would expect him to say. And he sees that. And so what I, what I told him is you, you have to take care of your heart. You have to know that if your cup's been filled with this much muck this week, you need to refill it with this much good.
00:23:01
Speaker
and it's super important to do. You gotta get it off your chest, but you also have to replace it with a certain amount. And so like in his case, I wouldn't probably recommend in that given week when stuff's been real tough, like maybe this isn't the time to watch CSI. Maybe this isn't the time to, you know, whatever your vice of choice is, maybe this is a time to watch Elf, something funny, something good, or like who you're gonna surround yourself with.
00:23:30
Speaker
Maybe you need to surround yourself with people who build you up, who lift you up. So yeah, no, I, I don't think everybody needs to be exposed to everything. I don't think everybody, everybody should. I think it's not healthy for everybody. Um, but there do need to be leaders in our community and our families who, um, understand the ways of the world. There has to be somebody who knows when you need a house alarm.
00:23:57
Speaker
I want to go back to the beginning of this conversation. And when I said that I... Oh, by the way, you talked about Casey Anthony. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Did you watch the show or no? No, I don't. I mean, there's this intrigue that I kind of do because I really remember that case strongly. But then there's this part of me that does it.
00:24:22
Speaker
So I used to drive daily by right down the street. So by the place where she was, the mental health facility where she was gonna spend the rest of her life. I used to drive by daily for five years and every morning I would say a prayer for her. I would drive by and it was right there. So all I had, I mean, the sidewalk was next to my car, right? And then there was the place.
00:24:52
Speaker
And I would say a prayer for every day. And I would say, God, everybody else in the world sees the worst person in the world. God do do something in her. I didn't even know what to pray for specifically. I would pray for every day. And my kids were in
00:25:15
Speaker
age three up to age 10. Yeah, they were little. Yeah. So, but in a way, I was setting myself up for the day because, you know, I was going to get into my office and I was gonna have to deal with families that were struggling with stuff and individuals that were doing with stuff and, and a kid that was in jail for something, you know, I was going to have to interact with all these people and I was going to have to be, um, um, I was going to have to bring God's grace to them. So,
00:25:42
Speaker
why not bring it to her? And nobody drives down that street and sees that building and doesn't think about her. There's a bunch of other people in there too who were going through their own struggles or had their own mistakes, of course. And you drive by that, it's like, oh, that's a place where Casey is. Well, I'll let you know if I watch it. You let me know if you watch it. In one of my questions about evil people,
00:26:09
Speaker
I remember in the membership class, referring back to the beginning of this conversation, I remember saying it out loud, you know, I just don't understand. I don't understand. And the way she put it is you don't have to understand. It is between God and the person. Only God knows what's on your heart, what's in your heart.
00:26:39
Speaker
what you are. And that did hit me because I thought to myself, well, yeah, that's all about judging. Nobody knows except for him. And so something that you and I have talked about, because that hit me. But then when you and I started talking about putting ourselves
00:27:06
Speaker
Not in God's shoes, not that, but as a father, as a mother, and our children. I'm not gonna abandon my child when they do something wrong. And that was another pivotal moment for me. Like, that's me and God, but you and God. He's not abandoning us.
00:27:33
Speaker
I want to say just a few weeks after I had first watched the Dahmer show, I saw that Jeffrey Dahmer's dad was going to be on Dr. Phil. And I don't usually watch Dr. Phil, but I got home early one day. I had to pick up my son from school. And so I got to leave work a little earlier that day. And I saw that Dr. Phil was on and sure enough, it was one of those episodes. So I got to watch like the second half of it.
00:28:00
Speaker
And it was amazing. Cause there was a couple of victims who were on the show being interviewed with another psychologist and Dr. Phil. And then Jeffrey's dad came on and he asked them to forgive him or was going to in the next episode was going to ask them to forgive his son. And I guess what I kind of saw from that is, you know,

Parental vs. Divine Forgiveness

00:28:31
Speaker
You know, for me, once again, like I'll say, did Jeffrey Dahmer really convert? Well, I don't know. I wasn't there. I'm not him. I wasn't that priest who was even there and I'm not God. So I can't even judge any of that. But from his dad's point of view, he believed he had. And from his dad's point of view, I don't even know if he just
00:28:59
Speaker
wanted them to even have a single kind thought about his son, or maybe he just wanted that for them. You know, because they say like, when you forgive somebody, you've really just forgiven yourself. The one who gets healed is you. Because somebody might not receive that forgiveness. Oh, I don't care if you forgive me. Yeah, but at least I got that off my chest. I just, I don't wanna, I don't wanna keep your pain in my heart anymore.
00:29:29
Speaker
I don't want to keep my anger for you and my heart anymore. And that's hard. It's hard. It's really healing. And the one who really gets healed is you. And maybe that's what his father was trying to say. Again, I don't know him. I don't, I don't know any of those people, but I think you're right. Like as a parent, you look at your kids and you're like, I know they're going to make mistakes. Yeah, they will. Like you and I did. Yeah. What if they make worse mistakes?
00:29:59
Speaker
What if they make the very worst of mistakes? Shouldn't a mother at the end of the day be the one person who won't just give up on them or maybe a father?
00:30:16
Speaker
I'd like to believe that's exactly what God is like. I certainly think that's what the Bible's saying. I certainly think that's what Jesus believed. And it's certainly what I tried to show to others. God is exactly like that and a little bit better. Cause I'm a dad and I still have my thoughts, but you know, like I understand God's love to a point. Like I have it to a point. Yeah, but if God feels anything for his children,
00:30:45
Speaker
the way you feel about your, your, your daughters, man, we're in good shape. And yet I know it's abundantly more. Well, as we wrap up this conversation, offended by mercy and sin, any last minute,
00:31:05
Speaker
statements, advice, words of wisdom you would like to give me and the listener. Okay, so you had shared a statement with me before. Is all sin really the same?

Sin's Disruptive Nature

00:31:20
Speaker
I don't like that phrase. Okay. I don't like that phrase because I don't think that's the way to look at it. I think the way to look at it is we are all trapped in sin. We are all in a state of sin.
00:31:36
Speaker
and we all commit sin. Obviously, if I punch you, that's way worse than if I play a joke on you. If you murder somebody, that's way worse than slapping somebody. The Bible isn't saying all sin is the same. It's saying that we're all trapped in the same state of sin.
00:32:03
Speaker
and that all of it separates us from God and it separates us from each other. And so whether somebody slapped you or punched you, it's mean to you, it all separates you from them. It all violates the way that God
00:32:23
Speaker
the way that God has really set up this world. It's a broken world now. We're supposed to live in harmony with each other and with God. That's why in the Hebrew Bible, one of the key words is shalom, peace. Peace, harmony. Things are supposed to be in harmony and they're not. They're in disharmony. We're all playing notes and they're all out of tune, but they could be a beautiful, beautiful song.
00:32:52
Speaker
When I want people to think about sin, I want you to start at the beginning when things were good. Adam and Eve were naked and eating mangoes and they were happy and their marriage was perfect. And then it wasn't. And then suddenly they're shameful. They're ashamed of each other. They're ashamed of themselves. And the world goes in disarray and that's where we find ourselves. The good news is what started with the tree will end with the tree.
00:33:21
Speaker
Maybe I'm talking about the tree of life at the end of Revelation. Right now, we just live between the trees. And in the eternal history of our existence, that will seem like a blip on the screen. This hardness and life and brokenness that we all live in right now, let's say we live to 80, Joe, that will seem like a blip on the screen for the eternal existence we'll have. And that should give us some hope.
00:33:52
Speaker
As always, thank you for your expertise. I know you'll be back and we'll just keep on hoping. Hey, God bless everybody. We're praying for you.