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[MUSIC]
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This is Undaunted Life, a man's podcast.
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I'm your host Kyle Thompson, let's get into it.
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All right, guys, we got a special guest on the podcast today.
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His name is Doug O'Donnell.
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So he is the Senior Vice President of Bible Editorial at Crossway.
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And additionally, he is the author and editor of over a dozen books,
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including The Beginning and The End of Wisdom, The Pastors' Book,
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The Song of Solomon and Matthew in the Preaching the Word commentary series,
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and Psalms in the Knowing the Bible series.
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So he's also contributed to Song of Solomon and Job, to the ESV expository commentary.
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He received his PhD from the University of Aberdeen.
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And we get into his education and kind of how he got into biblical
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and theological writings and those types of things.
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But the reason why I had him on the show is because I had a book
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that I wanted to talk to where basically, or talk about,
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I want to talk to the author about how did we get the Bible in modernity?
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How did the Bible get to us?
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Because there's a lot of confusion, a lot of cultural ideas about how the Bible
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was passed down and how it was translated and how the canon was decided on.
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And most of it is just flat out stupid and wrong.
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And so I wanted to kind of clear the air on some of that.
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So at the beginning part of the interview, probably the first half hour or so,
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we talk about his educational background, how he got into the writings
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that he has, we get into some of the things that Crossway produces
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because they've just produced this brand new men's study Bible.
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It's absolutely fantastic.
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The ESV men's study Bible.
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So we spend some time talking about that.
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How does Crossway decide on what types of content they're going to do
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and how they discuss theological disagreements?
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But then we got into the Bible itself.
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We talked about how it was transmitted via multiple translations over multiple millennia
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and not just centuries, but millennia.
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How can we trust the real Bible?
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How can we trust its inerrancy?
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We talk about inerrancy quite a bit.
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We talk about different translations.
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You know, he's had a lot to do with the ESV translation.
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So how do we get the English standard version of the Bible?
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But then we talk about men and how men don't read their Bible.
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So, you know, why make a mint study Bible and men don't really read their Bible?
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The difference between kind of studying your Bible and just reading it.
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Some cool things that Crossway has coming up down the road, some stuff for kiddos
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and just for other people that are looking to get a deeper level of understanding
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of what's going on in the Bible and the different scriptures and the commentaries and everything.
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Guys, I really, really enjoyed my time with Doug.
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We're looking to do some more things with Crossway that I hope to announce before too long.
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But without further ado, let's get into it.
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Doug O'Donnell, welcome to Adon to the Life of Man's podcast.
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Kyle, it's great to be with you.
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Now, as I told you off air, I'm excited to talk to you for multiple reasons today.
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Not the least of which is because you're surrounded by books.
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And I think you wrote most of the ones behind you if we can go there.
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But let's get a nice, soft place to land.
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Let's talk a little bit about your educational background and then kind of how that's led
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into the work you're doing now because my understanding is you've authored a lot of
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books about the Bible, theological books, commentary books.
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You've been mentioned off air that you did your dissertation in the book of Matthew,
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which is what we're going through in the forging table right now.
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So how did you get interested in all of this?
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How did your education take you that direction?
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Go wherever you want to go with that.
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Okay, great.
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Yeah, I was converted to Christ when I was 19 and felt a calling to ministry.
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I didn't know exactly what that meant, but knew I wanted to learn the Bible and eventually
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teach the Bible to others.
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So I talked to the one Christian friend I knew we played basketball together.
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And he told me about two colleges in my area.
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One of them was Wheaton College.
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I lived about 20 minutes from Wheaton College.
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Never heard of it.
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And so I decided to go to Wheaton College and study Bible theology for undergrad, loved
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it, stayed another two years, did some grad school here at Wheaton as well.
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And then I went to did a church plant in Chicago and during that time got married, started
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to go to seminary up at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, did an MA in church history.
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And then there was sort of a season of just pastoral ministry, 17 years as a pastor, three
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years overseas as a professor in Australia.
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And while I was in Australia, they really wanted me to get a PhD.
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And so some of my expertise was Old Testament wisdom literature.
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And so I thought I would do it in that, but they said we really need a guy to do gospels
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or New Testament in particular, but we have, they had a guy who did Paul.
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So I had written on Matthew, I was interested in the gospels and obviously Jesus.
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So I ended up doing a PhD at University of Aberdeen in Scotland.
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And during that time, moved back to the States for pastoral calling and then eventually about
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three years ago, moved into publishing full time with with Crossway.
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And with Crossway, I work on, Crossway is kind of divided the book side and the Bible
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side.
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And my job principally is kind of deciding what Bible projects we should do or working
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with a team who decides those sort of things.
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And then once it's decided like we're going to do a men's study Bible, you know, who should
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be the general editor, if there's a general editor, who should contribute to it.
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And then I work with those people and with my editorial team and putting together the
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content creation for that, and then I kind of come in if there's any theological issues
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that need to be solved that this contributor said this, the general editor says this and
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they're, they're sort of fighting over it.
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And then I get to call, I get to give the final shot call on what what we should do as
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a publisher.
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Okay.
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So you're the shot caller.
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I love that.
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You're like the mafia Don in the corner of the, the Italian restaurant.
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I love it.
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So a few questions came out of that there, Doug.
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So you said you were in Australia now, were you pastoring while you were in Australia
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or were you just studying?
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Sorry.
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I was, I was teaching.
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I was a professor at a seminary.
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Okay.
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And I was, I was preaching at my local church quite often in other churches.
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Okay.
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So talk to me a little bit about that because obviously the majority of our audience is
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here in America, but we do have an audience in Australia as well.
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It's a very post Christian environment, just like our audience in the UK, just like our
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audience in Canada, but Australia is kind of a unique duck that it's, it's very, very
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post Christian.
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Again, a lot of people like to make, you know, make fun of the fact that it was, you know,
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United Kingdom's penal colony and they basically sent all the crazy people there.
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And then, you know, everything got mixed up with all the animals and the heat.
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And now everyone there is basically insane, but I've spent time there and I loved the
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people there, but it is, it is a godless people group and a, and really it's, it's a place
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where the gospel is needed desperately.
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So how did you experience Australia when you were there, when the majority of the people
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there think that the Bible is nonsense and that God doesn't exist?
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Yeah, great question.
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Yeah, it definitely was the most secular culture I've lived in.
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I, so moved with my wife 24 years and four of our five kids.
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And I'll kind of answer the question through, through the kids eyes.
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It was interesting.
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But in the city, there weren't options for Christian education.
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And so they went to the public, the older two went to the public high school.
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And of this huge public high school, there was one other Christian that, that they knew
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of.
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I'm sure there were more, but, and so that gives you a sense of, you know, how, how secular
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it is and to be an evangelical Christian or a Christian of any sort of strike is an unusual
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thing.
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And in Australia, we were in Brisbane, the city of Brisbane, which is the third biggest
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city.
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It's kind of like Chicago, where I'm from.
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If you're from Australia, you don't know exactly where Chicago is.
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Yeah.
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If you're from America, you don't know exactly where Brisbane is, but it's kind of Melbourne,
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Sydney, and then Brisbane is up top, not all the way up top, but kind of in the middle.
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And it's the best weather in the world, by the way.
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And when my students would complain, I would, I would tell them, you know, you need to move
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for a, for a winter.
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No kidding.
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But yeah, it was tough navigating and just the church having little worldly power.
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It was a minority group, but yet in that, you know, the second Corinthians, in that weakness,
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there was, there was God's strength.
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So it was wonderful to worship with Christians who, we were all in it together.
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You know, we all knew that we were the minority.
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And being in a city too, there were a number of Christians from other places around the
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world, Indonesia in particular, heavy Muslim country, but right above Australia.
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So that's why there were a lot of Indonesians in the city.
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But a wonderful sort of cultural mix of people and of worship.
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And, and I think it actually like strengthened, I'll speak for myself, my faith to have to
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articulate what I believe, why I believe, why I'm a Christian.
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I remember the very first day we, we got to Australia, we went to what's called the Gold
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Coast, which beautiful beaches, they kind of call it the Las Vegas is because there's
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a lot of gambling and stuff.
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But yeah, I didn't do any gambling, but I did go to the beach, which is beautiful.
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And so first day we're there, we're from Chicago.
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So there's no ocean around us.
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It is the middle of the winter for them.
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And we jump in the water and it's the warmest water we've ever experienced in our lives.
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And the lifeguard comes up to me is like, no one else in the water.
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And he's like, you know, where you guys from, what are you doing?
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And so I sort of explained where I'm from, Chicago, why this is warm to us.
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And then he says, you know, what do you do?
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Why you here?
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And I say, I, I work for Queensland theological college.
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And his question to me is, what is theological mean?
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Yeah.
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I knew at that moment, like, okay, I'm in a different world, not that there wouldn't
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be Americans that don't know what theology or theological means.
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But it just, it was a wake up call that, um, this person knew nothing of God.
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I think I assume, you know, um, and certainly nothing of the study of God.
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I think that's interesting as well, because you don't really see that in America.
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And I live in Oklahoma.
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So it's kind of hard because, you know, you, you trip and fall and you will land on two
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churches somehow.
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That's how basically it is in Oklahoma.
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But when you go to these other places, my wife and I have traveled quite a bit.
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And well, I'll put it this way.
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Um, there was a hockey team that started at our university while we were there.
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And so they had a bunch of players from Michigan and Chicago and, uh, one guy was from Canada.
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And they were kind of hanging around and my wife was an RA at the time in the residence
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hall where all these players were living.
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And so they're in a bunch of different rooms, just kind of hanging out.
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And he sees her Bible like on her desk, this Canadian guy, and he goes, Oh my gosh, is
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that a Bible?
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And she's like, yeah, he's like, I've never seen one of those before.
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Would you mind if I touched it?
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And it's like, this was a 18 year old Canadian kid, French Canadian kid who just had no concept
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of the Bible, much less the gospel.
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So it provides, you know, ample training ground for you to, to make sure that you can answer
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skeptics questions, but also to understand that not everybody has the exact same life
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that you do.
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Um, I also want to go back to something you said, Doug, about how you decide what projects
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crossway will work on on the Bible side.
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Because I think everyone gets the divide that, okay, here's the nonfiction books on the book
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side that can kind of help.
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They're just like, they could be entertaining or educational, but then the Bible side, that's
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kind of like the serious side of the house, which is not to denigrate the people on the
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nonfiction side at all.
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But that's, that's of the utmost importance and it requires the utmost amount of care.
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So can you take me through, I guess, the matrix of decision making where you would say, Hey,
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we're not going to do this project, but we're going to do this one instead.
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Yeah, typically the, where are the, I would say the first thing is like, where is the idea
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coming from?
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And so most of the, I've only been here three years at most of the ideas in the Bible side
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come from myself or our chief publishing officer, Don Jones, and we're offices are right next
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to each other.
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So we, we talk about different ideas, hey, what do you think about if we did this?
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And it could be something like, we should republish the gospel of John and do a new cover, you
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know, it could be that sort of simple, which is an easy decision versus, I would say like
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what sort of gaps do we have that we want to fill?
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This is more like with study Bibles, but it could be other things as well.
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So we realized we don't have, we don't have a hardly anything for teenagers.
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And so we just came out with a teen study Bible.
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We don't have a lot of resources for children on the Bible side.
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We do on the book side, we have more on the book side.
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And so we worked on a curriculum, biggest story, curriculum for children.
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And that was a mutual effort with sort of everybody in house, but so what sort of gaps
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I'm working on a children's Bible right now.
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And I'm writing, I'm writing most of the content along with a few others here.
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So how we sort of decide, I would say like, what, what's the need?
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If there is a need, or what do we think would be really helpful for the church?
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And that can be, that could be children's curriculum, that could also be like I'm working
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on a commentary in the Greek text of the New Testament with Tyndale House Cambridge.
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And so we would get together like, who do we think are the six best Greek scholars in
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the world that we can get to work with as a cross way?
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And then I would write up a proposal, and then it goes through three stages at our Bible
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publishing meeting.
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Stage one is just sort of a memo, one page, here's the idea, here's potential contributors
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or editors, then stage two kind of expands.
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Stage three eventually would, would have sample content, it would have solidified who's, who's
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going to be working on it.
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So that's another thing too is for us, it's really important like, what's, what's the
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idea?
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Is it a good idea?
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Like doing a commentary in the Greek text, we think it's a good idea.
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And we've got to figure out the finances of it, can we pull it off, but also the contributors.
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So who's going to actually work on it?
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So if we feel like these are the right people working on a project, we get really excited
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about it.
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And so those kind of factors, those sort of three factors coming together, is the idea
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good?
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Is it in line with our vision as a publisher?
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So we're formed evangelical Christian Protestant.
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And do we have the right people working on it?
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And do we have, and we always ask this thing, do you have the best people in the world?
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That's, you know, we're ambitious, but it's kind of like, we just did a chronological
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Bible.
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We felt like we got the best scholar in the world to work on that.
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So if we can get that, that's important then finances, you know, does it actually work
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to, to print this thing, or is it going to shoot us in the foot?
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So those are the stages.
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And then we, the group of executives votes on the project.
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And if it gets a thumbs up, then my team in Bible editorial sort of takes over and then
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it goes, once the content is created, it goes to production and on we go.
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So I love that that you actually, because some people, you would ask them a question
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like that and they'd be like, Oh, I don't really know.
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I just kind of like, put a bunch of stuff on the board and throw a dart at it.
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So I'm glad there is an actual process, but you did mention earlier, Doug, that you're
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kind of the final say on if there is a theological debate.
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So take me through that, because in a small way on the forging table, which I told you
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about is, you know, we have four laymen around the table.
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It's a different mix every time, like we have theological debates, but none of us have theology
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degrees.
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We're not professional Christians.
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We're not pastors.
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Like we didn't go to Bible college.
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And so we're doing our best with, you know, the ammo that we have in our current weaponry.
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So for you guys, I guess, what makes you the final say, why are you like, you know, the,
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you have the biggest gavel that you can throw down, like, how do those theological debates
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take place inside of Crossway?
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Yeah, you know, I mentioned my PhD.
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So my PhD is in biblical studies in the gospel Matthew, as I said earlier, but so I have the
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educational chops to kind of that's part of my role.
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Now I don't do that on my own, typically, like I will ask my editorial team, which are
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also, you know, educated people, their thoughts on certain things.
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I'll also, I'll give you one example so you can send it, like what kind of thing you're
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talking about.
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So we're doing a commentary series.
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Someone contributed to Ecclesiastes, and he argued that Solomon was not the author.
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So one of the general editors, three general editors, one of the general editors said no,
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it's got to be Solomon as the author.
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And so they kind of debated back and forth.
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And so it was kind of a stalemate, and so it came to me then, what are we going to do?
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And so I looked at the ESV study Bible, I consulted with an Old Testament expert, two
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Old Testament experts, and then made a decision that we would go with what the, we tend to
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go with what the contributor wants to do.
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And so I'll go with the contributor, but I want him to write a whole 'nother paragraph
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on why Solomon could be the author, so it's a little more balanced.
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And so those kind of decisions would come on my desk, but not often.
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But again, I do consult experts in like the specific thing I'm being asked to do.
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And sometimes on the book side, we've got a book coming out and there's a paragraph they
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want me to read just to make sure this sort of doesn't get the author in trouble or cross
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way in trouble.
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And those aren't like political things or even societal things.
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Those are just like Bible questions, you know, just Bible theology questions.
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Very good, it's a great privilege to be able to do that and, and wait at some point, you
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know, at some sense to one, it's good that as you mentioned earlier, Doug, that you're
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looking for gaps to fill.
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And one of the gaps that y'all actually filled this year was a men's study Bible that I'm
18:39
showing here on screen if you're watching this on YouTube or rumble.
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And so I appreciate you guys shooting this over to me.
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And I actually want to read the description of this on the side before I ask you about
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it because I love the description.
18:50
The ESV men's study Bible was created for men in all seasons of life who are serious
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about God's word to help them pursue a deeper transformational understanding of scripture.
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This ESV Bible features additional content written, especially for men, including daily
19:03
devotionals and articles for more than 100 acclaimed scholars and pastors, along with
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were robust Bible study notes to increase their understanding of scripture.
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Men will find encouraging resources to help them develop a deeper love for the Lord.
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So I absolutely love that, but here's the thing that I know in talking to people that
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have written books for multiple different Christian publishing houses and different
19:26
types of things is that men don't buy books, men don't read books, men men don't take in
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this type of content, which is why when you walk into your typical Christian bookstore,
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it seems like, you know, a women's march, you know, threw up on an elementary school because
19:40
like that's basically the crowd that they're going for, right?
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And so it's a little ballsy to put together a men's study Bible, knowing that there are
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a lot of men out there that just aren't serious about this.
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You might get them to read while at heart, but you know, it's been in whatever you're
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going to spend on a men's study Bible.
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Again, you know the importance of it.
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That's why I all decided to do it.
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I know the importance of it.
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That's why I desperately begged the men in my audience not to just read constantly, but
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to read the Bible.
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I take it so seriously that the reason we started the forging table was because last
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year, Doug, I read 54 books to prepare for interviews on my show.
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And I probably didn't read 54 chapters of the Bible.
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And over Christmas break, I was like, wait a minute, like there is a tremendous inequity
20:28
here.
20:29
So I know there's a lot of ways that you can take that.
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But let's talk about the men's study Bible.
20:33
Why do this knowing what we know about the men's market?
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Yeah, it's really interesting.
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I was in a meeting months ago now where just it was like sales report and the women's
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study Bible is always going to do better than men's study but of course, you know, that's
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the thing.
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I actually I thought like, oh, you know, what if Kyle asks you about what are the resources
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across what we have?
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So I went to our website and there's all these categories.
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And the last one is women, but there's none, none specifically for men.
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Of course not.
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Of course not.
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It's not surprising at all.
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It looks for men, but we don't have a category.
21:09
So it's interesting, you know, you're sort of preface to the question.
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I think yeah, we we like you, you know, the bit I know about your show is it's like you're
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appealing to men.
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We believe that male leadership in the church and the home is absolutely crucial to Christian
21:29
discipleship and to the evangelization of the world.
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And so why wouldn't we do a men's study Bible if that that's sort of our commitment?
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That's our value.
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And so we we tried to design it in a way that would be appealing to men.
21:41
I mean, you put the cover up there, but Peter Voth did the artwork and I just great.
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He's wonderful.
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Great.
21:49
I mean, if you've never seen his work, just type in Peter Voth V O T H and he is very
21:54
manly artwork to.
21:55
Yeah.
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I love it.
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No, I've followed him on Instagram for years.
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That way.
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And every he does a new design for the header of each book of the Bible, which is just beautiful.
22:06
I was just talking to someone saying, I was going to go do this interview.
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And I said, I love we should do a poster of all of his artwork.
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Oh, yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
22:16
Yeah.
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So, so beautiful and original.
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And anyway, and manly, like I said, so I think having the right artist to appeal and
22:23
the right color, you know, of the three that we have out there, but this kind of green
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with black and white and content as the specifically designed for men.
22:35
I mean, if he just did, there's tons of study notes at the bottom and those have been taken
22:39
from the ESV study Bible, which is extensive notes and they've just been short.
22:44
So it's a little bit easier.
22:45
But if you're like, you know, what is a Levitical priest, you can look down and be like, Oh,
22:49
that's, that's what it is, you know, and what is this, you know, this certain feast of tabernacles.
22:55
What is that?
22:56
You can look at it and find out the study notes, but things we've done.
23:00
I mean, you mentioned like hardly reading the Bible and reading all these other books.
23:03
So we've got a, you know, 365 day reading plan.
23:08
If you want to try to attempt to read the Bible through in a year, we've got a ton of devotions,
23:15
daily devotions, as well as just these reflections, almost 400 different reflections.
23:22
Unlike key, key issues, some are going to be just like they're explaining the section
23:25
of Scripture or that Psalm.
23:27
But others are specific to, to issues that men are going through or in particular, you
23:33
know, that issues that temptations that women can struggle with them too, but men tend to
23:37
struggle more with and things like that.
23:40
And then related to the home and work and things like this.
23:42
So, and then there's a ton of charts and diagrams and those have been designed also to be appealing
23:50
to men.
23:52
I like looking at charts and all that and there are plenty of those to keep your attention.
23:59
And there's a, there's a bunch of articles and maybe I can read some of the titles and
24:04
find the articles here.
24:06
Yeah, just that so some will be just like this would benefit any Christian, Brian Chappell
24:12
does the message of the Bible.
24:13
So if you're like, well, what's the Bible all about, there's a short article.
24:17
But then there's things like man's identity, communion with God, the gospel and daily life,
24:22
man's inner life, life in the local church.
24:25
I think that's an important one often meant, I think maybe they don't need the church,
24:30
they don't need a fellowship of other believers and calling man's work, singleness, marriage,
24:37
fathering, leadership, pornography and doubt.
24:40
So all of those articles which are found at the end, written by experts in those fields
24:46
on those important issues that men deal with, struggle with.
24:51
So I think we've put together something that would really help men if they're like, I just
24:57
need a Bible to start with, you know, like, where do I go?
25:01
I'm obviously biased, but this is, this is the place that I would start.
25:06
Well, Doug, what's funny about that is I have suggested y'all's ESV study Bible for years
25:12
to people like, Hey, if I can only buy one Bible, you know, what translation, which one?
25:16
And that's the one I always say.
25:18
And partially because the first one that I have is just the hardback one.
25:22
And I was like, Hey, if you drop it, you're not going to feel like, you know, your grandma's
25:25
going to get mad at you like it's, it's something that you can take really good care of.
25:29
But what I will say is what a lot of people tend to do, Doug, is they tend to patronize
25:35
men when they're trying to make men stuff.
25:38
So I've said a lot on my show before a lot of men's ministries out there, they're just
25:42
women's ministries for men.
25:44
So it's women's content that's been repackaged with different colors with wood or with steel
25:50
or with dirt.
25:51
And then it's like, this is our men's whatever, this is our men's event.
25:55
This is our men's commentary.
25:56
This is our men's Bible.
25:57
But the thing about it is, is like men, whether they're emotionally available or not, they
26:04
can kind of sense when something's deeply and authentic or when it's, you know, talking
26:08
down to them as if they're two or three.
26:10
And I don't feel like y'all done that.
26:12
Like this content's not kitschy, the contributors aren't kind of like softball Christian pastors.
26:18
These kind of squishy Christian pastors, these are serious dudes like Alistair Begg.
26:22
Like the dudes in my audience, like Alistair Begg is like the gangster of gangsters to
26:26
the guys in my audience.
26:27
And the fact that it's contributed to this as well as a big deal.
26:30
But talk to me a little bit more about the brevity of the commentary, because as I started
26:35
using it in my preparation for the forging table, I, you know, because I have the ESV
26:40
study Bible out.
26:41
I've got a MacArthur's commentary.
26:43
I've got the Moody commentary.
26:45
I've got the Reformation study Bible, and then I have this one, and it's like, it's
26:49
the most brief of all the study Bible commentaries.
26:53
Was that a specific reason, like you wanted to make it smaller, you wanted to be more
26:58
to the point, which is more indicative of a, of a male's attention span and focus?
27:02
What was kind of the reason for being more brief in the notes section?
27:06
Yeah, the reason why, well, part of the issue we always struggle with is sort of page count.
27:12
So you don't want too big of a bulky Bible, because then you won't carry it with you to
27:17
church, things like that, or even Bible study.
27:20
So I think that was, that was one concern.
27:23
We, we believe, I mean, the ESV study Bible is our best-selling Bible far and away.
27:28
And it's because the content is so rich, and that's been for, you know, 20 years.
27:31
So we thought, why not, you know, use that content, but just shorten it, both to, to make,
27:38
make the Bible not so bulky.
27:39
But also, you know, to be honest is like, we don't want people being intimidated.
27:45
And if you see, it's kind of like if you, you give someone a book and they're not used
27:49
to reading, and it has, you know, 20 footnotes at the bottom, or it's got thick footnotes.
27:56
It's just an intimidating thing, like not everyone's a scholar.
27:59
So it's, I think it's that same sort of visual is that we don't want too much going on on
28:04
the page.
28:05
We want just the stuff that is essential, or, or for most people, most Christians, especially
28:11
newer Christians, like, I don't know of any idea what that word means, and you can go
28:14
there, you can go to a glossary, it has all these nice, short definitions in the back.
28:19
So that was kind of the philosophy, you know, behind it, is to make it a, not too bulky,
28:27
and, you know, of all that is there, what do they really need that would be most beneficial
28:32
to them as they read?
28:34
I think that that is something that's very important as you get to this type of content.
28:38
I think the same way in my preparation for podcasts to where it's like, okay, if you
28:42
listen to me yammer on for an hour, you're not going to get that hour back.
28:45
And if you listen to it at two times speed, a half hour of your life, you're never going
28:48
to get back.
28:49
So I really try to make sure that everything I say is pertinent and usable to somebody as
28:55
they kind of move through.
28:57
You did mention a comment, and I want to talk about this, and then I want to talk a little
29:00
bit more about the Bible itself and how we got it, because that's kind of the meat of
29:03
why I wanted to have you on today.
29:05
But you mentioned men in the church, and men having this idea that, you know, church is
29:09
not for them.
29:10
Yet a few people come out in the 2000s, and they were Christian type people, and, you
29:15
know, LaCray comes to mind where he released these albums about church clothes and how
29:19
he's like, hey, he's going to be doing church wherever he wants to do church.
29:22
He doesn't necessarily need a local community to do that.
29:26
I think he's since repudiated that ideology, if I remember correctly.
29:30
But most churches might as well have neon signs outside saying men, this is not for you,
29:37
because when you walk in the doors, all of the volunteer opportunities are more feminine,
29:43
more, you know, people focus as opposed to things focused and in general, men are more
29:47
interested in things than they are in people.
29:50
The sermon content is kind of a feminine or Ted talky or just kind of like somewhat useless.
29:56
It doesn't call a man up.
29:58
The music that's being sung, the lyrical content can tend to be homo erotic or at least just
30:04
not interesting.
30:06
It's sung in a key that most men aren't comfortable singing in or can't sing in.
30:10
And so part of the problem is men, I'm going to always put the onus on the man because
30:15
they're the individual that has to make the decision whether or not to be involved.
30:18
The man churches, as I've seen, have just not done a very good job of telling the men,
30:23
Hey guys, not only are you welcome here, we desperately need you.
30:28
We can't disciple your children without discipling you.
30:32
We can't catechize your entire family without getting you on board.
30:35
We can't push back the darkness and culture without you.
30:39
So talk to me a little bit more about that because to a degree, Doug, and you did it
30:42
with the men's study Bible, y'all have a hand in equipping these churches to be able
30:47
to tell these men, you're not just, you're not just welcome, but you're necessary.
30:51
Yeah, a great question and good observations.
30:55
I think, I mean, I'll just personal sort of reflection first, I think I had all the right
31:04
sort of men and mentors in my life and just sort of, it just in God's providence, that's
31:08
what I had.
31:09
So it was, it was when it came to like sexual ethics, here's what a godly man does when
31:14
it came to Bible study, here's what a godly man should do.
31:19
When it came to the local church, as you've been talking about, I remember my college
31:25
pastor just talking about, I don't know if it was a sermon or an aside, just like how
31:30
important it is to go to church, be a part of church in your college years and find a
31:37
particular local church.
31:38
This should be like your priority as you get, whether it's a college or you move from one
31:43
job to another and find a local church, be involved in that local church and he talked
31:50
about things like tithing, giving money and I was like, I was a young guy, I hardly had
31:55
any money, I was paying for my own education and I started tithing, you know, 18,000 a year,
32:02
I was making, you know, so hardly anything is going to really help the church and yet
32:06
I've never stopped since then and I think that's like those kind of habits and I think
32:12
one of my mentors was Kent Hughes, who you may have heard, disciplines of a godly man,
32:17
which crossway publishes one of our best-selling books, is I learn from Kent, you know, what
32:24
does it mean to be a godly man in these sort of areas?
32:29
Local church and giving your time, learning how to read the Bible, teach the Bible, those
32:35
are things, not someone like who's just an expert Bible guy needs to do, but every Christian
32:40
man needs to know how do I read the Bible, how do I teach it if I've got a family or
32:46
even, you know, you're talking about the group of guys getting together and doing a Bible
32:50
study and you're taping it so it's helping other people and if you keep doing that you'll
32:55
just get better and better with your knowledge of the Bible and how to explain it to other
33:00
people and so I think men, I'm saddened that like not every man has the experience I had
33:08
of like godly mentors, my father wasn't in the picture of my life, but not as a Christian
33:16
mentor in my life and so to me the local church, you know, Jesus, who's my mother and my brother
33:23
and my sister, you know, it's like those who do God's will, it's like the church became
33:26
my mother and my father and my brother and my sister and I think every man needs that,
33:31
they need someone to mentor them in the faith and they could initially be like, yeah, listening
33:36
to a good show or listening to Elsterebeg preach, like getting some sense of that thing,
33:40
but deep down there's something more they need and that's community with other men and
33:45
to reinforce what the Bible teaches on, you know, what's my identity in Christ, how do
33:52
I treat women, how do I work hard under the Lord and all these sort of issues that we're
33:59
dealing with.
34:00
So, yeah, I do wish the church did a better job of raising up enough mentors that any
34:06
guy walked through through the doors, there would be plenty of older guys who could take
34:11
on those roles.
34:12
I remember when I first became a Christian, I had went to this big church and someone
34:17
came up to me afterwards and just said, hey, you, you want to start reading the Bible together.
34:22
He was like, he was 40.
34:24
I was 20 something and I thought though I've had those experiences in my life that have
34:29
just equipped me to walk as a Christian, walk as a Christian man, know how to relate better
34:37
to my wife and how to discipline and teach my children.
34:42
So it's a huge need and I mean, the men's Bible studies, you know, small part of that,
34:46
but I actually think the local church is the bigger part of it and then other resources
34:50
beyond that, you know, podcasts, et cetera that equip men for walking in a manner worthy
34:56
of the gospel.
34:57
And that's why, you know, in Dante life, we're here to equip men to push back darkness.
35:01
And we do that by providing content that forges, spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
35:06
So that's part of the thing about the forging table is to have men around the country send
35:10
me messages like, Hey, I just started a forging table like because I'm so inspired by what
35:14
you guys are doing.
35:15
And it's not because we're so smart, it's not because we're so talented.
35:19
It's just that, Hey, we were going to do this anyway.
35:22
Why don't we just put some microphones in front of our faces and hit hit record on on video
35:26
to kind of give guys like, Hey, if you were going to do it, here's the way that you could
35:30
make this happen.
35:32
And that's why I tell guys, like when it's their first time coming on the forging table,
35:35
like, Hey, you're not performing here, like you're not presenting.
35:40
We're doing Bible study, like, so, you know, get out of your own head, yes, you have,
35:44
you know, headphones on, yes, you've got a microphone in your face, but we're just doing
35:48
Bible study.
35:49
And I think that's why it's been accepted so well.
35:51
But we've talked about all that, but the main reason why I want to have you on is just
35:54
talking about the Holy Bible in and of itself, because there are a lot of misnomers about
36:00
the Bible, even within Christendom, that most people don't really understand because they've
36:05
never taken the time to study it or whatever.
36:08
But the first one would be transmission, the transmission of the via the Bible via multiple
36:13
languages, obviously from the Aramaic and Hebrew and Greek through to German through
36:18
to English, but then within English, you've got people that are holding the ESV Bible
36:22
in one hand, and then they've got the message Bible in the other.
36:25
And it's like, what in the world is this thing?
36:27
And so it's like, but there's a difference there between a translation and an interpretation
36:31
of Scripture.
36:32
But overall, you have these big cultural characters like Joe Rogan, who is so deeply ignorant
36:38
on the Bible, but he'll say things like he'll just wave his hand over the Bible and be
36:42
like, Oh, yeah, the Council of Nicaea just decided what was going to be, you know, the
36:47
biblical canon and they made a bunch of stuff up and you can't even trust the translations
36:52
because it's been translated so many times over thousands of years and how could we possibly
36:56
know what it was originally supposed to be.
36:58
So I guess the generic way to answer this and I'll let you go wherever you want to go,
37:02
is how can we in 2023 trust that we have the real Bible that it was transmitted to us properly?
37:10
Yeah, great question.
37:12
Big question.
37:13
Yeah, of course.
37:14
Yeah.
37:15
I'll try to do this quickly and we can, you can play off things I say and ask me questions.
37:22
Um, within the Bible itself, we have, uh, we have record of the transmission of like what
37:29
God is saying.
37:30
So for example, you think of, um, God speaks to Moses on Mount Sinai, the Ten Commandments,
37:37
X is 20, and he tells him to record it on stone.
37:40
And so that's sort of a first example of, um, God has decided to reveal to humankind something
37:49
of himself, of his plan for the world.
37:52
Um, and Moses writes it down.
37:54
We know at the end of Moses's life, uh, he, you know, he traditionally is the author of
38:01
the first five books of the Bible and someone must have wrote the end of Deuteronomy because
38:05
it records his death, um, but Moses recorded those first five books, um, and that shows
38:13
you just sort of the value of the Jewish people and Christians as well.
38:17
We, uh, we've often historically said we're people of the book.
38:20
Um, and so those are the first five books, the Pentateuch, the five, the five books.
38:26
And then from there, we have other record within scripture itself of recording.
38:31
So Jeremiah is told to write down what he, um, what God says to him.
38:37
And then it's, it's a, it's burned at some point.
38:40
And then he has to write it down again.
38:42
And so those are just like glimpses of the process of what happened.
38:47
The same thing would have happened, you know, Luke tells us in the beginning of his gospel
38:50
that he's going to write an orderly account of, of the life of Jesus basically.
38:56
And then he goes through, um, the, like all the gospel, all the evangelists or the four
39:02
gospel writers would have done writing a record of Jesus' life that focused specifically
39:07
on the end of his life and his resurrection.
39:09
Um, and then acts as a book of history and a sense of the early church.
39:14
So there was in the Bible itself as the point I'm making, first of all, there's, there's
39:19
a record of how, how it worked.
39:22
God spoke to someone.
39:24
They recorded what happened in history or what God directly said to them.
39:29
And that's how we got scripture.
39:31
Now from there, um, the Jewish people were meticulous in, in, in taking those scriptures
39:38
and in copying them by hand over and over, so if you read in the Bible, you know, the
39:44
scribes and the Pharisees, well, then the scribes were the ones who would have learned
39:49
Hebrew and they would have, they would have written word by word, um, and meticulous.
39:56
And, and well, I say meticulous is, um, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which some of your readers
40:03
may have, listeners may have heard of, we're discovered, you know, um, a couple of decades
40:10
ago, um, a place called Qumran, uh, and these are, we have like almost all of the scroll
40:18
of Isaiah, for example, um, and it, if you look at that scroll, it's like so very close
40:26
to what we have in our Bibles today.
40:28
And so we have archeological evidence from manuscripts all over the place.
40:34
That would be sort of the big one that sort of shows, Oh, look at, these are people way
40:37
before, not way before, but a little bit before time of Jesus.
40:41
And it shows us they were meticulously, um, writing down scroll after scroll of the scriptures.
40:48
Um, and then there's record of that.
40:50
And so we have the same thing happened with the New Testament.
40:53
And so we have, we have thousands of, of, uh, manuscripts, um, in complete manuscripts
41:00
of the old and the New Testament, um, you could put them all together and you, you easily
41:05
get consensus on almost everything in the Bible.
41:10
And if there's not consensus like this manuscript says this, you know, this very reliable manuscript
41:15
says this.
41:16
This one says this, then scholars do something called text criticism and they, they try to
41:20
decide which one is right.
41:22
But that shouldn't throw us off cause some of those things are like, should the word
41:25
the be there or not, you know, right, the Christ, uh, or, uh, this one has son of God.
41:32
This one doesn't, it doesn't matter too much because Jesus called the son of God in the
41:36
next verse.
41:37
You know, so there's very little that affects our understanding of who God is, who we are
41:43
the plan of salvation.
41:44
Um, and so yeah, what, what scholars then do is and have done like, so the English translation.
41:50
So William Tyndale, Wickcliffe, before that, um, they would have looked at the original
41:57
and the sense of like, uh, we don't have, we don't have the exact manuscript that Matthew
42:01
wrote, but we have plenty of copies of it and more copies than we would have of, you
42:06
know, uh, a ton of other books in the ancient world, like Homer, you know, uh, and so, and
42:13
every historian believes that Homer actually wrote, you know, this and that.
42:16
So I think we have all these manuscripts and scholars go through it, scholar like Whitfield
42:21
or Tyndale, um, they then translated it into English Whit, Whitfield would have been first
42:27
and then Tyndale much later.
42:29
And these are guys who knew Greek Hebrew, Aramaic and they translated English and then that
42:36
eventually became the King James, um, and then, which obviously is still in use today.
42:43
And then from the King James, there were different, um, so the ESV is based on what I would say,
42:49
the English tradition of translation, um, from, from Tyndale to King James to, um, the RSV,
43:00
which was a revision of the King James to sort of modernize language a little bit or
43:05
a lot, um, and then the ESV, um, worked with the RSV, um, and then we made changes based
43:15
on, you know, that might be archaic or we know more about what this word actually means.
43:20
So we're going to change it, uh, or the syntax, you know, how sentences put together is a
43:24
little bit off.
43:25
And so we're going to make it so it's more readable.
43:27
Um, so the ESV then is in the, the tradition of translation that would be called like more
43:34
little literal or essentially literal, you know, literal would be like absolutely word
43:39
for word, but you know, Hebrew is different than English, Greek is different than English.
43:43
And so sometimes the words are going to be, uh, you know, Greek might start with a word
43:49
here that we is a verb and we need to translate it after the subject.
43:54
And so, um, those kind of changes.
43:56
So essentially literal means we're trying to get as many of the words as we can in the
44:01
original and put it in English in a way that's understandable.
44:05
Um, then there's another tradition that would be more, um, thought by thought.
44:11
And so you mentioned Eugene Peterson's the message.
44:14
That is like, uh, paraphrase, like intentionally, I'm going to try to express in the most modern
44:20
of English, uh, what is the thought, uh, behind this sentence?
44:25
And so, and both have value as, uh, you know, I've been a, I am a preacher.
44:30
I will often look when especially, I'm preaching through Joe, which has a ton of difficult
44:34
verses.
44:35
Um, and I will often look at, uh, the new living translation and or the living translation and
44:43
the, and Eugene Peterson, the message to say like, what, what do they make of this, you
44:48
know, what's, what do they think the sense of it is?
44:50
Um, and Peterson's a great scholar.
44:53
So it's not like you're, you know, he, he's, he's telling you what the Hebrew means, for
44:57
example, in the Psalms, I mean, he gets a little eccentric at times and I sort of roll
45:01
my eyes.
45:02
But, um, I say a little bit, I say all that to say there's, there's value, uh, in, in
45:10
both sort of, uh, streams of translation, uh, philosophy for me.
45:17
And it's not because I work for Crossway, but the essential literal, I think, is really
45:21
important to have, um, because it, it, I often say it's like the, the more it's a paraphrase,
45:32
the more he's doing the work for you, you know, the, the translator.
45:36
And so, uh, instead of like me wrestling with like, what is Joe exactly saying here?
45:42
So this, this, like I'm not making sense.
45:44
And then also the role of a preacher, like I think it's very important that someone says
45:49
this is what the Bible actually says here.
45:51
I know it's a bit confusing.
45:53
Let me explain it to you.
45:55
And so I think both for the reader, uh, for me to grow and what God actually says here,
46:00
I might have to struggle with some words that I have no idea what, what they mean, uh, or,
46:04
or idioms, you know, ways of talking that are foreign to the way I think is a America
46:10
growing up at the time I grew up.
46:12
Like I don't know all these farming analogies and, you know, what this kind of clothing looks
46:16
like.
46:17
But if you try to translate it that into like, you know, he was wearing a suit.
46:21
Well, no one's wearing a suit that, you know, and so to say, you know, his outer garment
46:25
was made of wool or something.
46:27
Um, so anyway, that's maybe too much, but no, that, that, that's all really good stuff
46:32
because, you know, I, in a way, I'd set you up poorly because it's like we could literally
46:37
talk for an hour, just about one of the things that you mentioned.
46:40
So we're literally just scratching the surface, but you did mention the originals.
46:45
And that's a large critique from non-Christians and atheists alike is, well, we don't even
46:50
have the originals.
46:51
So these are just copies of copies of copies and people think of, you know, a Xerox machine
46:56
and they're just copying the same picture over and over a million times.
46:58
And then by the end, it's, it's unrecognizable.
47:01
So talk to me a little bit because, because again, we don't know our history, we don't
47:05
know about the writings of Homer, the writings of Alexander the Great that, you know, the
47:09
earliest copies we have were hundreds of years, you know, after he lived, Julius Caesar the
47:13
same.
47:14
Yeah, people that just blindly believe that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, but not
47:19
that Jesus Christ walked in Galilee.
47:21
And so talk about the fact that the, that have not having the originals is just really
47:27
not that big of a deal.
47:29
Yeah, you can think of it this way, like, so Matthew wrote his gospel and then shortly
47:37
after he did that, they were going to send it to different churches.
47:40
So someone copied it, right?
47:43
And then they sent it to this church and Antioch and this church and Ephesus.
47:49
And then they copied it and they sent it to this church over in Turkey, you know, and
47:52
so it, it, what we have is that sort of second transmission.
47:59
And we have copies all around the ancient world, ancient Middle Eastern world of these
48:06
copies.
48:07
So let's say the, the one that's over here in Greece, the ones over here in Turkey, the
48:12
ones that made it all the way to Rome and Spain, they're all, they're all so similar,
48:19
like 99% the same, which tells us that they're all copying from the same manuscript.
48:26
So that's one thing is like that's sort of the evidence we have that there's an original
48:31
that they all must have been copying from.
48:34
The other thing is just like we have, beyond that we have evidence in other writings.
48:40
So, so there's the apostles and then there's the apostolic fathers and then there's like
48:45
the church fathers.
48:46
So the apostolic fathers would have been a group of, of leaders who lived right after
48:52
the apostles and some of them would have known the apostles.
48:55
And so we have their writings too.
48:58
And so when they quote from Matthew, we can look and see was, was that the, is that phrase
49:05
if they're doing a quote, is it the same that we have in this manuscript way over here in
49:09
Egypt and, and we find there's so much correspondence that there has to be some original that they
49:18
all based, based these on.
49:21
I think that that's an important thing.
49:23
I'm trying to remember the details, but Vodie Bockum recently talked about, you know, how
49:29
oh, you know, the transcripts were all changed.
49:31
It's like, do you even understand what you're saying when someone said that they changed
49:34
the transcripts?
49:35
Because they would have had to change them in multiple languages in, in multiple parts
49:40
of the world at multiple times and like you change them and got them back without anybody
49:44
noticing it's like, what are you talking about?
49:46
Like, it's like you will just believe anything that somebody puts into a meme on the internet.
49:52
But one thing that I will say that is a struggle for me personally and also struggle for a
49:57
lot of Christians and some Christians have just stopped struggling with it.
50:00
They just say, I don't even care, it doesn't even matter anymore.
50:02
And that's the concept of inerrancy, because when you see things like a good example is
50:08
in the synoptic gospels, you will have things the same story described.
50:13
And it's not that the story stories describe differently.
50:15
It's that actual details like numbers of things or people that were present are different
50:20
in the different transcripts.
50:22
And that is like, how can it be inerrant and all these details be different?
50:27
Now people have dealt with that objection before, like, if you're a detective and you
50:30
have five witnesses to a crime and they all say the exact same thing, that's going to
50:33
be a little fishy and suspicious.
50:35
But when there are mistakes that are made, because people are like, Oh, these scribes
50:39
didn't make mistakes, it's like, well, of course they made mistakes.
50:42
Like in, you know, sometimes if they made a mistake, they would throw the whole scroll
50:45
away.
50:46
Sometimes they didn't.
50:47
But there are even there's even kind of this new school thought that inerrancy wasn't even
50:53
thought about in the early church that no one thought the Bible in and of itself was an
50:57
errand or at that time it wasn't the Bible, it was just, you know, the different scriptures
51:01
and the scrolls that were floating around during that time.
51:04
But people in modernity are just like, Hey, inerrancy is like something that was made
51:08
up during the the Reformation, like we don't even take that seriously.
51:12
There are definitely problems in the Bible.
51:13
You have prominent pastors like Andy Stanley are there like, Hey, don't tie your faith
51:18
to the inerrancy of the gospel because that's a house of cards that will eventually fall
51:22
down.
51:23
Well, when people say that you start to believe them, like, man, maybe the Bible is not in
51:27
errant that maybe there are errors there.
51:30
But you know, the stuff about crisis may be not in error.
51:32
So again, with all my questions setups, I give you way too much information just like
51:36
you kind of pick and choose with your big brain, what you want to talk about.
51:39
So ready to go.
51:40
Yeah, I'm feeling my brain small after that's a big question that yeah, I'm gonna ask you
51:45
big questions to make as uncomfortable as possible.
51:48
That's good.
51:49
Good.
51:50
You asked how long I have.
51:51
I think my time is up now.
51:52
Yeah.
51:53
Oh, yeah, exactly.
51:54
Yeah, I think well, yeah, inerrancy is a term that is relatively new in church history.
52:03
But definitely, I would say a high view of scripture and the Reformation, the church fathers,
52:08
you know, everyone had a high view of scripture until more recently.
52:13
I do think, yeah, with with the son of the dawn of the scientific age, all these sort
52:17
of things were able to look at these manuscripts.
52:19
And so you're able to see things that other generations wouldn't have been able to see
52:23
that said, you know, there are times, you know, John Calvin, the great reformer and one
52:29
of the best commentators on the Bible in the history of the church.
52:33
I remember it's somewhere in, I think it's Matthew to where Matthew quotes Jeremiah, you
52:40
know, Jeremiah says this or something and and it's and Calvin goes, it's actually not Jeremiah,
52:45
you know, like, it's like, like, you know, in other words, Matthew made a mistake.
52:49
Right.
52:50
But there are two things, so one, it's like you can have his high, high of you is Calvin
52:55
and sometimes say, you know, I'm not sure if this is right.
52:58
So I think that's, that's okay for Christians to hear, like that said, there could be two
53:03
things.
53:04
One, there could be a scribal error, as you mentioned.
53:07
So someone's translating and they put the wrong name.
53:11
The other thing, and so we don't have the original manuscripts.
53:15
So it's sort of trusting that the original manuscript doesn't have that.
53:18
The other thing is there's some, there's nuance to what sometimes the writers are doing.
53:24
And so for example, Matthew will sometimes quote two prophets, but he'll say something
53:32
like Jeremiah, even though most of the quote is from Hosea, because Jeremiah is the bigger
53:38
prophet.
53:39
We call it major prophet, there's minor prophets.
53:41
He wrote more.
53:42
He's more important in that sense, like Isaiah, Ezekiel, those are the big guys.
53:48
So, so you, it's kind of like you would say in our culture, you know, like this famous
53:53
person said this, well, so did these other people too, but I'm going to say him, even
53:58
though they said it first.
54:01
So there are things like that, like where the more you dive into the specific issues,
54:06
there are reasonable, in my mind, reasonable explanations for why the biblical author might
54:13
have said Jeremiah instead of Hosea, or, or why the account has, you know, two men, two
54:24
men in the tomb that are demon possessed versus one man.
54:29
And so, well, is it two or one, you know, which gospel writer has it correct?
54:34
And so the, I mean, this is the synoptic problem is called Matthew Mark and Luke.
54:38
And it's, it's also, I like to say it's, you know, it's a great problem to have because
54:43
we have four witnesses to, to a number of different events and most importantly, the
54:47
death and resurrection of Christ.
54:49
So if this was a trial, this would be great.
54:50
We've got four eyewitnesses who have written stuff down.
54:55
And so it is though these sort of tricky things where you're like, well, is it two or one,
54:59
but it also of course could be that there were two and Mark decided he wanted to emphasize
55:05
one and his specific story and, and Luke wanted to do two who were actually there.
55:13
But it doesn't mean that Mark didn't know two were there.
55:16
It just means that he decided to focus on one, one aspect of the story.
55:21
And so you have the same thing with like, you know, Judas hanged himself and then, you
55:27
know, he fell to the ground or something.
55:30
Well, you know, which one is, which, which is right?
55:32
Like, well, he could hang himself and then actually fall from, from the noose.
55:36
You know, like his weight could take him down the cliff.
55:39
So, so there are, you know, and, and people have done like harmonies of the gospel and
55:44
how to, you know, how to reconcile.
55:46
So there's plenty of literature out there if someone wants sort of answers to these,
55:50
these tricky sort of historical things.
55:53
I mean, in the end, it's, you know, my view of scripture comes, everything to me kind of
56:00
goes through Jesus.
56:01
And so what was Jesus, if I, if I've come to believe in Jesus, as he is portrayed in
56:07
the gospels and he becomes my Lord and my Savior, well, then his view of things matters
56:12
to me quite a bit.
56:13
And those who were closest to him, their view matters to me quite a bit.
56:17
And so he had a high view of scripture, believed, you know, David said this under the inspiration
56:23
of the spirit.
56:24
This is how he and the apostles talk about different things.
56:27
And so that's my view, I believe this, that the Bible is spirit inspired, the very word
56:33
of God, you know, not a jot and tittle, you know, that's a little markings and Hebrew,
56:38
like it's all inspired by God.
56:41
And in a sense, then it's like it's without error in the original manuscripts.
56:46
That is when God communicated to the author and he wrote that manuscript down.
56:51
Well, Doug, let's talk about every jot and tittle because I think it's important.
56:57
I get a little concerned when people read the Bible from cover to cover literally and
57:02
they read everything as literal because in the Bible, we have collections of wisdom literature.
57:09
We have, you know, prophets, we have apocalyptic literature, we have, you know, Psalms and
57:14
Proverbs, we have history, we have poetry, we have all these different categories.
57:19
And I guess that's when it leads to these debates, like I got another email today.
57:23
I get asked about young earth all the time, young earth versus old earth.
57:28
And as a category, it is one of the least interesting things to me on the planet.
57:34
Like I am interested about like mollusks more than I'm interested about how old the earth
57:38
is because I don't think it's actually knowable, but you have people that will read Genesis
57:43
and they will read it as a as a history book and saying this is how it literally happened.
57:49
It's, you know, seven literal days as I experience 24 hour days in modernity and they have basically
57:56
they've shut themselves off to anything else because to me it's just it's odd.
58:00
Why would God give us all the ways to calculate all of these things and to age things only
58:05
to pull a fast one on us and say just kidding, it's only 6,000 years old.
58:08
But just talk to me a little bit about how people read the Bible because I know a lot
58:13
of people may include struggle that if I don't have time to study the Bible, then I'm just
58:17
not going to read it because you can't just read the Bible.
58:20
You got to study it.
58:21
You've got to dig into every single passage and figure out what it said in the Greek and
58:26
how it relates to this prophet and how it relates to this part of the gospel and it really
58:30
just kind of freezes people because we're stuck somewhere between literalism and not
58:34
having enough time to just read it much less study it.
58:38
Yeah, great question.
58:42
My latest book actually is on the genres of the Bible.
58:45
So with Lee Reichen, who's a literary professor of English literature, and so all the genres
58:51
you mentioned, it's like a chapter on each of them.
58:53
It's for a preacher.
58:54
It's called the Beauty and Power of Biblical Exposition by Crossway, so I'll plug my book
59:00
there.
59:01
There you go.
59:02
It'll be in the show notes.
59:03
We'll put it in there.
59:04
Okay, good.
59:05
Yeah.
59:06
So the book is written for preachers, but a lot of people have told me who are laypeople
59:12
have read it like this is such a helpful thing because I've never known how to read proverbs.
59:17
I've never known.
59:18
I've always read them as promises, but they're all promises and not general truths or guidelines
59:22
or things like that.
59:24
And the same with poetry.
59:25
Like I don't know what to do with poetry.
59:26
I just skip over it, you know, apocalyptic literature, you know, this sort of stuff.
59:31
So the book helps you with all of those things.
59:34
I think, yeah, it bothers me too when people are like, I read the Bible literally, you
59:41
know, like, it's like, well, you haven't read the Psalms and it's like, you know, I've put
59:44
all my tears in a bottle, you know, okay, you can't even do that.
59:48
Exactly.
59:49
Jesus is not, Jesus is not actually a vine.
59:52
He's not actually a door.
59:53
He's not actually any of those things.
59:55
Right.
59:56
Yeah.
59:57
So common sense, even if you know, nothing about how different types of literature in
1:00:00
the Bible work, you know, should tell you that, oh, this must be a metaphor for something.
1:00:08
So the Bible is not literal everywhere.
1:00:11
That's not to say like, Jesus didn't literally rise from the dead.
1:00:15
Or when it says on the Sabbath day, he entered the synagogue in Capernaum.
1:00:20
That's literal.
1:00:21
Yeah.
1:00:22
But when he says, I am the vine, you know, or take and eat of me on the bread of life,
1:00:29
you know, those are metaphors for some reality he's trying to teach.
1:00:34
He taught in parables, which are symbolic stories.
1:00:39
And so I think it's really important that we read, whether it's the Genesis account,
1:00:43
and I don't want to get into that too much here.
1:00:47
I don't want to hate mail.
1:00:48
I want you to get to hate mail.
1:00:49
Yeah.
1:00:50
Exactly.
1:00:51
But at the very least, you need to understand like how poetry works, how there's poetic
1:00:59
things going on in the creation accounts, just the days and how it's ordered.
1:01:03
It's really beautiful.
1:01:05
And the more you read Hebrew poetry, the more you understand, like, that's done all over
1:01:09
the place in the Bible and the beatitudes are ordered in a certain way.
1:01:13
Jesus talks this way, Mary and her Magnificat, you know, she speaks in Hebrew poetry that's
1:01:19
so similar to the Psalmist and the song of Hannah and these sort of things.
1:01:24
So I think it's really important if you're going to try to understand the Bible that
1:01:29
you understand, there are different genres, different types of literature.
1:01:34
And you have to ask yourself, what am I reading at this point?
1:01:39
And so, I mean, we divide like these are the historical books.
1:01:42
These are the books of poetry.
1:01:44
We do have some categories that I think help people.
1:01:47
But sometimes like the gospels, the four gospels, they have almost every type of genre in there.
1:01:52
The all of a discourse is apocalyptic literature.
1:01:55
Jesus is using imagery and things like this and so people misinterpret that too when they
1:02:00
think, oh, when this sign happens, then this earthquake over here in Japan represents the
1:02:08
end of the world.
1:02:09
People write stuff on that and they're always wrong because they're misunderstanding what
1:02:16
he's actually saying in the all of a discourse to his first generation and then the generation
1:02:21
beyond that.
1:02:22
So it can be very complicated, but I think to your point, I think Christians, if there's
1:02:29
a first time you're ever reading the Bible, you should come to Genesis and say, I'm open
1:02:34
to how God is deciding to speak here.
1:02:37
And what I often say to students is God is so diverse in the way he decided to communicate
1:02:43
in written form that he decides to start with a narrative, which is poetic as well.
1:02:51
And then Adam sings a song and then on you go throughout the Bible and there are whole
1:02:57
books of just poetry, Ezekiel's got all these crazy things going on that if you don't understand
1:03:05
this is apocalyptic and you're thinking this is literal, you'll just completely misunderstand
1:03:12
the message that God is trying to give to us.
1:03:14
So I love God's creative genius that if you've ever read the Quran or Book of Mormon, especially
1:03:20
the Quran, it's so different than the Bible because it's just sort of truth things, which
1:03:26
are not truths.
1:03:28
And the Bible is a story, it's a big story, there's little stories within the story, and
1:03:33
then there's these poems and there's crazy scenes and all of that.
1:03:38
And the more you grow in your reading of the Bible, I think you should appreciate how God
1:03:42
designed the Bible as a story, but also a story with so many different ways of communicating
1:03:49
truths to his people and to the world.
1:03:51
When I think that there are a lot of things that I could say there, but I think it's
1:03:56
the column cosmological argument.
1:03:58
I'm trying to do my best William Lane Craig impression, but it's like, you know, talking
1:04:02
about time, space and matter.
1:04:04
So if you read Genesis one one, literally in the beginning, God created the heavens and
1:04:09
the earth in the beginning, that's time God created the heavens, that space and the earth,
1:04:14
that's matter.
1:04:15
Like he created all of that there in the beginning and so you could take it philosophically,
1:04:18
you could take it scientifically.
1:04:20
But I think the thing that's important for people to realize is a book like what you
1:04:24
described that you wrote is going to be helpful for you because it's the same thing that whenever
1:04:29
you take a scripture out and put it on a coffee mug or a water bottle and you take it completely
1:04:35
out of its context, it loses its meaning because text without context is meaningless.
1:04:39
And so I think that's that's very important for us to understand the categories as well.
1:04:44
One thing and I don't know what crossways done because I don't know the entire crossway
1:04:47
canon or not, but one of the things that has helped me to believe not only in the truth
1:04:52
of the gospel, but really the truth of the eyewitnesses to Jesus's ministry, his death,
1:04:57
his resurrection and his ascension and the ministry that happened thereafter are the
1:05:01
extra biblical writings.
1:05:03
So these are the writings of people.
1:05:05
So when you have dummy say, did Jesus even really exist?
1:05:07
It's like, well, yeah, it's like one of the most attestable things in all of antiquity
1:05:12
that Jesus existed because it's not just written about in the Bible.
1:05:15
So if you accept, which I don't, but if you if you accept that the gospels were written
1:05:19
by people that were trying to get rich and famous and get chicks, and you know, that
1:05:22
was how they were going to control people was to write these gospels with fabricated
1:05:25
stories.
1:05:26
Great.
1:05:27
Now you need to talk about Josephus, you need to talk about Tacitus, you need to talk
1:05:31
about Kelsus, you need to talk about Pliny the Younger, you need to talk about all these
1:05:35
people that if some of them were neutral to the way and some of them were actually angry
1:05:42
and wanted to be, you know, adversaries to the way it's those extra biblical writing.
1:05:48
So for you guys at Crossway, how do you do the extra biblical writings?
1:05:54
Have y'all put together or do are there any plans to put together only extra biblical
1:05:59
writings that point to the truth in the gospel?
1:06:01
Like, Hey, when this was talked about in this area of Galilee, here's how it attaches to
1:06:06
something that Josephus wrote in the early parts as a historian.
1:06:10
So is there anything like that that y'all've done or that's in the works?
1:06:14
Yeah, so some of we've got two books in particular by a guy named Peter Williams, who's a he
1:06:23
leads something called Tindall House in Cambridge in the UK, brilliant, brilliant scholar.
1:06:30
So he's a new book that's coming out, I think it's in a couple months, something that the
1:06:35
title is something like surprising genius of Jesus and not only does he show like how
1:06:42
Jesus's teachings are genius, like this is really brilliant, but he does a lot of background
1:06:47
work too.
1:06:48
That's helpful to kind of supporting the historical Jesus.
1:06:53
I think he's done another book, something reliable, are the gospels reliable or something
1:07:00
like that?
1:07:01
All of Crossley books, right, but it's something like that.
1:07:06
So Peter Williams, Tindall House, we do a lot of work with Tindall House.
1:07:12
They do a lot of the stuff you're talking about.
1:07:13
So Peter Williams, and he's got a whole team of scholars working on something called the
1:07:19
name project.
1:07:20
It's really interesting.
1:07:22
So for example, the name Simon, so it's all over the Bible, all over the New Testament.
1:07:34
So they look at extra biblical literature to see, well, how popular is the name Simon
1:07:41
in this area of the world?
1:07:43
And they've discovered initial sort of findings and they're doing this to the Old Testament
1:07:48
as well, it can prove the reliability of something to say if like Simon and Jesus, these are
1:07:55
really popular names for that time, like they're also found in other literature of that time
1:08:02
period or Josephus, like someone named Joe, Joseph, popular name, Judas, popular name.
1:08:13
And so Mary would be a popular, so all of these sort of names that we find in the New
1:08:17
Testament and the amount of times we find them.
1:08:22
And so this is why it's like, you know, you've got two guys named the same, so they've
1:08:25
got to come up with a name for someone else because they're trying to, or Jesus of Nazareth
1:08:29
because there's so many Jesuses.
1:08:32
And so that sort of extra biblical stuff is going on, so we're working with them on that
1:08:38
massive sort of scholarly project that probably eventually would be published Lord willing
1:08:42
by us or by some academic publisher.
1:08:46
So there are things going on and you had, I think you mentioned before we got on like
1:08:49
the book on the Septuagint, which is the Greek translation of the Old Testament.
1:08:54
We're doing some scholarly things like that for people who are interested.
1:08:57
If you just go to like crossway.org and click on like the academics box or we've got apologetics.
1:09:04
Yeah, the first two are academic and apologetics.
1:09:08
There would be some resources there that could help you out.
1:09:11
Yeah, that website will be in the show notes as well.
1:09:14
One thing I did want to talk about is because at the forging table, everyone that's been
1:09:18
on there basically has used the English standard version, the ESV Bible.
1:09:21
I have several different translations.
1:09:23
My church, the pastors use the NASB, the new American standard Bible and those, those
1:09:28
are pretty close.
1:09:30
But just describe to me the ESV translation of the Bible, describe to our audience like,
1:09:35
what is it?
1:09:36
Because people know the continuum like, okay, is this a word for word translation or is
1:09:40
it a thought by thought or is it a something other type of thing and they just, most people
1:09:45
look at the ESV, they'll flip through and they'll go, oh, there's no, these or thou's.
1:09:48
So this might be more readable for me, but let's just talk about what is the ESV translation.
1:09:53
How did we get it?
1:09:54
Why is it a good translation for us to have?
1:09:56
Yeah, so I mentioned earlier, there's translation traditions and so some of the modern translations
1:10:05
that are done have just been a group of scholars, they're not unconscious, but they are, there's
1:10:13
of like the tradition that comes before them in translating to English.
1:10:16
But the ESV is intentional in saying we want to be in the tradition of Tyndale King James.
1:10:23
I mean, if you've ever listened to King James read aloud or just read it, it has a cadence
1:10:31
to it and it has a beauty to it.
1:10:34
And I would say that to me sets apart the ESV from a lot of translations as we intentionally
1:10:43
tried to keep as much of the cadence of English as we could, good English as we could.
1:10:49
And so that we had a literary stylist as part of the translation committee because we really
1:10:53
valued that not only correspondence with, we're part of a tradition of translation, we're
1:10:59
not just doing our own thing and we've got a group of scholars looking afresh at the
1:11:02
original and that's it.
1:11:05
What we did was we're part of the tradition, we care about literary excellence and readability
1:11:10
and all of those sort of things.
1:11:12
And then we had a group, we have a group of scholars, translation oversight committee,
1:11:17
that looked at the English translation that we're working with, the RSV, and then also
1:11:22
the original languages and made changes where we thought they needed to be made.
1:11:27
Either there's an academic reason this word should be this or this phrase is better rendered
1:11:31
like this.
1:11:34
And so, but the goal then was to have an essentially literal, a word for word where possible.
1:11:42
Sometimes you need to translate something that this word into a phrase to make sense
1:11:46
in English for example.
1:11:49
And so, and something we also did that's not in every literal translation is keeping theological
1:11:58
terminology that we think is significant.
1:12:01
So even words that might be hard to pronounce or know what they mean, propitiation, you
1:12:07
know, used in first John, the turning away of God's wrath.
1:12:11
And so, it's not just a toning sacrifice as some translations would have, but there's
1:12:16
actually an element of turning away God's wrath and the best word in English for that
1:12:21
is propitiation.
1:12:23
And so, keeping those kind of words that other translations would say, "Oh, that's archaic.
1:12:27
Nobody knows what that means."
1:12:28
That's too difficult a word for someone to read, you know, redemption, sanctification,
1:12:34
reconciliation, regeneration, justification.
1:12:36
These are important theological terms that we wanted to be in there.
1:12:40
And also trying to be, being a word for word translation is if a word is used here in this
1:12:48
place in the New Testament, this Greek word is used.
1:12:50
We wanted also to be used, if it's that same word, translated the same way if that's what
1:12:57
the context tick takes.
1:12:58
And so, trying to do those sort of things, I mean, you mentioned your church, the NASB,
1:13:04
yeah, it's like that before the ESV, I used that and I still will use it devotionally
1:13:10
from time to time.
1:13:11
They would be very close sort of in a philosophy of literal translation, word for word, that
1:13:16
sort of thing.
1:13:18
What the ESV does is why I think it's better is these things, literary style, readability,
1:13:27
and then being a part of a tradition, the English tradition of translation.
1:13:33
And I will say that the ESV is so tremendously readable, but it doesn't feel dumb down, I
1:13:39
guess you could say.
1:13:40
And so, and again, if you like the NASB, great, I mean, I don't really know a whole lot about
1:13:45
the NIV, that was the first Bible that I own, so the first Bible that I dug into was a was
1:13:49
a teen NIV Bible.
1:13:52
And so that that completely makes a lot of sense now.
1:13:54
I have a whole lot more questions I want to ask you, but you got things you got to go
1:13:57
do today.
1:13:58
So I want to make this the last thing that we talk about today, because you mentioned
1:14:00
this a long time ago, now probably about an hour ago, that you're working on a kids Bible.
1:14:05
And so right now, Doug, I've got a three year old and I've got a one year old.
1:14:09
And so I am so, I guess you could say nervous, but it's like, I have a reverence for the fact
1:14:14
that it's my job and duty to catechize my children.
1:14:19
Because yes, my, my son's learning all the dinosaurs right now, and he's so excited,
1:14:23
so much so that when I ask him catechize type questions, like, Hey, James, you know, who
1:14:27
made the earth?
1:14:28
And he'll be like T-Rexes.
1:14:29
And I was like, no, no, no, like God, who made who made the T-Rexes?
1:14:33
I think God did.
1:14:34
Dad, I'm a Velociraptor.
1:14:35
Right.
1:14:36
Those are how our conversations go, but I take the catechism seriously, cross ways sells
1:14:41
some great catechisms and things like that.
1:14:43
But talk to me about how you put together a Bible that is for kids because I didn't
1:14:50
grow up in church, Doug.
1:14:51
So a lot of the Old Testament stories that a lot of people have that's just kind of old
1:14:56
hat.
1:14:57
I didn't get that.
1:14:58
I didn't go to VPS.
1:14:59
VPS.
1:15:00
I didn't go to Oana.
1:15:01
I started going to church basically when I was in high school.
1:15:02
And so I want my kids to have that, but I don't want them to think the point of Noah's
1:15:07
Ark is that, Hey, they got two of every animal on there or two of every kind on there.
1:15:11
Isn't that cool?
1:15:12
It's like he had to build the art because God was going to flood the earth and kill
1:15:15
everybody.
1:15:16
Like, you know, like, but how do you do that with a kid that's three, four, five years
1:15:19
old?
1:15:20
So talk to me about that project.
1:15:22
I want to know more.
1:15:23
Who's it going to be targeted at?
1:15:24
You know, what age group, everything.
1:15:26
Yeah.
1:15:27
I need to show you a resource and we can send you one.
1:15:30
Give me a second here.
1:15:33
Perfect.
1:15:35
I love goodies.
1:15:36
I've never had an empty chair on my show before.
1:15:39
So that's going to be the screenshot.
1:15:40
Let's see this thing.
1:15:41
This is a big, so this is Kevin De Young and Don Clark is the artist.
1:15:48
So Kevin did a book called The Biggest Story and it's a bunch of Bible stories.
1:15:52
And so we've done a curriculum, 104 stories.
1:15:56
Oh, sweet.
1:15:58
And I helped, helped write some of the lessons or I wrote the lessons and then others helped
1:16:04
with the crafts and everything out.
1:16:05
Guys, you're not watching this on YouTube.
1:16:07
You're missing out.
1:16:08
So go back and watch it later.
1:16:09
All right.
1:16:10
So beautiful art and it just goes through Pentateuch, first five books, history, poetry,
1:16:17
gospels, acts, and then a coloring and activity book.
1:16:22
So this is one of the, since the ESV study Bible, this is the biggest thing crossways
1:16:28
done.
1:16:29
It's a big deal.
1:16:30
So it's got, here's the Tower of Babel.
1:16:33
So you know, lesson on key things in key parts of the Bible and walks you through the
1:16:40
big story of the whole Bible.
1:16:42
So it starts with a lesson.
1:16:45
So read this from Genesis and a big picture.
1:16:47
This is sort of, and these are written for teachers, but also for like homeschooling or
1:16:51
just even, you know, you with two little ones that aren't in school, school age yet.
1:16:56
Then teaching the story kind of reiterates what the story is, makes the connection of
1:17:00
the gospel, which makes it unique in a lot of curriculum, you know, how it was called
1:17:04
biblical theology.
1:17:05
You know, how does this connect the Tower of Babel?
1:17:08
How does that connect to Jesus?
1:17:10
And then it's got some discussion questions and then activities, activities are broken
1:17:16
down into K through second grade, and then third through fifth grade.
1:17:22
So toothpick tower is one of those.
1:17:25
Okay, there you go.
1:17:27
So on.
1:17:29
And yeah, and then what is amazing is you've got the activities, but for each lesson, there's
1:17:35
also a professionally made video where someone's reading it, the story.
1:17:42
So you can, you can use all of them.
1:17:43
We've got posters.
1:17:44
We've got memory cards, Bible memory cards.
1:17:46
So we'll send you, we'll send you all that stuff and you can promote it for us.
1:17:52
But yeah.
1:17:53
So that, that's something that I've been, I worked on that's just out now this summer
1:17:57
that we're really excited about helping the church, but also helping the home.
1:18:02
I think the kids are all my youngest is 16 now.
1:18:05
And I wish I had something like that to help me as a father, like know what to say and
1:18:09
what to, what to do.
1:18:12
And then so the children's Bible then is that it's basically we've done a suite based
1:18:16
on this biggest story concept.
1:18:19
And so it will have, it will feature the same 104 lessons throughout and some of the content
1:18:26
from that will go into the, the Bible.
1:18:28
So there's some continuity there.
1:18:30
So I think what's unique then about this, this children's Bible is teaching the children
1:18:36
how the, how the stories fit together with the big story, which I think is really significant.
1:18:42
I remember, Christian 19, you know, like, I don't know, 21, 22 or first time I was introduced
1:18:48
to biblical theology, how, how the Old Testament relates to the new and it was just sort of
1:18:52
mind blowing.
1:18:53
And I, I thinking of like a kid getting that, you know, you know, a six year old, a seven
1:18:57
year old going, wow, I've never thought about how the sacrifice of Isaac relates to the sacrifice
1:19:02
of Jesus.
1:19:03
And so that's not that other, you know, Bibles wouldn't do that, but I do think it's, it'll
1:19:10
be unique, a unique emphasis that the story of the Bible matters and connecting all the
1:19:15
stories together to Jesus.
1:19:17
And then it will be, you know, I'm writing introductions to each book of the Bible that
1:19:23
are kid friendly and also we're trying, trying to target someone who's, this will be their
1:19:28
first Bible and they've just started to read.
1:19:31
And so I do like a short introduction on Genesis and then I'll say, as you read, you
1:19:36
know, look for these things, they're almost like kind of like either not clues, but you
1:19:40
know, like, look for when this happens or look for this repeated word.
1:19:46
And so it's, it's reader friendly, child reader friendly, specifically thinking, you
1:19:52
know, the kid is reading the Bible for the first time, knowing they're not going to
1:19:56
read everything and they're going to have a hard time, get through Leviticus and other
1:19:59
things like that, but trying to give them spots where like, if you want to know where
1:20:05
knowing the flood is, you know, here, here it is, turn to pages, whatever.
1:20:09
The other thing, and this is the thing you said a number of times is like not dumbing
1:20:13
down, whether it's in church or in Christian literature or in a study Bible or something.
1:20:19
We've intentionally tried to not dumb things down.
1:20:22
And so I was just talking to the other guys working with a champ who's working with me
1:20:28
on this and we're coming up with like, what are some, you know, they're going to come
1:20:34
to this phrase or this word and they're not going to know what it means.
1:20:37
And so we're creating kind of a glossary and I make, we're not sure if it'll be in the
1:20:41
back or actually like right there in a little box, you know, but in Deuteronomy, for example,
1:20:47
there's a phrase, I can't remember how many times it's repeated over five times, devoted
1:20:51
to destruction.
1:20:53
And it's like, we're going to tackle what that means, like it's repeated a lot in Deuteronomy
1:21:00
and they're going to come, if they're going to read through Deuteronomy, they're going
1:21:03
to come through, you know, this is what God's people supposed to do.
1:21:06
They're supposed to destroy the city.
1:21:10
And so in a paragraph explained, what does that phrase mean?
1:21:15
And so, or God's wrath or things like this, so it's not just, you know, or even dealing
1:21:20
with, you know, stories that are in every children's Bible, Samson, but dealing with
1:21:23
the bad stuff too, and trying in a kid friendly way, like we can't, we can't do everything,
1:21:30
you know, that happens, you know, like explain what a concubine is or something, but we'll
1:21:35
try to do our best to say we're speaking to kids, but we're not going to shy away from
1:21:41
what God's word actually says.
1:21:42
Well, Doug, one thing I'm struck with, you know, watching kids shows now, because apparently
1:21:46
that's, you know, 27% of my life is watching these horrible kids shows.
1:21:50
But there's no, there's no real bad guys, there's no real, like, angst or angst depending
1:21:57
upon where you were raised, there's, there's no real, like, the, you know, the main character
1:22:01
who is good is really struggling, like, yeah, there's kind of good and bad, there's good
1:22:05
and evil, but it's not nearly as, I guess, explicit as it was with the, with the stuff
1:22:11
that I was consuming as, as a young kid.
1:22:13
So it's good to not just look at, oh, Samson, he had long, cool hair and, you know, the
1:22:18
jawbone of the donkey and all these cool feats of strength, it's like, that's not even the
1:22:22
main part of the story.
1:22:23
It's the main part we remember because we like, you know, strong men carrying heavy things.
1:22:27
But, you know, that's not really the point of the story.
1:22:30
So when can we expect for this kid's Bible thing and whatever you say, we're going to
1:22:34
hold you to it.
1:22:35
So when can we expect it on the market, Doug?
1:22:37
Yeah, it should be, I should be done, or we should be done writing and designing it a
1:22:43
year from now.
1:22:45
And so it usually takes a year after that.
1:22:47
Okay.
1:22:48
Well, we will be all about it whenever that comes out and we've covered a lot of ground
1:22:51
today, but I need to let you get on to doing your important work.
1:22:55
But that's all for me.
1:22:56
Is there anything else you want to get off your chest?
1:22:58
No, I'm delighted.
1:23:00
I didn't know what to expect and I think this has been a wonderful conversation.
1:23:06
And I, you know, Rich's blessings to your, to your family, to your ministry.
1:23:11
Thanks for having me.
1:23:12
Same to you.
1:23:13
Doug O'Donnell.
1:23:14
Thank you for coming on Undaunted Life.
1:23:15
A man's podcast.
1:23:16
There you go guys.
1:23:17
I hope you enjoyed my time with Doug O'Donnell, but before I let you go, we are going to do
1:23:20
a quick resilience boost at Undaunted Life.
1:23:22
Our mission is equipping men to push back darkness with content that forges spiritual,
1:23:26
mental and physical resilience.
1:23:28
So I've got three links for you today.
1:23:29
I've got a link to his bio on the crossway website.
1:23:32
I've got a link to where you can buy your own copy of the ESV men's study Bible and
1:23:37
also link to Doug's Amazon page where you can check out all of his different books and
1:23:40
all the things he's contributed to.
1:23:42
Thank you guys for listening to this episode.
1:23:44
Wherever you're listening to this, please subscribe, rate and leave us a positive five
1:23:47
star review.
1:23:48
If you want to come speak live at your event or on your podcast, you shoot me an email
1:23:51
to info@undaunted.life.
1:23:53
That's i-n-f-o at Undaunted.life.
1:23:55
Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook and check out our website for everything else,
1:23:58
including how to donate to keep more content like this coming your way.
1:24:01
Let's go to www.undaunted.life.
1:24:04
Also we want to thank the band Holy Name for allowing us to use their music for our content.
1:24:09
The music on this podcast is our song Perpetua, which is off their self-titled debut album
1:24:13
on Face Down Records.
1:24:15
The links are in the description.
1:24:16
I'm your host Kyle Thompson.
1:24:18
Remember, keep pushing back darkness, keep forging spiritual, mental and physical resilience.
1:24:25
Keep seeking the Lion of Judah.