Reasoning Through the Bible
Taking a cue from Paul, Reasoning Through the Bible is an expository style walk through the Scriptures that tells you what the Bible says. Reviewing both Old and New Testament books, as well as topical subjects, the hosts methodically show how Scripture is one cohesive story. Critical Thinking with a little bit of theology and apologetics and you have what this podcast is about. Just like Paul on Mars Hill, Christianity today must address woke, deconstruction, and progressive Christianity, all topics that are addressed if we go purposefully through the Bible. Join Glenn and Steve weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday as they reason with you through the Bible.
Reasoning Through the Bible
RTTB Ministry Update || December 2024
Discover how our ministry at Reasoning Through the Bible is committed to making deep, methodical Bible study accessible to everyone. We reveal our strategies for providing valuable resources to smaller churches and groups while maintaining a focus on fostering genuine connections over chasing numbers. This episode offers a behind-the-scenes look at our teaching philosophy and the journey we’re on to achieve our mission.
As we look to expand our ministry, discover our exciting plans for live streaming and interactive engagement with our listeners. Despite financial challenges, we dream of utilizing AI to translate our teachings into multiple languages, aiming for a global reach. Our gratitude extends to our listeners whose support fuels our journey. Delve into the wealth of resources on our website and join us as we continue to provide meaningful teachings from the Word of God, fostering a community of spiritually engaged listeners worldwide.
We here at Reasoning Through the Bible like to periodically pause from our normal ministry and give an update of what's going on with us in our ministry. So that's what we've got today is an informal talk about what we've been planning and what's coming up and just what our thoughts are about the ministry. So that's what we have for you today. I hope you enjoy it. Now what I wanted to do is it'd been a little while since we did a just a general thing, and so I totally unscripted. Not sure I'm going to use this, we'll, we'll see. But informal those of you, if, if, if we use this and it's the audio only, then some of what we do is for the video online and I'm not wearing the hat mainly just to show people that I'm not bald you still haven't fixed your eyebrows.
Speaker 1:I still haven't fixed the eyebrows, but there's whatever that means, but there's, there's. I wore this hat and we were wearing jackets, just to make it a little formal, and the hat was really just a shtick and just something visual to remember by, but people saw it and thought I was bald. So mainly, don't wear the hat, just so we're not bald. But one of the things that we do here at Reasoning Through the Bible is we had Steve and I had thought through how to approach our ministry and what we're going to do, and Steve and I get together periodically and talk about theology and different theological stuff and when we started doing podcasts OK, what do we do and what tack do we take and it just seemed to us that there's a whole lot of things online about Bible teaching. Most of it falls into one or two or three, two or three or four, I guess, categories.
Speaker 1:One is either pastors with their Sunday morning sermons and there's many of those, and a lot of them are really good and some of them are not so good, but there's just a lot of them.
Speaker 1:It seems like every pastor in every church in the world has their sermons out there.
Speaker 1:And then there's also people that focus on theological topics, and so you can go out there and you can find Calvinists and Arminians and amillennialists and dispensationalists and you can find all these people approaching these topical things. And you can find apologists and different things out there promoting different subjects and different denominations and things. And it just seemed to us that what was needed was just good, slow, methodical, deep Bible study. And because of that, then what we're finding over time is that there's some people very interested in that and then there's a whole lot of people that aren't.
Speaker 1:When we started out, the philosophy behind it was, it just seemed to us that there's a whole lot of people in churches that were a little bit deep not very deep and then there's this other knothole gang that just eats, sleeps and breathes theology and never the twain shall meet because they talk past each other. So what we want to do is bridge the gap and start where the average church member was and then build it up to some of these theological topics. But don't just live there, just mention it and then move on Right.
Speaker 2:Isn't that kind of the idea, and we also wanted to provide this type of teaching to smaller churches as well, because my father preached in smaller churches whenever I was growing up.
Speaker 2:My father preached in smaller churches whenever I was growing up.
Speaker 2:He didn't have a church, he didn't pastor a church as I grew up, but he was an interim pastor for many churches around the area where we grew up, and they were all small churches, and then, as he retired, he pastored a small church, a couple of them, and so those are the type of churches that he would preach in.
Speaker 2:Those are the ones that I remember as materials for their teachers to give to their congregants. So that's one of our goals too is to reach these small churches and be able to provide them with some free resources for them to then be able to have their teachers provide to them, and then also maybe small groups that can branch out the people and teachers that want to do small groups, and we are just now started introducing some study guides. We've been putting out your teacher notes, leader guides for them. Now we're going to be adding to it and we've actually published our first one in the book of James study guides for people to go and study either on their own or in a group, and then we'll have a leader guide, slash teacher guide, which will have your notes in it, for James also, and that's our first full, both study guide and leader guide book that we're going to have.
Speaker 1:So one of the questions we have now is okay, where do we go and what we do, and Steve and I are going to stay the course as far as doing this. We've kind of sort of got a plan on how to approach this the books we kind of just pray about and decide as we go. What I wanted to talk about for a minute, though, was when you go online with these things, there's, at least, I feel, some degree of pressure to grow the audience, and what we never wanted to really do was grow the audience just to grow an audience. One of the things that Steve and I always criticized were church leaders and pastors and ministry leaders that were just pandering to large audiences, and so far, we hadn't had that problem. We don't have mass crowds beating our door down.
Speaker 2:Well, and here's the reason, here's one of the main reasons is they do get them in, they come into the main service, but the vast majority of them then don't get plugged into a small group, where the small group is where they have the more methodical teaching of going through books or at least where they can ask questions and things like that. So the majority of these people come in and a lot of them come in and just are there for a few months and go out. Some of them most of them come in and maybe never go to a small group, where they actually then start getting discipled.
Speaker 1:Right, right. So we were really about the meat and potatoes Bible teaching. Now what a lot of people do online and they get audiences by talking about things that large groups of people want to hear, and there's large groups of people that want to hear things from like systematic topic standpoints. I have no doubt at all that we could grow an audience if we stood up and did anything severe towards a well-known figure. I mean, pick anybody on any part of the Christian spectrum, both really solid people on down to the really really not so good people. If we just picked one that had already had an audience and we did critiques of them, that we could get an audience. And I don't have personally any problem at all standing up and saying Joel Osteen's a false teacher, and I don't have any problem at all standing up and picking somebody like a John MacArthur or any any of the Osteen, piper, heiser, any of these guys and critiquing them. And the harder we would either support them or not support them, the greater the audience we'd get.
Speaker 2:And here's one reason why because you have the spectrum where you have some people that just want to know is what's our take, or anybody's take, on this teacher or this pastor? Are they good, are they not? All the way down to people that already have an informed opinion and they want to know if somebody else is going to beat them up or, on the other end, somebody else is going to praise them. So that's how you get the bigger audiences, because you're reaching out to all different kinds of people that want to know about that particular pastor and what your approach is going to be to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so that seems to be online. The 800-pound gorilla is YouTube. Youtube just has the audience. It's the medium and that's where you go to get the big, big audiences, and it tends to draw people if you do relatively shorter things that are relatively controversial. So if we went out there and did 12 minutes on Roman Catholicism or Calvinism or any of these topics, then and hit it hard enough, you can get an audience. It's just. We just didn't think that was really the purpose of why we ought to be here, because controversy sells.
Speaker 2:Controversy sells.
Speaker 1:But let's talk about something, Steve, that, as an example, as we record this, we're right in the middle of teaching Zechariah. Example, as we record this, we're right in the middle of teaching Zechariah and one of the reasons we picked Zechariah was because we knew it was really critical as far as end times prophecies. Right, the Old Testament, minor prophet of Zechariah. It's only about 14 chapters, but it's really critical in terms of end times teachings and these areas. So, typically, like when we were doing research, you go out and you go OK, what's people's? You look, different commentaries and things.
Speaker 1:What do people teach about Zechariah? And the vast majority of it zip down to chapter 14 that has this passage about the Messiah coming back and the mountain splitting in half and okay, and there's some things in there about the temple, and so the vast majority of attention that it's ever gotten ever not all, but the majority is centered around these couple of three themes that are the most, has the most little sizzle to it and there's just so much more to the book and yeah, it's important. But, for example, we were mentioning it to some friends of ours and the first question you get is oh, what are you going to do with amillennialism. Well, if we were to.
Speaker 2:Because the amillennialists use some of the things from Zechariah to support their view of amillennialism.
Speaker 1:Right, and so does a premillennial dispensationalist and things like that, right? So there's this arm wrestling that's been going on in the theological crowds about OK, how do you interpret these passages. So we could get a little more sizzle and a little more audience if we were to lead with oh, amillennium's wrong and here's why you know, and things like that. But that's not really why we were here.
Speaker 2:Let me just add this to along with eschatology, the big hitters in eschatology is Daniel and Revelation and the Olivet Discourse and first and second Thessalonians and a few chapters in Ezekiel and a few chapters in Isaiah and things like that. And even in Daniel they usually go to the latter part of Daniel, and so those are the big heavy hitters. And if you go out there looking for currently, eschatology or end times, those are what's going to be taught and those are taught by topic and they only go through three or four chapters of Ezekiel and then even in that there's only a few verses in those chapters that they talk about. So what we wanted to do that keeps in line with what we do as a ministry was well, let's go through Zechariah, because it is quoted from the New Testament and it has eschatology things in it.
Speaker 2:Easy for you to say, but the prophets are important and there's minor prophets Micah, joel, haggai. All of those minor prophets have eschatological, apocalyptic things in them which build a good foundation for end times views and end times teaching. So that's another reason that, as we go through here, we will eventually get to Daniel and Revelation. We've already gone through Matthew. We talked about the Olivet Discourse. But when we get to those two big heavy hitters of Daniel and Revelation, I think our hope is that we'll have many of these minor prophets already done, have gone through them verse by verse, which will have a good foundation and reasoning behind them so that when we refer to them, when we go through Daniel and Revelation, it gives people a better overview of all of the apocalyptic and all of the eschatological views and not just those heavy-hitting chapters. Slash verses in Daniel and Revelation Right right as an example we were recording.
Speaker 1:we're about I don't know part of the way through Zechariah as we record this, and with that I remember I haven't gone back and heard them yet but the chapter one and chapter two that we did of Zechariah the day we recorded them to me, it struck me as some of the best stuff we've ever done, simply because it covered so much good spiritual rich ground. What ends up happening is people either not knocking the pastors and not knocking the Sunday morning Bible teachers because they're just limited in time. You just don't have the time for 45 minutes or 30 minutes on a Sunday morning. You just don't have the time to go into these details.
Speaker 2:And the class members. They travel, they're in and out, they have family members, and so that's another reason why we started this ministry was that we could be consistent and refer people to an overview and a verse-by-verse study of a complete book and give them some consistency study of a complete book and give them some consistency.
Speaker 1:Now, that said and I will throw out this hand grenade is there are a lot of pastors that do not want to go deep. They just don't want to. They want to keep it high level and they could go deep. I mean there are people like John MacArthur that have gone deep. But I mean, look in past years, jonathan Edwards for crying out loud was a pastor of a local church that was mainly farmers. That was before the days of public school and he had really deep stuff. So there's really no excuse for not occasionally going deeper in a church and they just don't.
Speaker 2:And you have a story or example of the opposite end. Earlier we talked about churches that just seek to get people in. The opposite end are ones that really, really go deep. But do you have an example of one church or something that spent three years in just Romans?
Speaker 1:Oh well, yeah, the church I was saved in many years ago was one of the pastors decided hey, we're going to start going through Genesis and he started at chapter one, verse one, and he was kind of going through. He did 18 months of Sunday morning in Genesis and I don't think he finished chapter five. There was another guy I bumped into I think the one you were probably thinking of, steve that I had just accidentally talked to this guy and he said he had been teaching Romans for 20 years Now. Okay, romans is a complex book and's important, but there's other other stuff too, right. So one thing there's there's just so many people that either get Christianity light for 30 minutes on Sunday morning and that's all they do in this world of looking at all the scriptures from this theological perspective of Calvinism or dispensationalism or amillennialism or any of the other isms. They've got this theological system that they believe in and some of them good systems right, not knocking systematic theology at all, but that's all they do and they don't really take the time to start at chapter one, verse one, and go through and teach all these things. As an example, just this morning, steve, again in Zechariah doing my homework.
Speaker 1:It talks about the temple. It's been a little while since I read those chapters in Ezekiel, starting in Ezekiel chapter 40, there's a handful of chapters that goes into all this detail about the temple. It measures the doorways and all this thing. Just a handful of chapters about detail. In Ezekiel, chapter 43, there's a verse in there where God's glory comes into the temple and God speaks to Ezekiel and with that he's saying I will be on my throne and the sole of my feet will tread in this house in the temple verses because their kings had all this sin and all this death right of Israel. So we could approach that from a standpoint of we're going to teach premillennialism or amillennialism and it's real easy to beat up on the amillennialists because there's so much inconsistencies and I don't have any problem saying that.
Speaker 1:That passage in Ezekiel 43 that I was just talking about, in the same verse he's saying I'm going to, my spirit's going to be with Israel and he's talking about this future time. Well, okay, great, the amillennialist and the covenant theologian takes that and they say okay, well, that's the church and that's salvation, and he's cut off ancient Israel. The problem is here you've got Israel in two sentences in the same verse, one of them being the church and the other one being ancient Israel, that got condemned because he's not being with the church, with a spirit in it, and then cut it off too right, which is in that verse in Ezekiel 43. So what we could do and we draw a bigger audience is lead off with okay, we've totally refuted such and so position and then just go through and pick out those things and beat them up and we get a bigger audience.
Speaker 1:We draw this crowd of these theologians and theologian wannabes that eat, sleep and breathe a particular theology and are just there for the controversy, just there for the controversy, but we never would really exegete the passage, because once you get drawn into that, then you're spending all your time replying to and because, steve, we've been kind of under the radar here and we're able to say our very, very strong things Under the radar, nobody's noticed. But once people start noticing us and we start refuting this, then you get drawn into replying to these things, and that's just kind of where my head is right now.
Speaker 2:Well, and as that you then cater to that audience. You're not really necessarily catered to it, but that's the audience you get, and then that audience only gets so big and then you're one of many other types of things. So we feel that going chapter one, verse one, through the last chapter, last verse, through every book gives a variety for everybody, no matter what their view is. And our hope is, even if the particular views that we don't hold, we don't hold to all-millennialism, but we would hope that the all-millennialists would listen, for not just things that are associated with eschatology but for the other verse-by-verse things, and at least also listen to the arguments that are made, not to convince them to leave all-millennialism. That's up to them to decide what they want to do. But we feel that going verse by verse reaches the broadest audience that there could be, and because there's just so much good stuff, it's in the scripture.
Speaker 1:Another example we said, as we're making this recording, we're in the middle of Zechariah. Zechariah talks a lot about prophecy and is it end times or is it speaking of the church age? That's one of the major questions Confession time. I walk into doing Zechariah. I taught it a little over the years, but not a lot, and I knew part of what was in there. But okay, I need to study deeper.
Speaker 1:I've not really read ever and don't plan to read, to be perfectly honest, a lot of these end times books that are written from a perspective Now I tend to lean premillennial, but I'll confess I've never really read a lot of premillennial or amillennial end times books. It's just reading is difficult for me. I mean, I got through seminary through brute force. It was difficult. I don't read well, I don't read fast, and I've got books I'll never get around to reading already and I just don't approach the book.
Speaker 1:I guess is what I'm saying from a preconceived standpoint of already having read in detail these systems of end times views. I kind of know the general perspective that they're approaching it from and so I know some of the. Okay, here's the questions that are going to arise, but I don't know all of the ways that these pre-mill, post-mill, ah-mill, pre-trib I don't know how all those people have fit all the little puzzle pieces together around the millennium. And that's one of the questions, major questions of Zechariah is how does the millennium fit into this book? And so I don't approach this book having read a lot of that. What I do is I know kind of the approach and I say, okay, what does the text say? Is it present tense? Is it past tense? Is it future tense? How are we going to exegete this passage? And then that'll tell us whether it's going to fit into some end times view. And that's really the perspective that I approach these things from, and not having some preconceived version of having worked out all these details of some systematic theology of end times.
Speaker 2:So in general we view ourselves as being Biblicists. We approach the Bible and we go through the text and we use inductive study methods to exegete the text and to look at it. And we do have a hermeneutic that says let's take the reasonable use of the language and what does it say? And that's how we approach the scripture in general and I think that's kind of the way that it was written. It was written that way with that in mind.
Speaker 2:The scripture wasn't written with systematic theology in mind. It was written to convey a story, a narrative, and to reveal God and who he is. So that's the way that we approach it and I think that from that you can formulate some of these things that you talk about where it fits into and we've come to a position on some of the things, but we're open. However, when I say that we have gotten, we've gotten a few, we've gotten a few informations of cut and pastes into our comments, and they are cut and pastes because you can tell they are and they're just the basic arguments that are out there that you can read very easily, and so they're not really convincing arguments because we've looked at them before and they don't stand up to what we feel, that the scripture is saying yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what else would we want to tell people that just about us.
Speaker 2:I think that we would just really hope that the people are getting something out of it. We have a way that we can going through each of these books. You know, podcasts to me are the new radio. You know they've been out there for 15 years or even maybe 20 years. They're their new radio. When I was commuting back and forth to work, there was a radio, a couple of radio programs of some teaching that I'd listened to on the morning commute and there was a couple on the evening commute when I came back. But you couldn't go back and stop it. You couldn't go back and listen to it. If something came up during that commute at that time, there wasn't any way to go listen to it again. There's things that have evolved where you can go to the websites now and do that, but with these podcasts you can listen to them at your pace. You can go and listen to them and if you want to listen to it again, you go back to the podcast and listen to it again. We just think that it's a good format for people and we have a video side of it. That's the same as the podcast. The audio is a little bit cleaner. It's cleaned up a little bit, meaning that we've taken some of the pause and the double words out of it, and I think that the audio portion of it is good Again when you're commuting, when you're walking, when you're exercising, and we just think that it's a good format.
Speaker 2:And in our teaching, because we still teach, we taught or I taught our church Nehemiah not too long ago, but it was a six week course to go through Nehemiah. We had already done it. We went through 18 sessions. So as we went through it, I referred the class to the Nehemiah sessions that went with what we were going to look at on Sunday and most of them listened to it. Some of them didn't for whatever reason, but that's a way to be able to help any of you people that are teachers out there, any of our audience that are teachers. It's a way to help you assist in your class and in your teaching. And, as I said before, our goal is to put out materials so that you can form your own classes and Bible studies and you can also even just do your own study if you want to, by going to some of these leader guides that we're starting to put out.
Speaker 1:Now the other thing is, if you are interested in theology and doctrine, on our YouTube channel we have a playlist that's the term in the YouTube world. We have a playlist called Doctrine and Theology YouTube world. We have a playlist called Doctrine and Theology and when we do a topic in the midst of a book that does have a theological point to it, we tend to put it on that playlist and there's a large number there now. So we do a fair amount of theology as we're going through these things. I mean, I'm quite familiar with reformed theology and different aspects of salvific theology and all these controversies, so those we do deal with. What we don't do is just put it out there as an argument trying to draw an audience.
Speaker 2:And the playlist. We have them broken up by books that are there, but we don't have all of our content because we started video a little over a year after we started the ministry. So books like Acts and I think there's another one that they're not on the YouTube platform, they're only in the audio platform where our website is also broken up by books.
Speaker 2:So if you go to our website, go to the book series, you'll see each book that we've done. You can go in, you can listen to them each session, in order however you want to, as far as the pace that you want to go to. And if we have done video on it, you'll see the video there too.
Speaker 1:Right, so we do take questions. You can submit questions we have an email address or, via our website, go to ReasoningThroughTheBiblecom, or you can send us an email at info. That's I-N-F-O. At ReasoningThroughTheBiblecom we keep questions and save them up and do a session every now and then with half a dozen questions. I'd like to do a live stream at some point, steve, we will, and get some interaction with the audience. What we were a little scared to do was announce we're going to have a live stream and then nobody show up but us.
Speaker 2:We will be doing live. Each year we have added new things. We're in our third year, finishing up our third year. We will be doing live streams. We definitely will at the first part of next year and I've already got some ideas on that that I want to talk with you about. We'll do at least maybe one live stream a month, probably working into twice a month and at some point we might even do once a week.
Speaker 1:There's some people I'd love to interview and put on, we're going to do that.
Speaker 1:They'd have some good Christian point to them. It's just our main thrust was always teaching the scriptures and Steve and I feel this sort of commitment to getting this teaching down. And basically, steve, we're doing long format teaching in a short format world. I mean, I remember seeing commercials in the past, advertising oh, you can learn the Bible in five minutes a day, and things like that. That's just it's not how it works. You don't just plug a computer program into a slot in the side of your head and suddenly it's in there. The way you learn these things is by time.
Speaker 2:Now I will say this is that currently we, in order to do live streams, in order to do interviews, a main portion of our time is in editing and study and we have had some short term funding that has allowed some professional editing, which has freed up time to where we can then learn, put out the study guides, create and start putting out study guides the next study guide is going to be Colossians I'm already working on that and start putting out study guides.
Speaker 2:The next study guide is going to be Colossians I'm already working on that and also learn about how to do live streams and also start going out and finding people that we can do interviews. Having somebody be doing the editing for the video and audio has allowed time for us to do that, but that's short-term funding. That's not funding that's going to be there long-term. So if you want to see live streams and you want to but that's short term funding, that's not funding that's going to be there long term. So if you want to see live streams and you want to see us expand in interviews and other ways, support us and go to our support page and provide us with some support, ongoing support that will then fund the editing on a longer term basis, and that again frees up the time for us to be able to go off into these other areas.
Speaker 1:And the next step that was one of my dreams is that the technology exists now to take our audio files and even our video files and have it translated into pretty much any of the common languages of the world instantaneously through artificial intelligence software. On the video, some of them will even change your lips to where it looks like you're actually speaking that language. So imagine our level of detail and carefulness and respect for the scriptures in Chinese, russian, french, german, arabic, hindi all these languages. We could do that. It takes money that we don't have. That's why we hadn't even looked up how much it costs Up to now we just know we don't have it.
Speaker 2:We just know we don't have it.
Speaker 1:Even I have not taken not a penny out of this ministry as personal pay up to now. I don't have any problem with that. The scripture teaches a worker is worthy of his wages, and the Old Testament lines Steve, don't muzzle the ox while it's plowing the field, or something like that. So you let the workers feed off of the ministry, but up to now there's just not been enough to do that so, and there's always a long string of other expenses that were needed. So we've never taken any money out of this as far as personal pay or profit. It's always going back into the ministry and we would just really love to grow it. It's just right now. It's the two of us and we've managed to hire one or two side people to help us out. So God bless them for that help.
Speaker 1:But right now we feel this obligation to just do careful, detailed, verse-by-verse study and bring out everything in the Scriptures rather than focus on some sizzling hot-button thing that's just going to draw an audience. That's how we're approaching. So we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email, info at reasoningthroughthebiblecom, and if you have questions, submit them and we will do Q&A sessions every now and then. A lot of what we do is one way we record these things, send them out. So we're never really sure how they're received around the out, so we're never really sure how they're received around the world. So just let us know. We'd love to, if nothing else, just say, hey, we're listening to you and we hear from you, and here's what impact that your teachings had. So we just really thank you for being faithful listeners to the Word of God and just stay with us as we continue to reason through the Bible.
Speaker 2:Go to the website ReasoningThroughTheBiblecom, look there for the topical and the doctrinal sections, along with the book series studies, again, where you can go and select the book and start going through it at your pace, and also look for the resource page. All of our resources that we currently have are there and that will be continued to be added to, and again we're putting out leader guides and also now study guides. So thank you so much for watching and listening and, as always, may God bless you.
