Is God a Moral Monster?

Good morning. Let's get started with some prayer and we will dive into this week's lesson. Father in heaven, thank you for sending your word into this world for us to study, for us to be able to understand. Thank you for your Holy Spirit who illuminates your word and opens our eyes to all truth. We pray that we would be able to understand it better today.

In Christ's name I pray. Amen. Michael Kruger's book, Surviving Religion 101. Kruger points out at the beginning of chapter 14 The title of the chapter is Some Parts of the Bible Seem Morally Troubling. How can a book be from God if it advocates oppression or genocide? And the objection that is being raised by the opponent of Christianity in this chapter The question of whether scripture is, has been transmitted correctly, it's a question of whether or not the God of the Bible is himself moral.

And so there are three moral issues that have been brought up that are things that the non-believer says the Bible promotes, and that because the Bible promotes it, the Bible itself, or God himself, must be immoral, and therefore cannot be trusted. And those three topics are whether the Bible is pro-slavery, whether the Bible oppresses women, and whether the God of the Bible advocates for or commits genocide. And so those are the three topics that Michael Kruger addressed in this chapter.

And we're going to look at them in a different order than he presented them. This week we're going to discuss whether the Bible promotes genocide, whether God himself is a genocidal maniac, as some people have labeled him. And we're going to talk about whether the Bible's pro-slavery and whether those things disqualify God from being, in effect, authorized to make moral judgments on others.

So there's two ways the non-believer, I think, can make this argument. One way is for the non-believer to simply set themselves up as the moral authority and then to claim that because they are anti-slavery or because they think they're for women's equality or because they, the non-believer, would be against genocide, because God advocated for anything that's contrary to what they have set up, then therefore God is himself immoral and not to be trusted. That's one way a non-believer could argue this point, and the easy response to that, which has been repeated throughout these critiques in Sunday school, is that when the non-believer sets himself up as the moral authority, we can say, well, where do you get a standard of good from?

If you're going to say God's immoral because he told the Israelites to destroy the Perizzites and the Hivites and all those people, Well, then you're borrowing from the Christian worldview in the first place to determine what morality is. But one thing I think that can be a valid form of argumentation that is a different way that this question could be asked is the nonbeliever may not be saying, I think genocide's wrong. God committed genocide.

Therefore, God's immoral. What they may be saying is the Bible teaches that murder is wrong. God commanded the Israelites to go and kill people, which they would perceive as murder, and therefore God contradicted himself. So a thoughtful critique of the Bible by the nonbeliever would be what's called an internal critique, where they're not applying their own standard to the Bible necessarily.

They're trying to say the Bible itself is now inconsistent with itself. And I think that's a better way to think about giving credit to arguments against the Bible before we destroy and demolish every lofty opinion raised against the Bible. It is worth giving them credit to understand the logic that they may be trying to employ. So turn to Deuteronomy 7.

Michael Kruger did a really good job, in my opinion. In everything, here's my opinion when I'm discussing his book of addressing the genocide argument well. I thought he did a fine job on the slavery argument, and I thought he did a poor job on the one about women. And so we'll reserve that one for next week. But in the genocide argument, genocide being the wiping out of a people group effectively.

So you have a group of people that are all from a particular culture, nation. They all speak the same language. They're related people. And you go in and kill them all. The most popular one being what we call the genocide, the Holocaust, when Hitler was trying to eradicate Jews. And so the idea of genocide is that you have this targeted group of people because of their race or ethnicity, So, we're going to go and actually just kill all of them without any real reason other than you hate them.

And so, genocide's wrong simply because murder's wrong. And so the first problem we have is that when we accuse God of committing genocide we already loading the language because we using a word that literally means murder So rather than ask if God committed well we can ask if God committed genocide rather than assert that he has and then try to defend it So in Deuteronomy 7, let me read a few verses just to remind you that it's not... Sometimes people say God did something and our response can be, well, God never actually did that.

People say God said something and we say, well, God never said that. In this case, God's actually done the thing they're accusing him of, formally speaking. It's just not what they're accusing him of in spirit. So Deuteronomy 7, when Yahweh, your God, brings you into the land, excuse me, Don't even think about trying to escape. Pause for laughter. Thank you, Emma.

When Yahweh, your God, brings you into the land that you are entering to possess, and he drives out before you many nations, the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jeppesites, seven nations larger and stronger than you. And when Yahweh your God has delivered them over to you to defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction. Make no treaty with them and show them no mercy.

Do not intermarry with them. Do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons, because they will turn your sons away from following me to serve other gods. Then the anger of Yahweh will burn against you and he will swiftly destroy you. And he goes on to explain to them about tearing down all their altars. But the idea here being that when they drive these nations out, unlike what they were going to be allowed to do with some other cities, which we'll review at the end of the session today, they weren't to allow some of them to live.

They weren't to take some of them in and take care of them and put them into forced labor. They were to actually kill all of the people. And if you remember when Saul went to battle the Amalekites, and the big problem with Saul in 1 Samuel 15 was that he did not completely destroy the Amalekites, and God was very angry with him for that. So it is in fact the case that God has commanded the Israelites to drive people out and to put them to complete destruction, showing them no mercy.

And so Kruger's argument, which I think is a very good one here, is this. Point number one, every human being on the planet deserves God's judgment, not just the Canaanites. So if we start with the belief in what we call original sin, that everybody that has ever been conceived after Adam and Eve sinned, other than the Lord Jesus Christ, Is in fact born with the stain of original sin.

They're cursed. They inherit the guilt of Adam and thus are immediately responsible for their sin and do judgment from God. No one is owed any kind of blessing or mercy from God from their point of conception. So we start with this understanding that whether it's the Canaanites, whether it's the LaRueans, whether it's Russians, whoever it is, everybody is actually deserving of God's judgment from the very beginning.

There's nobody who would be exempt from that, including, of course, children and women and people that you would think of as more innocent than others at times. So that's his first point. And what I'll do is I'm just going to go through his points for you. And if you want to ask a question, go ahead. Or if you want to interject something, go ahead as well.

Just let me know. Secondly, the second point, after everybody's deserving of God's judgment, is that the timing of God's judgment doesn't always match human expectations. And his point was that sometimes we think God should judge the most sinful people first and then work down the list. Or maybe we think people should be judged more immediately when they do certain bad things than others.

And he says it doesn't always work that way in God's economy. And it makes sense if you think about the fact that we're all guilty before God from the moment of conception, that there's nobody who's in a sense more guilty than others. We have our perception of who is acting more evil in real time than others. But when we recognize that one person acting more evil than another is a demonstration of that God has deprived that one person of some restraint.

And that the only reason you maybe had ever acted more righteously than someone else is because God simply restrained you from all the evil that you would want to do in your heart. We can recognize that nobody's truly more evil than others in that sense. He quotes Jesus in Luke 13. Do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem when they were asking why the Tower of Siloam fell and killed 18 people?

And that's where he says, remember, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish. And so point number one, everyone is guilty before God and deserving of judgment already. So if God wanted to judge anybody at any time, he's authorized to do it. Secondly, it won't always happen in the way we think it should be timed. So the Canaanites, for example, got judged before another group.

And God's letting a lot of people in the United States continue to live and in fact prosper in many ways. And there people that deserve judgment here So he not obligated to judge people simultaneously And then the third one and this is the crux of it for Kruger argument God uses a variety of instruments to accomplish his judgment. What's one of the most famous instruments God ever used to judge the world?

With the flood. Yeah, God sent a flood to judge the world. And he was allowed to do that. And at that time, he just judged everybody all at once. So there were people at that time who were very old, who had lived long lives and had many opportunities to repent of sin. And there were also people who were probably just born at that time as well.

And the earthly judgment came upon them. But God also not only can use natural disasters, but he uses human armies. And that's where it gets a little uncomfortable for us. It's one thing to think that God judges people by having human armies by his providence come against each other. So maybe one of the greatest examples would be the Civil War of the United States when many Americans died and it was at the hands of human armies that it happened.

And a lot of people think it was a judgment on our country for not repenting of the slave trade at the time, which will be our next topic. But there's a difference between God providentially allowing nation to go against nation and many people to die and us being able to look back and realize like, well, that judgment is just because God's allowed to do it. And for God to specifically command a people to judge another nation by going and destroying them, which is what he did in Deuteronomy 7 when the Canaanites, the Hivites, the Hittites, the Girgashites, when they were all driven out.

And so the question becomes, was it right for the Israelites to do this? Or were the Israelites in sin when they drove these people out and devoted them to destruction? Andrew? Yes, yes, God raises up nations for his purpose. Exactly right. And so the answer is that no, the Israelites were not in sin.

It's one thing to say, I think that the people in a war may have actually been in sin. And even though God raised them up and used them, they were maybe also in sin at the time that they did something and they destroyed another nation. And we can see that God judged one nation by the hand of another, but that nation that was the judge wasn't actually right.

The easiest example that was a recent one we learned about would have been the Habakkuk and the Assyrians, right? When they came to conquer Israel, the Assyrians were evil, wicked people, right? And they were not, excuse me, but they were not doing God's will in the sense that he had told them to do something that would have been right. But when God says, destroy a nation to the Israelites, they're doing the right thing.

What about when God told Abraham to sacrifice his son and Abraham became willing to do that? Was Abraham committing murder? No, that's right. Because he was obeying God in that moment, that wasn't murder. That was obeying God. That was making the sacrifice God was requiring and he didn't end up having to do it, we know.

So with genocide, God doesn't commit genocide. God destroys nations, raises up nations as he sees fit, and if he chooses to use a human army to do so, then that's his prerogative, and that human army is obligated to obey what God has said, and the Israelites were chastised for not obeying. When they left some people, we'll read that in a little bit in Deuteronomy 20, when they left people alive that they should not have left alive, that was considered the problem.

So any questions or comments on whether God is genocidal? Paul? I don't know if we have a microphone available or not to help people. John MacArthur famously said, God is who he says he is. We don't like God sometimes. We don't like the way he behaves.

We don't like the decisions he makes. We think that we know better. And that is clear-cut evidence that we are sinful and worthy of hell. We read troubling things in the Bible. Romans 9, speaking of Pharaoh, says that God will have mercy on whom he will have mercy and whom he will have pardoned. Speaking of Pharaoh.

And he says, the whole reason I created you was to bring you death. So he has purposes far beyond what we could ever see. We could never know. We'll never know until we get to have his grand and glorious purposes. He's God, and we're God, and who are we to judge him? The Bible is very clear about this Very clear And you either acknowledge who he is and submit under his authority or you don And that's what we're looking for.

Amen. So it is not right for a person to object to believing in the Lord Jesus Christ on the basis that God is immoral because he commanded what they call genocide When what God does is right all the time, and in fact the Israelites were right to obey God. Secondly, the second moral objection I want to discuss is whether the Bible is pro-slavery. We live in a unique time in history in that we live in the United States of America after the period of time when we have abolished the slave trade that we practiced here in the United States.

And we have still are experiencing the repercussions of that practice in our world. If you haven't been paying any attention for the last 20 years, maybe one of the most prominent things going on in the United States right now, And since Obama was elected, basically, and was that 2008? Is that right? The. Hold on, I just thought of a joke I have to suppress.

Excuse me for my sanctification. One day I just won't even say that it came to mind. That'll be, you know, then that'll be done. But. Sorry, I'm not doing it. But race relations in the United States have become very difficult.

There's a lot of things that people are saying. It's not necessarily true that race relations have become more difficult, but the people who speak the loudest have raised that up as the biggest issue going on And have created what appears to be such a huge divide in our country among these things. I think if you talk to most normal people at Kroger or if you just go to Burger King, they don't just hate each other because they're a different race.

But the media wants you to believe that we have this gigantic divide in our country. And so anyway, that's all a result, I think, of what happened earlier. And so we had a thing in our country that was called slavery, and we abolished it. And that institution of slavery that we abolished had aspects to it that were inherently wicked and evil. And people read the Bible, and what they see in the Bible, rather than the Bible abolishing the concept of slavery altogether, What we read in the Bible is that slavery is not abolished.

It's in fact regulated. In the Old Testament, there was regulations for how to treat your slaves. There was never a time that just said, and slavery is bad, therefore don't do it. In the New Testament, you turn to Philemon. Turn to Philemon, but if you think about the book of Colossians, the book of Ephesians, instruct slaves to obey their masters, bond servants to obey their masters.

In Philemon, Paul, having seen this man Onesimus get saved, he led him to the Lord. This escaped slave sends him back to his master Philemon. And in verse 13, Paul says, I would have liked to keep him with me so that on your behalf he could minister to me in my chains for the gospel. Paul wanted to keep the guy with him. And Paul says, but I did not want to do anything without your consent so that your goodness will not be out of compulsion, but by your own free will.

And he says, perhaps this is why he was separated from you for a while, so that you might have him back for good. He says, no longer as a slave, meaning no longer only as a slave, he goes, but better than a slave is a beloved brother. And so Paul is telling Philemon to receive back this slave, but he's actually encouraging Onesimus to go back. In 1 Corinthians chapter 7, verse 20, Paul says, As each one should remain in the situation he was in when he was called.

He says, Were you a slave when you were called? Do not let it concern you. If you can gain your freedom, take the opportunity. And he explains why that you're a free man in Christ. The point being, Paul didn't instruct slaves to escape, and he didn't instruct masters, you better let them go. And people read that, and they correctly interpret that Paul did not abolish the slave trade.

The Bible does not abolish it. In the Old Testament, the slaves were part of the households and there were rules about how to treat your slaves. There were rules about how to treat Israelite slaves differently from slaves from foreign nations. And so to modern sensibilities where we're taught in America, it's like slavery bad, Bible approves of slavery or at least permits it and regulates it, therefore Bible must be bad.

That's the argument that people make. And so Kruger correctly points out a few things. If you turn to 1 Timothy, chapter 1, Kruger points out that there were, the Bible is, he says the Bible is not necessarily pro-slavery. But he points out that there were aspects of American slavery and the transatlantic slave trade that were violations of God's law that were in fact the problem.

So look at 1 Timothy chapter 1, we'll start at verse 8. Now we know that the law is good, Paul says, if one uses it legitimately or lawfully. We realize that the law is not enacted for the righteous, but for the lawless and rebellious, for the ungodly and sinful, for the unholy and profane, for killers of father or mother, for murderers. And then verse 10, for the sexually immoral, for homosexuals, he says, in my version, it says for slave traders.

In yours, it might say for kidnappers or for man stealers. And the idea is that in the history of slavery, which is as old as we have written history of anything for, kidnapping someone in order to sell them into forced labor is a violation of God's law. But for somebody to simply have a slave has never been something that was a violation of God's law.

Slavery in the ancient Near East and in the old times was usually, I don't know if I say usually, but it was predominantly and usually it was that a person was working for someone else, effectively speaking. And oftentimes it would be someone who had stolen something and they owed the person because of theft. They owed them restitution. So actually, rather than putting a person in a building called a prison or a jail and making the person who was stolen from then pay for that person's meals and lights and and cot for the for an unforeseeable future.

The person who stole something had to pay the guy back by working for him. So it's a little bit backwards. Somebody steals from you today and then you pay taxes so somebody else can feed them basically a school lunch three times a day and have electricity. Also, if somebody got in debt, so somebody, they were spending somehow, they were doing whatever it was that they didn't make enough money, They were overspending.

They could voluntarily sell themselves into slavery to somebody who could take care of them. And when you were a slave in the Old Testament times, you were part of the household like a like a child of the household. Being a slave was not the negative thing that we see it as because we see the negative treatment that wicked men did toward slaves in the United States due to their hatred for them, whether it was solely racially motivated or whatever reason people had so much hate in their heart for their slaves.

Turn to Galatians 4. So you have two kinds of slavery we're describing here. One is where you're voluntarily a slave. For example, somebody comes to take over your country and they say, well, we can put you to death or you can go to forced labor for us. That's one way you can become a slave. Another way would be you owe somebody something for whatever reason.

You owe them enough money that you go work for them, and while you're working for them, you're basically paying off your debt while you work for them. The other form of that would be that somebody takes you, steals you from where you live against your will, and forces you to work and treats you in a way that is inappropriate to treat another image bearer or a person that God has created. And so in verse 4, or in verse 1 of Galatians 4, Paul is trying to make a comparison about faith in the Lord Jesus and the law.

And he's saying that the law is a schoolmaster, it's a tutor that was meant to lead the Israelites eventually to their Messiah. But he makes a comparison they would all understand, because slavery is a reality. Now, whether that makes it good or bad, I don't know that we can say. I think there could be disagreement But slavery is a reality It been a reality And God has used it forever since the creation He says what I saying is that as long as the heir is a child he no different from a slave although he is the owner of everything I think it would be really odd for Paul to compare a child in a home to a slave in a home if it wasn't assumed at the time that slaves were treated well.

The idea of slavery at many different times in history was not, we're going to just beat these people as if we don't even think they're human. We're going to treat them as a different class of human. The idea was, this is a person who works for me. And that was the word, was they were a slave. They were owned by that person in such a way that they didn't have the freedom that we wanted to give to the slaves in the United States because of the way they were being treated wrongly.

And what I think is interesting is that we don't believe we're slaves today. Okay. And I would dare say that most of the people in the United States right now are slaves to American Express and Visa and MasterCard. We've just moved it from I live in your house and I work for you as a slave to I send you the payment every month as a slave. So we're still all slaves, I think, in a different form.

We're all indebted in some way. And for the most part, it's why a lot of us are working. It's to pay off debt. And so slavery itself is not condemned in the Bible. I'm going to say that's true. The existence of slavery isn't condemned.

And so when the nonbeliever comes along and says God is immoral, Because he has regulated this wicked practice, we have the first response we already talked about, which is, you know, where do you get your morality from if you don't believe in God? But secondly, I think we can say that God has created slavery for a reason. And what is one reason that we can look at slavery in an earthly fashion and help us to understand something about God?

I just want one, Paul. Just one. The right one, too. Well, it shows us our condition of sin. There you go. Slavery, right?

Slavery is, I think, a reality, not only in our world, I think it's somewhat inevitable. Whether that makes it good or whether it's just a permitted evil, we could argue that one. But the existence of slavery teaches us something about our slavery to sin, our indebtedness to sin. And if you want to compare our pre-salvation slavery to the dominion of darkness, to the type of slavery that we rightfully abhor in the United States, where Satan is our master, and where in the United States slaves were treated wrongly.

I think it's a good comparison. When people were beaten, killed, injured, stolen, treated as if there was no regard for them as human beings, they were effectively beasts of burden that had a little more rationality than a beast, so they could be asked to do more complex tasks. When we compare that to the way Satan treats us, when we're non-believers, And we compare that to being transferred into the marvelous kingdom of God's Son, Jesus Christ.

And then we consider that in 1 Corinthians 7, it says you were bought with a price. You were purchased like property, like a slave. God bought you. And so before we agree with the non-believer that slavery is bad, maybe what we should be able to consider is that the idea of how some slaves were treated is bad, but the idea that having a good master is actually a blessing, whose yoke is easy and burden is light, A master who was willing to pay for you with his own blood.

A master who died for you so that you could be redeemed out of your slavery to sin. And that reflects upon the types of households that you have to believe existed where slaves were treated well. Where slaves eventually, in some cases, received the inheritance due sons. Slaves were brought to church In a Presbyterian context a slave in a household would have been baptized and called part of the community of God In ours, we would still expect them to believe, of course, and then be baptized.

So the response for the Christian is to recognize that God has allowed slavery, he's decreed it, he's ordained it, and that there are ways we can use that to teach people spiritual truths about their salvation, or to challenge the non-believer to see that slavery doesn't have to be a negative thing necessarily. Their assumption that a person cannot be someone else's property or a slave is an assumption they're making. And what they may need to be able to do is categorize treatment of slaves differently from the concept of slavery so that they can at least think about whether things are right or wrong.

So now in Deuteronomy 20, you can turn there. God gives some provisions for when they're driving out nations. What's interesting is he tells them to drive out these people, and he actually gives them, we combine all the topics, he gives them a chance to say, well, before you destroy a people completely, give them a chance to become your slaves. It's kind of funny just because of the way the topics worked out.

But in verse 9, no, verse 10, when you approach a city to fight against it, make an offer of peace. As I read this passage about driving people out and potentially making them slaves, I want you to put on a pair of spiritual glasses. I want you to think about God before he judges a person making an offer of peace. He says, if they accept your offer of peace and open their gates, all the people there will become forced laborers to serve you.

If they refuse to make peace with you and wage war against you, lay siege to the city. When Yahweh your God has delivered it into your hand, you must put every male to the sword. But the women, children, livestock, and whatever else is in the city, all its spoil you may take as plunder, and you shall use the spoil of your enemies that Yahweh your God gives you.

So this is for the cities that are far away from you and do not belong to the nations nearby. So the outer cities, this is how they handled them. They made an offer of peace. If they accepted it, they would become their slaves, their forced laborers, a tribute to them. And then in verse 16, However, in the cities of the nations that Yahweh your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not leave alive anything that breathes, for you must devote them to complete destruction, the Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jeppesites, As Yahweh your God has commanded you so that they cannot teach you to do all the detestable things they do for their gods and so cause you to sin against Yahweh your God.

God is the king. And he is conquering the kingdom of Satan. You could say one soul at a time. He's plundering, taking the spoil that Christ has won. And he comes to us. He comes to you.

He comes to your children. He comes to your neighbors. He comes to the people you work with. And he makes an offer of peace. And the offer of peace includes the option to leave the slavery you're in to Satan himself and the kingdom of darkness And to become a slave of a good master, a loving master, a caring master, you're going to serve someone. Bob Dylan, I think.

That's two pop references. And Emma wasn't here for that one. That's too bad. Or if you refuse the offer of peace, the option is to be totally destroyed. I think God gives us pictures of things like conquering nations, and he gives us pictures of things in slavery. And they're not just stuff that happens in the world that just sort of happens.

I think he offers us these things and he gives them to us in Scripture as descriptions to help us to see the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ towards people who are worthy of judgment. But God did not have a definite judgment We need to make sure we able to I think turn some of these things around to teach people that this is God way of showing us the way kingdoms work on earth so that we see how the kingdom in heaven is designed When we talk about marriage, most of us know that we can quickly go from earthly marriage to the marriage of Jesus Christ and his bride. You know, God didn't invent marriage, or he didn't invent marriage and then say, oh, this looks like my son's relationship.

He made marriage in order to instruct us, and I think he does it with other things like national judgment and things like slavery. Let me see the time. We have a couple minutes if there's any comments somebody wants to add or any questions. Or if you have an objection you want to get in right before time runs out, and I won't have time to respond. Levi?

I might have an objection, I'm not sure yet. I anticipated that. Yeah. So, this makes me think of Mark where the Pharisees were trying to trap Jesus. Similar to what you just laid out, right? Like, slavery is bad, the Bible doesn't condemn slavery.

Therefore, the Bible is bad, right? The Pharisees did this to Jesus all the time. They would test him on the law. And the one that comes to mind is the Mark where he, the Pharisees say, well, what about the horse? How can I get you here? And, you know, they go to the, Jesus says, okay, so Moses said, you have to write out a certificate of the horse.

But I'm telling you, if you divorce your wife, you make her guilty of adultery. And the reason that there were regulations about divorce were because of the hardness of the heart. That's what Jesus says, right? So, you know, I know he was talking specifically about divorce in that passage, but similarly I would say divorce was a reality, so there were regulations because of the hardness of people's hearts.

So God provided regulations about all that abortion. Slavery is a reality because of the hardness of people's hearts. And therefore regulations were put in place to avoid, or to hopefully avoid the harsher realities that are just evil on their face. Right? Which, I don't think any of us would say, okay, divorce is, we would not be wishy-washy about the evils of divorce, right?

In the same way, I don't think, like I can understand your argument, but I don't know that it's slavery, I think, to work, ultimately, carries with it the, Well, ultimately, like for its work, there has to be the implied penalty of death for leaving or disobeying those kinds of things. And therefore, while it might be useful, as you have said, to make these other comparisons, probably... I'm open to the fact that some people will think slavery is just wrong, but God used it or not.

Jerry? My initial response to that was not all bond servants became bond servants because of sinful actions. There are legitimate reasons for debt to be incurred that would force somebody into bond servitude. And if one entering monster to have the proper heart is in fear of death, wouldn't it be the motivation to do what he's supposed to do to fulfill his obligation that led him to be a monster?

But we can talk about this at the picnic. It would be wonderful. We're all working for Jeremy, cleaning up. Not as slaves, though, as voluntary servants. Let's pray. Very good comments, very good thoughts.

Father in heaven, thank you that you have provided us with an abundance of truth and that we cannot plumb the depths of your word Lord, and that we can continue to grow as we swim in it. Help us to all be conformed to the image of Christ and renewed in our minds by the power of the Holy Spirit. And please help us this morning as we get ready to worship you together corporately, that we would do so with zeal, with joy in our hearts, with undistracted attention on the Lord Jesus Christ.

In whose name I pray. Amen.