Well, hello world, how we doing?
I hope you're doing really well.
I hope that you are having some really cool encounters with the Lord and with the truth
and with joy and with peace.
I just wanted to say hey and share a few thoughts that have been bouncing around in my head
today.
Hey there, how you doing?
It's a beautiful day here in New Zealand.
This morning I took my kids to a beautiful cafe in the countryside, enjoyed some quality
time together.
Also this morning I spent a bit of time in the Word.
I've been reading through a couple of books in the Old Testament and recently I read a
passage in Nehemiah.
I want to share it with you and just share some thoughts that have been bouncing around
in my head.
All right, so here we go.
The passage is from Nehemiah 13 and verse 23 it says,
Now I realized, this is Nehemiah speaking here, he says,
I realized that some of the men of Judah had married women from Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab.
Furthermore, their children spoke other languages from other nations.
And so I confronted them and I called down curses on them and I beat them and I pulled
out their hair.
Now that's pretty intense from Nehemiah, right?
I just want to pose a question.
I'm pretty sure that most of us here watching this video right now would probably agree
that that behavior from Nehemiah where he basically calls down curses on these men and
physically beats them and pulls their hair out because they had married women from other
lands probably wouldn't match up and check out with the New Testament example of Jesus.
Like if your pastor jumped up on stage and started beating somebody and pulling their
hair out because they married someone from another country and their kids spoke another
language that probably wouldn't be viewed as okay, right?
Or Christ-like.
Now I'm not saying that Nehemiah was necessarily in the wrong in context of the Old Testament,
right?
So just to clarify that.
But what I'm saying is, could it be, right, that not everything in the New Testament is
now appropriate, sorry, not everything in the Old Testament that happened is now appropriate
in the New Testament?
And I think we would all agree, I think we would all agree that not everything in the
Old Testament is appropriate, right, now in the context of the New Testament.
And there's a lot of dodgy stuff that happened in the Old Testament, like this passage is
a good example, as well as potentially that verse from Proverbs that seems to suggest
that we are meant to physically beat our children with a literal rod.
Now rod would be, you know, a massive stick.
And there seems to be quite a lot of people who have latched onto this that think this
is actually a good thing, that we should physically, that we should take that verse literally and
physically beat our children with a rod.
Now am I saying that we shouldn't, am I saying that we shouldn't correct our children when
there is error?
And not at all.
No, I think we, I think there's absolutely a place of correction in discipleship, right?
Now the question that I'm asking, I'm not saying that I'm right, that I have all the
answers, I'm just posing a question.
Could it be that this passage from Nehemiah, as well as a lot of other passages from the
Old Testament, including the one from Solomon, who by the way also believed that it was okay
to have 700 wives and slaves, could it be that maybe not everything they said and did
lined up with the New Testament example of Jesus?
Because you'll notice, you know, in Nehemiah, there isn't a disclaimer, there isn't a verse
after that that says, oh by the way, there will come...
a time where this behavior is not appropriate. It doesn't say that. But I'm pretty sure most
of us would agree that that behavior is no longer appropriate, right? I don't think that
we would probably think that's okay in our churches today, beating people, pulling their
hair out, right? Because they married someone from another country. That was the Old Testament
context. And even then, I question whether that was the heart of Jesus, right? But could
it be that the disclaimer, that the clarification in the Bible that God did offer was sending
Jesus and that Jesus is now the lens that we need to actually line everything else up
through, right, in the Bible? And I think most of us would agree that it is, right?
So could it be that Jesus was actually God's disclaimer, saying this is actually that stuff?
That stuff that some of these people who genuinely loved me and genuinely followed me, but a
lot of that stuff that happened wasn't actually my heart, right? Could Jesus actually be God's
disclaimer saying that stuff wasn't actually my heart? This is my heart, right? Jesus is
my heart. So it's just a question that I wanted to pose and just some thoughts that I wanted
to put out there just to challenge the way that we think. Because I think there's some
stuff from the Old Testament that has crept into a lot of our modern day beliefs and philosophies
around parenting that I wonder if maybe we actually need to view it through the lens
of Jesus and through the New Testament. Could it be, right?
So those are my thoughts for today. I go a lot deeper into some of these thoughts in
this particular topic as well as a lot of other topics in the Parenting Challenge that
we've done. You can find it on the Raising Royalty platform under Parenting. I'll put
a link to it in the comments of this video. I highly encourage you to check it out if
you haven't already. About nine months of hundreds of hours of study in not only scripture
but courses and books went into putting this course together. It basically summed up the
best of the best from a lot of different people into a nine-part series. I give some really
good biblical foundation for what I believe New Testament discipline and correction looks
like now. I'll put a link to that in the comments of this video. At the very least
I hope some of these thoughts get some of us thinking in a new way. I realize this could
be some offensive content but I also realize that Jesus broke every single one of the Old
Testament laws pretty much. He was hated by a lot of people for challenging the status
quo around what was acceptable and what was not acceptable. He was killed for it. Sometimes
when I bring some of these thoughts to the table people get offended. A lot of people
were offended at Jesus too. That's okay. Hopefully this gets some people thinking. If you want
to go deeper feel free to check out the course that's linked in the comments. I hope you
guys are doing really well. We love you. We're so excited about what the Lord's doing
in this community and this movement of love and acceptance and royalty. You guys are great.
Bless you and we will catch you later. Cheers guys.