Bible Basics Part One

[00:00:00] Today what we're doing are two lessons I'm calling the Bible Basics part one and two. So this is part one. [00:00:09] And so we're talking about the basics of the Bible. Now don't tune out because I think a lot of these things are assumed. There might be little bits here and there that you've never heard and can be helpful. And the reason I'm kind of connecting what we did with Asher to this is that one of the biggest reasons people have a hard time understanding the Bible is because they're just reaching around blindly throughout the Bible trying to figure out what they're looking at. [00:00:34] And you know, a yes or no question might help. But there's no one to ask questions to. They open their Bible in the morning by themselves and they have no idea what to do. Even those of you who have always been in church can often find yourself just lost. What do I do? How do I really understand this? Maybe you get some parts down, you feel confident you can read the Gospels. [00:00:54] You're kind of iffy on those minor prophets. [00:00:57] There are just different parts of the Bible that challenge us in different ways. [00:01:01] So let me ask you, can you tell me the significance of this verse for what happens to the children of man and what happens to the beasts is the same as one dies, so the other. [00:01:12] If you read that, you might be able to understand that. But if you just opened your Bible, you pointed at the page, you read that for your daily Bible reading, you might try again. [00:01:21] Maybe you might think that's weird. So animals and people are, you know, the same value, you might take that away. Well, that's also the wrong takeaway. What does it mean? [00:01:34] Well, if you understand what that verse is, where it is, what's going on around it, then you would understand that you're in the book of Ecclesiastes. [00:01:44] And if you understand what that book is about, then you might see that this poetic book of wisdom is showing that without belief in the one true God, you are no better than an animal in eternity sake. Now you have more value. But this is kind of like a cynic's view of the question. [00:02:02] But we need to know what we're doing. We need to know what his Ecclesiastes. We need to know what are these books doing, who wrote them, for what reason, what type of genre or literature is it? [00:02:16] So we're going to discuss two main questions that will hopefully help you do this. [00:02:22] What is the Bible and how is the Bible structured? Those are the two questions we're going to hopefully answer today. What is the Bible and how is it structured? The goal is for you all to be able to explain what the Bible is and how it is structured. That's the goal for you to be able to explain what the Bible is and how it is structured. That's like the main idea of the lesson that I want you to take away. [00:02:45] So the first of those questions, what is the Bible? [00:02:51] What is the Bible? Can anyone tell me what is the Bible? [00:02:56] Is this Word of God. [00:03:01] The way God tells us stuff? Yeah, no, that's fine. Yeah, good. Yeah, those are all right answers. So let's just go through a few points to kind of describe what the Bible is. The first thing we've said is God's word. Second Timothy 3, 16, 17. You guys might know this, maybe you've memorized it before. It says all Scripture. All of the Bible is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work. [00:03:36] This means that the Bible, every single word of it, comes from God himself. [00:03:44] Every single word. This is not some holy men's interpretation of who God is. These words are coming from God himself, with no error, no change in meaning. [00:03:57] These are coming from God. Every single word of it is true. Every single word of it is from God. Every single word of it is unaltered. Every single word of it is perfect. [00:04:07] And if that's true, then what does that mean for us? If this really is God's word, it has to be radically transformative in our lives, and we have to do something. If this really is God's word, that's. You know, a lot of people dispute that. But if it really is, then how should we treat it? Well, first we must read it. [00:04:26] You have to read it. God is revealing himself to you. Yesterday I called the Bible our burning bush. It is that magnificent. You know how magnificent the burning bush was? Moses had to take his shoes off because he was on holy ground as God revealed himself to Moses. [00:04:43] Well, this is how God reveals himself to us. [00:04:46] So we should treat it with the utmost importance. We must read it. That's simple enough. You got to read it. [00:04:55] The Bible is profitable. It's useful for teaching and correction and training and righteousness. But even more than that, the great almighty God has revealed himself to us. [00:05:06] He's saying, look, here I am. You can know me without this. You can't know me. You can know that I exist and that I made things, maybe, but you can't really know me. [00:05:18] But with the Bible, with his self revelation of himself, you can actually know him. [00:05:24] That is amazing. [00:05:26] We wouldn't be able to adequately discover him on our own, but he decided to use the words of humans to reveal who he is. [00:05:36] So a second thing that this means for us, that it's God's word, is that we must read all of it. So we need to read the Bible. [00:05:44] That's simple enough, but we need to read all of it. It is all useful for us. [00:05:50] We shouldn't settle for reading the red letters in the Gospels. Every word is the word of Christ. [00:05:57] So the red letter Bibles can help us in finding these quotes from Jesus. But sometimes it confuses us to think that these are Jesus words and these are maybe more important. [00:06:08] But that's not true. [00:06:09] That's not true. The whole Bible is Christ's word. He believed the whole thing was from God. And so what he is quoted as saying and everything else is equally his word. [00:06:21] In fact, in Luke 24:44, Jesus says, then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything about me in the law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms be fulfilled. [00:06:39] So when Jesus uses these, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms, he's referring to the whole Old Testament. That was kind of the shorthand way to refer to all of those books. The Law, the prophets and the Psalms. Sometimes said the Law, the prophets and the writings. [00:06:55] He's referring to the whole Bible at the time. [00:06:59] So we must read all of it. And then third, we must trust it. [00:07:02] So the Bible is God's word. It really is. We must read it, we must read all of it and we must trust it. [00:07:08] If Jesus believed that all of the Bible was God's word, and he did, we just read that, then we must trust every word of it. Every single word. [00:07:18] A man who died and rose again believed it. How can we not? How can we doubt it? [00:07:23] Now? Whenever you don't understand something or maybe something makes you feel uncomfortable, the right response is to assume that the issue is with you. It's within us, not in the Bible. Sometimes we do struggle to understand things. Sometimes we struggle to really get the context and what God is doing in this event or in this prophecy. But we need to assume that God is faithful and there is a way to understand this. And you, you just might need help. And that's okay. We all need help to understand the Bible and we need to do that work because the Bible is God's word. [00:08:02] Secondly, what is the Bible well, the Bible is something that requires a unique approach. [00:08:09] It needs a unique approach when we come to it, to read it and understand it, we can't come to it like any other book. [00:08:17] Now, since it is a book in one sense, we do need to read it like a book, which means we need to read it cover to cover. We need to read all of it in context. We don't want to skip around so much that we don't really understand how it fits together. It's not that you can never jump around, but you need to understand how it all fits together. First, you don't open the Lord of the Rings for the first time in the middle of the two towers and start, you won't understand it. [00:08:45] We don't start chapter seven of the Sorcerer's Stone without any reference to chapters one through six. If you're a Harry Potter reader, you wouldn't understand what's going on. You need to know the whole story. And if you know the whole story, then you can better jump in the middle and know what's going on. [00:09:00] But at the same time, we have to read it uniquely, unlike any other book because it's unique. So how do we read it uniquely? [00:09:10] Well, first, we read by faith. [00:09:14] You actually need faith to read the Bible accurately. [00:09:19] You do. You don't need to have faith to read a novel, but you need to have faith to read the Bible. [00:09:24] This is the main way that Bible reading is different than all other reading. When we read it, we must read it by faith. If we read it without faith, then the Spirit will not illuminate its meaning to us and we won't understand it. We will come short. You can understand bits and pieces, but ultimately it will fall flat of its true intent to bring you to Christ if you read without faith. [00:09:48] Second, read in context. [00:09:51] It means you got to understand what's going on in the book, around it, kind of the little book, what's going on in the whole Bible. Got to know the whole story, maybe how it fits into the grand story. [00:10:02] Know what kind of literature is being used. Is this poetry? Is this a prophecy? Is this a narrative? Is this a legal code? What am I reading exactly? [00:10:12] Generally, what history, you know, historical figures and actions are happening at the time can be helpful too. But we need to the best of our ability to read it in context. That can be overwhelming. I just would encourage you guys to just do what you can do your best. Use a good study Bible. Ask for help if you don't know. [00:10:31] And then the third way we can read it uniquely Is by reading the way the words go. Sometimes we want to restrict the Bible and think, well, exactly what it says is exactly what it means. I have to take it very literalistically. And sometimes people want to read the Bible and they think, well, it's all just kind of a metaphor for whatever I want it to mean. It's all just about love. You know, the stories, they may be true or not. No, that's not how we read it either. But the way that it's written will tell us we can understand that something could be happening to Abraham. And at the same time, it's pointing to a more future reality in Christ. The Bible does a lot of things like that. So we need to read, kind of understand what's happening, what it's all pointing to. [00:11:14] Because everything we read, especially in the Old Testament, is true and was happening, but was also pointing to forward, to the future, everything. [00:11:24] So we need to read the way the words go. Let the words of the sentences point us to their meaning. [00:11:31] It's very simple. Sounds complicated, but it's simple. It just takes practice. Just read the Bible because the Bible is God's word. [00:11:41] So that's what the Bible is. Now, how is the Bible structured? Talking about the structure will help us understand more about what the Bible is. But how is it structured? What are the two main groups of books in the Bible? [00:11:55] The New Testament and the Old Testament. The New Testament and the Old Testament. What is the Old Testament? [00:12:03] Anyone may be kind of hard to define. [00:12:09] This is the first part. Yeah, the Old Testament is like kind of like towards the beginning of earth and like. Yeah, all that. And the New Testament is like the Gospels and. [00:12:22] Yeah, the letters and the stuff around more Jesus time. Okay. Yeah, more like Judas is like the older than the New Testament, like the newer with Jesus because he died on the cross. [00:12:39] Yeah, Old Testament is older, newer in the New Testament with Christ. [00:12:43] Okay, well, those are true. How many. Does anybody know how many books there are in the Bible? In our bibles? [00:12:52] I heard 66. That's right. How many are in the Old Testament? [00:12:58] Trivia time. [00:12:59] What? 33. 33 is a good guess, but it's wrong. [00:13:04] That's closer, but wrong. [00:13:06] That's the closest. Oh, wait, I heard it. [00:13:09] 39. It's 39. 39 of the 66 are in the Old Testament. So the first 39 books are the Old Testament takes up probably about 4/5 of your Bible, maybe a little bit less than that. It's a lot of material. [00:13:24] The Old Testament is a collection of those 39 books, all written between 1400 BC and 400 BC, but some telling of even earlier than 1400 BC to the very creation of the world. [00:13:37] These books were all written in Hebrew, except Daniel has some parts in Aramaic, as we learned during Trivia. [00:13:45] Now it seems distant, right? The Old Testament. Historically it is distant. Sometimes it seems irrelevant, maybe even off putting to you. [00:13:54] Sometimes Christians can't even be embarrassed about parts of the Old Testament. [00:13:58] So what is the Old Testament for? [00:14:01] What is its purpose? Well, the Old Testament does three things, very important things. First, I think we even maybe Jeremiah or someone mentioned this. It tells of the origin of the world. [00:14:12] It tells who we are and where we came from. Who is God? [00:14:17] Who are we? [00:14:18] How can we be saved? What do we need to be saved from? [00:14:22] All of these questions are answered in the Old Testament. [00:14:26] The Old New Testament alludes to it. But without the Old Testament, we would lose a lot of the foundation. The New Testament just completes and clarifies these answers. But the Old Testament gives us the questions and starts to point towards the answer. [00:14:41] So it tells us of the origin. [00:14:44] Number two. It lays the foundation for the New Testament. [00:14:49] The New Testament quotes and alludes to the Old Testament all the time, countless times. And all the New Testament books assume at least some knowledge of the Old Testament. So you can understand the New Testament, but you can't understand it fully if you don't know the Old Testament. [00:15:04] The more you study the Old Testament, the more you will see these aspects of the New Testament pop out before your eyes. It will just color the pages of your Bible more beautifully so you can appreciate the glory of God in the Scriptures. [00:15:19] It brings color to a black and white picture. It's like generating a video with an image, which you can do now. [00:15:27] It just brings it to life. [00:15:30] That's the Old Testament. [00:15:32] So what is the New Testament? Well, it's, you know, the part after the Old Testament. 27 books in the New Testament. The New Testament is often where new believers begin. And that's a good thing. [00:15:44] Many Christians spend a lot of time in the New Testament. Fantastic. But you cannot see the full picture of it without an adequate understanding of the Old Testament background. But once we have that, the New Testament then tells us of Jesus life, his ministry, his death, his resurrection, all before turning to the conception and initial spread of the church. [00:16:08] And so this means that each New Testament book was written with church members in mind. [00:16:14] That's amazing. We are in a church, you know, we're in a building where a church meets. [00:16:19] Many of you might be baptized into this church. [00:16:23] These books were written for people like us. [00:16:27] Even the Gospels, you know, it tells of what happened before the church began. But it was written to churches. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote those for churches to read so that they would know who Jesus was. His life, his death, his resurrection, his and what they are coming from. [00:16:45] So we see that all those Old Testament themes that we could talk about, we'll talk about even more later, of sacrifice and atonement and prophecy and priests and descendants and land and promises. All of these are answered in the New Testament. [00:17:06] It's like a pass that is thrown at and then caught in the New Testament for a touchdown. It is like begun and then completed in the New Testament. [00:17:17] That's what the New Testament does. That's why it's so important. [00:17:20] Now we want to talk about the categories of the Bible. [00:17:23] So we got Old Testament, New Testament within these are more categories. [00:17:28] Is this getting confusing yet? You guys may have heard of them before. I think they're relatively helpful for us. [00:17:36] So first, let's go back to the ot, the Old Testament. We have the law. [00:17:43] What are some other words for the law? There's at least two other words for these books. Does anybody know them? [00:17:49] Yeah, the Pentateuch. Yeah, Pentateuch. Because there's five books. Pentateuch, five. What's the other one? It's a Hebrew word that you've probably heard. Maybe you didn't know it was Hebrew. [00:18:04] Torah. Torah means law. [00:18:06] That's right. Torah, law, same word. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. These first five books are the law. [00:18:14] And these books are called the law. And a lot of times you'll see in the New Testament reference to the law in general, these books are the law because it largely centers on the law of God revealed to Israel. That's kind of like the highlight. The main central point of those books, the story leading up to the giving of the law and how the law must be kept by them to inherit the promises of God. So we kind of see what happened before from creation. God picking a people, their need for a law, them getting the law, and then how do they follow it? We get a lot of content on that. [00:18:55] Now. There are a lot of things, you know, you get into the last part of Exodus, you read Leviticus, different aspects of numbers, and then Deuteronomy, you read it all for a second time. [00:19:06] It seems like a lot. It's a lot to keep. [00:19:09] And I think this isn't the only reason, but I think that helps us understand what its purpose is. [00:19:16] Someone needs to keep those laws. [00:19:18] You need to keep those laws, but you can't. [00:19:22] But thankfully somebody did. [00:19:24] Christ kept the law on behalf of all who would believe. [00:19:27] So we need to know what is the standard for holiness, to dwell with God, so that we can see that we can't do it and that we need a savior. That's what the law does. There are historical books is what we call them nowadays. [00:19:42] Joshua, Judges, Ruth, 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1, 2 Kings, 1st and 2nd Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther. [00:19:49] In your Bibles, these books kind of continue Israel's history after the law, from their entrance into the promised land to their eventual exile, AKA them getting kicked out of the promised land by Babylon and Assyria, and then even to their return from exile. That's Ezra, Nehemiah, and Esther even is kind of in between somewhere. So that's the historical books. We kind of see the unfolding of what happened. [00:20:17] You know, them, God fulfilling his promises, Israel not fulfilling their end of the covenant, and their punishment for it after that. In your Bibles, you get to poetry books. Now, these are not all chronologically in order, right? [00:20:30] So so far from the law, through the historical books, we kind of have a timeline after this. All of these poetry books and prophecy books you could pick up and place on top of that storyline. Does that make sense? [00:20:46] So it doesn't just keep going. Malachi is not the. Well, Malachi is the last thing chronologically. [00:20:52] But it kind of. Yeah, that was a bad example. But, you know, it kind of jumps around a lot. And so don't kind of read that way thinking that, okay, well, Jeremiah, you know, comes after the end of Chronicles because it's later in my Bible. That's not how it works. [00:21:08] So we have all of these poetry books. Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Solomon, and Lamentations. [00:21:17] With the exception of Job, which took place very early in history. [00:21:21] These books were compiled during Israel's history to expound on the law and the events happening to them. So it's helping them understand what is happening, what is wisdom, and really gives us a fuller idea of wisdom through the law. [00:21:38] So that's the poetry books. [00:21:40] Prophets. There are major minor prophets. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. [00:21:51] Those are a lot of books. They're the prophets. They prophesied during Israel's history, Now prophecy. I grew up always thinking that's when you predict the future and they do that sometimes. But actually, most of what they write is, is not predicting the future. [00:22:05] Prophecy is more accurately defined as someone speaking on behalf of God. So they're speaking on behalf of God. It's not always predicting the future. That might help you understand those books a little bit more. [00:22:16] They're speaking what God wants his people to hear. Sometimes that is foretelling the future. Sometimes it is calling them out of their sin right now. Sometimes it's something else. [00:22:27] Now, most of them prophesied before and during the exile, so when they were in their land as a kingdom, and then when they got kicked out of their land, but when they returned, then, you know, you get Haggai, Zechariah and Malachi. They're written after. [00:22:41] And what do these prophets do? They answer a question. [00:22:44] The question these last three prophets answer is what went wrong? [00:22:49] The other prophets are answering what is going wrong, among other questions. Those are kind of the main ideas. [00:22:56] Then you get to the New Testament, you get the Gospels and Acts. These are kind of the closest to history that we read, though we don't want to constrain them to being merely history. [00:23:08] They tell us more than that. So Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Acts, these tell of Jesus life, especially Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. The four Gospels are telling the same story from different angles. So they're all looking at the same story from different angles, and they're telling different parts of it. Some of them overlap a lot. Some of them are telling unique things, and they're telling it with different emphases. [00:23:32] They have an overall theme and a message they want to portray to the church from Jesus life. [00:23:37] So that's why they're telling the same story. But they're all different, some more than others, especially John. [00:23:44] When there's, you know, I think sometimes we can struggle with this idea. [00:23:49] They're so similar. But why are they different in some ways, when there's a crime, police detectives interview as many witnesses as possible. Did you know that? They do this because it gives them a better idea of what happened. [00:24:03] Now, in a different way, it's because witnesses are very unreliable. But these witnesses are inspired by the Spirit. [00:24:12] These authors made no mistake. But the various perspectives give us a fuller picture of. Of what happened. It gives us different themes and emphases to focus on. [00:24:23] And then Acts tells us of the inception of the church after Jesus ascends into heaven. [00:24:30] And then kind of through Acts, that timeline, we get a lot of our epistles, most of them. [00:24:38] So the epistles, the letters, you might hear epistles and Letters, we'll just think of them as the same thing. [00:24:44] There are many written by Paul. Anybody know how many trivia I'm preparing you guys for? Bible trivia? [00:24:54] 13. [00:24:56] It's 13, huh? [00:25:02] What about Hebrews? [00:25:05] Who wrote Hebrews? Maybe we'll talk about that in a little bit. [00:25:09] No one knows for sure, but we have guesses. All right, Paul, he wrote Romans, 1st and 2nd Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, Philippians, Colossians, 1st and 2nd Thessalonians, 1st and 2nd Timothy, Titus and Philemon. [00:25:21] Again. We might think because we've read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and now Acts that we're doing this timeline thing. But really, Paul's letters are mostly. [00:25:30] They're organized in terms of size. Romans is the biggest, First Corinthians is the second biggest. And then Second Corinthians isn't the third biggest, but it goes with First Corinthians. So they go together and it goes so on like that. [00:25:42] It kind of just goes in order of size. That's just how they organized it. So they kind of jump around a little bit. But it's in the same several decades. And these are written to churches. There are general epistles, Hebrews, written by Mr. Hebrew. [00:25:58] James. That's not a person, guys. James 1 and 2, Peter 1, 2, 3, John and Jude. These books help churches know how to live the Christian life. [00:26:06] All of these letters, Paul's and then the general ones, they help churches know how to live the Christian life. They do it in many different ways. That's kind of how you could summarize all of it together. [00:26:18] And then there's the Apocalypse. [00:26:22] You guys know what the Apocalypse is? [00:26:24] It's revelation. [00:26:26] Revelation in Greek is Apocalypto. So that's where we get the word apocalypse. It means revelation. And revelation doesn't mean end of the world. It means a revealing. But we've kind of taken that word revealing, revelation, and made it into an apocalypse and into the world type thing. So you think of apocalypse, we kind of have modern notions. It really is talking about God or Christ revealing himself to his people. What's going to happen? This book helps us understand what is happening today in light of what will happen in the end. [00:27:00] That's as simple as I can make it. What's happening today in light of what's going to happen at the end. And Christ will win. He'll be king forever. [00:27:08] There will be a new heaven and a new earth. [00:27:11] He's the victor. [00:27:13] That's the end. How do we interpret that today? How do we interpret the tribulation and the difficulties of life and the church today, through history, into tomorrow, until he comes? Revelation helps us with that. [00:27:27] So now then, there's all these genres we've mentioned, like narrative poetry, prophecy, they all have different ways to be interpreted. So the best thing to do is just kind of be aware of what you're reading and how it might be interpreted. Like, for example, apocalyptic literature, Revelation, Daniel, a couple other places in the Bible use a lot more symbolism than a narrative in Genesis, Exodus, or numbers does. [00:27:53] So you have to look out for that. [00:27:56] Another thing I want to tell you guys about is how to find passages in the Bible. You guys know how to find a passage in the Bible? [00:28:06] Yeah, yeah. The numbers and everything. [00:28:08] You know, sometimes we miss this. I've talked to many people that don't know this, and it's okay if you struggle to remember kind of exactly what it is. [00:28:16] Now, these numbers, did Jesus put them in? [00:28:22] No, they were added. [00:28:25] All the subtitles in your Bible, all of the little numbers in your Bible were added. [00:28:30] That's not part of the Bible, but it helps us find stuff in the Bible, so it's useful. It's actually, they've only existed for 2, 300 years at this point. It's not that old. But it is way easier to tell someone how to find a verse with these numbers. So thankful to whoever did that. [00:28:51] I don't think I wrote down who did it, and I don't know it off the top of my head. [00:28:55] But here's how they work. We have books of the Bible. You go to a book, the first number you might hear. When Someone says Genesis 1:26, the first number is the chapter number. You look for the big number, and then those little numbers are verse numbers. Sometimes they're footnotes, but you're just going to have to figure that out. I don't know how to describe the difference to you. There are lots of little numbers. [00:29:16] Chapters and verses help us find where we're going, and that's okay. [00:29:24] Oh, no. [00:29:26] The Apocalypse, anyway, something. [00:29:40] We're okay. [00:29:43] So chapter and verses. [00:29:45] Hey, when someone says Genesis 1:26, you go to Genesis, you find the number one that's big. And then after the number one that's big, you find the 26 that's little. Does that make sense? [00:29:56] That'll help you a lot. There's a table of contents at the beginning that can help you find the book. But especially in youth ministry, especially on Sunday mornings, Austin likes to go to a lot of different passages in the Bible. [00:30:08] A lot. And I'll say flip here. And I make it a point to not flip in advance to give people time to get there. But I've been doing it for so long, I think I get there pretty fast. [00:30:20] So if you want to keep up. I try to slow down, but if you want to keep up, you got to memorize the books of the Bible. I can't give you a quiz on this. It's not part of my job. [00:30:29] But I really would recommend, if you haven't, to memorize the books of the Bible. [00:30:36] Has anyone memorized the books of the Bible? [00:30:39] That's good. That's good. That's good. Keep practicing it. Annie's been practicing. Shy Lin has a great song called Gotta Know the Books. [00:30:48] Gotta know the books. There are other books of the Bible songs that are probably even simpler, but that's a fun one. [00:30:56] She loves it. See, she loves it. [00:30:59] She's going crazy right now just thinking about it. She's going to have to hear it on the way home today. [00:31:04] Got another book, something. Some book of the Bible song, some way to memorize it. Because, guys, it just makes your life so much easier. [00:31:12] Yes, it really does. It is worth it. And it really doesn't take that long. 66 words is not that much. [00:31:19] And really, a lot of them are paired up, so it's not even that many. It's like less than 60. When you get the first and seconds and the thirds together, you don't have to memorize that much. You can do it. I would recommend it. It's just way quicker than flipping back to the beginning and trying to find your way. And over time, you just get better and better at it. So that's my recommendation. I won't make you do it, and I will never ridicule you for not doing it, but I highly encourage it. [00:31:46] Okay, so what is the Bible? Well, the Bible is that. [00:31:51] I hope you guys have maybe a better understanding. Maybe a couple things here and there were new to you. Maybe some helpful reminders, and if nothing else, you just had someone else encourage you to memorize the books of the Bible. And I hope you remember that and do it. Does anybody have any questions? [00:32:09] No. Well, after lunch, you know, we'll play a couple games, but we'll have one more lesson, and we're going to talk about the story of the Bible, and that'll be our part two of what is the Bible? How to understand the Bible, Bible basics. [00:32:27] Okay? [00:32:28] So for the next 15 minutes or so, let's have some free time. Take a break. Get a snack. Lunch will be here in 15. [00:32:37] Then we'll eat it. [00:32:40] It's beef Wellington. You said yes. No, it's. [00:32:44] It's from the crib. [00:32:48] Wait, what's. You have a question? [00:32:52] Oh, yeah. It's from the crib. Rib crib. [00:32:57] Only the best barbecue for you guys. [00:33:04] If you want to organize a dodgeball game, you may. [00:33:08] Yeah, we'll be back in here after lunch, so, yeah, you guys can hang out over there. Over here. Until then. What? [00:33:15] Oh, yeah, you're right. Hey, stop. Stop, stop, stop. Guys, I made a grave error. [00:33:21] I made a grave error. I want to pray before we get out of here. [00:33:26] Asher, I'm so. Thank you for reminding me. Man, I get so distracted when I have to, like, organize events, too. [00:33:33] It doesn't feel right. And that's true. That's true. It shouldn't feel right. [00:33:37] Hey, let's pray. I want to pray right now. Father, thank you for another great day. That we can come and have fun together. [00:33:46] God, we pray that you would help us to understand your word more and more every day. That you would grow us, sanctify us in truth through the word. Lord, keep us safe as we fellowship together and play games this afternoon. And we want to thank you even now in advance for the food that you have provided for us today. Lord, we thank you, and we hope to not take that for granted. We pray this in Christ's name, Amen.