How to Apply The Bible!

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This is Truth Network. When you get into chapter 23 and 24 of Genesis, and you're reading through things and they're kind of telling some of the story over and over again. Chapter 24 is about Rebecca, but in chapter 23, Sarah's death and burial. And there's this back and forth about, hey, I'll give you the land that you can find the cave in and bury Sarah. And Abraham's like, no, I'm not going to just take the land.

I want to pay for it. And then the other guy says, no, I'm just going to give you the land. And then Abraham says, no, I'm going to pay for the land and back and forth, literally the whole chapter. And I get to the end of Genesis chapter 23 and I'm like, all right, what does this mean to me?

Like, how do I apply this? You want to give me something for free, but I should pay for it. And then we should argue according to Genesis chapter 23, we should go back and forth, I think maybe five times. And then we go from there. But what if you're in Leviticus? So do you ever struggle today on Theology Thursday is what we're diving into is application. Do you ever struggle to figure out applying the Bible to your life as you're studying the Bible or when you're running into situations or topics, issues in your life and you run to the Bible to try to get some guidance? It's not always easy to find chapter and verse. This is the introduction from a book that we're going to discuss a little bit today, kind of as a background issue. The book's called Beyond Chapter and Verse, The Theology and Practice of Biblical Application.

This is from the introduction. Kate closed her Bible with a sense of disappointment. She was glad that she had faithfully done her devotion, yet she was frustrated that she hadn't gotten anything out of it.

Been there, done that. Even more discouraging was that she had been asking the Lord to show her his will with a major decision, but the Bible didn't seem to provide the direction she needed. Can you relate to that? Andrea, another story, appreciated the opportunity to counsel her friend whose marriage was hit hard times. But after a while, though, she didn't know what to do. She was coming up dry as she tried to think of verses that related to Carla's situation. She faced the same struggle in responding to questions and objections from her non-Christian co-workers.

Or how about this one? Craig was having another tense discussion with his teenage son, Chris. They were back to the issue of video games. What's wrong with this game?

questioned Chris. The violence is only make believe. Besides, where in the Bible does it say this is wrong? There's plenty of killing in the Bible anyway.

Whoa. Have you been there and done that? This is the challenge of application, dealing with the Bible.

How do you apply it? Should you be able to apply everything you read in the Bible to your regular life? And if you don't, does that mean you're a lame-o, flunky Christian? Dr. Ken Casillas is back with us today from BJ Youth Seminary, who teaches this class to mostly appointed that people that want to be either lay teachers, Sunday school teachers working with the youth, or perhaps want to be pastors themselves. But this is a really rich subject, Ken, and something that I think, truth be told, a lot of us are struggling with. But thanks for being here today. How are you? Happy New Year. Oh, thank you. Doing well. Thank you.

Looking forward to this chat. So when one writes a book like this, like you have, beyond chapter and verse, what kind of drove you to that? Was that like, there's a huge need out there and I need to respond to it? Was it the environment at BJ Youth that you're in?

Or what was kind of the genesis of it? I would say there was a need. I mean, you have a lot of great books on how to interpret the Bible and how to preach the Bible.

Most of them touch on application, but there really aren't too many that are focused on this question of why we apply and how to go about it. So I feel like there was a gap there, but probably the bigger thing is that I grew up in an environment that was very strong on applying the Bible, on living for Christ, on living a holy life. But sometimes the applications that were made and the way that it was done really wasn't convincing in terms of this is what actually the Lord would have us get out of this or that passage. And so kind of in reaction to that, I just observed teaching here at BJU for many years that young people were sort of going through a struggle and trying to deal with weaknesses that they observed in their past like that and ended up at a point where they just weren't that interested in applying. They sort of got cooled off on it because of the misuses of Scripture. And so this was an effort to kind of bring the pendulum back to the middle, but addressing some of the problems, but also showing here's why we must apply and here's a responsible way to do that.

Yeah. So can you start, Ken, with a kind of a 30,000-foot question about why study the Bible at all? Well, I suppose at the most fundamental level that it's the Word of God, right? So he took the trouble to communicate with humanity and we believe that he did it only through these 66 books that now form the Bible. And so if nothing else, out of respect for the God that we believe in and worship, we want to pay attention to what he says. But beyond that, we also want to know what his will is for our lives.

And 2 Timothy 3 16 tells us not only that the Bible is inspired, but that it's profitable for us, that it is designed by God to work sanctification in us. So once we become believers in Christ, this is the means that he has given us to inform us, to direct us, to grow us. And so we've got to be interested in it.

Yeah. And then just understanding, and we'll get into this because we have to talk about a couple of the challenges with biblical application is you've got to understand what you're reading, context matters. And then, you know, I think sometimes we try to put a square peg in a round hole. And that's another question we'll explore is, do I have to be able to apply absolutely everything I read in the Bible to my life?

Because people will go after all, hey, Steve, hey, Ken, the Bible was written 2000 years ago plus, and things are a little different now than they were back then. So maybe some things I can, it's good to understand because you understand the heart of God, you understand the nature of reality and truth, but it doesn't necessarily apply today. You've got to cross those types of bridges too. So today we'll spend a lot of time just in the how to's here, but we've got to deal with kind of the necessity of it. Should we always apply the Bible patterns for doing that? There's some things that you've got to be careful of, some objections there. Should it all be all application?

Because some churches like are like that. What do we do with the problem of application? We're here today with Ken Casias. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. It's Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday, as it is each week with our friends at BJU Seminary. Dr. Ken Casias is back with us today talking about biblical application. Let me give you guys an example of biblical application going way wrong. So if you have biblical application without good theology, you'll go down the road, well, of an author who happens to be homosexual. This is why he's an author and claims Christianity, Matthew Vines. Now, Matthew Vines has come up with something that you could literally call the gay gospel. So Matthew Vines goes into the scriptures and says, God is a God of love.

Yes, I agree with you, Matthew. And then you go into the scriptures and you look at relationships and God calls us to a monogamous relationship. Sex within the confines of marriage.

OK, got it. What happens then when he goes off rails with his application, he goes, if I'm in a relationship with another man, in his case, as long as we're loving, we're good because God is God of love. And then setting that aside, because this is a loving relationship, I'm in a monogamous relationship with my boyfriend or my quote unquote husband, whatever the case may be, and God calls us to monogamy.

And so I'm good there, too. Therefore, God is OK with my not only my homosexual lifestyle, but my quote unquote gay marriage. And his application is completely off. His theology is even worse. But he would say that he's properly applying the Bible. And so that's the scary thing here, that you can really get off course when you just pull things out of the Bible and make them fit your Lego set instead of making your Lego purely out of the blocks that God gives you. So that's why we're talking to Dr. Casillas today and based on a book that he wrote, which I've got a link up for now, which is super helpful beyond chapter and verse, the theology and practice of biblical application. Again, Ken, thanks so much for being here.

Welcome. So when you begin to kind of unpack this with students or with lay people, because you also teach this class for people that are just thinking, I might go teach a Sunday school class. I might lead a small group. What are some of the biggest dangers just in general?

Because we're going to end up in the second half of the show, everybody talking about how do you do this correctly? But what are some of the biggest dangers that we need to be aware of when it comes to applying the Bible to, quote unquote, everyday life or some of the big issues that are hot in the topics out there right now, the culture? Well, I think there's a whole spectrum. And if I could just summarize some of the extreme. So one end would be the approach where, say, your Sunday school lesson just turns into like a commentary. And you're just kind of describing the context and the historical background and whatever, which is helpful and which is foundational. But if you don't take the step of making the connection to real life, then then, you know, have you really is a scripture really accomplishing the purpose the Lord intends in a setting like that?

So you have that sort of just academic commentary type thing. On the other end, you have so much interest in application that you skip over the actual wrestling with the meaning of the text in its context. And you might latch on to some little statement or some verse and just balloon it into some some idea for your life or for somebody else's life. And it may not be anything heretical that you are saying there. But on the other hand, you don't really have the confidence that you're proclaiming that the message of the Lord.

Yeah, because there's no real tight, logical connection between what he said to the original audience and what he is wanting you to say to the contemporary audience. And so we have to avoid just immediately looking for ourselves and our lives and our problems and making that the, you know, the extent of what we do with scripture. And with that, like with the example you gave, one of the dangers would be that when we're looking for application and thinking about and thinking about ourselves largely, we actually are being influenced by some other current of thought altogether. It may not be our own just personal needs, really wanting to live for Christ, but it might just it might be some philosophy of the world that we have bought into. And that's now become the filter through which we sort of pick and choose what fits what we've already concluded before we even got to the Bible. Which is what I, in teaching high school age homeschoolers myself for 11 years now, I think that's one of the biggest problems.

They've got an operating system that's been dumped into their heads since kindergarten because the smartphones and so forth. And then that's affecting the way they interpret and understand scripture, which then skews their application. So God is a God of love, so he would never come out in the public and say anything negative about somebody that claims to be transgendered, for example. But what about in our Sunday schools or a small group setting, whatever the case may be, Ken, when people go, you know, you read a passage of scripture and we ask that question that we've all heard, what does this passage mean to you? Right.

Is there anything wrong with that? Well, I would say it is not good hermeneutics or good approach to using the Bible to start with that question or to make that the whole of what you're doing. Because apart from whatever you think it means to you, it means something objectively.

God was saying something concrete to the original audience through the original author, and it is expressed in the actual words there. And so it's not primarily a matter of what does it mean to me, but what does it mean? Period. Right. And then on the basis of that, then we can start to discern what the application to our lives is. But we have to have that ground underneath us.

Yeah. In my civics class that I teach, we go in the reverse direction because we talk about strict constructionists and broad constructionists relative to the U.S. Constitution. A broad constructionist will say, hey, this was written 240 years ago by a bunch of white people who lived in the late 1790s, and we've got the world's a little different now.

Plus, we have international law and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Other people, strict constructionists of which I would be one, it goes, no. What did the founding fathers mean when they wrote it? We have to understand what they meant in context at the time it was written so that we make sure we use it properly here 240 years later. We do the exact same thing with the Bible, don't we? Exactly. In fact, in the book, I have a whole section where I'm quoting Antonin Scalia, the great Supreme Court justice, such a defender of constructionism, and saying that what we're doing in this application process is very similar to what a conservative judge would do with the Constitution. There's a carefulness about the original context and the historical setting, the actual definitions of the words that are being used, and then anything that you're extrapolating from that to new situations, you've got to be able to demonstrate that this is a natural ramification of what was the original meaning to start with. All right.

So this just, since we're both on the same page here, I'm going to write this down because this is one of those moments when I'm like, wow, that's really good. So when we talk about judges that we don't like, this is largely a very conservative audience. We don't like judicial activism. Right. So you don't care what it says in context. You just do it the way you want to do. So now we have biblical activism. We do the exact same thing. Forget what it actually means.

I'm going to take it and use it for my own purposes. And I think that's probably a pretty widespread problem, even for those of us that know and love the Lord. Yeah, no, there's a pretty big influence of postmodernism on some circles as far as interpreting the Bible. There's a whole way of looking at it called reader response, for example, where it's kind of like whatever I make of it. And again, if you're heavily influenced by some social philosophy or political agenda, then that's going to drive what you make of what's there. Yeah. Yeah. Here's another example of this.

I just talked about this in a brand new ethics class today. I asked, they're all high school age, mostly juniors and seniors. I said, what percentage of my generation, I'm 56, what percentage of my generation do you think identifies as LGBTQ? And they're throwing numbers out there. And I said, it's two to 3%.

Okay. Do you know what percentage of your generation identifies as LGBTQ? And they're all over the map. It's 32%. So 32% of Gen Z, that's basically 15 to 24, identifies as LGBTQ. So you've got a whole lot of Christians and young people that identify that way. And then when they encounter the Bible, they're going to see it through that lens. That's why this is important. We'll be right back.

Welcome back. It's Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show, Theology Thursday. If you're a Christian, are you literally bulletproof? Like, should you run down to the reptile store this afternoon, buy a poisonous snake, let it bite you and in Jesus name and echoing our friend Paul, claim that you will not have a problem. Now, is that how you apply that passage of scripture? Biblical application can be, I think, much more of a challenge than perhaps we think it is.

And we mentioned this earlier, talking to Dr. Ken Casillas today from BJU Seminary on Theology Thursday and being in a Bible study. Hey, what does this mean to you? And you said something similar to what I used to say, Ken, and I struggled to say it with a lot of compassion before. I think I'm better at it now. I'd be like, listen, I did this in my own class. I don't care what it means to you.

I just want to know what it means. OK, well, I was accurate, but not necessarily effective in my communication. So there's a lot to deal with.

Plus, Ken and I were talking during the break. If you're a parent, perhaps you have a son or a daughter, a friend that identifies LGBTQ, whatever the case may be, and you're trying to be compassionate or trying to be kind. That's got to be an unbelievably challenging, difficult situation. I have parents emailing me pretty regular basis from all my classes that know somebody. Sometimes it's in their family. Sometimes it's a friend of their son or daughter that's in that world. And they long to be compassionate and kind and gentle and loving. And so they're going to take that into the Scriptures and they're going to say, OK, I know what the Bible says, but I'm not necessarily going to bring that to bear.

So you understand theology, but you leave out application. There's a lot of challenges there, Ken. Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is more and more of an issue. We've always had to apply the Scriptures, but we have all these other movements that are shaping people's thinking. It just becomes all the more important to have a a worked out, credible, responsible approach to how you use the Bible.

Yeah, yeah. It's such a great point. And that's the least read book in America actually is not the Bible. It's the car owner's manual. The existence. Why do we have a car owner's manual?

That is they're quoting a friend of mine to help you get your car to operate at maximum efficiency and to avoid major breakdowns. That's why it's there. But none of us read it.

And now we just go on YouTube and try to find a solution. But with the Bible, it's the same thing. It's not just to be read and understood in its context and its actual meaning.

But then how do you apply it? So let's let's spend the rest of the show working on that, Ken, is how do we like what are the procedures for doing good biblical application? Because it's really important that we do this well. So in the book, I try to boil it down to three phases of interpretation and application. And it's not necessarily that we're consciously going through all these different steps, but all these things have to be in play if we're going to make that responsible application. And so the three categories would be number one, meaning. Number two, implication. And number three, significance, which is a technical term that that people use to talk about actual application. So meaning, implication, significance. And meaning is the benchmark. This is what grounds us.

This is what keeps us safe. This is what would prevent us from abusing scripture or just kind of using it for whatever agenda we have. And in order to get at the meaning, I talk about two different kinds of meaning.

They're very closely related, but I think it's helpful to distinguish them. One would be the historical meaning. And what I'm talking about there is what the human author, under the special influence of the spirit, what he was working to communicate to his audience, right? And there's plenty of great books on that subject. That's what hermeneutics tends to concentrate on and what we call grammatical historical interpretation, which has to do with looking for the author's intent by understanding as much as you can about his history, his background that led up to the writing. Also, by looking at the kind of literature he's writing, which is the genre and their different characteristics that you want to keep in mind based upon whether you're reading, say, an Old Testament historical narrative or a New Testament epistle or whatever the case might be. And then context is hugely important where you're connecting each individual statement with the whole flow of thought in a passage. And then you're finally then ready to go into the weeds of your passage and look at the actual language, the grammar of it.

And that can sound really technical, but the reality is we do a lot of this intuitively when we read anything. We want to know who wrote this. We want to follow his train of thought.

We don't want to just pull out a statement. And we want to appreciate how this all hangs together and how his words are making some kind of argument. So, some of this is just applying basic principles of communication that we might use in our just day-to-day conversations or reading the newspaper or reading a novel or something and using that actually when we come to the scriptures. Yeah, I was just thinking as you were mentioning that and remembering going through classes like this when I was working on my master's degree at the seminary, thinking, okay, if you don't get this understanding, if you don't get the historical meaning and really try to look at it in context, then I should have plucked my eyes out a long time ago and I should have cut my hands off a long time ago because that's what Jesus said.

If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out because you'd rather go into heaven without eyes than to go in as a sinner. I'm like, okay, what kind of language is he dropping on me there? And that's why Old Testament, New Testament, that's so important, the historical meaning. But then you mentioned the trans-historical meaning, which is going to trigger some people, but trans-historical meaning, which is really fascinating.

What's that? Yeah, so don't associate that with any current ideas here. It's not a 20-second century. It just means that it supersedes, not supersedes, but it goes beyond, it transcends the original setting. And so the idea is, yes, there was a historical meaning to the original audience, but through that, God is also speaking to later generations. And there's something universal or timeless here that is the basic theological point that's being made for anybody that comes along and picks up the Bible. And so we, again, understand this kind of intuitively, but it helps us to make that distinction that, for example, I don't literally have to do everything the Bible says, even in the New Testament. For example, this is kind of maybe a goofy illustration, but toward the end of his life, Paul is writing to Timothy and he says to Timothy, come visit me and bring me my coat and my parchments. And that's a verse in the Bible.

And so if I have the attitude, this is the word of God, and there's something here for me, well, God is not actually telling you to go to some prison to find the apostle Paul and take him as coat. We understand there's something very particular there that does not enter directly into the trans-historical meaning. So you have to exclude some things. We understand that because of many differences between ourselves and the original audience. And of course, that's even more of the case in the Old Testament.

Oh, definitely. So we know that the New Testament tells us that we're not under the law and God is not requiring us to carry out all the very specific things that he had for the people of Israel. And so there's some elements of the historical meaning that don't enter into the trans-historical. Right. But what I'm trying to get at is that even though there are those kinds of issues, there's still some core of truth that really does have a bearing and that God is communicating to all future generations. And so we're struggling to get at those timeless truths or those paradigms or patterns, which is the word that I tend to use for it. And does that take us into the second main point, which is implication?

Right. So implication is going to be where we are moving beyond the express statement and we are inferring some things from it. Now, that inference might be the pattern of truth that's there that goes beyond the historical meaning, or it may be that we're inferring something that's not really the point of that passage, but that using good logic, you can come to a conclusion about. And this is where we get into a lot of our contemporary issues, because in the 21st century world, there are all kinds of things we face that didn't even exist in the Old Testament. There was no internet, there were no cell phones. There wasn't this ability to quote unquote change your gender or somehow work physically to try to change yourself that way.

No cloning, no artificial dissemination. We have to infer and make a connection to something else. And that's where implication becomes so significant.

Yeah. And so there's two points there. Real quick, logically valid versus logically sound.

Right. So these are two characteristics of good logic. To say that it's logically valid means that those conclusions necessarily lead, those statements will necessarily lead to the conclusion. And there's a lot of logic that we use that is maybe getting us into possibilities, but really does not have the authority behind it because it's not certain that one, two, three necessarily adds up to this other.

Okay. And then to begin with, it has to be logically sound. And that is that the premises of the argument have to all be true to begin with. And so anytime we get into an application, we ought to be trying to figure out whether we're listening to somebody teach or preach or write a book or doing it for ourselves, what are the steps of logic that they're following here? Are all the steps true? Right.

And do all the steps necessarily add up to the conclusion? Yeah. Because if you're going to put your weight on a chair, you should probably make sure it's got four legs. Right. If it's a regular chair that's designed for four legs, but it only has three, you're going down, my friend.

I don't care how adept you are or how balanced you are. So you've got to make sure it's logically valid, logically sound. So we talked about meaning. We talked about implication. We'll talk about significance or application, which is our focus today. When we come back, it's Steve Noble with Dr. Ken Kasias on Theology Thursday.

Don't go anywhere. Welcome back. It's Steve Noble, The Steve Noble Show Theology Thursday with our friends at BJU Seminary. And one of the things I wanted to mention, this is a class Dr. Ken Kasias is with us today from BJU Seminary, and he actually teaches this as a class. And it's going to be available online come this fall. He's teaching it on campus. But there's one of the things that you can do is access all kinds of classes that BJU offers, the seminary offers. So there's a website that you can look at that will basically show you kind of all the different things that are available. So the website is scope.bju.edu. Anytime you're dealing with a college or seminary, you're always going to see edu at the end, okay, edu as in education.

scope.bju.edu will walk you into kind of the digital mall for BJU and the seminary. So you can see all kinds of things that are online, a lot of great resources there. So thanks for mentioning that to me earlier, Ken, and thanks for being here today to talk about it. It's such a great topic. Glad to be here. And so we were kind of working our way as we've been talking with Ken about proper biblical application, we were talking about meaning originally, what's the actual meaning of the passage when we can all talk about what does this mean to you? Okay, application.

That's some legitimacy in the question and having that conversation. But you got to start with, what does it actually mean? And then we'll get to what do you think it means to you?

Or how do you perceive it? But what's its actual meaning when you're looking at the historical meaning, the background, the genre, the context, when it was written, who is written to the language that was used? Is this prophetic language? Is it metaphorical? Is it narrative telling a story? Is it wisdom literature?

What's the deal? And then trans historical meaning, which means you're kind of going, okay, this was written in the first century, or whatever the case is. So some things you can leave behind, but other things you need to definitely carry forward with you, which takes you into the implication.

What are the ideas that are clearly implied by the passage? And then that lands us into significance or application. So when we're going to take it, we understand what it means. We know what we can leave behind in terms of context and what we bring forward with us, the implications of the scripture. But then how do we properly apply that to our lives, Ken? Yeah, so that's a third step here, significance or application.

And this could go in a lot of directions and there are a lot of good, helpful questions to ask yourself. But one of the ways that I tried to boil it down is in terms of a famous passage that probably a lot of us could quote Romans 12, one and two. And this is where Paul says, I beseech you by the mercies of God to present your bodies of living sacrifice. So there's an aspect there of just your own personal devotion or worship to God. And so I talk about relational sanctification that when we're looking at a passage, we could ask, how does this enter into my worship of the Lord? What kind of truth about God is there that could prompt me to worship him in a particular way and just interacting with him as a person through the truth that's in that passage. But Romans 12 goes on to say that we're not to be conformed to this world, but we're to be transformed by the renewing of our mind.

Now, a lot of times when we think about application, we're wanting some like step to follow or something really concrete to do. And there's going to be that, but really there's this other internal component that has to be there where my whole worldview is being shaped. How I look at life is different from the streams of thought in the world. And I'm being shaped by the scriptures in my outlook. And so there's that internal aspect. So there's the relational, there's the internal, and then there's finally the external where Paul goes on to say that by testing, you may prove or discern what is the will of God that which is acceptable and perfect. And so equipped with the biblical mindset, I'm now evaluating things in life and making discerning decisions about what pleases the Lord. And this is where I work it out in the how-tos of my life. Yeah, because we're all to a certain extent, I think a lot of us, myself especially, are kind of like the rich young ruler. I'm looking for a list.

I'm looking for a list and I want the easy one, two, three steps to save my marriage, to parent my child more effectively, to help with this and help with that. And sometimes the Bible gives you that. Sometimes it's black and white.

It's very simple. Other times you have to dig and cultivate and work the land a little harder. So you've got to be careful with that. But again, and you said this in this great chart, which I want to make this available on Facebook, knowing God more intimately, that's the relational thing. So you start there, just knowing God more intimately, which is super important, Ken, because I talk to people about God's providence. The more you know him, the easier time you'll have with his sovereignty. Yes, yes. And so understanding God, knowing him more intimately, boy, unlocks so many other blessings. And then internal sanctification, which you mentioned, being more like God, just me personally, and then external, this is the real key, I guess, in the application, acting more like God or like W.W.J.D.

What would Jesus do in this circumstance? Yeah. It's really an application question, isn't it? Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. That's a great way of looking at Romans 12, one and two. I asked you about an example where we could kind of apply this whole process.

You mentioned 1 Corinthians 9. Yeah. So at that point, Paul is making a case for a bigger issue. But I want to focus in on the part where he is defending something very specific, and that is that the churches need to support their preacher financially. Okay.

That's a very practical thing. It gets to your wallet. You know, you have to make decisions about where the money goes. And so how is he going to defend that? Well, he actually has several arguments in there. But the main one that he develops is from what would seem to be a pretty random place in the Old Testament. And that's Deuteronomy 25, 4. And he says, hey, remember that God said that if you're out as a farmer and you have some animal that is helping you harvest, you're not supposed to cover his mouth so that he doesn't eat some of the gleanings. And God actually put it in the law that they weren't allowed to muzzle the ox, that the ox is supposed to be able to eat something from what he's harvesting. And Paul basically says, learn something from that for this other topic. And basically his argument is God wanted to remunerate fairly and lovingly even the animals who are doing this work. And don't you think that he would also want you to remunerate your pastor?

Okay. So there's implication there. Deriving a truth, and then he's applying it to some totally different situation. And I think that's a great example of the kind of thing that we could do. I think of other laws like that. There's this other law that talks about how when they're building these flat roofed houses, they're supposed to put a fence around it. It's called a parapet for the purpose of protecting the people that are on their property from falling over.

So you're reading that and you're like, well, my house doesn't have a flat roof. Why should I care? The question is, what does that tell you about God's way of looking at life and the responsibility that he's expecting you to take for other people that are on your property or that you have some ability to protect?

He wants you to be concerned about their well-being. And so there could be all kinds of applications of that principle to all kinds of issues of life. And so we need to get in this mindset of drawing those kinds of implications.

Yeah, such a great point. Back to that 1 Corinthians chapter nine. I got an email. This is several years ago when I first started teaching and somebody hauled off on me in the email that I was totally in sin for charging people to teach them. Because they're like and then I now on the other extreme, I have some some pastoral friends who do really, really well financially and they'll say, hey, a worker is worth his wages. And so you sit there and go, OK, right?

What do I do with this? I think that to me, that was when they first said that, when that charge first came along, I'm like, huh? Like, where did they get that from? And they were quoting out of scriptures. And I'm like, wow, am I wrong?

Should I be teaching people for free? Like, what's going on? There you go. You know, let me give you another example.

And this is something that you've talked about on your show, I'm sure. But the whole issue of abortion and pro-life as Bible believing people, we don't have a verse that says abortion is sin. What we have is an argument based on biblical teaching that leads us to that conclusion. Right. And I think it is a necessary conclusion.

Right. It's one of these cases where it's a logically sound and valid argument where we know that murder is wrong and there are indications in scripture. I mean, we could also look at science to demonstrate this, but there are indications in scripture that life and human personality begins at conception and we put those ideas together and we end up with a pro-life position.

That's an application that we're going to hold to very firmly. But it's something we've arrived at that has taken us some steps of logic beyond what the scripture says. Yeah, there's a lot of issues that come up in my ethics class for ethics class for high schoolers, for example, like cloning. OK, take me into the Bible and show me where God teaches us about what to do with the issue of cloning or artificial insemination.

A husband and wife, they love the Lord. They're desperate to have children. The husband can't.

He doesn't produce any sperm. And so they're going to take the egg from the mom and they're going to do artificial insemination insemination with a sperm donor and then re-implant the embryo into the mom and then she's going to carry that child and give birth. OK, what do you do with that biblically?

And they're like, uh, I don't know. What about artificial intelligence? Are we somehow getting out of God's will here because we're dealing with artificial intelligence? And there's places there to your point, Ken, that you have to work through it and draw the implications in order to land at the proper application. And in the modern world, that's getting increasingly more challenging in many ways. Right. Right. So technology is a whole area where we have to extend the biblical teaching to a to a very advanced, sophisticated society.

And some things we can be really sure about, other things maybe not so much. But this is the process we have to engage in if the Bible is going to exert authority in any meaningful way. Right.

Right. So that's why it's so important that you understand this and can work on it, which is why we're talking about it today. This would be a great theology Thursday, whether it's the podcast or on Facebook Live or on Rumble to share this one, push this one around. We do have a lot of problems with bad application. We have bad theology and out of bad theology comes bad application. And that can wreak havoc in people's lives that can wreak havoc in our lives individually, in our children's lives, in our families lives.

And I think it's pretty obvious that we see it wreaks havoc even at a national level. Dr. Ken Casillas from BJA Seminary, such a great conversation. What an important topic. Thanks so much for leading that today. Thank you. You're very welcome. This is Steve Noble on The Steve Noble Show. God willing, I'll talk to you again real soon. And like my dad always used to say, Ever Forward.