Well, hey everybody. Uh it's it's me, Justin, and welcome to something that I'm gonna call the cutting room floor. The cutting room floor. Here's the concept behind this. Um, when whenever a director will film a movie, they will have all kinds of scenes that don't make it into the final cut. They end up on the cutting room floor. Uh nowadays that's all digital, so there's really no actual floor where there's film. But back in the old days, when they would use film, there would actually be film that would get cut out and it would be on the cutting room floor and it wouldn't make it into the final cut of the movie. Uh you see this maybe if you see deleted scenes in a film that you might love. Maybe you buy a Blu-ray, and part of the special features is that there are deleted scenes. And those scenes are really important and valuable to the people that are really interested in that particular movie, but they're not scenes that the average person maybe would care that much about, and so they didn't make it into the final cut. Well, the same is kind of true with a message that I do on a Sunday morning. You know, every time that I prepare a message, the main thing I'm asking is, God, what do you want people to walk away with? You know, God, what's the point of this? Like, what do you want people to know? And the thing about God's word is that it's so jam-packed with with amazing detail and it's so full and rich that so often there there's all kinds of really interesting extra stuff that we could talk about. And it is interesting, and it actually is important, but it may not line up with that that one thing that God wants us to take away from that morning, in my mind. And so rather than just wasting 10 minutes of people's time during the message, which I have done many times before, I'll confess. But from now on, at least, rather than wasting 10 minutes of people's time chasing that that rabbit, um, we're just gonna record a cutting room floor segment and explore it there. So, so this is uh hopefully gonna save you some time, or at the very least, you can choose to have your your 10 minutes of time wasted uh when you're driving in your car or you know, doing whatever. So, so that's the concept behind the cutting room floor. This is what this is. And that said, I just want to jump into what got cut from Sunday's message and why I think it's something that's still worth talking about. So um, in the message, we talked about Elijah and this particular story that's probably the most famous story in Elijah's story, and it's it's the moment when Elijah calls fire down from heaven, uh burns up this altar and this sacrifice, and then there's this kind of massacre of these prophets uh of a false god called Baal. And so here's what happens: um, Israel has kind of abandoned worshiping God, they're worshiping Baal instead. Baal is a false god that the Phoenicians worshiped, and uh Israel's king Ahab married a Phoenician princess named Jezebel. She brings Baal worship into Israel in a big way, influences Ahab, he sets up Baal worship as the official religion in Israel, and so all this has led to all kinds of disaster for Israel. Elijah is a prophet of the real God, and he stayed true. And finally, after about three years of this huge drought that's gone on, because Israel has abandoned worshiping God, and now they're worshiping Baal, Ba was the god of the rain to the Phoenicians, so they're trying to worship Baal for rain, and it's not raining, it's not working. Elijah shows up and he lays down kind of this showdown. It's like a gauntlet, it's a challenge, really. And he says, Hey, let's let's settle this once and for all. Baal versus versus God. Let's see who wins. And he says to these Baal prophets, uh, there's over 400 of them, about 450 of them, he says, Why don't we do this? Why don't we set up two altars? And on each altar we'll put a bull. That's that was their worship in ancient. This is 3,000 years ago. This is barbaric times. So what they would do is they would worship by sacrificing live animals. And so he's like, hey, why don't why don't we do this? You know, take take a bull, uh put it on your altar, and you guys pray to Baal and ask Baal to bring fire from from heaven and and you know, bring this whole thing to flames, and uh and I'll I'll have a bull on my altar and I'll pray to God to bring fire from heaven and to burn up the offering, and we'll see which God answers. And if and if Baal answers, great. Baal's God, let's worship him, and if God answers, great. God's God, let's worship him. Let's just let's just settle this once and for all. And so they do this, and and the prophets of Baal, over 400 of them, they like all day long, all day long, they pray and they dance and they do all kinds of rituals and crazy stuff, and they're they're yelling and screaming and they're trying to get Baal's attention. Nothing happens. Not a not a spark, nothing. Okay. When all that's said and done, Elijah comes and he prays, and he even kind of shows off a little bit, you know, uh, for God uh by by drenching his altar with water. It's like completely drenched, making it even harder for it to light on fire. And Elijah prays, and boom, fire comes down from heaven, burns up the altar to the Lord, and all the people are amazed, and all the prophets of Baal are like, uh oh, we we have we have made a serious error. And uh and then this crazy thing happens where Elijah basically turns to all the people watching and he says, Hey, see all these prophets of Baal? Round them up. Like, get them. And the prophets of Baal that day are killed. And so this is one of those moments where sometimes we struggle, and it's okay. This is good, this is good to do what we believe at his hands, we believe in wrestling with God. Like it's okay for us to have questions. It's it's actually healthy for us to go, man, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand this, this doesn't line up. And so, you know, if if you listen to the message and you're like, I have a problem with the whole those prophets being killed thing, I don't like that. I I wish that wasn't in the story. Why does that happen? Why is that okay, you know, from God's perspective? That's that's what I want to explore. That's what I want to talk about real quick, because it makes sense that we read that and go, how does this line up with Jesus? In fact, there's a really direct kind of parallel to Jesus in this story. In in uh Mark chapter 9, for example, or is it Luke chapter 9? Hold on, let me look. It's Luke chapter 9, sorry, starting in verse 52, the Bible says this, talking about Jesus. He sent messengers ahead to a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival. But the people of the village did not welcome Jesus because he was on the way, his way to Jerusalem. And so, when James and John saw this, they said to Jesus, Lord, should we call fire down from heaven to burn them up? But Jesus turned and he rebuked them. So they went on to another village. So here's Jesus with his disciples. This is, you know, years later, thousand or so years after Elijah lived. And they're in Samaria, which is actually the area, the region where this whole thing with Elijah would have taken place. And the Samaritans, they're not like having it with Jesus. They're not excited about Jesus. Uh, they they're they're not happy with Jesus, they're not like accepting Jesus, they're they're not receiving him well. And James and John, these two extremely passionate followers of Jesus, these really zealous guys, they're like, hey, Jesus, we got this great idea. Uh, since these people aren't receiving you like they should, do you do you want us to, you know, call fire down from heaven and just burn them up? Is that what you want us to do? Because we're willing, Jesus, we're we're ready and willing to go all Elijah on them. And uh and Jesus rebukes them and he says, What are you talking about? What on earth would give you any indication that that's something that I would want you to do? What have you seen me do that would make you think that that's that's what I would ask you to do? Like he rebukes them, he like they get in trouble with Jesus. And on one hand, you kind of feel for James and John because it's not like they don't have a precedent for this, it's not like they're just coming up with this idea out of nowhere of fire from heaven kind of thing. I mean, this is tied to a biblical story, and it seems to them to line up very much with with what happened with Elijah. And Jesus says, no, why? Like what's what's the difference? Because sometimes we have this tendency to think that the Old Testament, the part of the Bible before Jesus, is like God in a bad mood. And in the New Testament, Jesus shows up, it's like God, I don't know, he he he got over his anger, he he came to terms with some things, and now he's in a good mood and he's he's kind of rebranding himself or whatever. That's not the truth. God is the same in the Old Testament and the New Testament, he's the same God. In fact, in the Old Testament, the number one word that's used to describe God's character is the word kindness. He is the same God, but he's operating under a different set of guidelines with people. And we have to understand this to make sense of what's going on here with Elijah and these prophets of Baal. And so we have to understand the concept of a covenant, okay? A covenant is an agreement between two parties. Marriage is a really classic example in our in our culture of a covenant relationship. So two people, two parties enter into a relational agreement, and that agreement has boundaries. And so when I got married to my wife Megan, there were boundaries that we laid out. And one of those boundaries, for example, she's a really obvious example, is I will I will only be with you in a physical, you know, sexual sense. I will not go outside of our marriage, outside of the boundaries of this relationship, and sleep with someone other than you. And so if I were to go outside of those boundaries, if I were to kind of break that covenant, I would be jeopardizing our relationship. And she would actually be free in that circumstance to kind of end our relationship because I have I have stepped outside of those boundaries and I've sort of broken that covenant. Okay, so that's that's kind of the concept of a covenant. God's love for us is so intense that we we've broken his covenants so many times and he never abandons us. He loves us so much. But the story of the Bible is in many ways the story of covenants. It's the story not only of God and people, but of the kind of relational boundaries that exist between God and people. The Old Testament largely describes a covenant that we refer to as the Old Covenant. And the old covenant was the law. And it was it was a list of rules, a list of do's and don'ts. And if you do these things, it'll work out for you. And if you don't do these things, it'll work out for you. But if you step outside of the boundaries of this covenant, if you break the law and the laws that I've given you, then you'll be susceptible to wrath. You'll you'll be susceptible to some serious consequences because you'll also be stepping out of the protection of a relationship with me. So if you step outside of this covenant and the boundaries I've set for you, you're stepping outside of my favor, you're stepping outside of my protection. And God pleads with people in the Old Testament, don't do that. Don't do that. And then Jesus shows up and he brings in a new covenant, a new relationship. And it's no longer about a list of rules, a list of do's and don'ts that sort of earn our way into a healthy relationship with God. And Jesus' covenant is about mercy and forgiveness and grace because Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice to pay the price for our inability to follow what God says we should follow. It's a complete inability that we have to do that. And it might be really easy for us to go, well, I mean, why didn't he just do that in the first place? Why didn't God just give us the new covenant to start with? Why all this old covenant stuff to begin with? Well, the answer is kind of simple. God knows human nature really well. He understands human nature better than we even do, and he knows that there is something within us that believes, we believe we can do it ourselves. We believe we can absolutely do it ourselves. And I see this in my children. I have three amazing, beautiful children. I have another on the way, and and my my youngest children will try to do things that they cannot do. They physically cannot do it. They will try to pick things up that are too heavy for them to physically be able to move. And I'll see them do things like that. I'll see them try to carry something they cannot carry, and I'll ask them, hey, can I help you with that? You want me to do that for you? And they'll say no. And they'll try it themselves. And they'll say no to another offering of help, and they'll try it themselves, and they'll keep doing it until they finally get to a point of surrender and they they realize, okay, fine, I can't do it, and then all of a sudden they ask for help. There is something within human nature that believes we can do it. And it's interesting, by the way, if you look at every major religion in the world, it's basically built on human performance. It's built on the assumption, the idea, and the belief that we as people can do enough good things to sort of earn our way into a favorable relationship with God and whatever that religion's concept of God is. Basically, every major religion recognizes that there is a distance, there is a gap that exists between us and the divine, between us and God. Virtually every religion in the world recognizes that there's a gap, and maybe it's not even a religion, it's just a worldview. It recognizes, though, that there's a gap between, at the very least, who we are as people and who we ought to be, that we are not as we ought to be. And so all religions and worldviews are basically uh strategies for bridging that gap, for closing the distance between who we are, who we ought to be, for closing the distance between us and God. And it's always, you know, a list of rules. It's always behaviors, it's always things that we should do, we shouldn't do, we should do, we shouldn't do. The idea being if we if we do these rules well enough, then finally we'll we'll be okay with God. And that's the basis of virtually every faith in the world. And see, God, the reason that that's the case, really quick, the reason that that is a common link shared between all religions is because of human nature, because something inside of us believes we can do this. I got this, I can do this, I can handle it, just you know, let me let me dig in deep, let me commit, I can do this. And so the old covenant was not God just being mean to us and you know delaying this new covenant that we have through Jesus. It was God recognizing that we needed to get to a point where we recognized that we can't do it. We just can't. And so he gave us this list of rules and he said, do this. And if you do this, it'll work. If you don't do this, it won't work, you know, and and we tried and we tried and we tried and we tried and we failed and we failed and we failed and we failed, and God needed us, he knew that we needed, not really he needed, but we needed to spend about a thousand years as people trying so hard to follow this law that God gave, just so he could say, hey, it's been a thousand years. I gave you ten commandments. Hence, has any one person in the last thousand years been able to follow just ten simple rules? Don't lie, don't cheat, you know, that kind of thing. Don't steal. Don't cheat is not one of the ten commandments, but you know, lying and stealing kind of goes hand in hand. Like, don't murder, don't worship another God, don't say you know, the Lord's name in vain. Keep the Sabbath day holy, like these very ten rules. Can you just do ten? There's one person been able to do ten of these. And the answer is no, not one. And finally, after a thousand years of trying, it was like we were at the right place in history for Jesus to be able to step onto the stage and say, hey, maybe you can't. Not in this self-defeating way. Jesus has an incredibly high opinion of us, but for Jesus to say, hey, maybe you're at a place where you can recognize that you you don't have it within you because of sin and its effect on you, you don't have it within you to actually follow these rules. And what if instead someone who could do it did it for you? What if instead of you just trying harder and harder and harder and striving and striving and striving and wearing yourselves out and feeling like a failure? What if you just surrendered and accepted forgiveness and mercy and grace? Mercy means we don't get what we deserve. Grace means we get what we don't deserve. What if we accepted mercy and grace? That's the new covenant. Jesus offers us a relationship, not a religion. He doesn't offer us a list of rules. There is a right way to live out of a relationship with God. Just like if I really love someone, there's a right way for me to live to express that love to them. But it's not a list of rules. We have a relationship, and it's grace and it's mercy. Jesus brought that in, but the the old covenant had to exist so that we'd be ready to even want and recognize the need for the new covenant when it showed up. And in Elijah's story, we're operating in the old covenant. We're operating in the time when the old covenant is still in effect, and God has said, here's the boundaries, stay in them, and you'll be good. Get outside of them and there will be consequences. And the number one boundary that he gives, the very first commandment that he gives to the people, is don't worship another God but me. And so here you have these prophets of Baal, and they are they're not just breaking this commandment personally. They're not just themselves out of confusion or manipulation or whatever of someone else like worshiping Baal. They're the ones doing the confusing, they're the ones doing the manipulating. They they are the ones who are who are sort of propagating this worship of Baal. They're the ones who are leading Israel astray and causing great harm to Israel. They have stepped way outside of the boundaries because now not only are they personally making these mistakes, they are then leading other people into sin. And it's having damaging effects. And so these are people who have who have stepped outside of the covenant in a big, big way, and that had serious consequences in the Old Testament because of the Old Covenant. But there's so that that's a big part of it. So it's the concept of these covenants. There's a second thing that I want us to explore really quickly, though, and then we'll wrap up. Aren't you glad that this wasn't in Sunday's message? Isn't it a good thing? Um so here's the other thing we have to understand for this to make sense to us. It's it's a concept called God's will. And you can kind of understand God's will with two different categories, right? There's God's desired will, and then there's God's decreed will or his determined will. Those are some terms that are used sometimes to make sense of God's will. Because there's some some nuance there. There's God's desired will, all right? That's one category of his will. This means what God wants to happen. What does God want to happen? What does he desire to happen? Well, the Bible is pretty clear on a few things. Number one, like 2 Peter, for example, chapter 3, verse 9, says that God wills that all people would repent. For God wants, he wills no one to be destroyed, but everyone to repent. And repent means rethink. It means rethink your life and give your life to Jesus. And so, you know, this is really clear. God wishes, he wants, he desires that every person would know him, every person would give their life to him, every person would repent. But that doesn't happen. Every person does not repent, every person does not give their life to Jesus. And so, what does that mean? Well, it means that God doesn't get what he wants sometimes. That's kind of a weird concept, right? And the truth is, God has given us choice and he honors our choices because he loves us, and love is about freedom. You cannot, you know, you don't love someone by holding them against their will. Right? You don't love doesn't hold people hostage. Love gives people the choice to choose or reject. And God loves us, and so he gives us choice and he allows us to make decisions. And so sometimes we can choose things in our lives personally that God doesn't want to happen. We can do things that God would never want to happen. And there may have been things done to you by people, and it was not God's will that that happened to you. It was never God's will that you were hurt, it was never God's will that you were, you were offended in such a crazy way, that you were used, that you were broken like that. It was never God's will because someone did something that God did not want them to do because he gives us choice. So there's God's desired will, and we all find ourselves outside of God's desired will. We all do. We all make decisions, we all get ourselves in places where we're just we're we're outside of what God would want for us. We're not in that spot. And God has great mercy and love and patience for us. When we're outside of his desired will, he does. And then there's a second category, though, of God's will, and it's called God's decreed will or his determined will. And what that means is this is that there are things God has said will happen. God has said this will happen. This is going to take place. These are promises that God has made. For example, God promised Israel, He promised them that their enemies would be his enemies, that if anyone made themselves an enemy of Israel, that they would be standing in his way. When Jesus walked into the temple and he saw the temple of God in his time being turned into this basically like a business, and people were just manipulating and lying to other people to make money, he like had a righteous anger and he flipped over their tables and he chased them out. Because God's decreed will, what God had said when he had that temple built, was that this would be a place of worship for all people, that all people could come here, and what was happening was out of greed, the Pharisees and the people who were running the temple were putting boundaries up to people being able to come in and worship God and offer sacrifices to God. They were being turned away. God had said from the beginning, My decreed will is that this is a place of worship for everyone. And so the people who stood in the way of God's decreed will, they got moved out of the way. Right? It's one thing to be outside of God's desired will in the sense that you're just not like you're confused, you're making mistakes, you're just doing things that aren't what God would want for you. It's a whole other thing to stand in the way of God's determined will. It's a whole other thing to actually put yourself in a place of opposition to what God has said will happen. And so that's actually what's going on in a large part with the prophets of Baal. They're not just confused and you know making mistakes in their own personal worship, like we said earlier. They are actually standing in the way of God and his people. They are standing in opposition to God's will for his nation of Israel to serve him and to follow him and to be in relationship with him. They are standing in the way of that. They've made themselves an opposing force to God. And that is not a good idea. I mean, Jesus himself said this in Matthew chapter 18, talking about children in this instance. He said, if any of you cause one of these little ones who trust in me to fall into sin, it would be better for you to have a large millstone tied around your neck and be drowned in the depths of the sea. And that's really intense. That's Jesus saying that. And what Jesus is saying is, hey, look, I love you, I care about you, but don't make yourself an enemy of God. Don't put yourself in a place where you are actively, consciously, purposefully opposing God. If you do that, you will lose. That's what Jesus is essentially saying. And that's what these prophets of Baal did. They made themselves an enemy of God. They are actively, purposefully trying to oppose God's decreed, determined will for his people to be in an exclusive, loving, caring relationship with him. They are working against that. They are leading the people of Israel astray. They are leading the people of Israel to abandon worshiping God and to worship a false God called Baal. They are opposing God's will, and it does not work out for them. You know, just like with Jesus in the temple with the Pharisees and the money changers. They were they were they were standing in the way of God and his people, the people that he loves. And because they chose to stand in the way, Jesus moved them out of the way. That's what happens with these prophets of Baal, because they chose purposefully, intentionally, to stand in the way of God and his people, God moved them out of the way. And that's in part why they were killed. And so, you know, I again I hope this helps. I hope this helps you kind of make sense of this whole man, all these people being killed, and I don't know what to do with that. That said, look, maybe, maybe not, maybe, you know, it's still not quite enough, but I just want you to chew on this and and think about it, pray about it, you know, read, ask questions. It's okay to wrestle. It's okay to struggle and try to think through these things. It's actually really healthy and good to do that. And so hopefully this has helped that along a little bit. Um, you know, thank you so much for being part of our church. Even if you're just someone who listens online, thank you so much for being part of what God's doing at his hands. Um, we love you guys, we care about you greatly. We're committed to your growth, we're committed to helping you understand and come to terms with whatever you know God's doing in your life. It's good for us to do this. And so um, this is the cutting room floor. There will probably be many more of these in the future. It won't be every single message. Um, but at the very least, those of you who come on Sundays, uh you I saved you 25 minutes. So, yay. Love y'all. Have an awesome time, uh, have an awesome week, and we'll see y'all soon.