Troubling Images of God in the Old Testament – Part 1 (Introduction)		Download	PowerPoint

Introduction

John:  We’re starting a new series.  The series we’re going to be doing I’ve titled, “The God I Don’t Understand,” and what we’re going to be focusing on is different images of God in the Old Testament.  So I’m going to just intro the topic tonight and let you kind of talk to me about it.  A little bit later I’m going to have you write down on cards some questions you have, so be thinking about what questions you might have about something you encountered as you were going through to the Old Testament, because I would like your feedback.  Unlike other series I don’t think we can cover every single question.  We’ve tried in other series to do that, but the Old Testament is kind of a broad topic and there are a lot of things that you might find difficult.

What We’re Going To Cover

John: So let me start with jut an introduction of this topic for you and, as always, feel free to jump in, but I’m going to kick us off with just some ideas of what we’re doing.  Here’s kind of the things we’re going to cover in the way I see it: Tonight we’ll just do an intro and get your feedback.  Next week I hope to begin talking about some of those goofier laws that you find in the Old Testament that maybe you wonder, do they still apply to us today? Are they still applicable?  We might see a few of them at the end tonight to remind you what some of them are in case you haven’t been looking there lately and don’t know what I’m talking about.

There’s also a section I think we’re going to do on some of the more “crude” laws that Jesus seemed to “correct.” And  I’d put all of those words probably in quotes, they appear crude and Jesus appeared to correct them.  So we’re going to spend a bit of time asking, why does He even do that? I mean,  if the Old Testament is what it is and it’s God’s word, why is He seeming to “correct” it — and again, underline the word “seeming” — is one of the questions a lot of people have.  We’re going to talk about patriarchy.  You might have heard it different, like “male dominance,” so in case you’re not familiar with the word.  We’re going to talk about the role of women in the Old Testament.  Polygamy, concubinage, which is the act of, the use of concubines.  I think all those things are a  subject that people think like, yeah,  it seems like the Old Testament is a little out of touch with the 21^st century sensibilities.  And I know when they wrote the Old Testament they were just thinking about you in the 21^st century.  They were hoping to please you.  So we’re going to look and see, like, does it any of it apply, do we just excuse it as cultural, do we rip it out of the Bible, do we ignore it?  What do we do with some of those things?  People have asked about that.  Slavery and human trafficking might be an issue that comes up as we look at the Old Testament.

And finally, probably most on point with where most of us go, what about some of those stories about massacres and ethnic cleansing.  How does that relate?  And if you look at this outline, what I’m trying to do is wade into the topic, as opposed to just dive right in at the very bottom of the screen.  I’m trying to see if there’s a way we can build up some tools and some rules that might help us to understand this topic a little bit better.  So, it sounds kind of weighty.  It is weighty.  We’ve waited a long time to do this topic, even though it’s been on the radar for a while, because we wanted to make sure we had a little bit of time to do it and hopefully this is going to be the time.

Why Take On This Series?

John: So why even do this series? It’s a good question. It’s always a good question for us to start any series with thinking about the amount of time it’s going to take to research and read these kinds of books and present them here.  You might even be thinking tonight in just the 45 minutes you might be sitting here, why would I even invest any of my time doing that? And I think it’s always a good question, because if our time can be better used, let’s do it.  Here’s my pitch on why I think we should do the series:

I think we all have questions in this area.  I think if we’re honest with ourselves, many of us as we read through the Old Testament, get to a point where we think, “huh, that’s a little bit strange. I’m not sure what to make of that.”  I think what we tend to do though, is we either get unsatisfactory answers from people — and I’m not guaranteeing that the answers you get here will be that much better.  I pray that the Spirit will help us to do that through deliberation, but I’m not going to guarantee that our answers will be perfect.  But I will say this: most of us, we do get unsatisfactory answers; otherwise right now we’d think, “This is an easy topic, I already know the answers.”  And then the next thing we do is just simply ignore it.  We just ignore the issues. The reason I think that doesn’t work is because someone in your life at some point is going to really press on the issue.  And if you don’t believe me, read the little booklet in the back that we’ve put that’s called Deconversion Testimonies of Former Christians. Because we collect these sometimes when I do some research online of Christians who have just said, “I have had it with Christianity and here’s my issues.” And when you go through them you read over and over and over some of the issues we tend to ignore and think, “I don’t need worry about this.  I just need to praise God and love Him and just have faith and everything’s going to be okay” — and I believe all that, but when we let these issues lie dormant, sometimes somebody presses on them and it really causes a crisis at some point — probably at the worst time.  Probably at the point when we least need it.  And we’re not helpful to that person who’s raising the issue and it’s certainly not helpful to us.  Instead of us having some sort of response to help lift them closer to a relationship with Christ, we end up both going down.  So I think that’s probably not a good place to stay, of ignoring it.

I do want to tell you the goal is not to solve for God like we’re doing some academic proof.  That’s not possible.  And that’s not even my goal.  I’m not trying to sit here and say, “If we can come up with a geometric proof that will establish God, and we’ll all be good for the rest of our life.”  That’s not the goal.  I think the actual goal is to ask deep questions about the character of God.  Which is really what troubles us sometimes when we see difficult passages because we’re trying to reconcile who God is.

So like every series we do, the series really is about something else.  It’s not really about difficulties we encounter in the Old Testament, it’s about who do we see God to be.  Who is God?  What is His character?  How do I know His character and why does it seem sometimes that His character differs at least from the way I’m reading this?  So I want us to learn about His character in these pages and come away with a deeper appreciation for who God is.  That’s the goal of our series. But I think it’s really important that we not skip the other ones.  We do need to know a little bit about what the resolution might be in our mind of some of these things.

What We’re Not Going to Cover 

John: Just a couple of caveats of what we’re not going to do:  We’re not going to solve every Old Testament difficulty.  The good news is you’re not in a seminary class that will last three years.  I don’t even know if they could do it then.  Also what we’re not going to do is eliminate the need for faith, or expect a faith that God has to justify Himself to our standard.  In other words what we’re not going to do is sit in this room and say, “Unless you can explain this to me, Lord, in a way that makes perfect sense to me, I refuse to believe in You.”  I think that eliminates one, who God is, second, who we are, and any kind of mystery or faith in the relationship between us and the eternal.  So we’re not going to go that far.

And, I don’t think we’re going to do this, which I don’t think is going to happen, but I have heard it done before, so I would like to just say we’re not going to do this:  Some people like to solve the problems of the Old Testament by just saying, “Well that’s just what they thought.”  So when it says in there, “And God said go over there and kill every man woman and child,” the answer they come up with is, “Well, they probably just wanted to do that, and then they just decided that that’s what God was saying, and then they wrote that ‘and God says’ because then everybody would go do it.”  Here’s the reason I’m not going to do that.  We’re not here to critique how scripture came to be.  We already did that in a long, long series.  We’re not going to do that again.  And the second reason is, I think it’s harder to do it our way.  If you could just write off every Bible difficulty by saying, “Well that’s just what they thought.  It wasn’t God saying that, they just thought God said that,” then we would be done with the series.  Then we would just close right now and say, “That’s really what it is.  Let’s close and go home.”  I think it’s harder to say, “Let’s take it at face value,” which I think is the proper approach and I think is the faith posture, but I also think makes us actually do the work and not just write it off and say “no.”  That’s kind of what we’re going to do.

Our Trouble Is Nothing New

John: The place I want to start is also to tell you, I don’t think any of this is new.  We’re not the first people to struggle with this.  And that happens to us sometimes.  We think sometimes, well, we know so much now.  You know, we’re so smart as a society that we can go back.  We’re so elevated, we’re so much better, we’re so much smarter.  We have so many more ethics and values that we can now look back and think tsk tsk tsk those Old Testament people and the way that they thought and their ethics.  And that’s not really true at all.  You go back to the 2^nd Century — I’ve put up here an example of Marcion of Sinope — and Marcion was probably one of the first people in the church to ever get ex-communicated and be declared a heretic, one of the first.  Probably one of the first substantial heresies to arise in the church.  And the reason he was labelled a heretic was he did the same thing we’re going to do.  He looks at the Old Testament and he thinks, “There is no way that this guy is the same guy that shows up in the New Testament.  So the only way that I can reconcile these two things is just to say that was a different God.  The God that we see in the Old Testament, the God that we call Yahweh, He was just some sort of inferior deity.  We really didn’t know who God was until Jesus comes, and then He reveals the true God.  So it was that they were mistaken and they were actually following an kind of an inferior, wrong God.”  And we can probable see, yeah, that’s probably not orthodox Christianity and he was ex-communicated for that kind of heresy.

But that was the way he came to it.  I don’t think he woke up one day and said, “I’d like to be a heretic.”  I think he struggled with this and said, “That’s the only way I can reconcile it.”  And before we make a cartoon character out of Marcion, one of the things we should decide is, are we liable to be called heretics too, because what’s the difference when we just kind of ignore the issues or don’t view God.  Or some of us secretly probably do think, “I don’t know how you reconcile them.”  And we don’t.  So I’m not saying we’re all heretics, but it’s easy to point at somebody who came up with his formulation for how you solve this and say, “Oh, yes, that’s wrong.” But what’s our formulation?  Right now as we sit here before we do this series, how many of us have a good formulation?  Some of us probably don’t have … if I asked you straight out, “So how do you reconcile the God that we find in the Old Testament with things that we find in the New Testament?”  I would venture a say without having to go through that exercise that at least a third of us would probably be stumped trying to even understand it.  Some of us might say, “I don’t know, what’s the problem, what’s going on, why is there even an issue?”  But I think some of us would start to have to sit down and really think some things through and it’s really difficult.  So before we criticize too much, we should at least know that we ourselves sometimes just ignore the situation, and think “I don’t resolve it at all.  Why?  Because I just don’t deal with it.”

Criticism by The New Atheists

John: Let’s start with this:  Anyone know know Richard Dawkins?  Heard of Richard Dawkins?  One of the leading atheists.  He’s written The God Delusion.  So, he’s read a lot of the Old Testament and this is his formulation about what he believes about God.  He says this, this is his view:

“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it…”

I want to highlight just this as a way of learning how to study the difficulties we find, because the first thing we have to do is figure out what’s a “difficulty?”  I’m going to highlight the word jealous.  Does it strike you as weird that God is described as jealous?  You’re shaking your head.  Why not?

Jolene: Because He created us and I feel like He has the right to be if our attention is being drawn away from Him, the creator, onto something else.

John:  Okay.

Rachel:  I have a problem with the word because it sounds petty and very human.  It doesn’t fit in with the idea of a supernatural being, not that there’s anything wrong with God having human emotions, but that might be probably a hang-up for some people because it sounds like such a … like how powerful can He be if He experiences something so human as jealousy?  Shouldn’t He transcend that in some way?

John:  Shouldn’t He be better than jealousy?

Rachel:  Exactly

John:  Okay.  Abby?

Abby:  Yeah, it’s like it implies that He’s inferior, or Has like fear.  Like a boyfriend is jealous of another guy being with his girl because he is afraid that their relationship is not good enough.  He doesn’t feel like … there’s not a lot of trust.  Very relatable like, there’s something missing in him, which would make him jealous and it’s a deficient, almost emotion.

John:  Okay, I like that, it’s a deficient emotion, right?  Monique?

Monique:  I actually don’t have a problem with the word jealous, like I don’t look at it as inferior.  My issue when I come across “I am a jealous God” is that there are also verses that say “love is not jealous,” but God is loving and that kind of stuff is sort of what … and I know it’s probably used in a different way or a different meaning, but that’s always what’s tripped me up about that one.  Not because I view it as inferior, it makes sense to me that He would be jealous, but when love is not jealous, but He wants us to love Him in that way, it’s confusing.

John:  Okay.  Jill?

Jill:  I’ve always looked at the jealousy through kind of the filter of His righteousness, so nothing God can do would be a sin.  Nothing can be skewed by an emotion that would seem to us to be kind of lowly.  So it’s a weird tension to hold it into, but like I see that love is not jealous as an instruction to us because we experience jealousy as those things — as the fear, and as something that’s deficient in us so we need to seek it, but God does not possess those characteristics so He cannot be skewed by that and He’s experiencing that through all of the filter of His righteousness.

John:  Okay.  Karissa?

Karissa:  I think maybe it has something to do with … in the Old Testament when God’s talking about His covenant before and how He wants them to be jealous and what that was like.

John:  Okay.  Anyone else?  Last comment?

Monique:  It kind of just occurred to me, too, that like, when we are jealous over things, it’s almost like that flaw… so if you think you possess something, like it’s yours, and maybe there is sin in that.  Like kind of what Jill was saying, because we don’t possess anything.  But everything does belong to God.  And so we belong to Him, and when we love something else above Him, whatever it may be, another god, whatever is in our life, that kind of makes sense to me.  Because He actually does possess all.

Understanding “Jealous”

John:  Okay.  Let me raise this for a moment.  One way to look at a word like “jealous,” is to look at a word like “anger.”  Like we’re not supposed to be angry, yet at times we see that God is angry.  Jesus exhibits anger.  In fact, we’re told that in some places we are to be “slow to anger,” not, not to be angry at all.  So there may be an understanding we need to peel away of what is the difference, and some people would say, there is “sinful anger” and there is “righteous anger,” where you are angry in defense of another.  I’m not going to go into a whole theology of anger, but I do want to tell you that maybe, just maybe, there’s multiple ways to understand jealousy.

Now let me tell you why it might be important.  Forget Richard Dawkins for a moment.  I recently bought a Bible for somebody who is checking out Christianity and they just wanted to read through the Bible.  As they were reading through the Bible, they would come with questions every once in a while and one of the first questions that they had is about jealousy.  Probably because they encountered very early on in the scriptures some text about jealousy.  For example in Exodus 34:14 “Do not worship any other God for the Lord whose name is Jealous, is a jealous God.” Or Deuteronomy 4:23-25 or just that section, says, “For the LORD your God is a consuming fire, a jealous God.” Ezekiel 36:6b.  “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I speak in my jealous wrath because you have suffered the scorn of the nations.”  There’s different ways that jealousy is used there in each of those, but here’s the question, and it was very much what was already stated and I think Ray started it off, with, they came and said, “I don’t understand this God, He seems so weak.  To have such a petty emotion as like jealousy?  I mean if this guy is supposed to be the creator of the universe, the Lord of everything, and He’s jealous?  Of what?  Of who?  Some people?  That they don’t worship Him?  And suddenly He’s jealous of them?”  Yes?

Rachel:  I think jealous is a word that other Christians have taken over and redefined sometimes the way they want to, especially with like the song, “He Is Jealous For Me.”  Christians are just reinterpreting — thank you —  Christians I think are intending of sort of redefine what it means instead of just dealing with the word “jealous” as it means in the context of our culture and how normal non-Christian people would define the word “jealous.”

John:  Yes, we’re going to come back to this worship song that just flashed on the screen.  Heather do you have a comment?

Heather:  Yeah, I was just going to say like, when I read the words “God is jealous” and those verses even refer to people committing adultery with other gods, and I feel like, as a married man, if a man was talking to your wife, you wouldn’t necessarily be jealous, I’m confident in that.  But if she was sleeping with him, you would for sure be jealous of that.  [Laughter] You know, like “We entered into this covenant and we said that we were going to be the only partners in this covenant.  And now you’re going outside of that covenant.”

John:  So let me ask you the question:  If you were talking about, let’s say, most of you have been referring to 1 Corinthians 13 “love is not jealous,” right? But you’re saying, for example, if I found out that my wife was sleeping with another person and I came in here and it was clear that I was jealous, you’re saying that that’s a proper emotion to have.

Heather:  In relation to her, I would say that that’s something you need to bring up with her.

John:  Probably in relation to our covenant, right, as well? Like if I don’t have that emotion, then I’m probably … yeah, there’s probably something wrong with my love for her.  There’s probably also something wrong with the covenant clearly at that point, but I wouldn’t be able to act in the way that I’m suppose to, to either correct the covenant, find reconciliation, bring back some sort of thing, because absent that emotion, something is amiss in the relationship.  And that may be the way you explain it.

Jolene: And I think in the same way, when we say that we have a relationship with God, I know it’s been used a lot of time in the Christian context, that you are in like a marriage with God and with Jesus, like the bridegroom.  And I think in that regard He has a right to be jealous of you when your attention is blatantly going towards something else and not on Him.

John:  In both the Old and the New Testament, the imagery of God acting in that way is present in both places.  It’s one of the consistent images that we’re given.

Let me go back here for a minute.  This verse from Ezekiel probably should have some context. When it says the “LORD says: I speak in my jealous wrath because you have suffered the scorn of the nations,” what He is saying is, because the nations have scorned you and because I love you.  I’m going to rise up against them.  They are going to pay for what they have done to you.  There is a protective kind of jealousy for them.  But again, think about it from a perspective of somebody who isn’t doused with Christian worship songs and doused with all these allusions that we have, who is just coming to this brand new, and they’re looking at me thinking, “this God is just so weak that He would have such a petty emotion.”  I think what’s going on there is he hasn’t had this conversation.  Or he hasn’t had the years that we’ve had to accept jealousy or to understand it in it’s rightful way.

Misunderstanding the Object of Your Criticism

That brings us to a couple of things that are important:  It means that when someone like Richard Dawkins comes up with this statement, all they’ve done is scoured the Old Testament for the most blatant thing they can say without understanding it.  But I want to be careful before we point fingers at other people — we do the same thing sometimes.  What I’m trying to point out to you is that in this series we’re going to come to things that are difficult at face value, that we need to spend time to understand.  Most of us are not troubled by jealousy because we understand its context.  And when we hear that God is a jealous God, or if you were singing this song on a Sunday morning and it begins with, “He is jealous for me,” none of you are like “eww.”  Most of you are swooning because this is a song written for women, I’m convinced of it! [Laughter]  “Loves like a hurricane.”  We’d just all be singing along, right?  This guy knows how to write songs.  [Laughter]  None of us are creeped out.  None of us are angry, any more than when you read this line, by the way: “Bending beneath the weight of His wind and mercy” — nobody is like “oh, He’s so oppressive!” [Laughter]  All of us are like, “oh, I’m like a tree!” [Laughter]

So what I’m trying to point out is when you see the rest of the things that maybe you’re not familiar with.  Maybe you’re comfortable with jealousy, but you’re not as familiar with the other things, that we need to take a moment. That’s why this series is important, because I think you understand jealousy.  Clearly Dawkins does not.  Or he doesn’t want to.  Listen to the rest of his quote by the way.  I only gave you the first part.  Here’s the rest of it:

“…jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control‐freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal,filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capricious malevolent bully.”

Yeah, and “your butt’s big too!”  I mean, is there anything he left out?!  [Laughter]  What other name could you think of, you know? “And He has a big butt as a God!”  There’s nothing else that a childhood bully could throw other names than just string them all together.

Now I would say that if you do a cursory examination of the Old Testament, you could make this list just the way you could about jealousy.  You could at face value look at every one of these things and say, “Oh yeah, He did this.”  I mean if you called Richard Dawkins and go, “Justify the ‘filicidal.’ ”  Does everyone know what that is?  It’s the killing of children.  Alright, anyone want to know what any of those mean?  He just used a lot of big words,  you know? It’s okay, I had to look up a couple of them.  The “pestilential” means the one who sends pestilences upon people.  [Laughter] He could have just said “pestilence-sending.”  So you could, at face value, say, “I’ve got a verse from scripture for every one of those things.”  That’s really cheap.  But is it any cheaper than the efforts we make when we come across difficult passages?

Some leading atheists, this is their comment on Richard Dawkins.  Dr. Michael Ruse, whose a pretty well known philosopher, says “The God Delusion (which is Dawkins’ book) makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.”  Terry Eagleton, who has been a professor at Oxford, he’s been professor at the University of Manchester, one of the foremost linguists in the English language, says “[Dawkins and Hitchins] invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince. The more they detest religion, the more ill-informed their criticisms of it tend to be.”

I’m not here to talk about Dawkins or Hitchins.  What I am here to point out is sometimes our knowledge goes no deeper than theirs.  My pitch to you today is to stick through this so that your knowledge of it could go a little deeper.  So that maybe if John Mark Macmillan writes another song and he uses one of those other verses, we would be swooning just the same way and it wouldn’t bother us, you know?  [Laughter]  Okay, maybe that would be over delivering if I could do that this series.  We’ll call John Mark and see what he can come up with in the meantime.

What Do We Make of Certain Laws?

John: So, I’m going to read you one thing in closing.  This is a mock letter that was written to Dr. Laura Schlesinger who used to give advice on the radio.  And the reason was Dr. Laura always seemed to cite to the Old Testament.  At one point she was orthodox in her Judaism and found that all the answers were there and she stuck to a lot of them.  So this letter was kind of posted on the internet as an open letter questioned to her about some issues, but I think it will kind of give us a preview of where we’re going next week.  So just to close off, listen to this:

 

Dear Dr. Laura

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s law.  I have learned a great deal from your show and tried to share that knowledge with as many people as I can.  When someone tries to defend the homosexual lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly states it’s an abomination.  End of debate.  I do need some specific advice, however, regarding some of the other laws and how to follow them.  When I burn a bull on the alter as a sacrifice, I know it creates a pleasing odor for the Lord as in Leviticus 1:9.  The problem is my neighbors.  They claim the odor is not pleasing to them.  [Laughter]  Should I smite them?  I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7.  In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?  [Laughter] I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman during her menstrual cycle, Leviticus 15:19-24.  The problem is how do I tell?  I’ve tried asking, but most women take offense.  Leviticus 25:44 states that I may indeed possess slaves, both male and female, provided they are purchased from neighboring nations.  A friend of mine claims that this applies to Mexicans but not Canadians.  Can you clarify?  Why can’t I own a Canadian?  [Laughter]  I have a neighbor who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2.  That clearly states that he should be put to death.  Am I morally obligated to kill him myself?  A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an abomination, Leviticus 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality.  I don’t agree.  Can you settle this?  Leviticus 21:20 states that I may not approach the alter of God if I have a defect in my sight.  I have to admit that I wear reading glasses.  Does my vision have to be 20/20 or is there some wiggle room here?  Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed including the hair around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Leviticus 19:27.  How should they die?  I know from Leviticus 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me unclean, but can I still play football if I wear gloves?  [Laughter]  My uncle has a farm.  He violates Leviticus 19:19 by planting two different crops in the same field.  As does his wife by wearing garments made of two different kinds of thread, cotton and polyester.  He also tends to curse and blaspheme a lot.  Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble of getting the whole town to stone them as in Leviticus 24:10-16?  Couldn’t we just burn them to death at a private family affair like we do with people who sleep with their in-laws? Leviticus 20:14?  I know I’ve studied these things extensively.  I’m confident you can help me.  Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your devoted fan,

Jim

John:  What do you think?  You don’t have to tell me.  Come back next week and we’ll tell you where do those things fit in the grand scheme of things?  Yes, this is clearly tongue in cheek and it’s clearly meant to be sarcastic, but there’s something in there where all of us are like, “Yeah what do we do with all those verse citations?”  Do we just say, “Hey that’s just the old covenant, I don’t follow them anymore?”  What do we do with the fact that we seem to point to some things and hold on to them and not others?  Is anyone wearing a cotton polyester blend tonight?  We’ll get the stoning going a little later.  That’s it.  It’s just an intro.  Next week we’ll really get diving in and hear more of your comments.  Let’s pray and close up:

Lord God, the first words on my lips tonight as I pray, humor us.  Put up with us as we take on these subjects.  People have done so irreverently so many times, but Lord I don’t know if that’s any worse than those of us that have just ignored them.  You have something to teach us in your scriptures, otherwise you would not have preserved them for us.  They would not be, as the New Testament declares, examples of how we’re suppose to live out our faith. So Lord all of the scriptures, even in the things that we don’t understand, your wisdom is preserved for us.  Help us Lord to do a little bit of the difficult task of uncovering that wisdom.  Be patient with us.  Most importantly Lord, unleash your Holy Spirit in the commentary that’s going to come in this room and the wrestling that we have in one another.  Even in these questions that were asked tonight, Lord may truth be produced because your Spirit is here and active in your body as we deliberate.  I pray this in your name, Amen.