➡ Tim Mulgrew, author of “The Story of Us,” discusses how to engage with the Bible in a meaningful way. He suggests that understanding the Bible is more important than just reading it, and that we should see ourselves in the stories. Mulgrew also emphasizes that the Bible is written in an Eastern style, meant to be experienced rather than just read for facts. He encourages readers to find relevance in the Bible, rather than viewing it as just historical events from thousands of years ago.
➡ The text emphasizes the importance of understanding the Bible rather than just reading it. It criticizes the tendency of Christians to read the Bible as a duty or obligation, often without fully understanding its meaning. The text also highlights the importance of context when interpreting scripture and warns against legalism, or focusing on rules rather than the overall message. Lastly, it discusses human behavior and our struggle to connect with a God we can’t physically touch or see.
➡ The text discusses how people often let good things, like family or religion, become obstacles to a genuine relationship with God, turning them into idols. It emphasizes that God desires a personal relationship with us, similar to the one he had with Adam and Eve. The text also explores how people often avoid confronting their own faults and sins, choosing instead to focus on the faults of others. Lastly, it talks about the “age of abandonment,” where people think they don’t need God, leading to a decline in morality, but this is meant to drive us back to seeking reconciliation with God.
➡ This text discusses the importance of involving God in all aspects of life, not just in times of crisis. It highlights the trend of men seeking spiritual guidance as they struggle with societal changes that challenge traditional male roles. The text also emphasizes the need for Christians to continually grow in their faith, rather than remaining stagnant or satisfied with a superficial understanding of their beliefs.
➡ The text discusses the author’s journey in Christianity, expressing initial disillusionment with the simplicity of the faith. The author then delves into the deeper understanding of Christianity and the Bible, encouraging even non-believers to explore its historical and scientific aspects. The text also emphasizes the importance of a relationship with God over material wealth, and criticizes human tendencies to focus on negative news and tangible, physical entities over spiritual faith. The author concludes by highlighting the futility of complaining about government, suggesting that the focus should be on personal faith and understanding.
➡ The text encourages people to find meaning in their lives through the Bible and to use it as a guide in times of adversity. It also warns about the dangers of being controlled and manipulated by those in power, urging individuals to value their worth and dignity as creations of God. The author calls for resistance against isolation, deception, and intimidation, and encourages sharing of information to expose hidden truths.

Well, joining us now is Tim Mulgrew, and he’s the author of a book, the Story of Us. It’s really about helping people to read the Bible, to find it in a way that is open and engaging. We’ve got a lot of people who are looking with interest, and I’ve heard a lot of celebrity stories about people like Tim Allen. I’m going through the whole Bible and it truly is amazing. He says, but how do we do that? I’ve tried in the past, I’ve tried the annual Bible reading thing and it got to be very mechanical and it really was counterproductive.

There’s different ways to look at it. So we’re going to talk to Tim about his suggestions. We have a lot of people, as I said, they’re looking at this. We’ve got Bible sales are jumping, and yet we don’t see that reflected in society. We don’t see that reflected in our lives in many cases. And so we’re going to talk to him about what his suggestions are. Thank you for joining us, Tim. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. You know, it’s always important to talk about this. You talk about the fact that sometimes we look at the Bible as an idol.

What do you mean by that? Well, it’s interesting because in the book I say, you know, how many people have actually thrown an old, worn out Bible in the trash? We kind of feel funny about that. Even non believers feel funny about throwing a Bible in the trash. What it basically means is we elevate the book itself to be more than just bound paper put together in a. In a nice envelope for our convenience. Yeah. So before we ever get started, let me jump in here for a second. It’s like, what that reminds me of is Trump, you know, when he walk in, he just holds the Bible up, he’s like, look, I got this thing, you know, and it’s like, it’s like a relic, you know.

Right. I’ve got the holy hand grenade here. Instead of like, well, open it up and read it. What does it say? My whole thing is that it’s better to understand what the Bible says than to simply read it. Or as most people just own it. Yeah. But we make the Bible the book itself to be an idol, and then we basically are harming our chances of ever understanding it because we’re thinking too highly not of what the Bible is, but the book itself. Now, your title, the Book of Us, when I look at that, I had a question about that as well, because Jesus said, well, you Search the Scriptures because in them you think you have eternal life, and yet they testify of me.

And that is one of the reasons, one of the things that I look at, what does this tell me about Christ? But it’s really, what does it tell me about Christ and his relationship with me? And so how do you see that? So the book of Us, it’s kind of a play on words like the book of Acts, the book of Romans. So generally, I’m looking at the book, the Bible as a whole book, and trying to discover in there the human nature. In other words, you know, why did God think it was so important to capture all of these different events through history and all these different people, preserve them for thousands of years for me to read today? Yeah, that’s right.

So it. When you go through. And in the latter half of my book I write each of the 66 books of the Bible, there’s a summary there that talks about what the human nature, the human behavior is. God basically wrote the Bible to us for us. He doesn’t need a Bible himself to tell him how to be God. So it’s clearly written for. For us. But, you know, if we can’t find the relevance, then really it’s just anecdotal history of something that happened to people a couple thousand years ago. And why should I care now? Right? Yes, yes, yeah.

Is to find ourselves in it. That’s right. And when I look at it, you know, that is a key thing. If you see yourself in that, look at how that person reacted. That. Am I like that? You know, that type of thing. And, well, we are our own favorite subject, right? That’s right. It’s kind of funny because we look at it and I’ve often thought about the Bible, you know, when there’s so few physical descriptions of anyone or anything, right? There’s a couple of vague descriptions. It’s like, you know, David is ruddy, you know, whatever that means.

Does he have red hair? Does he have like a reddish complexion or something? What does that exactly mean? It’s a little bit ambiguous. And he might talk about Saul being really tall or something like that, but that’s the first thing that humans will do is focus on the appearance, right? You’ll get a big description of the setting that’s there. You’ll get a description of what that person looks like, what they’re wearing. And yet that’s not the way God puts this together. We see people unfold in terms of the way that they interact with each other and with him.

Right? Yeah, right. If it was intended to be a historical account, they would have given us a lot more information, but they give us enough to turn our imaginations on. And the idea then is to picture yourself in that scene. I always tell people when I’m teaching class that every time you hear Israelites or the Pharisees or any of the what we think of as villains in the Bible, you’re supposed to put your name there because there’s a lesson to be learned. And the lesson’s more important to learn what happens to you and your behavior versus what happened to somebody thousands of years ago that you can’t relate to.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Here you talk about it not really being set up in a long timeline. And of course that’s something that can be very difficult to do if you try to read it in chronological order because the books are not even laid out in the Bible in a chronological order. So like, so what is the, this prophet, when did he live? Were they in captivity or who was the king and what was it like? Like in the times that he was writing. That can become kind of challenging actually to try to put into a timeline.

But that’s not really the point. You point out that it’s written in a circular Eastern style. What do you mean by that? So Western style writing is what you’re referring to. That’s what we’re accustomed to. It’s basically what I would call a data dump. Fact, fact, fact, fact. You put the facts in your head and then you’re supposed to figure out when to use them. But remember that the Bible is written to be timeless. Eastern style writing is more. You’re supposed to experience what you’re reading, put yourself in that scene. Because we remember experiences and we can apply experiences in our day to day walk without remembering what particular passage it was from.

We learn and pick up the lesson behind it. And that’s a usable thing. That’s what makes the Bible alive. Yeah, that’s right. Also makes it very relevant to us. That’s right. And I think a big part of that too is when we look at this, when we talk about a daily Bible reading plan. And that’s fine, but I tend to think of that as something that you do kind of at the start. Maybe if you didn’t grow up in a church or something and you don’t have this kind of a background, you’re trying to get what we call, when we do homeschooling or classical education, we call that kind of the grammar stage.

Right. You’re just Accumulating facts, and you’re like memorizing the multiplication tables or something like that. It’s hard. It’s not necessarily very interesting, just accumulating facts, but it’s necessary to have some of that because without that, you can’t start putting the bigger picture together. Right. And so typically, when they’ll talk about classical education, they’ll talk about grammar, then they’ll talk about a logic stage, and they’ll talk about a rhetoric stage. And so at each of these stages, you’re starting to put this together. But it’s not simply an academic exercise. When we are Christians, you know, things are happening in our life all the time, and God is teaching us through those things that happen in our life.

And so it’s kind of a mixture of the academic and the experience. And a lot of times, I remember when I was very young, I would read the Psalms, and it’s like, this is the most boring stuff. I didn’t like it at all. But now, you know, you go back as you’re older, and you’ve experienced these things that David was writing about or whoever was writing that particular psalm, and it’s like, yeah, yeah, that happened to me, too. Yeah. Yeah, well. And that’s, of course, what we find is that, you know, Solomon said it, there’s nothing new under the sun.

And that still, still holds true today when you can understand and see the experience that the Bible is talking about and relate to the message rather than getting hung up on the details. So you’re describing what I call milk, bread, and meat. Most Christians don’t ever really get past the milk phase. They. They read the Bible through in a year. I remember read the Bible through in 82 was a big thing, you know, back in 1982. And there’s always these gimmicks to get us to read the Bible. Well, it’s interesting that a Christian should need a gimmick to read the very word that God has for them.

But we do. You know, we’re human and we have lots and lots of interests in life. But you’re right, it’s a good idea to go through the Bible cover to cover, as a lot of people say. But, you know, the problem with a program that has a beginning and an end is that’s how we also tend to read. Right. I started this, you know, the book of Romans. Oh, I need to finish the book of Romans. And so my goal is to finish the book, not to understand the book. Right? Yeah, that’s right. So you start with a passage and Then you finish that passage and you go on to the next passage.

But you don’t have any idea what that passage means. So why go to another passage? It’s just a passage like the passage you were on. Right. In other words, we’re always in a hurry to finish. That’s really what Western style is. It has a beginning and an end, whereas Scripture doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It always speaks to us. So the whole idea is to stop those habitual programs and say, I want to know what God has to say to me. That’s what I’m interested in. That’s why I’m reading the Bible. Not because it’s a duty or an obligation.

I’m a Christian, so I have to say, yes, I’ve read the Bible 15 times. What good is it to read it if you don’t understand it? Right? That’s right. If you picked up a novel, you would read it the same way. Right. You’d be interested in the characters and the story and how it develops. And you know, Hollywood is, teaches us to fall in love with the character so that we feel emotions as the story plays out. And yeah, they kind of spoon feed the whole thinking process to us. But we fall in love with different things that we can identify with.

But we don’t, we don’t read our Bibles that way. We like a textbook and nobody likes textbooks. That’s right. Yeah. And I’ll read. I guess one of the things that I found is I’ll go through it and there’ll be something that, wow, what does that mean? You know, really strange. And that’s been the time when I really would get something that would really hit me deeply because I’d sit there and I’d focus on it for several days. I’d just stop right there. As you point out, don’t just keep reading, you know, stop and figure, well, what was that about? And if you, and if you dig deep on that and if you look at it and I would do different things like, you know, read different translations and sometimes I’d get, you know, different commentaries or whatever.

But you pray about it and after a while you start to see it and you start to see it in your own life as well. It really is kind of interesting to stop on one particular thing that you don’t understand and focus on that. I think that’s a very rewarding thing. It is. Without getting too granular on a particular passage, you have to keep it in context. That’s right. And you talk about that as well, yeah, talk about context a bit. That’s important. We, you know, we, in fact, I’m, I have a couple more books in progress here and I was just writing about that earlier today.

We, we, we tend to love our legalism and legalism goes through and it picks out certain pieces of scripture and says there’s a rule, we need to enforce that rule. Right. But it’s completely out of context. When you roll up to the 30,000foot level and you look at what’s being talked about, it’s not a rule at all. It’s never intended. We drive people away from Christianity because they say, I don’t want to have to follow a list of do’s and don’ts and a bunch of rule books and all that stuff. But that’s not at all what Scripture is.

And that’s the point I think most Christians are missing because we drill down, we find one little statement and we hang our hat on it without understanding in context what the writer was talking about. That’s right, yeah. That happens all over scripture. That’s right. As some people said, a text without a context is simply a pretext for what you’re reading into it. And I think that’s really true. And we look at it many times. We’ll look at it if we say, what is this telling me I’ve got to do right now? And it’s not really about that.

It’s really about your relationship with God. It’s not about a list of things to do to be approved by God. That’s how Christianity is different from every other religion. Every other religion is like, well, you do this, this and this, and then you get this at the end. As a result, Christ’s message is, you can’t do that. I’m going to give you some standards here that are impossible to meet. Now there’s going to be some things that if you do them, your life is going to be better. You’re going to get blessings instead of curses in this life and just natural reaping what you sow, good or bad.

And so there’s that aspect of it. But ultimately our approval with God is based on what Christ has done. That’s the Christian message. Right. But we would rather earn our way into heaven. That way we have control over it. Right. Nobody likes charity. The Bible says if you approach this on your own terms, you won’t make it. That’s right, because God is the one in charge. Yet isn’t it funny that we’re still trying to do things to earn Our way, even though the Bible tells us it’s impossible. That’s right. But that’s. That’s our human tendency. So, you know, my book is really about understanding what our human behaviors are, what our tendencies are.

And we are the same as. As they were thousands of years ago. This is a pattern. It’s. It’s recognizable. So if we can recognize it and we can control our behavior rather than trying to control Scripture, we’ll probably get a lot more out of scripture than we ever, ever did before. That’s right, yes. You’re talking about memorizing scripture without understanding it. And again, this is another one of these things, like grammar school level. It’s one of the things that we would do with our kids when they’re very young. You’d get them to memorize certain Bible passages.

And there’s a value to that. Just like you need to be able to memorize the multiplication table or you’re not going to be able to do a higher level math. Same thing is true with that. And, you know, part of it is, you know, hiding God’s word in your heart so that it comes back at times. And it will do that. It’ll come back so that you understand it at that point in time when it’s actually something that you’re going through. Yeah. Well, the problem is, is that we start to take pride in the fact that we’ve memorized all of these different things.

But if we don’t understand the message, how do we know when to pull them and use them? That’s right. That’s right. Thy word is a lamp and a light into my path and a lamp into my feet. Okay, well, I’m having an argument with my spouse. How does that come in handy? Right. We don’t. We’re not understanding the message that’s there. And to me, it’s more important to understand the way to be than what to do. Right and wrong. Right? That’s right. Yes. So, you know, when you talk about textbook human behavior, what do you mean about that? Throughout the Old Testament? So it works a lot like medicine.

In medicine, they gather a whole bunch of people that have the same symptoms, and then they try these different medications to figure out, hey, anytime we see this group of people and we give them this, it works. And that’s kind of how medicine works. It’s trial and error. You talk about human behavior. Our human behavior basically is entirely predictable. When you look at how the Israelites behaved towards God in the earliest of days, I mean, straight out of. Straight out of you know, God pulling them away from the Egyptians. They’re hanging out, waiting for Moses to come down the hill.

And what do they do? They make a golden calf. Why? Because they want something tangible to worship. And that’s. That’s the struggle we have. We have. We need to look, touch and feel. And having a God that we can’t touch with our hands is difficult for us to actually truly commit our entire lives to. So we have this tendency to create things that’s like making your Bible an idol. We can even make God an idol. You can make your family an idol. It’s not that the Bible and the family and these things are bad things. It’s that they are getting in the way of a true, pure relationship with God.

And so anything that does that is an idol. But we’ve been taught to think that it’s a golden calf or a, you know, a piece of wood or a stone or something you put on your dashboard or these types of things, but that’s not it at all. It’s anything. Good things, most of the time, people’s good things are an idol. And it just prevents you from having a true relationship with God. What is it that God wants? When we talk about restoration, what are we being restored to? We know what we’re being restored from, but what is it we’re being restored to? Well, if you go in the early pages of Genesis, God walked in the cool of the morning with Adam and Eve, they hung out together, they talked.

Could you imagine walking and talking with God all day, all night, you know, hearing everything he has to say? This is what God wants to restore us to, the ability to have that kind of a relationship with him. Yes, but that’s not what we do. We walk down the aisle, we say the sinner’s prayer, we convince ourselves that we’re saved, we read our Bible, we go to school, to church on Sundays, and then we’re waiting to die basically before we’ll get to use our Christianity. And that’s not the message of the Bible at all. The message is reconciliation and restoration today so that you can have the relationship now.

And Scripture is all about the relationship with God, not the inheritance that comes at the end of the road. Yes, yes. It’s kind of like the lady, the woman at the well, Right? The Samaritan woman at the well. And Jesus said, if you knew who you were talking to, you ask me. It’s like you’re missing out on something really important here. And immediately, you know, when he tells her some things about her past and it amazes her. And it’s like, whoa, you’re a prophet. Okay, let’s talk about religion now. And so she starts talking about, where is you? Jews worship God in Jerusalem, but Samaritans worship him.

Mount Gerizon or whatever. So let’s talk about something different. Let’s make this a little bit distant. Right. It’s a little bit too personal and up close when she does that. And I think we can wind up doing that as well. You know, we can say, whoa, this is. I’m looking at all the different mistakes that you’re talking about. You see this as we’re reading through it. And of course, time is compressed quite a bit when you’re reading the story. But, you know, you see these amazing things happen and people are walking really well with God and then all of a sudden they just go in a different direction.

It’s like, how in the world could they do that? And then you look at your own life and say, how did I do that? You know, we fall through the same things, you know. Well, we don’t like pointing the finger our direction, did we? That’s right. And that’s kind of why we’re resistant to reading the Bible that way, because it really does make us point the finger at ourselves. It’s so much better. When you read through the first part of Romans, Paul starts off and he talks about all the bad things non believers do and how they behave.

But as soon as you get to chapter two, he says, now I’m talking to you people who are believers. And the crime is bigger. Why? Because you know better, they don’t know better, you do. And yet you still choose to behave this way. So we don’t, we don’t like that, that, you know, we’re, we’re happy to point our finger at other people and say, you know, look at all the bad things these other people do. That’s why we love the, the Pharisees and the Israelites and all that in scripture. Because it’s somebody else. Yeah. That’s why I say replace that with your own name and see how that reads.

And it’s close to home. That’s right. Not challenged by it. You’re never going to break down the walls that are separating your relationship with God. God is there. We’re the ones that opt to stay away from him. Like you said, the woman at the well. Well, I don’t like the idea that, you know, all the husbands I’ve had. But let’s talk about what the Jews do, right? Yeah, it’s the same thing. That’s a human behavior, you see, that you just picked up. And that’s exactly what we do. Yeah, yeah. Let’s argue doctrine and we can push this off a little bit further out than my personal life here.

That’s right. Too close and personal to talk about that. That’s right. Well, we hate to think it, but we do love our sin because we have the power in us to never sin again and to live the rest of our life perfectly because that’s the power of the Holy Spirit. We just don’t want to. It’s very unpopular to think that way. But we choose to sin, and we choose the sins we like. They’re not forced on us. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. It wouldn’t be a temptation if it wasn’t something we liked that pleasurable. That’s right.

You talk about, as we’re talking about sin, you talk about the age of abandonment. What do you mean by that? So as we approach the end times, which of course everybody thinks is tomorrow, they’ve been thinking that 2,000 years, there’s these different phases where we. We see God less and less. If we look at kind of our society today and you relate it back to like the 1950s, you know, when. When married couples slept in. In separate beds and, you know, there’s all of this. These different levels of morality, and you say, where has all the morality gone? What we see is that God is really giving us that free will he promised us.

He’s really allowing us to decide what we think we want in our lives. Because we’re not choosing to follow him voluntarily. He’s saying, okay, if you think you know better, then let’s see you go out and try. And what that’s supposed to do is drive us back to him to say, I tried it and I failed. You know, please forget, forget about forgiveness, because that’s just something we throw around. I want to be reconciled again. I don’t want my own will. That’s what the age of abandonment is about. It’s about people who are becoming a little too high and mighty, if you will, thinking that we don’t need God.

Our whole premise as humans is to find anything that is not God. We don’t like answering to anybody, much less somebody we can’t see, touch and feel. So God is like. Is like one of those parents who. Their children are bound and determined to do something that the parent knows is bad for them, but the parent is going to say, okay, if that’s what you really think you want. I’m going to let you do that and we’ll see how it works out. And that’s kind of the age that we’re in now. And you can find in Scripture that as the end time approaches, this is really easily identifiable in those passages.

Yes. And that’s where we are now. Well, I often think of the prodigal son story, right. About the guy who goes out and lives this spendthrift life and the Father gives him his inheritance, lets him go, and winds up learning the lesson that is there. And I’ve often heard that offered out as an example to people who are not Christians. But not too many people want to talk about it from the standpoint of the fact that he’s already his father when this happens. And so this is kind of he’s talking about. It’s like, well, I’m going to go off on my own and try this.

And yet the message is that God is long suffering and you’re going to be long suffering until you return to him. So it’s a good example about how I think the Father does not disown him and he’s ready to accept him, but the guy’s got to come to the end of himself and realize that that’s really what he needs. Right, right. That his father wasn’t his enemy, he was really his best friend. That’s right. Which is the message that we have with God. We’re. We like to call on God when things in our world get too big for us, but we don’t really like to call on him for the things we have under control.

And I always say, and I said it in the book several times, that we’re made in the image of God. And so we misuse that much the way Lucifer did, where we create and become gods of our own little worlds. We pick and choose who’s there, who’s not, what happens, when what doesn’t happen. And then anytime it gets a little bit bigger than us, well, then we turn to the big guns. Right. But we don’t do that on a daily regular basis. We’re not in a constant state of prayer, as scripture tells us. We are a call on him when we need him and the rest of the thing, I’ll take care of it.

Or. And we, we often say that, well, I don’t want to bother God with all the little details as if he couldn’t handle them. Right. That’s right. Yeah. I’ll save the big stuff for him. I’ll wait until I really screw it up and then I’ll. Then I’ll bring him in and then I can blame him when it goes wrong. Yeah, and then you’re missing out on a lot of stuff because God does inherit those little small details in our life if we actually involve him in that. So, yeah, he can use. God wastes absolutely nothing. And if we understand that when we read Scripture and we understand that when we experience a relationship with him, you know, that nothing is wasted.

Even bad things are used for good. Right? That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. That’s one of the things Karen really taught me. She’ll call on God for the smallest thing. I need a parking space over here. I can’t find my keys or whatever. And then you see God right away when you turn to God. One of my favorite passages is this guy who’s a king and something happens to his foot. And the Bible just kind of summarizes that he went to a doctor, so he died. He didn’t ask God, so he died. He’d rather go to a doctor and get a solution there rather than going to ask God.

And that’s one of the things we say all the time, is that we hear people say, not only, as you pointed out, well, I don’t want to bother God with all the small details. He’s got too much on his hands. Or we’ll say, well, I guess there’s nothing left now to do but to pray about it. That’s right. Last resort. Okay, this is my Hail Mary that is coming in at this point. And it’s like, that’s the prodigal son. I’ve come to the end of myself. Now I’ve got to turn back to God. Yeah, that’s right.

That’s right. Well, you know, you talked about the age of abandonment, and of course, we were told that people will become, in the last days, people become lovers of themselves. And that’s really what we’re looking at here. But there’s something that’s a little bit hopeful and some of the stats that. That you’ve got here, that’s in your email. You talk about the fact that we have. And I just saw an article about this as well. There are a lot more young men that are investigating and looking into the Bible, curious about it, than there are women, which is kind of interesting at this point.

I think always in the past we have seen when there was a time of revival, it would kind of be mentioned that God would turn the hearts of the fathers towards their children. I always looked at that, and I Thought, well, I wonder if that is a sign of revival. Or maybe it’s to the extent that always in the past it was kind of assumed that the women would be thinking about the welfare of their children. Now that’s not happening as much as it is men. So I don’t know. How do you read that? Do you see that as a hopeful thing, the fact that we’ve got a lot more men? I mean, it’s good when anybody of any sex is looking for God, but it’s something that is unusual in our time.

We have not usually seen this in the past. Yeah. And I think that what society has done is really erased men as, as anything important. And men have lost their identity and they’ve lost their honor and their respect and their hard work ethics and all those types of things. And we’ve been neutralized, if you will. And I think what we see is more men are seeking truth because they’re starting to pay attention as the politics and all that start ebbing and flowing. Pro this, anti that. The question is, well, what’s real anymore? That’s what we really need to know, what’s real? What can I hang my hat on? That’s right.

And men who’ve lost their identity want a true identity. They don’t want to create a fake one. And I think a lot of that drives their desire to say, well, let’s try this God thing, because I haven’t tried that. So, you know, you see this resurgence and particularly in the colleges and all of that, which is very interesting because, you know, they always say, if you want to indoctrinate a society, you start very young. You know, I remember in elementary school they were teaching us how smoking was bad, even though, you know, in fifth grade I never thought about smoking, but it was an indoctrination.

They’re trying to stop it before it happens. Right. And so now you see these young men who have gone through and they don’t even know which bathroom to use anymore. And now all of a sudden they’re in college and they’re like, hey, I need to grow up now and, you know, be somebody. I need to think about raising a family and getting a career, but I don’t even know who I am anymore. And society has kind of eliminated the male as being something good. It’s been looked at as a bad thing for such a long time that nobody wants to be one anymore.

I agree. But you know, short of surgery, you don’t have a whole lot of choice. Right. You are what God made you so can we make something of ourselves and can it be the best that we can be? And the answer of course is yes. It’s just going to take a different way of thinking. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon with the world, we need to do what God does. Go anti world. My ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts. And basically restore the dignity of being male. It’s not that it’s superior, but it is equally important at least, right? Oh yeah, yeah.

Basically what the world has done, I think. And it is a kind of adversity, you know, people turning to God out of adversity. Of course, that can be a lot of different things. It can be your health, economics, it can be society in general. But in this particular case, I think there’s a tremendous amount of adversity because society has decided that they’re going to take away the role of man and give it to women. And so now what do I do? Right. I can’t get into this college because they won’t even let me in. They’re going to give preference to a woman with this or whatever or into a job.

And so it creates a real system of adversity. As you point out, people are looking for the meaning in their life. Where can I find meaning in this? And whatever kind of adversity we’re going through, whether it’s individually or collectively or a group of people that are suffering from this adversity, it is something that is always. That’s the kind of thing that actually can be a real blessing in disguise. Right, right. Well, once we start to recognize that God’s structure in the Bible talks about the man being responsible for the head of his household and society is reversing that.

Why? Because society always is looking for the anti God way of doing things. That’s right. Because that’s again, our human nature. Our human nature is to stand on our own two feet. And, and we don’t need anybody and we certainly don’t need a God. And so these are the kinds of things. Well, if God’s principle is to put is to make the male the head of the household, let’s undo that, let’s emasculate the male and you know, take that out of the equation because that’s anti God and anything that’s anti God is seen as good because in the end times good is bad and bad is good.

Right. Woe to do that and see that. But that’s right. Yeah, absolutely. So, so who’d you say this book is for? If you were going to encapsulate this. You know, there’s a lot of what I said earlier about label Christians, people who, who, who have done the minimum requirements to be a Christian, but they aren’t really, they aren’t really advancing in their Christianity. So first and foremost, most of it is because they don’t understand who they are and who their God is. And so understanding and learning how to read Scripture the way it’s designed to be read helps that kind of person.

Then you have stagnant Christians, people who have reached a plateau either because they’ve found a level of satisfaction in their Christianity and they don’t really want more or less, they’ve hit the ceiling because you know, what they’ve been taught all along is so lightweight milk level. And they’re really looking for where is the bread, where is the meat in this relationship? Is this really all there is? I found myself in that situation in the early days of my Christianity. I, I started in my teen years, so I wasn’t raised in a Christian home by any means.

But I was disillusioned because, you know, they said all you got to do is walk down the aisle and, and invite Jesus into your heart and you know, then come to church on Sundays. And it’s like, wow, is that really all there is to this deal? That seems a little, a little too, too easy, right? And if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. So when you’re looking to go deeper and you’re looking to understand and you want to figure yourself out and you want to figure out this God thing and you want Christianity to mean something, then the book really speaks to that level as well.

But actually, you know, there’s a big section in the book that talks about the Bible itself, the history of it, how it’s written, how it’s designed, where it comes from, and it gives you a solid understanding of the book. And that alone would cause even a non believer to say, wow, if all of this is true, there’s really something substantive here. This is really something I should try to investigate actually. My wife and I, we have a few children who aren’t Christians, factly more that aren’t that are. And encouraging them to read this book, if for no other reason, to understand what it is they’re choosing to not believe in.

And so this section that talks about the Bible and it’s all historical fact and it’s non religious historical fact, you know, it’s, it’s archives and histories and these types of things, but written in a way that anybody can understand. So it’s not heavy theological. None of my books really are because really what I want to do is talk to the average person. Right. In a way that they can understand and appreciate and identify. So in that sense, you know, even a non believer could read this and say, wow, I had no idea when I read this junk before in my life that it actually was talking about me.

And like I said before me, that’s our favorite subject. Right. Of course we want to read all about ourselves. So if we can learn how to do that and see. See ourselves in Scripture, really. The book is for so many different audiences, but for different reasons. Yes. Yeah. You know, it definitely is a history book, but there’s so many other aspects to it as well. You know, when you get into science and you start looking at different things, whether it’s astronomy or whether it’s microbiology or all these other things, and you start seeing intelligent design either in the universe.

We just had one of the astronauts who came back, and he’s an atheist, and he just felt like it was a religious experience for him just to see creation. And of course, we’re told that day after day and night after night, it pours out speech. But you don’t hear it in words, but you see it there, and you know that there is a creator that is behind all of this stuff. And so when you look at it from that standpoint, I found over the years, as I would get involved in science or different things like that, it just.

It kept. It’s like layers of an onion that kept going back. I remember going to SeaWorld with the kids, and we’re looking at the penguins swimming, and they have a observation thing where you’re below the water level and you can see them swimming in the water, and they’re actually flying. I thought about it and I thought, yeah, they’re actually flying. It’s just that they’re going through a thicker fluid than air is. Right. Because, you know, normally you got to have the. You know, flight is about having a big engine that’s going to pull you through the air quickly enough that it’s going to increase the effective viscosity of the fluid.

So these are. You know, they’re. They’re flying, but they’re flying in the water. And then I thought about that and I thought, you know, now, why would Moses group together the things that fly and the things that swim at the same time? He wasn’t an engineer, he wasn’t interested in aerodynamics, knew nothing about the science of aerodynamics. Or fluids or anything like that. So you constantly see these types of things as they come back. If you’ve read the Bible and you’ve looked at some of the stuff, it’ll come back to you. And it’s like, oh, so that’s why God created the things that fly and the things that are now he classifies them as a matter of fact.

On this day, I create the things that are moving in this way, and on that day I create things that are moving in that way. And it’s like, so why would he do that? It’s kind of strange classification until you look at it and then it makes sense. And so there’s things like that that just keep coming back. And when I look at this and you’re talking about our relationship with God and what does it say about us? It made me think, Tim, about the Westminster Confession, which again, goes back several hundred years. A lot of people use that.

What is the chief end of man? It’s to glorify God and to enjoy him forever. Right, right. Well, Solomon came up with the same thing. Solomon had all the money in the world, all the wisdom in the world, wine, women and song, all those things. If they had rock music back then, he’d have had that too. He had basically everything. And how does he sum the whole thing up? Yeah. All he says in the end is ultimately all of that was just grasping at the wind. And the only thing of any value whatsoever is just to have a relationship and a respect for God.

That’s right. Yeah, that’s right. If we can’t learn a lesson from the. From the one person who truly did have everything, everything man ever dreams of, he had it all. Yeah. And yet in the end, he says it’s all worthless. And that’s true. Because where is all that wealth today? Where’s all that gold and. And silver and all? Nobody knows. It evaporated. It went to, you know, different kingdoms, different people. Who knows, we might even be wearing it a ring on our finger. We don’t really even know because it wasn’t about the stuff. The stuff was worthless.

Yeah. It was about the relationship with God that is really the chief end to man. It’s actually the chief beginning of man. Because once we understand that and we can relate to God, we can actually really live. We live with a lot of fear in our lives, but if we understand that God’s in control, what is it we’re afraid of? That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. We’re not really understanding that, are we? That’s right. Try to remind people that all the time. Because I cover the news and the news is just fear based actually, you know, you don’t see too much that’s good news anymore.

But there is a good news. But that’s pretty much limited to Christ and to God and you know, glorifying him in a way that is enjoying him, it’s praising him and glorifying him. So that really is almost redundant there in a sense. Except that as humans we don’t want to hear the good news, do we? That’s right. We seem to be drawn to the bad news. Why is that? You know, that’s that another one of those human behaviors. It’s anti God behavior. That’s right. Well, it’s like good news. We prefer the bad news. That’s right. It’s what you were talking about with a immediately they get delivered out of Egypt and right away they’re building an idol, a golden calf or whatever.

And then later on, as you pointed out, they want something that is tangible, that’s physical, that they can focus on. That’s right there. So what they do, they ask for a king. Right. Rather than having God, which God is not someone that they can look at right there. So they want to replace him with a king. So he says to Samuel, they haven’t rejected you, they’ve rejected me. Even though they were warned about what a king would do, they said, I don’t care, I want him anyway. That’s right, yeah. When I was with the Libertarian Party and we were doing stuff, that was one passage that they all knew.

They said so you know, they asked for a king and they said so he’s going to tax you, he’s going to send your young men to war and all the other kind of stuff. That’s what government does. But of course it doesn’t really appeal to people. You can’t really convince them any more than Samuel could convince the Israelites at that point in time. Well, I think we like, we prefer to sit around and complain about our government, don’t we? Yeah, it doesn’t matter who our government is. We’ll find something to complain about. That’s right. And we’ll just flip one side to the other, back and forth, back and forth.

Good kings, bad kings. Right. Because that’s what we do as humans. That’s right. Because it’s a whole lot better than relying on God. That’s right. We can lay it off on them and if it goes bad it’s their fault. But of course there won’t be any punishment for them either. Well, it’s wonderful talking to you about this again. If you are somebody who’s out there looking for meaning in your life or you’re going through adversity or whatever, we would recommend that you take a look at the Bible. And this is a tool I think, that will help you to do that wisely and kind of walk alongside of you and give you some pointers on how to understand it and how to really apply it in your life.

That’s always a good thing. Of course, you know, God is going to be our teacher. He has promised that Christ promised the Holy Spirit to Christians to guide them and to teach them. But he’s also told us that iron sharpens iron. And so I think this is something, this book, the Book of Us, I think is something that will really help to sharpen you as well. Again, Tim Mulgrew is the author and the book is the Book of Us. Thank you so much, Tim. I really appreciate talking to you. It’s very interesting. Yeah, thanks very much.

I love these kind of conversations. Yes, yes. Very important. A very important conversation to have the one between you and God. And I think that’s a key takeaway that you’ve got in your book. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. The Common Man. They created Common Core to dumb down our children. They created common Past to track and control us. Their Commons project to make sure the commoners own nothing and the communist future. They see the common man as simple, unsophisticated, ordinary. But each of us has one worth and dignity created in the image of God.

That is what we have in common. That is what they want to take away. Their most powerful weapons are isolation, deception, intimidation. They desire to know everything about us while they hide everything from us. It’s time to turn that around and expose what they want to hide. Please share the information and links you’ll find@thedavidknightshow.com thank you for listening. Thank you for sharing. If you can’t support us financially, please keep us in your prayers. Thedavidknightshow.com. Sa.
[tr:tra].

See more of The David Knight Show on their Public Channel and the MPN The David Knight Show channel.