Hey, I was just about to get you down. Yeah, I presume that that's the tomb there. Yeah, I presume that too. Although it's kind of got a casket next to it, so I'm not sure it's. And is that the stone on the inside or what? Exactly. It's make it hard to roll. You've kind of got some squarish level flat. Yeah, it wouldn't roll worth it, would it? Much more faceted than rolled, that is. Got some. I don't know what. What'd you put in to call that up or are you going to tell us about it? Yeah, it had a phrase, something about. I'll have to remember modern. Something with geometric. There's a. There's a phrase for it. Had you lost a lot of sleep? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Good. Good visit with all the kids. We did good deal. Yeah. Sharon called, she'd want to know if they could come and park the. Oh, yeah, good. Hey. Hi, Mary. Oh, I know. It's good to see you. It's good to see you. I've been looking for you. I'm asking Randy for you. He went out on the surf party and look for you. Get all these for three weeks to find you. So I'm glad to be home. Yeah. Randy didn't bring you back? No, he just showed up today too. You know how he is on social media. Right. No, it's good. I finally came out of the cold. We just had so much company over Christmas. I thought she was going to be back a little bit for the winter. Yes, we were, but we were inundated and. And you know, with one car, it's not easy get people and they want to be in the ski. They don't want to be here. Doesn't work that way for. For some reason I never raised in that manner. So anyway, you don't show your authority then. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, those of you online. Sorry you had to wait as we greeted and got back. And I'm glad to be back in the Taos pulpit today and glad Mary's back in the Taos pew today after a long absence. Thanks, Mary, for being back and the rest of you as well. Good to see everybody here today. We're doing a little bit of this and a little bit of that. That's the series. That's what. That's what you have to do in the modern age of YouTube because before it just wouldn't have been a series. But now if I ever need to find it again, I got to put it on a playlist, and therefore, that's the playlist. It's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. And so with that, we'll have a little bit of prayer. And then I'll tell you what this and that are for today. Heavenly Father, thank you for the opportunity to be on vacation, the opportunity now to be back and hit the ground running. We're grateful for all that you have done for us and your watch, care and preservation over each of us, and for all of the blessings that are ours. We're. We're grateful. In Jesus name, amen. Okay, so we are going to talk about the Proverbs, sort of. I have. I started a few weeks ago. I think I've done four sessions now, perhaps five, going through the Book of Proverbs, and this is a supplemental to that. But I have struggled with the Book of Proverbs for a long time in my mind. And my struggle was everything I've been told about the Book of Proverbs just doesn't seem right that the Book of. We almost, it seems, when we preach the Book of Proverbs, we kind of apologize for the book up front and say, now, you know, these are not. These are not promises. These are just Proverbs. And so I kind of came to the conclusion the way we're teaching it is that we, if we were to be honest, we would say, ladies and gentlemen, today I want to open up to the Book of Proverbs, a book that is sometimes true and sometimes not. And that doesn't sound like the Bible. That sounds like maybe Rudyard Kipling or something like that, but not the Bible. So what do you do with it? So I tossed it around in my mind for a long time, several years, actually, trying to come up with, okay, what's the key that we're missing? I'm convinced we're missing a key. I just don't know what the key is. And finally I said, okay, I think I've got it. And that is, why don't we just take it literally? We have messed ourselves up by taking it as Proverbs, and we ought to take it as what it is. Now. I want to show you a little bit about that, but first, you know, I didn't. I didn't try this ahead of time. So I'm going to see if I can even do this. I'm gonna. I'm gonna turn the volume up a little bit here. And I think that I've got. Yeah, I just pulled up on YouTube here. I said that there's My search. Proverbs are not promises. And I did this at home. Some of these I may have seen, some of them I may not have. I just wanted to give you a little taste of how much we teach. Proverbs are not promises. So these are all shorts, which means they're typically less than a minute long. I just want to pick two or three of them I'm going to go by by ones that have a picture of somebody talking that looks to me like that's what it would be. And let's, let's see here. Hopefully you'll be able to hear it. Let's see. So one of the things that I've learned here, while it's central, is about wisdom literature. And while I consider myself a fan of the New Testament, I still love the Old Testament, especially the book of Proverbs. And one of the things we talked about in our Old Testament poetry class with Dr. Summa is that proverbs are not promises. And a lot of times people try to equate them and they say, well, it's in the Bible. God promised us that this would be the case. But here, right here in Proverbs 25:15, it says, by forbearance, a ruler may be persuaded and a soft tongue breaks the bone. There we go. Proverbs are not promises, says the young man at Central Christian College. Proverbs are not promises. Ah, that's good enough right there. Proverbs are not promises. They are principles. Go to this lady. It says, willow Creek Community Church. Let's try her. Proverbs offer principles, not promises. Ah, that's far enough. I think we don't need to go any further than that. Let's try. Here's Adrian Rogers. He's a Southern Baptist and was a good one. Let's try that. You cannot guarantee the way your children will turn out. I agree. Some people have almost put themselves in an early grave because they've had a wayward child and they have prayed and sacrificed and taught. That child has done wrong and somebody has taken Proverbs 22:6 and beat that person over the head with it. So doesn't the Bible say, train up a child in the way that he should, and when he's old, he will not depart from him? Friend, that is a proverb. If you read the book of Proverbs and try to turn the Proverbs into promises. Ah, that's. That's. We'll, we'll stop right there. If you read the book of Proverbs and turn it into promises, you'll lose your faith. Let's have one more. Here's Kathy Howard. I don't know her. How should we understand Proverbs? Proverbs classified as wisdom literature. And on the basis of the genre, when we read prophets, we are looking at principles for wise living, not promises. Ah, there we go. Okay. Give to us principles, not promises. We get it over and over and over again. The proverbs are not promises. And that again was a random search. You can go through and do your your own and see that this is what we have done with the book of Proverbs. And I'll that an apology. I apologize for this book up front. It's not promises, it's proverbs, which means sometimes this book is true and sometimes it's not. I can't really guarantee it, but I don't have a sermon today, and this one will be like a go get him tiger sermon. Maybe it'll work, maybe it won't. Who knows? The problem is, as I read the book of Proverbs. Let me get, get us back there. As I read the book of Proverbs, it. Well, it reads like promises. I'm going to go to just Proverbs 3 Today is what we'll look at. It's one of these known ones, familiar passages to us. And now remember, anywhere else in the Bible, if we'll take the Bible, we'll read it literally, right? So here we go, my son. Forget not my law, but keep thine heart. But let thine heart keep my commandments for length of days and long life and peace shall they add to thee. Now, I just want you to know the proverbs are not promises. Even though it's spoken exactly like a promise. But it's not a promise, it's a proverb. What if we did that to the gospels? You know, Jesus walked on water. Now, I want you to know that doesn't mean that he necessarily walked on water. It means, it says that he walked on water, but it means he had power. Means that sometimes Jesus could have walked on water if he wanted to walk on water. If we, if we discounted the rest of the scripture like we discount the book of Proverbs, I think we would be the laughing stock of the religious world. Maybe we are. Maybe they're all looking at us saying, you don't even take your own book. Oh, we're people of the book. You know, God said it and God means it, but not that, not that book. Not. Why don't we just cut it out and have 65 books of the Bible. Right. And skip this one. That sometimes is true, sometimes it's not true. I don't know if it's going to be true in your life or not. So this one looks like a promise. Here's the. In verse one is the. The requirement. Keep my law, do my commandments. Here's the promise. Length of days, long life and peace shall they add to thee. Now, I think you would admit that is a very clear. I'll go ahead and call it promise. You get length of days and long life. That is, not only do you live a long time, but you get a lot put into those days. And, you know, we lost an hour last week, and so. But. And peace. Okay, let not. Here comes more requirements. Let not mercy and truth forsake thee. Bind them about thy neck. Write them on the table of thine heart. That sounds an awful lot like what. What the Jewish people call the Shema Hero. Israel. The Lord your God is the Lord is one. And then it talks about taking the law and binding it about your, what, your arm, Putting it upon your forehead, keeping it upon your mouth, putting it on the doorposts of your house. Uh, so, you know, let not mercy and truth forsake thee. Bind them about thy neck, write them on the table of thine heart. So shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man. Now, I know that reads it like a promise, but it's really not a promise, it's a proverb. I don't get it. Why do we keep discounting it? Here's another requirement. Verse 5, a very familiar one. Trust in the Lord with all thine heart. Lean not unto thine own understanding in all thy ways. Acknowledge him. And sometimes your paths will be directed by him. No, it's a. It's a promise. He shall direct thy path. Here's another requirement. Be not wise in thine own eyes. Fear the Lord and depart from evil. And a promise it shall be health to thy navel and marrow to thy bones. By the way, the modern translations cut out navel and put body, but the Hebrew definitely says navel. And I think that's kind of a good thing because it gives us the sort of poetic picture that he is giving here of an unborn child fed through the navel. It's this that the fear of the Lord is what feeds you. Health to thy navel. So not just health to thy body, a healthy health coming in your navel is a healthy body, but there's. There's more to it. So I think we. I Think the modern translations discounted that. Too much and marrow to thy bones. Okay, let's just stop right there. And in those eight verses right there, I think, you know, we've got, I don't know, four, four promises or so. Some of them have various aspects to it. And we've got it. Now, I, I have determined that the key is right here. My son, My son. Now let me, let me illustrate with another example. Let's go to Joshua, chapter one, verse eight. This book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth, but thou shalt meditate therein day and night. That thou mayest do is that. That thou mayest observe to do according to all that is written in it. Now if we stop right there, that sounds an awful lot like proverbs. Keep my law, do my commandments, follow my ways. All those things you get in Proverbs, chapter three. So here you got it again. The book of the law shall not depart out of thy mouth. Meditate day and night, be careful to do according to all that is written in it. Then it says, for then thou shalt make thy way prosperous and thou shalt have success. I've never heard Anyone in Joshua 1:8 say, now that's not a promise. That's a proverb. That's a promise. It's very clearly a promise. Now, as I have taught and others have taught as well, there's. In Joshua 1:8, there's a couple of things you can do with it. One is you can become a health, wealth, prosperity gospel teacher and say if you do the Bible, then you get prosperity and you have success. Another thing you can do is redefine prosperity. And well, you actually have to redefine the whole by the whole verse because it does say this book of the law and the word there is Torah. The Torah shall not depart. But you can start and redefine that and just redefine it as the Bible. My friend, if you take this Bible and you obey this Bible, the word of God, it's the instruction book. And if you do it, you are going to find prosperity and success. Let me redefine that. That is, God is going to smile down upon you. Doesn't have anything to do with you getting rich and being successful. So you redefine prosperity and success. Now there's a third thing you can do with it. I don't want to do option A. I'm not a health, wealth, prosperity gospel teacher. I don't want option B. I'm not going to redefine it. I'll go with Option C and say, ah. Wait a minute. This right here, who is this written to? We've got to. If I can. If I can highlight it there. We've got to be as it says. Yeah, just making sure no one stole it while I was gone. We have to be persnickety, especially about our pronouns. And so then thou shalt make thy way prosperous. Who's he talking to? Oh, he was talking to Joshua. This is a promise to Joshua. So if Joshua would do it, he was going to be prosperous and successful. Now, you could read the book. You can take that as a key to the book of Joshua. And when you come to the end of the book of Joshua, you will find out Joshua was careful to do everything according to the law and he died prosperous and successful, just like it said. Take it literally. It's a promise. Now let's back up again to Proverbs, chapter three. And you have my son. Now, this is one I memorized probably in the nasb, but I memorized back when I was a young man, because this is what you were supposed to do if you were a good godly young man, is memorize lots of Bible verses. And I liked a lot of these in the Proverbs because, you know, it talked about my son. Okay, I was son age. You know, I was a young man. And so here it is. And so I would memorize these. In fact, I memorized Proverbs, chapter three, verses one and two. My son, forget not my law, but keep. Keep my commandments, for then you'll find length of days and long life and peace shall be added unto thee. So I took that as this is just me. Now. Since then, I have become much more of a biblical literalist. And I have also, by the way, over the last few years, become much more convinced that biblical literalists are few and far between. Now, there are a lot of people that call themselves biblical literalists, but when you get down to listening to it, you find out they are not a literalist, like I am a literalist. So I take this as somebody is talking to their son. Okay? That son has a promise. Now who is talking to the son? Well, we could back up to get a little context and just go to Proverbs, chapter one, and it says, the proverbs of Solomon, the son of David, king of Israel, and he gives a few. So. So Solomon wrote this. I'm just going to take that literally. By the way, you would be amazed if you pick up, maybe even in your. I haven't seen what Scofield says, but in your study Bible or any commentary on Proverbs. I would, even as a Baptist, you know, non gamble and Baptist, I'll go ahead and put money down that there's a, I'll say 80% chance, 80% chance that you pick up a random commentary or notes on the book of Proverbs and you look at what they say about, especially say verses one through seven maybe, right. In verse one where it says the Proverbs of Solomon, it'll immediately say these were written by David. But I'm a biblical literalist, I think it's Solomon is writing. Okay, so Solomon is writing. He says some of the reasons why he is writing in verses one through seven. And then Solomon says, my son, hear the instruction of thy father. Okay, this sounds to me like Solomon writing to his son. Now you remember that Solomon had a whole bunch of wives. I've forgotten the number. Was it 700? You can't count that high. Yes, exactly. Not to mention the concubines in addition to that. So I suspect he had a lot of sons. Kind of like Elon Musk. Right. So. But you know, of all the sons that he undoubtedly had, there is only one in the Bible who's given a name. In fact, there's only one that's mentioned and that is Rehoboam. Rehoboam of course, became the king of Judah after, after Solomon died. Now I, if we take this literally, then he's saying rehoboam, I'm writing to you now we get back to chapter three and you can take this all the way through, by the way, but you get down to chapter three and he says, rehoboam, forget not my law. In the intervening time he's told us that his law is Torah, that Solomon in his old age has decided Torah was actually the way to go. I didn't always do it, but now it's my law. I, I own this thing. I'm taking it. So don't forget the Torah. Let thine heart keep my commandments. Length of days, long life and peace shall they add to thee. Now I think if you want to go beyond Rehoboam, there's probably one place that you could do and that is to say proverbs, especially 1 through 9, when you get into chapter 10, it changes its focus just a little bit and we' save that for another day. But all of these my son passages are directly to Rehoboam, indirectly to any of the descendants that are going to sit upon the throne. So Proverbs becomes then an instruction manual. For the kings of Israel. Now that became my premise. You know, how I study is that I look at a passage, I make an assumption, and then of course, we have to question the assumption. And it's just like in science. In science, you make a guess, a hypothesis. You know, I think if you do this, you're going to get that. There's my. You. You all remember the science fair, right, with your three poster boards, and you had your hypothesis there, and then you had your experiment and then you had your conclusion. And if you, if you're, if your experimentation proves that your hypothesis is wrong, you didn't waste your time. You marked that one off the list. So my hypothesis or assumption has been. Proverbs is a book written to kings of Judah. Now then, that's easy to put to the test because we have a record of the kings of Judah. So I took. And that's what the rest of this Sunday school lesson is going to be about. That was a long introduction to get there, but I just took the kings of Israel and divided them out between faithful kings and unfaithful kings and looked at those who followed the law versus those who didn't. And to make a long story short, what I found out is that the kings of Israel who followed the law, guess what they had. Length of days, long life and peace. Those who didn't forsake the truth of the law, but wrote them on the table by heart. They found favor and good understanding in the sight of God and man. Those who trusted in the Lord, those kings that trusted in the Lord and acknowledged him, the Lord direct their paths. They had a healthy navel and marrow, good health, marrow in their bones. It. It has proven thus far. And in my study, I've gone through chapter four, by the way, and I have, I have seen, I have not yet seen that there is something that trips this whole hypothesis up. It all seems to work. Put it to the king. You got it. Put it to me and you. Then I would have to say, well, you know, coincidentally may happen, you know, you. Maybe, maybe you'll live long too, maybe you won't. But this is not really our stuff, so we can't take it. We can't own it. We can look at this and say, here's what God has promised to the kings of Israel to help them to lead in this. By the way, of course, you know, I'm a dispensationalist, rightly dividing the word of truth and on so many books of the. Of the Old Testament, I'll say it anyway. Even non dispensationalists or sloppy or leaky dispensationalists that are a little wishy washy on it, they still would pretty much go to a lot of the law and the prophets and they would say something like, now you remember, this is for Israel. They were under the law, we're now under grace. And they would, they would point out that there's a difference. But what do they do when they come to Proverbs? Read a chapter every day. This is marvelous. This is for you. They, they fail to say, hey, this is a book that was written in a completely different dispensational time. God was working with a specific group of people in a different way than he's working now. And so we shouldn't just begin to take this. I used to, probably some of you did too, because it was the evangelical command for a while that you had to read one chapter of Proverbs a day, otherwise you were not a good Christian. So I would read one chapter of Proverbs a day. It's, it's handy because you didn't have to remember what day it is. This is the 16th. And, and by the way, I wore green for tomorrow. This is the 16th. And so you read Proverbs chapter 16. And some months you got to skip that Proverbs 31, which was a nice thing for the lady anyway. So I now want to say, hey, let's do Proverbs just like we would do, I don't know, say Malachi or Isaiah, these other books, to say, wait, there's a dispensational focus that we ought to give now to, to come in and look at these kings. Obviously we are not going to go all the way through. I'm just going to go through on the outline and put them as I've looked at. But there was Asa. These are not, not necessarily in any kind of order other than they're, they're, they're in the order. If you put these two groups together, you, you'd have to put them in the right order. So Asa comes first and Josiah comes last in the whole list of faithful kings. And then Rehoboam comes first and Zedekiah comes last in the list of unfaithful kings. So they're chronological within their, within their list. So there's Asa, who really was very faithful. I, I determined faithful like this. What I found is there were none of them that were perfect. Is that a surprise to anybody? None of them were perfect. So all of them made mistakes. But the faithful Kings, when they did make a mistake, eventually they owned it. And they took that as their. As theirs. The unfaithful. They tended to be unfaithful all the way through. I think this is probably just human nature. You know, a person is either either has integrity or doesn't have integrity. And it shows through every day, right? So you find these kings of integrity as it relates to the law, kings of without integrity as it relates to the law. So here's Asa, 41 years. He did make some end. Some. Some. Some alliances at the end that he shouldn't have made a made. But the scripture says his heart was perfect with the Lord all his days. So he came back, he said, man, I shouldn't have done that. He reigned 41 years. There's not, by the way, on some of these kings, there is not a whole lot, a lot of information given. Someday maybe we could do a series on some of these kings and look into their lives a little bit more. But for most of them, it's three verses, you know, that are given that we don't know a whole lot. But here's Asa good, faithful king Jehoshaphat. You remember him, Fat, fat Jehoshaphat. And he sent teachers of the law to instruct Judah. He did make some unwise alliances, but he also turned back. He had a reign of 25 years. Uzziah. Remember in the. What. What did Isaiah say in the year of the. Of King Uzziah, I saw the Lord high and lifted up. He served a whopping 52 years. And he did right at the end. He became disobedient to the Lord. He became proud. He. He started to do the priestly duties himself. And that's when the Lord immediately took him out. So he had 52 good years and messed up right at the end. And God just says, away with you. So you see the. The promises all of his life. But you see that like in. Like in Proverbs 3, there's all this requirement for the promises. Uzziah came to the point where he didn't fulfill the requirements and God pulled it out and his Reign was over. Jotham, 16 years again, he did that which is right in the sight of. Of the Lord and had a. A stable and a healthy reign. Although there was some idolatry in the land, but was not something that he was promoting. Didn't go as far as some of the others, like Asa and get rid of it. Hezekiah, 29 years. You remember at one point Hezekiah made a. Was. Was starting to make a Little mistake. And Isaiah said, because of that, you're going to die. No more health to your navel. It's done with. We're cutting it off right here. And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall, repented to the Lord, begged for mercy. God gave it to him and gave him another 15 years. And he served totaled 29 years. Manasseh, 55 years, the longest of the reign. And he started out bad, but turned really quick and ended his reign. And lived most of his reign seeking the Lord and had those 55 years. Josiah, remember him? Good King Josiah, we often call him. 31 years. And he's the one that couldn't sleep one night and so discovered, rediscovered the book of the law that had been kind of gaining, gathering dust. And he picked it up and said, oh, wait a minute, we're supposed to be doing some stuff. And he initiated stuff like the return of the Passover. So you get all that. You, you go from. You have an average of a 30 year reign going from 16 years on the short side to 55 years on the long side. They were periods of peace, they were periods of prosperity. They were periods in which I think you could take the Proverbs. I would say, go ahead, go Proverbs 1 through 9, the My Son passages. And you would say every one of those was proven to be absolutely a promise when you give it to the right person. Proverbs, the book of Proverbs is a book of promises. It's a book of promises to the kings of Israel, not necessarily to me and you. And so our, our problem is that we're not taking the Bible literally. We're taking me to be the son. And even you girls are taking yourself to be the son. Right? And we need to take it literally. It is to the kings. Now then there are the unfaithful kings. There are 12 of those. Rehoboam was, was that son right from the beginning. You may remember that Rehoboam rejected to go back up to Proverbs chapter three, verse, verse one, which says, let's just go ahead and substitute Rehoboam. Forget not my law, but let thine heart keep my commandments. After Solomon died, the first thing he did was say, get all of my dad's advisors out of here. I want my, my, my buddies to come and talk to me. He rejected his father's commandments and immediately the, the nation went into civil war and divided between the northern kingdom and the southern kingdom. And so he, he did as it says in the notes. There had a Have a brief humbling. But overall his trajectory was a rejection of the law. Abijah served three years. His heart was not perfect. Says in 1st Kings 15:3 Jeroham again eight years died painfully unlamented. That is painfully. And the response was to have a celebration ding dong, the which is dead. Isaiah only had one year, but did not follow faithfully. Joash 40 years. And he was faithful for much of that, but never did not have any repentance. Eventually turned amaziah 29 years. Ahaz 16 years. Ahaz was one of the worst child sacrifice pagan altars. Ammon two years Jehoahaz three months. How's that? In fact, at the beginning they just said get, get rid of him. And he was sent down to Egypt. Now by the time you get to 9, 10, 11 and 12, the Babylonians are really already in control. They haven't totally carried them all off to Babylon, but they're a vassal state of Nebuchadnezzar at this point. And so you have Jehoiakim who served really under Babylon, Jehoiachin, who again was the one who surrendered to Babylon and Zedekiah who was nothing but a puppet king there. So their average reign is 11 years. Well you just put that, put that together there. What was the first one? 30 years. Wherever it is. I lost it. Yeah, 30 years. 30 years to 11 years. That's a, that's a huge difference over several hundred year period of time. 400 or so year period of time that this changes. So there you've, you've got the actual numbers and you, you take it and you begin to say, hey, maybe we've just been looking at proverbs wrong, apologizing for the book of Proverbs every time we come to it. And if you want go home today on YouTube or something and search sermons on Proverbs, you can do like I did and put Proverbs are not promises. Or you can just put sermons from proverbs, any like this. And I think you're going to find them in one of two categories. And then of course you'll find mine, which is unique on the Internet. But you'll find two categories. There are health, wealth, prosperity, people who take them as promises. I guess my kudos to them is at least they take it literally and say, reads like a promise to me. I guess we should take it as a promise. Then they'll beat you up over the head for not being very faithful. That's why it hasn't come true to you. And then the vast majority will be Those who, who give a nice camouflaged apology for the book of Proverbs on why we're not experiencing this in our daily lives. Now, let me, let me go back to the science experiment. I. Several years ago, I watched a little YouTube. I think this was a short also. It wasn't very long at all. And it had this guy who was trying something. I wish I even knew where the video is. I'd go back to it. But he had an experiment and it was, it had something to do with the holy grail of a perpetual motion machine. You know, he thought he had this figured out where this thing he had created was going to start moving and was never going to stop. So he videoed when he did it and he got it going and it went for a few minutes and it stopped. And the, his, his video ended by saying, that doesn't work. Now that's good science. Actually. You have an experiment, you see, you say that doesn't work. Let's scrap that one. We won't do that one anymore. I think that the Christian world has taken this hypothesis. The book of Proverbs is not promises, but they have never experimented other than their own. They keep doing the same experience experiment over and over. Does this work for me? Does this work for me? Nope. Does it work for me? Nope. Does it work for me? Nope. Does it work for me? Nope. Well, every now and then it does. So sometimes, you know, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. And so they've taken that as. My assumption was true. Proverbs are not promises. Whereas they ought to be like that guy that did the experiment and said, hey, I should try a new experiment, I should do something else, I should go a different way. Boom, let's do this. Let me close. I'm out of time. But you know, who cares? I have been reading a book. You know what that means for me? Reading a book about the guy. Maybe you remember him, he was in the Japanese army on an island that later became the Philippines. And he didn't get word that the war was over. And he actually served, served the Japanese army 30 years after the war, lived there. Very interesting story. It's called something. The subtitle is My 30 Year War. If you look that up now, the Japanese knew he was there and so they kept sending. There were a couple others too. He, he was the only one that lived the 30 years. They kept sending people to tell them the war is over. They would drop leaflets that had. They. They even, they knew it was these three guys. They would get send pictures and notes from their family. At 1 point, 2 points, actually, they even sent their brother, their sister to the island on loudspeakers they were saying, you know, hey, Hiramoto or whatever his name was, you know, this is your brother. They would tell. He would tell things that the brothers and sisters would tell, things that only the brothers and sisters could know. They would leave newspapers that showed, here is Japan outside of, you know, this is Japan today. This where the. The war is over. And not once would he believe it. Every single time he said, this is a trick of the enemy. This is a trick of the enemy. Now my conclusion is, when you have determined something to be true, it is virtually impossible to get you to look at it differently unless you will train yourself to say, I'm going to question the assumptions. I think I could gather all the evangelicals in the world and tell them the Proverbs is a book of promises. And they would say, no, it's not. I heard it in seminary, the Proverbs. Don't even try to give me that garbage. They would reject it. Just like that guy for 30 years lived in the jungle of some island on the Philippines. Refusing to believe anything other than everything they are giving me is a trap and a trick. We get so caught and stuck in this. But I think it's liberating when you finally come and say, okay, I'll. I'll go out to this way. Okay, I don't believe anything. I don't believe anything. I think that's a, that's a good place to be, by the way, because someone who doesn't believe anything has to test everything you have to say, okay, I don't believe this. And so let me check it out. Let's try to put it. And if we would begin to do that with the Bible, I think that would make an amazing difference. And so let's see that that ends today's a little bit of this and a little bit of that. But before we have a word of prayer, we will go in in just a moment and I'll give you a preview of the sermon. Even though my lettering didn't work out right at the bottom there. But that's okay. We're going to a new series, Death Undone, a pre Easter series. We're going to have six weeks, including today and including Easter, on leading up to the resurrection, on some of the things that are important to understanding the power of the resurrection. Well, and today we are going to look at the claim often given as well, the claim. This is more from skeptics than insiders that Jesus never said he was God, Jesus never claimed to be God, that this whole Christian idea that Jesus is God came up much, much later. And you and I who believe this, we've just bought a bucket of lies. We'll look at whether or not Jesus ever claimed to be God. That's coming up next. Those of you online. It'll be a new broadcast, but let me lead us in a word of prayer here first. Heavenly Father, thank you for helping us to understand this book of Proverbs in a way that relieves us of having to give it an apology. And I pray that if we got anything wrong here, we would quickly recognize that or, or at worst, forget about it and if we got it right, that we would put it to use in our understanding of the scripture and the worldview that that gives us. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen. God bless you. We'll see you, those of you online in a new broadcast here in just a moment. We'll take about a 10 minute break or so. God bless. Good to see you.